Norsemen Deep in the Heart of Texas: Norwegian Immigrants 1845–1900 by Gunnar Nerheim (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Norsemen Deep in the Heart of Texas: Norwegian Immigrants 1845–1900 by Gunnar Nerheim
• T. Lindsay Baker

Norsemen Deep in the Heart of Texas: Norwegian Immigrants 1845–1900. By Gunnar Nerheim. ( College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2024. Pp. 430. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.)

To write effectively on any immigrant groups, historians must employ sources recorded both in the emigrants' home places and in their destinations. This seems obvious, even though many writers on people who came to Texas from elsewhere use evidence only from where they ended up. This strategy usually leads to unbalanced interpretations. Researchers may find themselves cut off from evidence by military conflicts, but more often they are deterred by their own lack of language fluency or perceived expense and inconvenience of travel.

Professor Gunnar Nerheim, recently retired from the University of Stavanger in Norway, provides an impressive model for how historians can find and employ documentation from both the places of origin and the end points to provide a comprehensive understanding of immigrant experiences. In 2015, during [End Page 103] the first of several trips, he attended the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association in Corpus Christi to establish connections with others who studied immigration to Texas and explored libraries and repositories that might contain pertinent material on Norwegian settlers. Nerheim found kindred spirits among Texan scholars and discovered multiple locations containing both English- and Norwegian-language evidence. Newly met local historians advised him about the types and locations of sources documenting the life experiences of immigrant groups.

Texas holds an unexpectedly prominent role in the much broader story of Norwegian immigration to the United States. Emigrants from Norway began creating settlements in the northern states starting in 1825, when Cleng Peerson first organized their movement. He followed up with more colonies in the 1830s and 1840s. In the meantime, Peerson joined with other Norwegians who independently had already located in northeastern Texas to establish new farming communities farther west in Bosque County in 1854. Peerson, renowned as the founder of Norwegian immigration to America, remained in Texas until his death in 1863. His modest grave at the Norse rural community in Texas became a destination in later years for notable visitors, including King Olaf V of Norway, who in 1982 traveled there to recognize the two hundredth anniversary of Peerson's birth. Even today in Europe, Norwegian school children typically learn a rhythmical song that in translation narrates, "Cleng, Cleng, name like a song, lonely and lean drifting along. Crossing the prairies and wading the streams, his purse full of nothing, his hat full of dreams." Virtually everyone in Norway knows about Peerson, though most Texans do not.

The author of multiple scholarly volumes, Gunnar Nerheim knows how to find sometimes hidden sources and how to weave them into nuanced stories of people who lived between European and American worlds, like Peerson. Over the course of almost a decade on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, he time and again not only went to libraries and archives but also interviewed the descendants of immigrants to Texas and those who stayed home across the Atlantic. The result is a comprehensive and eminently readable study of Norwegians in the Lone Star State that will stand as a model for those who examine other immigrant groups.

T. Lindsay Baker Rio Vista, TX Copyright © 2024 The Texas State Historical Association ...