Sami Emigration to America
by Beverley Wahl

The following is a paper I wrote in about 1984 and presented at a conference in Oslo on Norwegian-American studies. It summarizes material which forms the basis for an as yet unwritten post-graduate thesis.

When I tell people I'm writing my thesis on Sami emigration to America, most of them look bewildered and say, "Oh. Was there any?" It's a possibility that just hasn't occurred to them. It hadn't occurred to me either until about three years ago. It started in the office of the Oslo Sami Association. The Sami movement were having a party, and I was meditatively cracking a marrow bone with an enjoyment matched only by my lack of skill, when I observed that one of my neighbors, who looked as though he should know better, was clearly as much of a novice as I was. I took the opportunity of striking up a conversation, and discovered to my astonishment that, far from being a native from Finnmark, he spoke Norwegian with an American accent and hailed from Duluth, Minnesota. It transpired that his parents had emigrated from Finnmark when he was a boy, and like so many of far more widely publicised Scandinavian emigrant groups, he was looking for his roots, and trying to learn about and interest other people in the almost entirely neglected area of Sami emigration to America. I am consequently indebted to Mr. Rudolph Johnson and his wife Solveig for giving me the idea for my thesis. It was the start of a quest which turned out to be long, hair-raisingly expensive, and often frustrating, but never boring. I finally settled on a group, most of whom left Norway in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and many of whom ended up in Poulsbo, Washington. I had some trouble finding Poulsbo on the map, but eventually located it on the opposite side of Puget Sound from Seattle.

The biggest problem was tracing people on the other side of the Atlantic. The changing of names is a common phenomenon, and it was a bigger problem than most in America for a number of reasons. The Sami have a long history of being discriminated against in Scandinavia. Apart from a minority, the first thing they did when they arrived in America, was to try to blend into the crowd. Finally they had a chance to make a fresh start, they felt, and they didn't go out of their way to celebrate their origin. Some of them already had names which were typically Norwegian of Finnish. Others took them. Some kept their typically Sami names, but the spelling became altered in the records. It was sometimes anglicized, sometimes merely simplified, so that Baer became Bahr, and Bango became Bang. These changes often caused them to resemble other foreign names - German or Italian.

The events which led to my trip to Poulsbo started with a remarkable project in reindeer husbandry which was initiated during the last decade of the 19th century, and involved the transfer of some 70 Sami families to Alaska.

The story begins with the inspiration of Sheldon Jackson, then Commissioner of Education in Alaska, in 1893. Jackson was concerned about the situation of the local Eskimos. And looking for some constant means of livelihood which would suit them. It occurred to him that since reindeer herding was so successful in Scandinavia, it should work in Alaska as well. One is inclined to wonder why the natives had never learned to herd caribou, but the facts appear to be firstly, that they were basically hunters, and the transition to being a herder is no simple one, and secondly that caribou are not particularly amenable to herding. Jackson learned fairly early that in order to realize his project, he would have to import both tame reindeer, and skilled herders who could teach the Eskimos the art. He was told that the Sami were the only people for the job, but found that it would be more logical to import reindeer from Siberia, just across the Bering Straight, than from Norway. A full account of his ideas, and their successful implementation over the years, is given in a series of reports he wrote to the Alaskan Bureau of Education. Their most valuable asset, from my point of view, was that they included a reasonably full list of names. The first trial was made in 1984. Six Sami families, and one unmarried man were recruited by word of mouth in Norway, and shipped across to America on a five year contract. They were sent to different parts of Alaska and their task was to herd the Siberian reindeer, and to instruct the local Eskimos in reindeer husbandry. One of these families was headed by Johan S. Tornensis of Kautokeino, and his name keeps cropping up throughout the story.

The first three years were a success as far as the Alaskan Government was concerned and Sheldon Jackson's next project was far more ambitious. It was also partly inspired by the plight of a number of whalers who had become stranded in a remote part of Alaska and were threatened with starvation. Jackson managed to persuade the powers that be that a herd of draught reindeer would be a valuable asset for transporting supplies, and they set about recruiting a far larger group for the venture. However, the original group of Sami were far less enthusiastic than Jackson about conditions in Alaska. Some did renew their term of service, but some of them who had made a trip back to Norway during the first five years, didn't paint a very favorable picture of conditions, and the result was that it was by no means easy for the government's representatives to recruit the people needed for Sheldon Jackson's next project. I suspect that this is at least part of the reason that amongst the 70 families which were now recruited - again apparently by word of mouth - there were a number of Norwegians and Kvens (Norwegians of Finnish extraction).

Up to this point, a nice clear picture of events is presented in Sheldon Jackson's reports. The contradictions start to appear from the point when letters start arriving back from the settlers, not least from Johan S. Tornensis, who wrote frequently and at length, for several decades. A perusal of old copies of the Sami parish magazine "Nuorttanaste," which was in fact the only Sami periodical of the time and covered not only church, but also local and international news, makes it clear that the fact that there was a gold rush on in Alaska was by no means unknown in Samiland. This fact, plus the rather haphazard way in which recruitment was carried out, the problems the government representative had in finding a sufficient number of people, and the strange mixture of emigrants, makes me strongly suspect that there were by no means only experts Sami reindeer herders who shipped out. An 80 year old man in an obscure corner of a strongly Finnish settlement in Oregon assured me that his father was hired as a carpenter and knew blow-all about reindeer. He dismissed my tentative protest that it must surely have been easier to find carpenters in the United States than to import them from Northern Norway, as being of minor interest. The 70 families were shipped to New York in February 1898 along with several hundred gelded draught reindeer which were to carry supplies to the starving whalers. Local Norwegian newspapers report their departure from Alta and their stop in Trondheim to pick up provisions, and at least two members of the expedition kept diaries of the trip. One of these was stolen and only recovered recently, and the other, written by a Kven, Wilhelm Basi, has now been published in English translation and gives a blow by blow account of what was, by all accounts, a rough trip. Basi remarks laconically on February 16, "Some of the people were seasick in the bad weather. Life aboard this ship is nothing to brag about, the food is poor. The weather is nice now." The crossing to New York took three weeks and, two days later the whole company was on a train for Seattle where they arrived a week later. The supply of moss, which is the food preferred by the reindeer, was running out and the reindeer were all taken to Woodland Park, which Basi describes as being "two-three kilometers outside Seattle," but is now well inside the city limits.

At about this point the real problems started. They were delayed in Seattle for two weeks, during which time the reindeer finished up the remaining moss, and when they finally did reach Haines, Alaska, there was five feet of show and apparently nobody had thought of looking for moss there either. By the time moss had been found in the highlands, the numbers of reindeer had been severely reduced. In a way, however, this worked out well. For one thing the starving whalers had long since been rescued. For another, Sheldon Jackson probably never had occasion to develop any suspicions regarding the people's motivations and knowledge of reindeer husbandry, because there were no longer enough reindeer to keep everybody occupied. To everyone's satisfaction, a number of people were released from their government contracts and went off to try their luck in the goldfields.

The fortunes of the gold hunters were various. One of the group who made his name was Jafet Lindeberg, generally recorded as being a Kven. He had been recruited from the Kåfjord copper mine near Alta when operations there were stopped, and it is generally known that he became a millionaire. It has been maintained that he was of Sami stock, having come from the northernmost province of Finland, and I tried to investigate the possibility. That was when I first became aware of the extreme diffuseness associated with race and nationality in Finmark, and how virtually impossible it is to say with certainty what somebody is in terms of ethnicity. There is a picture in Wilhelm Basi's diary which shows Lindberg's sister Anna Frederica, in what looks very much like a Sami outfit. I managed to contact her son, an elderly gentleman who lives in Portland, Oregon, but his reply was rather unsatisfactory. "Well, you know what women are - one moment it's an evening dress, the next it's a bathing suit." What it seems to boil down to is that one's ethnicity is what one feels oneself to be. Jafet Lindeberg seems to have considered himself to be a Kven, like Basi, who also joined the gold miners. For a while, Lindeberg, Basi, and a number of other Kvens and Sami divided their time between looking after the remaining reindeer, and stalking and working gold claims. They were among the first to be released from their contracts with the government in 1899.

So much for how they got to Alaska. Then there's the question of their connections with Oregon and Washington. There appears to have been a solid core of itinerant pastors of the Apostolic Lutheran Church on the west coast. The term "Laestadian" was remembered in Oregon, but I found nobody at all in Washington who was familiar with it. I did not find any satisfactory explanation for this, but suspect that it may have been because the Laestadians in Washington blended into the existing more general Lutheran congregations. Basi records a visit to Portland, Oregon in late 1899, and attending a service held in the local Apostolic Lutheran Church by Mr. John Lumijarvi, of Hammerfest, Norway. He also met a relative, and though he does not make it clear whether it was by chance or not, one assumes it was not, and that it was connections from the old country which led his group of Kvens to northern Oregon and the strongly Finnish community around Clatskanie and Quincy. Another example of this thin line between Sami and Kvens is exemplified by one family who still live in Quincy. The eldest surviving member at the time of my visit, the son of one of the expedition members, told me emphatically that he was a Finn, just as emphatically as he assured me that his father had been hired as a carpenter. I looked incredulously at the portrait of his father above the mantelpiece and didn't argue. But his nephew confirmed my views later. "If uncle wants to make a case for our pure Finnish blood, he'd better take down grandfather's portrait." When I got back, I checked Kautokeino-Slekter, the genealogical work by Adolf Steen, and discovered that, sure enough, they were a Kautokeino family - originating rightly enough from Finnish Samiland.

Unlike the Basis and the Lindebergs, this family had moved down to Oregon from Poulsbo, Washington, and Johan Tornensis had been writing to Nuorttanaste from Poulsbo since at least 1901. There seems little doubt that Johan S. Tornensis was the core of the Poulsbo settlement, but an article in Nuorttanaste in 1901 shows that he had already been in Oregon and bought land there. Which came first, the Poulsbo settlement or the Oregon one, is one of the questions that I have still not managed to answer. Johan Tornensis was in Oregon, but ended up in Poulsbo. The Nakkala family were first in Poulsbo but ended up in Oregon, where they still are. Unfortunately Nuorttanaste only started coming out in 1898 and Tornensis had been in Alaska since 1894, and if he wrote letters between those dates, which seems likely, they have not fallen into my hands. So exactly what took Johan Tornensis to Poulsbo remains a mystery. None of the present day descendants of the reindeer herders were able to tell me. They suppose their grandparents or great-uncles and aunts "knew somebody there." But who did Johan Tornensis know? Why Poulsbo? The question continues to frustrate me. However it becomes evident from the letters in Nuorttanaste that Johan Tornensis was the driving force behind the establishment of the little Sami colony with some 8 - 10 families who settled in Poulsbo over the next few years. His enthusiastic letters back to his family and friends and the readers of Nuorttanaste clearly persuaded a number of other northerners to emigrate. The local Poulsbo newspaper records a surprising number of visits between Washington, USA and Kautokeino and Karasjok in Norway. One example is the three Pentha sisters, who came out one after another, married, and with one exception, stayed. Susanna Pentha's son, John, an old gentleman when I met him, still remembered a few words of Sami, though he was born and brought up in Poulsbo, Washington. Inga Pentha married Mathis Tornensis, brother of Johan, who was not among the original group.

In addition to the surprising extent of travel between Norway and Washington, the Poulsbo newspaper and Nuorttanaste witness to an interesting phenomenon which is not unknown in the northwest coast today. Many men, in particular, commuted between Puget Sound and Alaska. They would spend the summer in Alaska and the rest of the year in Washington. Originally, as in the case of Johan Tornensis, this was to keep his eye on the gold claims and workings. Others used to, and still do, spend the summer off the Alaskan coast fishing. Amongst them are Bill and Bob Wilcox, Johan Tornensis' great-nephews. This seasonal commuting may explain how Johan landed in Poulsbo. Perhaps he met someone from Poulsbo when he was in Alaska?

It was only toward the end of my visit that another name began to crop up more and more. The name was Nils Paul Xavier, and though he ended his life as a Lutheran minister in Parkland, Washington, he began it as Nils Paul Xavier Tornensis in 1839 in Kautokeino. It was a while before I discovered that he was also uncle to Johan S Tornensis, but it was very satisfying to see yet another piece fall into place. His unusual name was due to the presence of two French travelers in Kautokeino at the time of his birth. His mother used both their first names when she Christened her son, and one is almost tempted to believe that the combination of a long line of Lutheran ministers in the family, (the Tornensis men had already been in the ministry for two centuries by this point) and the influence of the two travelers, might have determined his future. Nils Paul wanted to be a minister too.

Adolf Steen's short article in the mission periodical, Samenes Venn doesn't really explain why he wasn't content to become a minister in Norway. He does mention that two of Nils Paul's sisters also went to America, but not whether they preceded him or followed him over. One way or another, Nils Paul was 34 years old and had a wife and 3 children before he decided that he had to study for the ministry, and Steen maintains "the only way out was America, where he went with his family in 1873. In America he studied first at Concordia seminary, St. Louis, and later at Concordia seminary, Springfield, where he was ordained as a minister in the Norwegian Lutheran Synod." Thereafter he served as a minister in Minnesota, Iowa, and finally with the Lutheran Church's home mission around Puget Sound, Parkland, Washington. Quite an unprecedented career for those days, considering that he learned Norwegian in his late teens, and then had to start on English in America, although it is possible that he was able to use Norwegian for much of his studies there. Nils Paul had nine children, and two of his sons also entered the ministry. One, Johan Ulrik, was professor at Parkland Lutheran Academy and Acting President for awhile. He also wrote a book of poems, largely of a religious nature, in both English and Norwegian. I was lucky enough to be given a copy of these by one of his nieces.
(Editor's note: Nils Paul Xavier: Sami Teacher and Pastor on the American Frontier, by Einar Niemi. Norwegian-American Studies, v.34, 1995, Norwegian-American Historical Association, Northfield, MN)

The Xaviers have been remarkably consistent over a period of three centuries in two respects - the considerable size of their families, and the quite remarkable number of them who are associated with the Lutheran ministry. I met several members of the family and found most of them to have been unaware of their Sami background until recently, but they do exhibit one very typical cultural feature, which is the closeness of the family and maintenance of links with what we today generally consider rather distant relatives. The Xavier family has impressive dimensions today and is spread far and wide in the United States.

I spent most of my two months in Washington trying to trace the last direct descendant of Johan Tornensis, whose name, is no longer Tornensis. Everybody had heard of him, nobody knew where he was. It was with the sense of meeting a living legend that I finally spoke to him on the phone, and he agreed to meet me two days before I left. He walked into the restaurant where we had agreed to meet and tossed a packet of documents to me saying, "I don't know if these are any use to you. Take them back with you if you want." They turned out to be claims certificates from Alaska, belonging not only to his grandfather Johan Tornensis, but also to many other Sami, and not least to Nils Paul Xavier himself. He was certainly a man of many parts.

Finally, I should like to talk a little about Poulsbo today, and the descendants of the group of reindeer herders and gold diggers. Poulsbo calls itself "Little Norway." The population is predominately of Scandinavian descent, but mostly Norwegian and in the past two or three decades it has had an ethnic revival which has left it more Norwegian than Norway itself. The social life of the whole town revolves around the local Sons of Norway lodge. Most businesses have the name "Viking" or "Scandinavian" in them, and the 17th of May is celebrated with great vigor.

In reality the ethnicity around Seattle has become "Scandinavian" through a sort of blending process. The most significant thing about this Scandinavian ethnicity, from the point of view of the reindeer herders who moved down from Alaska, was that in that community it was impossible to do what one could do in most heterogeneously populated areas - escape being a Sami. The stigma they had suffered from back home followed them out to Washington State, USA. Several of the older people I spoke to, whose parents had been with the Alaska expedition, stated that they had always had a vague apprehension that there was something wrong about the Sami side of their ancestry. Some of them had deliberately tried to conceal it from their children. One woman I interviewed was the step-granddaughter of Andrew Bahr who achieved fame as "the Arctic Moses" when he made a remarkable 5-year journey across Alaska to Northern Canada to deliver a herd of reindeer. When I asked her one of my standard questions, "When did you first learn you had Sami ancestry?" she replied with a heartfelt sigh, "Yesterday!" I found the daughter's generation to be fascinated. They wanted to know! So a lot of them started digging for old letters, diaries, etc. and I'm hoping that some of the answers to questions may still turn up.

 
Since I didn't finish my thesis, I never had the opportunity to thank publicly the many people who helped me with it - and sadly, I cannot double the length of this contribution by naming them all now. But a few key people cannot go without mention. Apart from Rudy Johnson himself, Myrdene Anderson generously supplied me with many vital leads and ideas, as well as putting me up overnight on a reindeer skin; and Earl and Norma Hanson - well, who else would say, "Come and stay for as long as you like, honey!" - and mean it? As far as those two wonderful people are concerned, I think it says it all! - Beverly Wahl

Beverley Wahl, originally from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), has lived in Norway since 1974. She is the translator of Nils-Aslak Valkeapää's "Greetings From Lapland."