Ansten Nattestad may be regarded as the father of the emigration movement from Numedal, Norway, from which some of the most successful Norwegian settlements in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, were later recruited. His brother, Ole Nattestad, became the founder of one of these settlements, that of Jefferson Prairie, in Rock County, Wisconsin (also extending into Illinois); while Hans Barlien founded the first Norwegian settlement in Iowa, at Sugar Creek, Lee County. Of the circumstances which led to the emigration of the Nattestad brothers, an interesting account appears in _Billed-Magazin_, 1869, pages 82-83. This, which is an interview with Ole Nattestad, has been reprinted in other works and I shall not take the space for it here. We may note, however, that they had received their first news of America upon a journey to the neighborhood of Stavanger in the close of 1836. During Christmas of that year, they were the guests of Even Nubbru in Sigdal, a member of the Storthing, and it was his praise of American laws which first aroused Ole Nattestad's desire to emigrate, as he had already had some unpleasant experiences in that respect. In April, 1837, they stood ready to leave for America, having converted their possessions into cash, a sum of eight hundred dollars. They went on _skis_ from Rollaug to Tin, over the mountains and through the forests to Stavanger. Halsten Halvorson Brække-Eiet, also from Rollaug, became a third member of the party. In Stavanger, local official hostility to emigration led them into difficulties, and they were forced to seek safety in flight by night. They went to Tananger, where they were more successful, a skipper contracting to take them in his yacht to Gothenburg. In Gothenburg, they secured passage with a ship which carried iron from Sweden to Fall River, Massachusetts. The journey lasted thirty-two days. Thence, they went to New York, where they met a few Norwegians, and thence again to Rochester. Here they spoke with several members of the sloop party of 1825, now living in Rochester, and they were, for a short time, the guests of Lars Olson, as so many others of the immigrants of those years. Hearing that those who had come to America in 1836 had gone west to La Salle County, they decided to go there. In Detroit, Ole Nattestad was one day walking about to view the city, and he says: Here I accidentally came upon a man, whom I immediately recognized by his clothes as a countryman from the western coast of Norway. I greeted the man, and the meeting was for us both as if two brothers had met after a long separation.