Dave Wood

With the whole USA spinning about how stalwart Minnesotans are, I think it’s time to speak up for the grit of the upper Midwest’s Scandinavian forebears. So today I’m writing about Charlie, Born Carl Otto Gustav Johnson, 1836-1919, in Sweden. I’ve learned a lot about his gutsy life from recollections by descendants, especially Elaine Johnson of Osseo who researched the family genealogy.

From that I learned that Charlie’s parents bore 11 children—impossible to support on a crofter’s wages, so Charlie was farmed out to a parish priest. That experience instilled in him a love of serious literature as well as a lifelong distrust of organized religion. He moved on from the priest’s home to work as an apprentice seaman, receiving as salary of “three meals of hardtack and two lashings a day.” He soon tired of such compensation but his years at sea gave him skill in several languages, so he then apprenticed to a blacksmith in Larvik, Norway. When that apprenticeship was finished wanderlust seized again, and he headed to the New World and found work as a smithy in La Crosse, where he used one lunch hour to marry a Norwegian, Anna Granlien.

But he hadn’t traveled so far to settle for being a day laborer. So he took off, ON FOOT and headed northwest in search of acreage with hills and springs. He walked at least 80 miles until he reached Hale Township near Osseo, where he hit pay dirt and purchased several 40-acre plots, all of which had natural springs to water the sheep he intended to raise.

Then he sent for his father and siblings, and they farmed together, then split up and Charlie doled out acreage to each of them. He was joined by his kin and wife Anna, who gave birth to eight children, the youngest being Martha Johnson Wood (1886-1972), my grandmother. Her father continued to travel, and because Martha was too young to work, she was allowed to ride along every six months when Charlie took a Conestoga wagon all the way to Eau Claire.  Grandma told me about one trip: “We left home with an empty wagon, except for the basket of food to eat on the two-day trip. Whenever we approached any incline Pa ordered us out of the wagon to save on the horses.” On the way home the next day the rear hollered ‘whoa’ when a wagon wheel began to squeak. Pa dug in the food basket, dug out what was left of Ma’s home churned butter and greased the axle.” 

When Martha grew up her father apprenticed her to a seamstress in Whitehall, sending her off shod in a homemade dress and army surplus shoes left over from the Spanish-American Civil War. Grandma walked as far as Caswell School, her alma mater. “I took them off, hid them in a ditch and made my way into town barefoot.” Not long after that, my Yankee Grandfather Ralph Wood spotted her in a wedding party and vowed to make Martha Johnson his bride, setting a record as the first native-born American to marry a woman of Scandinavian descent.

The “mixed” marriage was not without friction. Charlie was a notorious nonbeliever; Ralph’s father was a staunch Baptist. Ralph wore three-piece tailored suits and fedora hats. Carl was always topped with a knit stocking cap and a dogskin overcoat with little fur. Charlie was very well off by this time. Ralph spent too much on fancy buggy teams and a Nash Touring car. And Charlie got the last laugh.

One of Charlie’s longest trips was when he accompanied Martha, Ralph and their young offspring on a train trip to Montana to visit Charlie’s older daughter. Grandma and Grandpa and children Helen and Harold were all dressed to the nines when they met Charlie at the Merrillan train station. He was clad in the dogskin overcoat and cradling a quart jar of pickled herring, out of which he was noisily eating. 

Harold later recounted that: “We boarded the train, and Ma was already fit to be tied as Grandpa was pulling whole herring out of the jar, putting his head back and dropping them into his open maw like a seal out of a side show. 

“But that wasn’t the end of it. When we arrived in Minneapolis, we had just 20 minutes to get to the new station off Hennepin. The crowds were daunting to us rural folks. Grandpa spotted two cops standing on Cedar Av, told me to hold the herring, grabbed the police, whispered something to them and they grabbed him, arms and legs flailing, uttering swear words I had never heard before. The cops raised him above their shoulders, shouted “This guy has gone nuts, make way!’  The crowd parted like the Red Sea. We made it to the new station and headed for Montana.”

Surely this story is a testament to us vigorous and independent residents of western Wisconsin!