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A Giant Step

It is the year 1903, and Nils Olai Hansen, his wife Jakobine, and their kids embark upon the voyage of their lives. By boat and train they travel from north of the Arctic Circle in Norway to Grantsburg, Wisconsin, to start a new life in the United States. With the keen eye of a sailor Nils keeps track what he sees, and faithfully records every experience in his diary, which has survived as a family heirloom to this day. This is the true story of the Hansens' great adventure.

Three cultures meet on a small plot of land in Northern Wisconsin. A museum has been built to honor two of them, the third remains little known.

This is a book about fur traders and native Ojibwas at a Yellow River fort, but first and foremost it is the untold story of the hard-working fisherman Nils Hansen from the Arctic regions of Norway and his voyage to rural Northern Wisconsin – based on his own handwritten diary from 1903.

A Giant Step follows the odyssey of the Nils Hansen Family and journeys with them from snowcapped mountains over stormy oceans, through endless forests, and into Wisconsin swamp lands.

Forts Folle Avoine by the Yellow River in Wisconsin, the site of two reconstructed fur trade posts.

The world they left behind – Magesås, here pictured on a sunny summer's afternoon. The peninsula lies well north of the Arctic Circle, in the Salangen fjord under the four thousand feet tall mountain Elveskardtindan. Here, the Hansens had their four-acre farm and two cows.

The farm might have been tiny, even by local standards, but fortunes could still be made in Salangen. Not so much on land, which yielded little beyond grass and root vegetables, but by sea. Nils was a høvedsmann – a captain, on a fishing boat, working the rich fisheries in the nearby Lofotens and along the rest of the coast all the way up to Russia.

The Hansen family: Jakobine and Nils,
with Aminda, Jakob, and Hansine standing behind.

The voyage went by coastal steamers, by train, and finally the Hansens crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Allen Line's Bavarian, a modern passenger ship. Nils observed everything keenly and scribbled frequently in his note book.

Why did the Hansens emigrate? What moved them to leave family, friends, and everything they had behind? Why did Nils quit his job as captain on a fishing boat in order to become a smallholder farmer and exchange the open ocean for the sluggish Yellow River?

What kind of existence did they find in America? And what was the story of the farm land they bought, land that supposedly never had been anything but forest?

A Giant Step sheds light on their lives both in Arctic Norway and rural Wisconsin. There was no stearage, no Ellis Island, no sod house on the open prairie; this story is far removed from the well-known and established picture of being an immigrant in the United States.

A Giant Step is a piece of history rarely told, in the immigrants' old country as well as their new.

Paperback at Amazon.

Kindle ebook at Amazon.