Onon Bjornson Dahle was born in 1823 in Upper Telemark, Norway. After attending normal school in Hvideseid and teaching for six years, he emigrated to America in 1848. He taught school in Norwegian around Christiana for a winter, worked the harvest, and cut cordwood near St. Louis with his brother. In 1850 the brothers and three Scandinavian partners headed west across the plains with three yoke of oxen for the gold fields of California, a trip which Onon later described as "hungry horrors." Eventually they had some success mining gold and returned to the Midwest in 1851.