I first discovered the portrait of Mina Westbye at the archives of the Norwegian Emigrant Museum. Amazingly, when I showed the image to a colleague at the University in Bergen, he recognized the young woman as his great-great aunt. He introduced me to Westbye’s then-90-year-old son-in-law, and to her grandchildren. I went to visit them in the U.S., and they let me study their family letters and photographs.
Gradually I was able to assemble an outline of Westbye’s life. Her father was a military officer of lower rank, who deserted his family in 1888 to emigrate to the United States. At the age of 21, his daughter followed, apparently to live with him—though her descendants say he had alcohol problems and had remarried, so she likely understood the necessity of shaping her own future in America.
At the time one way to make money was to speculate in real estate by becoming a homesteader. According to migration records, Mina Westbye purchased a plot in North Dakota in 1903. She wrote in her letters that she planned to sell the property and use the capital to make her new start in life.
But homesteading laws required that she had to live on the property for three years before she could cash in—so while she sat there, waiting for her real life to begin, Westbye took photographs and wrote letters. The photo of her sitting outside her house on the prairie captures her circumstances neatly. Through the little window facing the photographer, we glimpse ironed curtains. Westbye wears a white lace blouse and a bonnet, and she poses like a young woman from the urban middle class––straight-backed and deeply absorbed in what appears to be a book or magazine. Her posture and grooming stand in strong contrast to the dismal shanty where she lives. A shovel leans against the wall, but her relationship to the landscape seems to be quite different than that of a farmer’s practical, utilitarian perspective. She is focused on what’s next, a world beyond.
The photograph of Westbye’s house on the prairie went home to Norway, but most of her letters during this waiting period were addressed to her future husband, Alfred Gundersen. Gundersen had a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and was teaching there while he continued his academic education in botany. It was probably in Minneapolis where he met Westbye and began writing letters to her while she was living alone in her claim shanty. Their correspondence stretches over a seven-year period, from 1904 to 1911.