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A boy living near the rim of the Dakota country in 1882 long remembered the pageant of pioneer caravans that passed on their way westward. "We watched the schooners come up from the south," he wrote many years later, "zigzagging up the tortuous trail like ships beating up against the wind. Slowly they drew nearer - sometimes one, sometimes five or six in a fleet. Out to the road we went to watch them pass, and it was the only event of interest from one day to another. Usually the woman was sitting at the front driving the team, and beside her or peeking out of the front opening were a flock of dirty, tousled, tow-headed children. Often she held a small baby in her arms. Behind followed a small herd of cattle or horses driven by the man and the boys on foot, for the rate of travel was a walk". Sometimes the travelers would stop. "They told us where they came from, Fillmore or Goodhue County in Minnesota, or Wisconsin, or Iowa……… "Slowly the wagons passed on, the children now peeking from the opening in the rear, the schooner receding into the distance, very much like a real ship plowing its way over a trackless sea and then disappearing below the horizon."
"Sod Houses and Prairie Schooners", Minnesota History, 12:153-156
(June, 19331) and reprinted in Norwegian Migration to America, Blegen,
Theodore, C., 1940.
