The Swiss Emigration to the Red River Settlement in 1821 and its Subsequent Exodus to the United States

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Everything went wrong. Having crossed the Atlantic for about 3 months and getting stuck in the ice of Hudson’s Strait for another three weeks, the band of Swiss emigrants had to row with great hardship up the Hayes River over some 6o portages, and cross Lake Winnipeg in its full length. Arriving starved, exhausted, and deprived of their belongings at the Red River Settlement just before the snows, they were told that nothing had been prepared for them. Lodging and food was there none due to a plague of grasshoppers and floods that had destroyed the harvests of the previous four years. The so-called Promised Land was bare of any prospect. Thoroughly embittered and disgusted, one family after the other headed south between 1821 and 1826, some alone, others in groups, hoping to reach present day Minnesota as their first refuge. But to get there they had to cross over some 350 miles of prairie, a veritable desert of uncharted trails and water holes, peopled by roving Sioux looking out for victims to scalp. How did they survive? That’s what the reader will find out by reading this dramatic document, which is illustrated by Peter Rindisbacher, the young artist who participated in this extraordinary venture.