less than two years old, died with the mother—the Asiatic cholera decimating the country.
Father, whose first name was also Frantisek as written in the Cesky tongue, soon married again. So young Frantisek attended the village school under the care of his stepmother, Anna, till the spring of 1854, when the family with a number of other families from near-by villages moved to the United States of America. We came down the rapid river Vltava [Moldau] to the capital city of Prague, there taking the railroad train by way of Leipzig to Hamburg, and from there by a small steamer to Liverpool, where a three-masted sailing ship was boarded.
After four weeks of fairly good sailing, having experienced only about three days of storm, the colony arrived at New York City and proceeded by railroad train via Philadelphia to Pittsburg, Pa., where a stop of a few weeks was made. From there we went to Cleveland, Ohio, where a longer stop was made; but this city was not the goal of the colonists. Their desire was to acquire land for themselves, and they had been advised by well-informed persons that the new state of Iowa, just beginning to be settled upon its eastern border, was a favored country to go to. Therefore the next move was via the Great Lakes on a rear-end turbine propeller to Chicago, Ill., thence by railroad cars northwest to Galena, as far as any cars ran at that time; from there the journey was made by wagons, to haul the baggage, the women and the children; men had to walk. Thus the colony proceeded to the Mississippi through the dense forest.
An accident which might have been very serious, happened one evening as it grew dark, and before we reached a lowly tavern in the woods. The driver of one of the wagons, seeing a big mud-hole before him, and trying to avoid it, turned too far to the right into the dense trees and upset the wagon in the mud. We were all thrown out; children screamed, women prayed, and the driver cursed; trunks burst wide open, spilling the linen and extra clothing into the mud and water. The men came up to the catastrophe and dragged the besmeared ones out of the mud, set the wagon right side up, and, each finding his own, started on pulling the dear ones along by hand, for no one wanted to get on the wagon again. When dad wiped the mud off my eyes I could see a light ahead. It was the tavern in the woods. Washed up and with a steaming supper in the glare of the candle lights, we saw and felt we were not hurt as bad as we were scared.
Next day reaching the Father of Waters, a steam ferry took us to Dubuque, Iowa. The colonists rented houses on the outskirts of the small town, placing two or more families in each house, and the men looked for work, as the finances of most of them were nearly exhausted by the long journey. My uncle Frank, or Francis Swehla (the same name as father’s, they were cousins), took a trip to Winneshiek county, Iowa, where a Bohemian settlement had been started early that summer (1854) near Calmar, then called Whisky Grove. It was on the border of a large settlement of Norsemen, or Norwegians, which reached far beyond Decorah, the county seat. My uncle bought out the rights of a Norwegian settler and secured a section of land for himself and relatives. So after a few months’ sojourning in the town of Dubuque, and working for fifty cents per day, part of the colony moved to their destination by a river steamer up the river to Lansing, when they should have gone to McGregor, that being the shortest route. On reaching
