Cleng Peerson was born on May 17, 1782 in Tysvaer, Tysvær kommune, Rogaland fylke, Norway. He was the son of Peder Hesthammer, his name originally being Kleng (or Klein) Pedersen Hesthammer. He is said to have traveled as a youth in England, France, and Germany.
In 1821 Cleng Peerson journeyed to New York in company with Knud Olsen Eide, probably as the agent of a group of Quakers and others in the Stavanger region who were interested in emigration as a way of escape from religious and economic difficulties. He returned to Norway in 1824, made a short visit to his home community, and then hastened back to America to make arrangements in western New York for the purchase of land and the erection of houses for the prospective immigrants. When they arrived at New York on October 9, 1825, on the sloop Restaurationen, sometimes called the "Norwegian Mayflower, " they were met by Cleng Peerson, and most of them followed him to the Kendall settlement near Rochester. For eight years Peerson remained with this colony, but in 1833 he journeyed westward in search of a new site for settlement. This pedestrian reconnaissance took him into Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and probably Wisconsin. His preference for the Fox River Valley in Illinois determined the location of the first Norwegian settlement in the West. Peerson trudged back to New York and the next year, 1834, led the first contingent of Norwegian pioneers to Illinois.
The Fox River colony became a center from which radiated many other immigrant settlements in the West. Ever restless and ever attracted by new frontiers, Cleng Peerson founded a Norwegian colony in Shelby County, Missouri, in 1837. Three years later he resided in the first Norwegian settlement in Iowa at Sugar Creek, Lee County, where the federal census of 1840 recorded him as "Klank Pierson. " In 1842 Peerson went once more to Norway, where an influential newspaper berated him as an infectious agent in the spread of "America fever. " A contemporary account pictures him sitting in a Norwegian tavern on a spring evening in 1843, clad in a long coat, wearing a fur cap, and expatiating in broken "English-Norwegian" on the glories of America to a group of eager listeners.
Later in the year Cleng Peerson returned to the United States and guided an immigrant party to the West. In 1847 he joined the Bishop Hill colony in Henry County, Illinois. and, He soon left, however, both the colony and his wife to rejoin the Fox River settlement. A long-standing interest in Texas prompted him to visit that state in 1849. On his return to Illinois he urged Norwegians to turn toward the Southwest, where they could spread out "so as to have greater freedom in their sphere of action". Under his guidance a group of Norwegians left Illinois in the fall of 1850 for Dallas County, Texas. In 1854 he removed to Bosque County, and there, in the heart of a Norwegian community, he died on December 16, 1865.
Peerson was a droll and entertaining story teller whose visits were welcomed in frontier homes. He was eccentric, restless, a lover of adventure, in some respects a Peer Gynt, but he was motivated by a genuine interest in the welfare of his countrymen.
Cleng Peerson married the Swedish-born widow Ane Cathrine Saelinger (1749 – 1831) in 1807. He later married Maria Charlotta Dahlgren (1809 – ca. 1849) who had emigrated from Sweden in 1846.
