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Lower Deatnu/Tana History 1700-1900 (Part 2) by Nils Evald Biti  Buolmat Sami 1880s The lower part of the Deatnu/Tana valley was sparsely populated. The church did not have a regular minister, and only during the summer season when transactions with the church/state were most needed. Luckily, records are intact from this church all the way back to 1751. From these records, we see there were many baptisms, weddings and burials. Those who died during the winter were kept in a small wooden shed, until the frost left the ground. Much of the history (the church was the official keeper of government records) can be found in small notes in the margins written by the ministers. It was normal that the church would demand that a marriage be postponed, even three times before the marriage was conducted. Normally it was three church holidays that covered the time after an announcement of engagement. But if it were the sons or daughters of officials or traders, these postponements did not happen. Often the notation was that there was a royal wedding document, and in some cases that they were married at home. At confirmation, certain priests gave the children of traders and officials very good marks. Children of Sami and Kven received the worst, since their ability to speak the language of their studies, Danish or Norwegian, was limited. In some cases the minster would note the following about the confirmed: “Does not read the book of sermons well – this person will amount to nothing.” Even though individual ministers were quite pietistic in their preaching, they did not live up to that in their free time. Many of them socialized with other officials, consuming large amounts of alcohol on a daily basis. One can read in the official records about a Sami who went to the Ohcejohka (Utsjoki) church to buy a bottle of moonshine from the minister Jacob Fellman. The Buolmat (Polmak) Sami got his bottle and proceeded to get drunk with some friends. He returned to the church to buy more, and finding no one at home, broke into the building where the moonshine was being made. According to the records it seems to have been quite a factory. Upon discovery, he was beaten by the parsonage’s hired hand, and later fined for disorderly conduct in the church yard. Moonshine production, which was built upon the Sami, was another obvious example of the distance between the individuals minister’s life and his teachings. Some ministers also described the Sami’s intellect based on their appearance, without taking into consideration that they spoke neither Norwegian nor Danish. The minister Peter Werløe wrote about the Sami in a more neutral, but less than objective way, in a report from May 17th, 1741 to the King, where he describes the nature and inhabitants in the terrible Gilevuotna (Kjøllefjord) parish that he had been assigned to: “The Sami are small, but some are as tall as us. The Sami become quickly old and wrinkled, since they live mostly in smoke and eat a lot of fat.” Werløe mentions also that delinquents had also been banished to the parish, and should clearly have been confined to other places that his parish. An ungodly and very brutish person by the name of Christen Jensson, lived with his mother-in-law, a good woman between 70-80 years. There in his laziness he had used all of her out buildings for fuel. They only had one cow left, that only he and the children were to live off of, but he brought it into the kitchen and slaughtered it in front of his mother-in-law, after she had asked him to get some forage for the cow. He was later sent to an asylum. In October, 1744, when Major Peter Schnitler was visiting Deatnu, he names all the settlers within the present day municipality. Two Sami lived on the east side, and one Sami on the west side, in Ráttovuotna (Smalfjord). In my town of Bonjákas (Bonakas) there lived a new immigrant by the name of Erich Bonjakas. He had come around 1740 from Sweden where he was suspected of murder. The name Bonjakas isn’t very Swedish sounding, but sounds the same as Bonjákas. Minister Jacob Fellman in Ohcejohka, describes this Erich as Erik Johanson, which does sound like a Swedish name. The author Paulaharju describes this person using the Finnish name Jussan Erkki, which is in effect Erik Johanson. Schnitler used these settlers to identify the boundaries between Norway and Sweden. Before they testified, they had to swear a blood oath, that they had been at God’s table, and in which church. Further up in the Deatnu valley there were two Sami in Sieiddá (Seida), one on each side of the river, and further on at Buolmat point there were some settled families. After Peter Schnitler had evaluated the boundary descriptions, he recommended that Erich Bonjakas should not be exposed along the Norwegian/Swedish border “because I have understood that his issues are such in Sweden, that he will not allow himself to be seen of the Swedish authorities. Schnitler states there were also mountain Sami with their reindeer on both sides of the Deatnu river, and that they also hunted wild reindeer and fished for trout and char in the mountain lakes. From the middle of the 1750s population began increasing in the whole valley, and Kven/Finnish immigration became dominant in several towns in lower Deatnu. Many of these were capable farmers and craftspersons whose large families also increased the population. Among these was a blue blood, with roots in the Orleans branch of the Bourbon family of the French royalty. His name was Erik (Walbom) Kolstrøm. It happened that French Prince Louis Philippe was in exile in Scandinavia and traveled under the name Muller. In 1795 he came to Muonio in the Tornio Valley in Finland, and lived for a time with the minister Mathias Kolstrøm and his wife Brita Elisabet (born Walbom). When Prince Louis Philippe left their home, it was discovered the servant Beata Caisa Walbom, the wife’s sister, in her passion, had become pregnant by the worldly prince. This was a great shame for both the minister’s family and the reputation of the parsonage. This had to be hidden from the authorities, and Beata Caisa was sent unseen to the parsonage’s fishing cabin near Kärejokis Hirvaslompolo. There Beata Caisa gave birth to a healthy boy. When they came to bring Beata Caisa back to the parsonage, they had to hide the newborn boy in a keg. The boy was named Erik, and was also called Puolikko-Erkki, or “keg-Erik.” When he was 28 he married Margrethe Johansdatter Hetta from Eanodaga/Enontekio, and emigrated to Seilnes in Norway, a few miles below Kárášjohka. Not happy there, he built a log raft and set off down the Deatnu river until he stranded in Sieiddá, and later moved to Masjok, which already had Finnish settlers. Erik was an industrious man with many talents. The family grew large in Deatnu, and today several of his descendants have taken the last name of d`Orleans. The Deatnu fjord and river, especially because of its salmon, was widely known for its fishing, and the valley had good possibilities for farming. Most of the settlers in these small communities lived by farming and fishing, as well as those who were reindeer owners and hunters. One of the most dominant families in the 1770s was Peder Johannesen’s. Peder had Sami and Finnish roots and was a framer, fisherman, and sheriff. With his wife he had five children, four boys and a girl all who left many tracks behind in Bonjákas, both good and bad. All the children were only teenagers when Peder died in the Deatnu river in the late 1780s. When I started to dig a little into the settlement, I had many “aha” experiences. I had long wondered why my property was called ”Johannesjord.” It turns out that the next eldest son of the sheriff had cleared the property and gained title to it in 1825. Johannes, who was born in 1769 did not live to enjoy the property for very long since he was killed in 1829 in Baggjegiedde (Øvre Bonakas) in the home of Lasse Aslaksen who was married to his sister Ragnhild. It was during an engagement party at the farm, where a good deal of alcohol was consumed, that brother Nils hit Johannes, knocked him to the ground, killing him. When his wife Inger discovered that her husband was dead, she said to her brother-in-law, “You better watch yourself, Nils, because you have killed a man before.” There was a complete investigation of the case, and it was revealed that a traveling Swede had died under suspicious circumstances at the home of Nils after a drinking party. Nils was cleared of all charges, and later became a prominent man in the settlement. He was mailman, court translator, transportation coordinator. Nils, born 1774, had six children, the next-youngest Ivar born 1819. Ivar was educated as a teacher Trondheim and taught at Bonjákas for a few years, quitting for unknown reasons. Brother-in-law Lasse Aslaksen had quit as a reindeer owner, and become a fisherman/farmer, probably after he had married the sheriff’s daughter Ragnhild. One of Lasse Aslaksen’s grandchildren, Ole Olsen Baggjegiedde, (the Sami name for Upper Bonakas) became a well-known Læstadian lay minister. Lasse and Nils were good friends, and they fished salmon together in the Deatnu river. From the court records from Gollesuolo and Marienlund, it is seen that they were accomplished bear hunters, and that they did not always stay within the law in their salmon trapping. They were often fined for blocking the river, promising to pay the fine the next fishing season. When the Ting (court proceedings) opened the following year, the two had still not paid the fine, even though they already had a very successful fishing season. Many in the Deatnu valley definitely suffered a shortage of food during the war years 1807-1814 as mentioned earlier. In spite of blockades, Johan K. Garman Schanche bought the trading post Gollesuolo for 400 riksdaler from legal advisor Frich in 1810 (a riksdaler was a silver coin worth about 4 Norwegian crowns). If this was a good deal is unknown, but it was in any case a bold purchase. Only one year later during the war years, Schanche was about to go bankrupt, but somehow managed to pay his creditors in Tromsø. Schanche was also a division leader for the coast guard during the war years. They had a few dozen men with weapons, but not all had rifles. It is said that the other weapons were halberds, axes and spears. Signal fire stations were built on mountain tops up the Deatnu valley that could be lit if a Swedish invasion was discovered coming down the valley. Luckily these signals were never used, but the Clemet Samuelsen family in Bonakas earned income for many years by maintaining one of them on the mountain, right over my property here on the west side of the river. Gollesuolo was the only trading center in all of Deatnu, and when it finally went on sale, the locals could have done worse than Schanche. Schanche married the same year he purchased Gollesuolo. He was 29 years old and his wife Else Sofie de Wahl was a young girl of 16 years. Else was the daughter of Isac de Wahl who owned the inn in Gilevuotna. Johan and Else had 12 children as well as some foster children. All of Johan and Else’s children lived to adulthood except for one who died shortly after childbirth. Johan was like a patriarch and had a finger in everything that went on in the municipality. There was hardly an official position in the municipality that he had not held. Those who had Schanche on their side, both during court cases and other official transactions were most certainly guaranteed to come out a winner. Both he and his wife Else were godparents to dozens of children, Sami, Kven and Norwegian. All his sons became either merchants or postmen like himself. The daughters married well with persons who also had social position. |
