Owen didn’t say anything. He just stared at me.
So I told him.
Ragnhild Moe came to America all by herself in the spring of 1919. She was sixteen. She came from a little farm on a fjord in western Norway, where there were eleven children and not enough potatoes to feed them.
Her mother put her on a ship with a cardboard suitcase and a letter of introduction to a cousin in Minnesota.
When she finally got to Minnesota, after three weeks on the ocean and four days on a train, she found out the cousin had died of the Spanish flu three months earlier.
Nobody had written to tell her.
She spoke maybe twenty words of English.
She had four dollars.
“What did she do?” Owen whispered.
“She got a job,” I said. “Cooking. At a logging camp way up north of Bemidji. For sixty men.”
The head cook at that camp was an old Swede named Gus Nordstrom. He was seventy years old, half blind, and mean as a badger. He’d been cooking for lumber crews since the 1870s.
He didn’t want a sixteen-year-old girl in his kitchen.
But nobody else would take the job. So he hired her.
For eight months, Ragnhild got up at three-thirty every morning in a shanty with no heat. She chopped wood for the cookstove. She hauled water from a hole in the lake ice. She made biscuits and flapjacks and salt pork and beans for sixty lumberjacks. Three times a day.
She burned her hands so many times that by Christmas she couldn’t feel two of her fingers.
“That’s awful,” Owen said.
“It was,” I said. “But here’s the part that matters.”
In February of 1920, a blizzard hit. The worst one anybody up there had seen in thirty years.
The snow got so deep the supply sleds couldn’t get into camp. For eleven days.
They ran out of almost everything. Flour. Salt pork. Coffee.
The men were still working twelve hours a day in thirty below zero. And they were starving.
And then Gus Nordstrom came down with pneumonia.
He was too sick to get out of his bunk.
So it was just Ragnhild. Sixteen years old. Alone in that cookhouse. With sixty hungry men and almost nothing to feed them.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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