PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE EARLY EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT.
THE SWEDISH COLONISTS. (con't)
troubled years. One evening in Whitewood the local practitioner came
to me and said "You are going north tomorrow, aren't you"? "Yes, to the
Sumner colony". "I have a call to the Swede colony, I'll go with you";
and he did. We found the place we were looking for on a side trail, a
humble shack with a bit of bluff back of it. The Doctor went in, I waited
in the trap outside. After a while the Doctor came out got in the trap
and showed me a twenty dollar bill. He said the case was a woman who
was very ill; there were three other children and another on its way. I
did not see the husband.
A few months afterwards Whitewood was mildly horrified by the news
that this man had cut off the head of one of his children. His wife had
died, leaving him of course in great straits with his young children. His
troubles became too much for him. He began to hear voices; and a voice
told him to cut off the child's head; he obeyed and severed its little head
with an axe. A calf was tied, and the voice told him to decapitate it also;
and he hewed off its head. The poor fellow was manifestly crazy, and so
the jury found; and he went to Brandon Asylum. Some years afterwards
I was driving with James Gathercole, an Englishman with a Swedish wife.
We met a couple in a buckboard, a rosy-faced man all smiles and a buxom
woman. This was the man who had cut off his child's head. His mania
had passed, and he had made a happy second marriage.
Bibliography follows:
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