The chronicles reckon his reign from
this small beginning; while the Danes and their abettors in Stockholm
long continued to speak of him and his party as a band of robbers in the
woods.

Thus the Dalesmen swore fidelity to Gustavus--the inhabitants, namely,
of the upper parishes on both arms of the Dal-elf, where a numerous
people, living amid wild yet grand natural scenery and hardened by
privations, is still known by that name. Gustavus came to the Kopparberg
with several hundred men in the early part of February, 1521, there took
prisoner his enemy Christopher Olson, the powerful warden of the mines,
made himself master of the money collected for the crown dues, and of
the wares of the Danish traders on the spot, distributed both the money
and goods among his men--who made their first standard from the silk
stuffs there taken--and then returned to the Dales. Not long afterward,
on a Sunday, when the people of the Kopparberg were at church, Gustavus
again appeared at the head of fifteen hundred Dalesmen. He spoke to the
people after divine service, and now the miners likewise swore fidelity
to his cause. Thereupon the commonalty of the mining districts and the
Dalesmen wrote to the commons of Helsingland, requesting that the
Helsingers might bear themselves like true Swedish men against the
overbearing violence and tyranny of the Danes. Those cruelties which
King Christian had already exercised on the best in the land, they said,
would soon reach every man's door and fill all the houses of Sweden with
the tears and shrieks of widows and orphans; if they would take up arms
and show themselves to be stout-hearted men, there was now good hope for
victory and triumph under a praiseworthy captain, the lord Gustavus
Ericson, whom God had preserved "as a drop of the knightly blood of
Sweden"; wherefore they begged them to give their help for the sake of
the brotherly league by which, since early times, the commonalty of both
countries had been united.

Ten years afterward, the Dalecarlians recall the fact that they had
received a friendly answer to the request which their accredited
messengers had preferred on that occasion, and that their neighbors the
Helsingers had promised to stand by them as one man, "whatever evils
might befall them from the oppression of foreign or native masters."
When Gustavus had begun the siege of Stockholm, every third man of the
Helsingers in fact marched thither to strengthen his army. Yet at