Per Person and Margareta Olson, both Swedish immigrants, were married at Mayville in Dakota Territory in 1883. Their attempt at renting land in the Goose River Valley was not rewarding so they decided to find a homestead. Father walked the fifty miles to the new homestead area west of the new village of Cooperstown. He found a disillusioned bachelor who was glad to sell his shack and any right to the land. He had spent one winter there and that was quite enough for him. Father paid him a few dollars and re-filed for the homestead. It was a two room tarpaper covered shack and a well.
Early in the summer of 1884 they set forth to their new home in the west. The trek was undertaken in an old lumber-wagon drawn by a team of old and tired horses. In the wagon beside my father, my mother sat holding a sick baby in her arms.
The first year there would be no crop and they were in dire need of money. Father hired out as a harvest hand on the large Cooper ranch. Mother remained on the homestead while father walked to and from his daily task. In the fall he was paid in "gold."
In the "Section" where the folks now made their home there were two other neighbors, the LUDVIG ANDERSONS and the PETRUS ERICKSONS, the latter, near relatives of the Persons. Then there was one quarter of Tree Claim on which father filed.
Other relatives from Sweden later arrived, three brothers of father:
JENS who took a homestead and built a sod-house
JONAS (SKANSE) who, with several members of his family, located in the community, and ANDERS who arrived, with his family, too late to get a homestead in the vicinity but located in Foster county. One neighbor though not a relative, took a homestead and built a dugout in the side of the hill, LARS SUNDBERG.
The Person homestead consisted of low land with a large slough with shores covered with dry buffalo bones, the remains of either an epidemic among the big beasts or wholesale slaughter. Father had exchanged the two old nags for a yoke of half domestic young oxen. While the oxen were at noon rest from pulling the plow, father picked dry bones to be sold in town and later shipped east to be ground up for fertilizer. The tree-claim consisted of higher ground, so the two-room home was moved to higher ground. In that two-room "palace" five children were born and survived. The first two children died in infancy. The five that survived were:
Peter, now living in Santa Barbara, California
John, deceased
Margaret, Mrs. Thorvald Gilje, now of Spring Valley, California
and two, still living on the old farm:
Julia, and Inga, Mrs. Axel Liljenquist. The Axel Liljenquists had three children, Wilbur, Margaret, Mrs. Allan Stokka and Julienne, Mrs. David Johnson
The courthouse records preserve the name Per Person Hodal. There were two Per Persons that received their mail at Cooperstown. They conferred and decided to add to their names the name of the place in Sweden from which they had come. The one who had come from KINDSO and the one who had come from Hogdal decided not to take the porcine name HOGDAL but HODAL. We children never liked the new name. We dropped it even though our farm was for a time registered as "The HODAL Grain and Stock Farm."c
Source: Griggs County History 1879 - 1976 page 277