Johan Reinert Reiersen

Background

Johan Reinert Reiersen was born on April 17, 1810 at Vestre Moland, Norway, the son of Ole and Kirsten Gjerulfsdatter Reiersen.

Education

He studied at the Arendal Middelskole and was about to enter the university at Christiania when he suddenly broke off his schooling to embark upon a literary career in Copenhagen.

Career

There in the thirties he edited several ephemeral Danish magazines and published nearly twenty volumes of translations, chiefly of English, French, and Swedish works, including George Sand's Valentine and a half dozen of Bulwer-Lytton's novels. In 1839, having returned to Norway, he established Christianssandsposten, through which he soon provoked a nation-wide newspaper controversy on America, emigration, the status of the Norwegian farmer, and the need of reform.

In the summer of 1843 he emerged from his editorial sanctum and set out for the United States on a trip of investigation in behalf of a group of prospective emigrants. The man proved a tireless investigator. He landed at New Orleans, journeyed north to St. Louis, visited Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, then went to Austin, where Sam Houston expressed warm interest in the prospect of a Norwegian settlement in Texas, and finally, after pushing his way north to Cincinnati and New York, he returned to Norway. There, in 1844, he published his Pathfinder for Norwegian Emigrants to the United North American States and Texas.

In the spring of 1845 Reiersen led a small group of emigrants to Texas and established, at Brownsboro, the first Norwegian settlement in that state. Before he left Norway he founded, with characteristic zeal, a monthly magazine, Norway and America, through which he could place before the Norwegian public his own and other reports from America. It was issued for two years, he himself editing it during the first year from far-distant Texas. In its pages appeared a series of valuable "Sketches from Western America, " several interesting reports from Texas, immigrant letters, and a number of polemical articles on emigration. In 1848 Reiersen founded the second Norwegian settlement in Texas, with Prairieville as its nucleus.

Reiersen died at Prairieville, Texas.

Achievements

• The Pathfinder was the most comprehensive book about America published in Norway up to that time. In ten detailed chapters, Reiersen discussed natural conditions in America, agriculture, how to start a farm, trade and industry, minerals and mining, the public lands, conditions in the Middle West, government, the republic of Texas, and the Norwegian pioneer settlements. He praised the enterprising nature, versatile culture, and practical knowledge of the Americans, and asserted that the new-world environment awakened a new spirit of tolerance, independence, and self-respect among the immigrants. His book was widely read and exercised a marked influence upon Norwegian emigration, though his advocacy of the New Orleans route and of the South as the most promising area for immigrant settlement failed to win any wide popular ratification.

Views

Unlike most Norwegian editors of the time, Reiersen pictured America in a favorable light and argued for emigration. It was his belief that those who were departing for the western world were the most energetic and progressive of Norway's working people; that they were seeking, not gold and luxury, but bread and freedom; that over-population made planned colonization a desideratum. Egged on by journalistic and official criticism of his theories, Reiersen determined to put them into practice.

Quotations: "I am free and independent, among a free people who are not bound by the chains of old class and caste conditions, and I feel proud to belong to a mighty nation, the institutions of which must necessarily conquer eventually the entire civilized world. "

Connections

His first wife, Henriette Christiane Waldt, whom he had married on August 5, 1836, at Copenhagen and who bore him six sons and two daughters, died in Texas in 1851. His second wife, who was the widow of his brother Christian, survived him; her maiden name was Ouline Jacobine Orbek.

Father:

Ole Reiersen

Mother:

Kirsten Gjerulfsdatter Reiersen

Spouse:

Henriette Christiane Waldt

Spouse:

Ouline Jacobine Orbek