'If I like it, I think I'll stay'

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Torsten Anderson, in the farmyard of his uncles' Dundy County homestead.

MAX -- Torsten Anderson has lived most of his 95 1/2 years in America.

With a twinkle in his crystal blue eyes, a grin on his weather-worn face and the rhythm of Sweden in his English, he teased, "Well, I've been here 78 years. If I decide I like it, I think I'll stay."

Torsten has grown hay on Dundy County ground and raised steers on its prairie grasses since coming to America to farm with his uncle late in 1925. With so many years of hard ranch work behind him, Torsten said he's thought about retiring.

"Well," Torsten mused, on a warm October afternoon, "I've thought about it. I just never got around to it."

Torsten still works outside about three hours every day; he's often seen attacking weeds that encroach on the buffalo grass and fencelines of his neat farmstead. "I fix fence in the spring of the year," he said.

Torsten has no cattle of his own any more. "Verle Raichart has been running cattle on my north pasture for 30 years," he said. "And Boyd Adkinson and his wife run cattle on some of my land too."

Torsten visits often with the crew on an oil-drilling rig that pokes out of a hilltop southwest of his home.

Torsten lives on the land his uncles, Frank and Sanford Stoneberg, homesteaded in 1886. Frank came from Sweden in 1883 and settled with relatives in Illinois. Frank and his brother, Sanford, came to Nebraska three years later, "and Sanford started this ranch in December 1886," Torsten said.

Sanford raised cattle, grew some hay and started buying land, Torsten said. Frank, who had trained in Illinois to become a blacksmith, started a blacksmith shop.

Frank was well-known, Torsten said, for the precision with which he built wagon wheels. The hub of the wooden-spoked and steel-banded wheels had to be absolutely perfect. "It goes to pieces if it's not just right," Torsten said.

Sanford's 14x18-foot one-room house originally sat on the other side of Indian Creek. He moved it, Torsten said, in 1902 or 1903, and added on to it in 1917. "It was almost new when we came here," Torsten said.

Repositioned, Sanford's house sat west of the board corrals and windmill, and northwest of the house he would build in 1917 for "the married man," (the hired man who had a wife and oftentimes children), Torsten said.

The married man's house is the house Torsten moved into about a year and a half after he moved to America, and still lives in today.

A 17-year-old Torsten came to America with his older brother, 21-year-old Carl B. "My brother wanted to come over," Torsten said, "but he didn't want to come alone."

Torsten and Carl came to America for the same reason most Swedes left their homeland. "Most of us came to United States because we needed money ... a better chance to make a living," Torsten said.

Back home, there were three other brothers to either work the small family farm or take over their father's blacksmith operation.

Carl and Torsten left Sweden on Nov. 25, 1925. Their uncle, Sanford, was to meet them in Chicago. "Trouble was," Torsten said, "he met the wrong train. He got the wrong information from the steam ship company, and we had already been there."

Torsten continued, "The train we were on wouldn't stop in Max, so we got off in McCook." It was the middle of the night, Dec. 2 and 3, 1925, he remembers.

Torsten also remembers a new two-story brick depot in McCook looked finished on the outside, but wasn't inside. "They still used the old frame building," he said.

Neither Torsten nor Carl spoke or understood any English. The parents of a McCook police man were Swedish, and the officer took the two young men to the McCook Hotel. "Our uncle caught up with us there," Torsten said.

By May of 1926, Torsten was working for Sanford, and Carl was working for a neighboring farmer, Albert Hansen.

"Our uncle thought it better to part us so we'd learn English," Torsten said. Torsten and Carl learned English, "one word at a time," Torsten remembers.

"Carl worked for Hansens a little better than one year," Torsten said, "and then came back to work with me here."

When the two brothers arrived from Sweden, there were no roads to the Stoneberg ranch northwest of Max. In knee-deep and deeper snow, Torsten's uncle and the married man road horseback across the hills to get groceries and the mail in Max. They fixed fence on their way into town, Torsten said, and filled gunny sacks with groceries for the ride back.

Carl died of a ruptured appendix 3 1/2 years after the brothers came to America. The closest and only doctor who could treat such an illness was in Cambridge, Torsten said, but his brother didn't survive. "My brother worked through all the tough years in the beginning ... " Torsten said.

Carl B. Anderson is buried in the cemetery north of Benkelman, beside his uncles Frank and Sanford Stoneberg.

Torsten said his mother and father thought he would return to Sweden after Carl's death. " ... guess I was stubborn then, too. I stayed," he said.

Torsten worked for Sanford until 1938, when Sanford took Torsten on as a partner. "He owned half the cattle and I owned half the cattle," Torsten said. "The partnership lasted until he passed away. He died on my 50th birthday, July 13, 1958."

Sanford died of an infection after getting kicked by a horse. No one's lived in his house since.

Torsten had just a grade-school education when he came to America, and did not continue any schooling in his new home. "Last spring," Torsten chuckled, "it's been 82 years since I have been in school."

Torsten never married. "Nobody proposed," he says, cocking his head and grinning. "I was so bashful, I didn't know the man was supposed to do that."

All of Torsten's mother's brothers were bachelors. "That's where I inherited my ability to be a bachelor," he chuckled.

"I've lived most of the time alone," Torsten said.

There were times, however, back in the 1930s and 1940s, when the married man and his family lived in the little house with Torsten.

"When we had cattle and were putting up hay, I cooked for the man hired to help," Torsten said. "He died, though."

"But he hadn't had any of my cooking for several years when he died."

Torsten said he never thought of returning to Sweden. "They have Socialism," Torsten said. "I certainly don't believe in that."

He thought a moment. "And I was just a kid ... I was only 17, when I moved here. I grew up on this ranch."

Torsten keeps in touch with family in Sweden, and every once in a while, someone -- a niece, a great-niece -- will visit America. He has friends here who are also Swedish immigrants.

"My sister and one or two others still write," Torsten said. Pictures that Torsten has collected over the years are tucked in a shoebox; he knows everyone in every picture.

Torsten has traveled back to Sweden 14 times. His first trip back, in 1954, both his parents were living.

For a while, he returned every other year. "It's been five years now," Torsten said. "The last time I got so terribly dizzy. The pressure in the (airplane) cabin was not good. I was so dizzy I couldn't walk."

"I probably won't go back again," he said.

Maybe Torsten Anderson has decided he likes America. Maybe he'll stay.

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