Abstract

Niels Tobias Dahl was one of three sons of Peder Hanson Oxendahl (1802- 1876) and Karen Larsdatter Espetvedt to emigrate from Norway to the United States. Niels was born in Oxendahl, Bakkesogn, Norway in 1831 and came to Wisconsin in 1851. He married Tori Hoverson in June, 1857, homesteading in Coon Prairie and Dunn County until 1870, when the family moved to Minnesota, living first in Blue Earth County, than in Lyon County.

Abstract A near-contemporary of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Tilla Dahl Deen lived a life nearly as adventurous, too. During her 19th-century childhood in, first, rural Wisconsin and then rural Minnesota, she lived in a sod shanty and lived through two of the harshest winters the Midwest has ever seen. Along the way, she fended off a wolf, watched a summer sky turn dark with grasshoppers, saw death at first hand, and saw, first-hand, too, the transformation of a small prairie settlement into a thriving...