Elsa Peterson Nelsdaughter (Elsie Peterson Johnson's Grandmother). Also spelled Elsie Nelsdauter
After she came to the USA she still continued to be a midwife as doctors were far away. She made many hard long trips in the winter in all kinds of weather to bring babies into this world. She also took care of the sick. She was just like a doctor to the pioneers. She kept this up till she died in September 1894, ten years before I was born.
In the quaint, beautiful countryside of Hellum, on Oct. 24 1862 my father Nels P. Peterson was born to Mr. and Mrs. L. C. Peterson. His father died when he was a small child and his mother was left with four children to support, Sena, Louis, Dad, and Chris. She remarried a man by the name of Nelsdaughter who had quite a sum of money.
In the meantime, Grandmother and Sena were busy spinning sheep wool into material to make into men's suits and women's dresses. So they were looking for somebody who would dye it black, they had twenty yards of material. One day a clever young man came by. He said he knew somebody that could dye it for them, so trustingly they let him take the material to have it dyed. They waited for some time for him to bring it back. He never came back with the material, so they started to look for him and then somebody told them he had gone to Nebraska, America. I guess he had sold the material to help pay his way to America. The stepfather said "Pack your things and we will go to Nebraska to look for him". Stepfather told Sena to marry her boyfriend, Nels Kristensen, and he would pay their way over too. They were busy getting ready to leave Denmark to come here, and they came to New York in May 1871.
On their way through Iowa, they came to Grinnell and Newton, Iowa, where they had to stay for a while, as Sena was expecting her baby. They found work until they could continue on. Sena had a baby girl, Johanna Marie, born on May 18, she is Harry Johnson's mother. When they came to Davenport, Iowa, they had her registered there.
They did not realize how far it was to Becker County. They reached James Johnson's home on October 18 1872. It was a long hard trip with oxen. The roads were bad and many places there were no roads and they had to cross creeks and rivers by driving through them. They had to rest the oxen and let them feed, as they carried no feed with them. They had to milk the cow and cook their own food as they went along because there were no restaurants in those days to eat in. They all slept in the wagon, which was already full of their wares to keep house. Winter was just around the corner, with no house or barn to live in and no feed for the cattle.
Mr. Johnson told them they could live in the cave he had lived in while they were building their log house, so they fixed up the cave, which was not very big, and moved in. There was also a dugout for a barn in the hillside north of the cave where the oxen and cow were put. The lake was close, as it was east of the hill by the cave.
One day they had a terrible snow storm which lasted three days, and they were buried under three feet of snow. They had a hard time digging out. When they got to go to the barn, the cattle had no feed or water for three days. They were afraid to open the door, for fear they were dead, but they were still alive, so they got them watered and fed and they all survived. One day the baby dropped her biscuit in the pot, and her father fished it out, washed and ate it. Where there is hunger, there is nothing to throw away. There were seven people in this cave trying to survive the winter.
In the winter, my father got scurvy, for lack of green vegetables and fruit, and he nearly died. One day a squaw came by, and told Grandmother to go to the swamp and dig up some roots and boil them to make a tea to drink, which she did. It was not too long before he was well again. He was nine years old at this time.
Mr. Johnson told the people at Oak Lake there was a family living by his place that was starving for lack of food. The grocer and the people around there sent flour and groceries back with Mr. Johnson for the family, which they were very grateful to get. Oak Lake was fourteen miles from where they lived. They had to walk most of the time. If it was nice weather they would drive the oxen to get supplies.
One morning in early spring, Grandmother woke up to see her husband hanging from the ceiling by a rope they used to raise themselves up with. There weren't any cemeteries at this time. They buried him a half-mile west of the cave on James Johnson's west forty on the south side of a hill by a slough. They wondered whether he did this so that there would be more for the family to eat. The stepfather must have had a mental illness, as he was very brutal to the stepchildren. He would whip them for no reason at all. He tied them to a post or tree and whipped them till they were all bruised. My father hated his stepfather with a passion, even if he was a small boy.
She had the most beautiful flower gardens in front of her house on each side of the walk, with a home made gate, made of little poles nailed to boards and cut to a peak in the middle. This was hinged to the post with heavy leather strips. Mrs. Sherman lived at Oak Lake, out on their homestead. She was a well educated person. Her husband died on December 31 1869. He was first white man to die in Becker County.
Mrs. Sherman asked Dad to come and work for her, and she would teach him to read and write if he stayed till he was of age. She would also give him a team of horses, and some money when he left. I don't really know how old he was at the time.
One day Mrs. Sherman took Dad along to Otter Tail to buy some cattle. They drove the oxen team there, and Dad had to walk behind to drive the cattle back to the homestead. He was getting very tired of waling without resting and he wished they would stop to best for a while. Then they come to the Otter Tail River to cross on a wooden bridge. Dad hoped that the bridge would break down, so they could rest for a while. The bridge did break down, so his prayers were answered! They had to get things together before they could continue on. If they had known he had such a wish for them, he wondered what they would have done to him, but Dad said he did not see how she could give him anything under the circumstances, so he went home to his mother to break up the land for her. They used one oxen and cow that one season. Later they traded the oxen for a horse, and used the cow and horse till another horse was bought.
Louie was eighteen years old, so he went to Oak Lake to see if he could get a job, working on the Northern Pacific Railroad that was being built at this time. He got a job digging out the deep cut which took many months. They used picks, shovels and wheelbarrows to haul the dirt away in the wintertime, but as the weather warmed up in the spring they used oxen and scrapers to move the dirt away. Louie did not get very big pay, but it helped his mother to get food on her table.
In the winter when there was not too much work to do, Dad walked to Richwood to go to school. There were many grown men who went to learn to read and write. He walked about three miles to school. The way he told it the teacher had quite a time with these men and boys!
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