Mr. and Mrs. Barre Stoen were among these settlers. After a fourteen-week journey from Norway to New York City, they immediately boarded a canal boat and traveled the length of the Erie Canal to Buffalo, then crossed the Great Lakes to Milwaukee, where they bought a team of oxen and headed further west. The Stoens eventually settled at Long Coulee, thirteen miles north of La Crosse, Wisconsin. The first settlers in this secluded region, the Stoens were joined shortly thereafter by other pioneers from Scandinavia. Nearly a century later, fourteen-year-old Melvina Casberg recounted the Stoens' experience including an account of the settlers' first encounter with the Native Americans of Wisconsin:
One day a messenger on horseback rode over the prairie shouting fearful news to the pioneers. A band of Indians was coming directly there and they should seek places of safety. The women and children found refuge in one of the log cabins where they might be protected . . . The several men lay armed in the tall grass by the creek that was near their home. The tribe soon came and camped where the Holmen school now stands. After watching the Indians for a while the men decided to go and talk to them. The chief appeared very friendly, offered the peace pipe and presented various gifts. The next morning the Indians left and fear for them was gone.
Completion of the Erie Canal also stimulated the growth of New York City. Canal boats facilitated exchange of manufactured goods from the city with agricultural products from the Midwest. A 1903 actuality film from the Thomas Edison film company, Panorama Water Front and Brooklyn Bridge from East River, begins with footage of canal boats from the Erie Canal demonstrating the canal's continuing commercial importance to the port of New York at the turn of the century.
In fact, the Erie Canal remained vital well into the twentieth century. The New York State Barge Canal, completed between 1903 and 1918, incorporated the canal into a larger system of waterways that included extensions to Lake Ontario, Lake Champlain, Lake Cayuga, and Lake Seneca. Commercial use of the Barge Canal had declined by the 1980s. Since then, it has become a popular venue for pleasure boaters.
For more about the Erie Canal and the settlement of the Midwest:
- Read more about the Wisconsin village settled by the Stoen family. Search the collection American Life Histories, 1936-1940 on the term Long Coulee. American Life Histories, 1936-1940 includes several narratives recounting the experiences of immigrants who settled in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana in the nineteenth century. To find their stories, browse the title lists for these states, or search the collection on pioneer.
- Additional stories of pioneer life are available through Pioneering the Upper Midwest, ca. 1820-1910. William Nowlin recounts his family's adventurous 1834 journey on the Erie Canal in The Bark Covered House . . . a Description of Real Pioneer Life in the Wilderness of Michigan.
- American Memory has more than 400 photographs of man-made waterways in this country and abroad. Explore these images. Search across the American Memory pictorial collections on canal.
