The pertinent question has been asked if these men and women who for decades continued to leave their homes and travelled thousands of miles to carry out this `hard, grueling work,' might not have achieved the same results in their own homeland, in the provinces of their birth. But one may also ask, how many of them would have been able there to carve out a given region's biggest and most prosperous farm? How many of them would have been able to educate themselves to become speakers, or singers, or actors, or musicians, in addition to earning their daily bread? Very few. They would have lacked the opportunity for independent action, for in Finland the majority of these men and women who became the immigrants would have followed well-trodden paths, with the traditions of their fathers and mothers being their ideals, against a background of a slowly developing rural setting in which their particular heritage was membership in a fixed social class. In a big, free America these strong but silent and unassuming men and women of Finland did not stop at the street corners of the big cities and seek an easy and convenient life; they were eager to make their way to the places, not where the streets were paved with gold but, where they were in contact with the land, the forest, the wilderness. There they faced the task of hewing the forest, clearing the boulders out of their way, before the earth was ready to receive the touch of the hoe. And they struck their hoes into that earth, worked tirelessly, ceaselessly, until they had created their own measure of happiness with their own strength and were able to give healthy and strong progeny to this new land they called their own.

The years which have passed have brought about vast changes. The pioneers themselves have had to suffer the ravages of time. Many already rest in their graves, from which one can barely make out that the name carved on the stone is a Finnish name. Those who are still alive no longer remind one of the persevering pioneer. Their hands, which once held the plow so firmly, have lost their strength. The busy fingers of the pioneer mother are folded quietly over the open pages of the old family Bible.

This history of the Finns in Minnesota is not intended to be a monument to them, another to rank besides so many already erected. The Finns of Minnesota were pioneers, tenacious of purpose, and miners of the wealth hidden deep in the earth, and that they were successful in what they undertook their work most amply proves. Let their monument be the Northern Minnesota which they have created.

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