Despite its relative briefness, the Dakota War of 1862 was a complicated series of events marked by acts of extreme brutality and exceptional humanity by different individuals on both sides of the conflict.4 This is information of which Moberg was well aware; therefore, in describing the Dakota War in The Last Letter Home, he was faced with the difficult task of joining his narrative of actual historical events to a description of his fictional immigrants’ immediate experiences and emotions. For example, he incorporated into his novel the grisly accounts of mutilation of the bodies of whites by Dakota people. While some stories of this type may have a basis in fact, many others of questionable reliability were told by members of the military burial parties that reached the dead after several days. Exposure of the bodies to animals and August heat may have produced gruesome results that the whites were all too ready to blame on the Dakota.
Regardless of whether such stories were true or false, they were widely believed by whites in Minnesota in 1862. Moberg used them in his novel to heighten the sense of alarm felt by his fictional characters, whom he referred to as “the immigrated Europeans” (de inflyttade européerna). With limited access to factual reports in their own language,5 such immigrant groups often saw the peoples and customs of the American frontier as strange and frightening. Their judgments were frequently based on rumors rather than on facts. This tendency may be seen as a case of one minority (the recent immigrants) being aroused against another (the Native Americans) by a lack of understanding that instilled suspicion and fear.
While some readers in the late twentieth century may find certain details in The Last Letter Home to be less than complimentary to Native Americans, it is interesting to note that in the late 1950s and early 1960s Moberg received numerous letters from American readers who protested that he had portrayed American Indians “as altogether too sympathetic and pleasant [a people].”6 This reaction reflects the changing sensibilities and the tangled emotions of Moberg’s readers and of his fictional characters alike. In short, Moberg felt the necessity to depict in certain of his Swedish figures an apprehension about Native Americans. Since this perception was a historical fact among many immigrants, Moberg insisted that literary realism demanded that it be described as existing among various characters in the Emigrant Novels as well.
Readers wishing to assess Moberg’s own personal sentiments on this issue should understand that he was indeed sympathetic to Native Americans. He had a great interest in the culture of American Indians and saw the loss of their lands as a calamity. In Moberg’s own words, the white Americans’ treatment of the Native Americans was “one of the most reprehensible deeds in world history.” According to his own later writings, he felt he had written this same message into the Emigrant Novels. He wrote in 1968: “In my novels I laid the blame for the Indian uprising principally on the white man’s hard and inhuman treatment of his red brother.” Earlier American novels of the frontier had pictured Native Americans as bloodthirsty savages, Moberg wrote. He argued that he himself had gone against that tradition by portraying them as peace loving.7
Determining the true relationship between actual nineteenth-century Swedish immigrants and Ojibway and Dakota people in Minnesota is extremely difficult because there are so few accounts written on the topic from a Swedish perspective. One line of reasoning is that the two groups enjoyed good relations. In 1932, Andrew Porter of Chisago County reminisced that his Swedish parents traded food with Native Americans in the 1850s and remained on good terms with them even when wild and unfounded rumors about Indian atrocities spread throughout the area in the late summer of 1862. Porter commented: “These Indians were very friendly and they never did any harm to people or stock.”8 Likewise, Moberg himself talked with descendants of the first Swedish settlers around Chisago Lake. These people recalled their own parents’ tales of friendly contacts with Indians, who were “peaceful and nice, if they were left to live in peace.”9
Other comments hint at less cordial contacts. In his work on the Indian leader Little Crow, historian Gary Clayton Anderson wrote: “Most newcomers were from Germany or Scandinavia and carried a cultural baggage into Minnesota that was of necessity thrifty, so they saw no reason to share resources with Indians.”10 There were instances of white settlers taking (and keeping for themselves) excessive amounts of fish and game in areas near Indian camps. This approach could have caused serious misunderstandings with the Dakota, who considered it “exceedingly uncivilized to hoard food.”11 During the Dakota War of 1862, furthermore, one of the more aggressive white citizen-soldier units guarding against Indian attacks was the Scandinavian Guards of Nicollet County.12
One writer has concentrated on the subject of Swedish immigrant-Native American relations as portrayed in the Emigrant Novels. The Swede Kent Adelmann wrote that, even though Moberg was sympathetic to Native Americans, he depicted them in the novels as seen through the eyes of Europeans. According to Adelmann, Moberg determined through his research how different Swedes understood the American Indian way of life. But because he was writing from the perspective of “immigrated Europeans,” he could not picture a close relationship between settlers and native people.
Adelmann argued, furthermore, that Moberg’s immigrant tale focused sharply on the concept of freedom. In America, Mobergs fictional Swedish settlers attained freedom from an oppressive European class system, but they did so at the expense of another people (Native Americans) who themselves were being oppressed in the social system of the United States. This situation, incidentally, gives to the novel an ironic touch that the practical-thinking Karl Oskar has difficulty understanding and accepting.
Native Americans did not have the opportunity to speak for themselves in the novels, Adelmann continued. Samuel Nöjd, a character Moberg generally portrayed as repulsive, defends the Native peoples against Karl Oskar, who argues that they are lazy. Meanwhile, the reader hears from the natives themselves only indirectly through a speech made by Dakota leader Red Iron, quoted in the novel. Adelmanns reasoning was that Moberg, although not Eurocentric in his intentions, was at critical moments in his novels unable to divorce himself from a Eurocentric narrative approach.13
Moberg returned to the journals of Andrew Peterson for information on the Swedes during the Civil War. Peterson wrote of his attempt to join the Union Army. He was turned down for medical reasons — his advanced age and a chronic back problem. Peterson had incurred his back injury while lifting stones on his farm and spent his declining years as a semi-invalid. Moberg used a similar series of events involving Karl Oskar to show both the protagonist’s part in the drama surrounding the Civil War and his advancing old age. Like Peterson, Karl Oskar attempts to pass a physical examination for the military. For the first time, however, Karl Oskar is forced to become a bystander. Then back troubles increasingly hobble him, and his sons take over the farm.
Although some readers prefer the storytelling qualities of The Emigrants over other sections of the Emigrant Novels, there is little in Moberg’s corpus that exceeds the poetic nature of the final parts of The Last Letter Home. Here Moberg captured the feelings of homesickness, anger, regret, and lost love in one aging figure. Karl Oskar has changed from the forward-looking young man “K. O. Nilsson, Svensk” to the backward-peering “Charles O. Nelson, Swedish American.”