CHAPTER IV. Future Hopes--Farm Life--Norwegian Pioneers--The Condition of the Immigrant at the Beginning of the Fifties--Religious Meetings--The Growth of the Settlement--Vasa Township Organized--A Lutheran Church Established--My Wedding--Speculation--The Crisis of 1857--Study of Law in Red Wing--I am admitted to the Bar and elected County Auditor--Politics in 1860--War is Imminent. We had now commenced a new career, located on our farm claims in the boundless West, with no end to the prospects and possibilities before us. We felt that independence and freedom which are only attained and appreciated in the western wilds of America. From the Mississippi river and almost to the Pacific Ocean, was a verdant field for the industry, energy and enterprise of the settler. To be sure, our means and resources were small, but somehow we felt that by hard work and good conduct we would some day attain the comfort, independence and position for which our souls thirsted. We did not sit down and wait for gold mines to open up before us, or for roasted pigs to come running by our cabin, but with axe and spade went quietly to work, to do our little part in the building up of new empires. [Illustration: OUR WAGON.] In the beginning of May, my father came from Illinois and brought us a pair of steers and a milch cow; this made us rich. We made a wagon with wheels of blocks sawed off an oak log; we also bought a plow, and, joining with our neighbors of Belle Creek, had a breaking team of two pair of oxen. That breaking team and that truck wagon, with myself always as the chief ox driver, did all the breaking, and all the hauling and carting of lumber, provisions, building-material and other goods, for all the settlers in that neighborhood during the first season. Soon others of our party from last year joined us. Some letters which I wrote in _Hemlandet_ describing the country around us, attracted much attention and brought settlers from different parts of the west, and while the Swedes were pouring into our place, then known as "Mattson's Settlement," (now well known under the name of Vasa), our friends, the Norwegians, had started a prosperous settlement a few miles to the south, many of them coming overland from Wisconsin, bringing cattle, implements and other valuables of which the Swedes, being mostly poor new-comers, were destitute. Many immigrants of both nationalities came as deck passengers on the Mississippi steamers to Red Wing.