[85] Langeland, _Nordmændene i Amerika_, 44-45; _Billed Magazin_, I, 13. [86] It may be well to note that the name of Dane county has no relation to Scandinavian settlement, but was given in honor of Nathan Dane of Massachusetts, author of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. [87] Anderson, _Norwegian Immigration_, 276. Provision for religious instruction and ministration was one of the early concerns of the Norwegian immigrants, as would be expected from a people essentially religious, who moved by whole families. Nor was there much distinction between the more orthodox and the dissenters. After their magnetic center shifted to the west in 1835 and the settlements and population multiplied, a good deal of lay preaching of one sort and another went on,--Lutheran, Methodist, Haugian, Baptist, Episcopalian, and Mormon. Lay services, in fact, were the rule all along the westward moving frontier, and services conducted by regular clergymen the exception. One of the Norwegians wrote: "We conducted our religious meetings in our own democratic way. We appointed our leader and requested some one to read from a book of sermons.... We prayed, exhorted, and sang among ourselves, and even baptised our babies ourselves."[88] [88] A letter of John E. Molee, February, 1895, quoted by Anderson, _Norwegian Immigration_, 320. (See also, _ibid._, 396-399.) Cut off by language from much participation in English worship--a man must know an alien tongue long and thoroly to make it serviceable for religious purposes--the men from Numedal, Vos, and Drammen, felt keenly a great need for some one to instruct their children in the Norwegian language and in the Lutheran religion after the Old World customs. In 1843, two hundred men and women in the flourishing group of settlements around Jefferson Prairie, Wisconsin, signed a petition addressed to Bishop Sörenson in Norway asking him to send them a capable and pious young pastor, to whom they promised to give a parsonage, 80 acres of land, $300 in money, and fees for baptisms, marriages, and the like.[89] Tho this petition itself seems not to have been answered, it was not long before a properly ordained clergyman arrived. [89] Anderson, _Norwegian Immigration_, 255.