Relatively few scholars have studied letters written by European immigrants in the United States as forms of folklore. Jennifer Eastman Attebery’s Up in the Rocky Mountains breaks new ground in analyzing Swedish immigrants’ letters as artifacts of vernacular self-expression. Building upon previous scholarship by Linda Dégh, Sandra Dolby Stahl, Robert B. Klymasz, and others, Attebery shows how much we can learn about immigrants’ shared culture by scrutinizing the letters they wrote to folks at home.
In 1988, just before traveling to Sweden, Attebery began studying the lives of Swedish immigrants in Idaho. Her sojourn in Sweden included visits to her husband’s family’s farm, a nearby church, and the Swedish Emigrant Institute in Växjö. At the Institute, she found a newspaper article inviting Swedes to come to Idaho’s Snake River Valley. When she returned to Sweden on a Fulbright fellowship in 1998, she closely examined fifty-four collections of letters sent to Sweden from immigrants who lived in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. She found that each collection of letters “read like an epistolary autobiography, though often cut short and lacking a narrative conclusion that neatly answers all the reader’s concerns” (xvii).
In the first chapter, Attebery examines letter writing as a folk practice. She explains that Swedish immigrants who wrote letters home between 1880 and 1917 used “a conventional format, themes, and formulas” to express their personal concerns (12). Although letter-writing manuals were available both in the United States and in Sweden during that time period, she finds that the influence of such manuals was not strong; instead, immigrants’ sharing of letters with each other reinforced traditional patterns such as the use of opening and closing formulas and focus on certain kinds of content.
In the second chapter, Attebery suggests that letters are “tangible texts, recognizable even before read on the basis of their size, shape, and packaging” (22). Her interpretation of letters as artifacts is detailed and persuasive. Photographs of two letters help the reader to visualize the artifacts’ shape and form. The letters have three sections: opening, middle, and closing. Attebery notes that the middle section reflects the “dialogic principle of turn-taking” that alternates the writer’s viewpoint with the viewpoint of the recipient (29). She observes that the letters’ closings, with their “redundancy of greetings and well-wishing,” resemble the last parts of family visits, when people take their leave slowly and ceremoniously (40).
Chapters 3 through 6 provide fascinating glimpses of how Swedish immigrants lived while adjusting to daily life in the Rocky Mountains. A letter from Pet Stred, written in Bay Horse, Idaho in 1891, states, “To drink and shoot each other are part of everyday life; here you live a quite wild life; any church or similar establishment cannot be found in more than 100 miles” (45). In this unfamiliar environment, many Swedish immigrants expressed a need for comforting connections to their home culture. Attebery notes that Rocky Mountain merchants did their best to provide Swedish clothing and foods; larger cities had Swedish barbers, dentists, and journalists. Affiliation with churches, fraternal organizations, and other groups made daily routines more comfortable and familiar.
In Swedish immigrants’ letters home, the phrase “I work every day” commonly appears after greetings and inquiries about loved ones’ health. Some letter writers express frustration about having little time off from work to worship and celebrate holidays. Many carefully describe their wages and work schedules. Attebery observes that frequent use of the formulaic phrase “I am sending money” shows that “sending money had as much ceremonial as practical import” (99). Enclosures, typically photos and pressed flowers from Sweden, serve as “metonyms for the personal contact that correspondents hoped to maintain” (101). Identification with their new region emerges in use of phrases such as “the wild West” and “up in the Rocky Mountains.” Attebery examines the myth of the wild, remote West, where people may transform themselves by “going native.” She mentions one early twentieth-century letter writer in Red Lodge, Montana, who writes, “I usually take a bath in the river and run about like an Indian” (114-15).
Chapter 7, which explores religious language in immigrants’ letters, offers especially valuable insights. Attebery suggests, “Openings and closings become sacred spaces in which relatives separated by an ocean can share their religious beliefs and experiences” (142). Images and themes influenced by Christianity include the “gift of God,” the “helping hands of God,” and “God’s eyes,” in which all people are equal (145-46). Liturgy, hymns, sermons, and testimony all contribute to the use of these themes and images in letters (156).
Attebery succeeds admirably in bringing Swedish immigrants’ letters and daily routines to life for the reader. Her explication of immigrants’ letters as a vernacular genre constitutes a significant contribution to folklore and history. Her analysis is lively and persuasive, and the well-chosen photographs help the reader understand what it was like to be “up in the Rocky Mountains” around the turn of the twentieth century.
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[Review length: 824 words • Review posted on April 16, 2008]