Immigration

This country has been peopled by immigrants—people who came for opportunity, for possibilities, to escape religious persecution, to escape family, war, destitution … came for hope.

Family mythology maintains that my maternal great-grandmother came from Sweden. The story has it that a friend of hers was going to come to America as a mail-order bride, but the young woman chickened out so my great-grandmother came in her stead. Supposedly, she didn’t marry the hapless fellow but paid him back and made her way from there—eventually marrying a widower with children. Their union produced two daughters to add to that family.

Oxbow on the way to Holter Lake, family journal

Later, my maternal great-grandparents lived at Holter Lake where my great-grandfather was foreman on the dam construction, while great-grandma ran the single men’s boarding house.

One of their daughters, my grandmother, married a man whose family immigrated from Germany to Canada, then found their way to Montana. 

Thus my lineage on my mom’s side is barely four generations in this country; on my dad’s side the connection goes back to founding—even so we are newcomers to a land that was peopled long before our ancestors ever dared sail the flat world, risking spilling over the edge, or into the maw of monsters.