Up in the Rocky Mountains
Subtitle: writing the Swedish immigrant experience
By: Jennifer Eastman Attebery.
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Minneapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780816647675; 9780816647682
Subjects: Swedish Americans -- West (U.S.) -- Correspondence; Swedish Americans -- Rocky Mountains Region -- Correspondence; Immigrants -- West (U.S.) -- Correspondence; Immigrants -- Rocky Mountains Region -- Correspondence; Letter writing -- West (U.S.) -- History; Letter writing -- Rocky Mountains Region -- History; American letters -- West (U.S.); American letters -- Rocky Mountains REgion; West (U.S.) -- Social life and customs; Rocky Mountains Region -- Social life and customs
Genres: Correspondence.
Description: "Before the turn of the twentieth century, many Swedish men emigrated to the American Rockies as itinerant laborers, drawn by the region's developing industries. Single Swedish women ventured west, too, and whole families migrated, settling into farm communities. By 1920, one-fifth of all Swedish immigrants were living in the West. In Up in the Rocky Mountains, Jennifer Eastman Attebery offers a new perspective on Swedish immigrants' experiences in Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico from 1880 to 1917 by interpreting their letters home. Considering more than three hundred letters, Attebery analyzes their storytelling, repetitive language, traditional phrasing, and metaphoric images. Recognizing the letters' power as a folk form, Attebery sees in them the writers' relationships back in Sweden as well as their encounters with religious and labor movements, regionalism, and nationalism in their new country. By defining personal letters as a vernacular genre, Attebery provides a model for discerning immigrants' shared culture in correspondence collections. By studying their words, she brings to life small Swedish communities throughout the Rocky Mountain region"--P. [4] of cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: A note on translations; title: Preface : expanding Swedish America westward; title: Vernacular writing : letter writing as a folk practice; title: "Thanks for the letter" : the shape of the genre; title: "Here are many Swedes" : nodes and networks of Swedish settlement in the Rockies; title: "I work every day" : becoming American workers; title: "I am sending money" : old country and new; title: "Out West" : identifying with a new region; title: "God's good gift" : religious language in the Rocky Mountain letters; title: Identity, genre, meaning : what we learn from reading vernacular letters; title: Appendix : the letter writers and twenty letters.