d were met at the union depot by thousands of people.
The Swedish Guard, Normanna Infantry, and the society Dania were paraded
outside the depot building. The guests were received by a committee, and
conducted in procession through the illuminated and crowded streets to
Dania hall, where a splendid banquet was enjoyed, while music was
discoursed by the Svea and Normanna bands. The city mayor, Dr. Ames,
made an address of welcome, after which several Scandinavians made
speeches. I had been elected as the spokesman for the Swedes, and
expressed myself as follows:

"_Honored Guests from Sweden, Norway and Denmark_:

"From the place where we now stand the roar of the St. Anthony falls
may be heard through the still night. You are, therefore, far back in
the depths of the American West; and yet this is only the modern gate
of entrance to the great North-west.

"A couple of hours ago a half dozen railway trains left our depot over
different roads and are now speeding on toward the setting sun, and
some of them do not cease their journey until they have passed
distances greater than that between London and Rome, through fertile,
but, as yet, mostly unsettled regions. Thirty-four years ago I, with a
few other of your countrymen, some of the earliest in Minnesota, gazed
for the first time at the St. Anthony falls. There was no city, not
even a sign of a city, on this side of the river; the red man chased
his game in the woods where our churches and school-houses now stand;
the country west of us was an unknown wilderness, Minnesota did not
exist as a state, and many of our western states, which now contain
millions of happy inhabitants, were not even projected.

"Now, on the contrary, our state alone is a mighty empire, with a
population of nearly a million and a half, and with an assessed
valuation of six hundred million dollars. Minnesota now produces a
hundred million bushels of grain annually on her fertile fields, six
hundred and fifty million feet of lumber from her forests, and her
infant iron mines already show an annual production of half a million
tons of rich ore. The Scandinavians constitute more than one-fourth of
the population of the state, and produce at least one-third of our
agricultural products on their own lands, as most of them are farmers.
The amount of grain which in Minnesota alone is annually produced,
would be more than sufficient to furnish th