The Norwegian, true to viking traditions, led the modern exodus.  In 1825 the sloop Restoration, the Mayflower of the Norse, landed a band of fifty-three Norwegian Quakers on Manhattan.  These peasants settled at first in western New York.  But within a few years most of them removed to Fox River, Illinois, whither were drawn most of the Norwegians who migrated before 1850.  After the Civil War, the stream rapidly rose, until nearly seven hundred thousand persons of Norwegian birth have settled in America.

The Swedish migration started in 1841, when Gustavus Unonius, a former student of the University of Upsala, founded the colony of Pine Lake, near Milwaukee.  His followers have been described as a strange assortment of “noblemen, ex-army officers, merchants, and adventurers,” whose experiences and talents were not of the sort that make pioneering successful.  Frederika Bremer, the noted Swedish traveler, has left a description of the little cluster of log huts and the handful of people who “had taken with them the Swedish inclination for hospitality and a merry life, without sufficiently considering how long it could last.”  Their experiences form a romantic prelude to the great Swedish migration, which reached its height in the eighties.  Today the Swedes form the largest element in the Scandinavian influx, for well over one million have migrated to the United States.

Nearly three hundred thousand persons of Danish blood have come into the country since the Civil War.  A large number migrated from Schleswig-Holstein, after the forcible annexation of that province by Prussia in 1866, preferring the freedom of America to the tyranny of Berlin.

Whatever distinctions in language and customs may have characterized these Northern peoples, they had one ambition in common—­the desire to own tillable land.  So they made of the Northwest a new Scandinavia, larger and far more prosperous than that which Gustavus Adolphus had planned in colonial days for his colony in Delaware.  One can travel today three hundred miles at a stretch across the prairies of the Dakotas or the fields of Minnesota without leaving land that is owned by Scandinavians.  They abound also in Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, Eastern Nebraska, and Kansas, and Northern Michigan.  Latterly the lands of Oregon and Washington are luring them by the thousands, while throughout the remaining West there are scattered many prosperous farms cultivated by representatives of this hardy race.  Latterly this stream of Scandinavians has thinned to about one-half its former size.  In 1910, 48,000 came; in 1911, 42,000; in 1912, 27,000; in 1913, 33,000.  The later immigrant is absorbed by the cities, or sails upon the Great Lakes or in the coastwise trade, or works in lumber camps or mines.  Wherever you find a Scandinavian, however, he is working close to nature, even though he is responding to the call of the new industry.