Northwestern Minnesota Counties: 1. Crow Wing; 2. Otter Tail; 3. Wadena; 4. Becker; 5. Wilkin; 6. Clay; 7, Norman; 8. Mahnomen; 9. Clearwater; 10. Hubbard; 11. Polk; 12. Red Lake; 13. Pennington; 14. Marshall; 15. Kittson; 16. Roseau; 17. Lake of the Woods; 18. Kochiching; 19. Beltrami; 20. Cass.

In fact, moreover, it might have been difficult to find any Finns at all, for a correspondent for the Duluth Päivälehti wrote in 1914 that "here in Brainerd live several hundred Finns, but I have observed that if a new Finn were to appear in our city he would not find it easy to locate a single Finn, no matter how many of them might pass him on the street. The thing is that no one here wants to speak Finnish - everyone who possibly can hides that language. Indeed there are even many who will most firmly deny that they are Finns."

This phenomenon was a very general one at that time. Kaarina Leino-Olli gave her explanation for it in an article in the Päivälehti in 1938:

"Why did we Finns who were growing up around 1915 feel ourselves so inferior? First of all, because we belonged to a small nationality group, which in addition to everything else had come from a country of which nobody knew anything at all or only so much, perhaps, that it was some north Russian province. If the name of Finland meant anything at all to an average American, it brought to mind images of a frozen wilderness, of reindeer and of Lapps peering out of their leather hoods with slanting eyes. If someone said, 'My parents were born in Finland', he usually was asked, 'Where's that?' And although we children were born in America, we were usually called foreigners just the same. The irony of it was that those who accused us of being foreigners or worse were frequently foreigners themselves, but from England or Ireland, and since they spoke the language of the country they considered themselves very superior, even though they were often very simple people.

"Yes, they called us foreigners, and in less charitable moments they called us bums or dirty Finns. Geography books, encyclopedias and social studies always used to state that the Finns were Mongolians. It is difficult to describe to you who have been able to avoid these libels, how it froze the heart and how it could crush a child. I shall never forget what happened to me once when I was about ten years old. Near us lived an Irish family, with a daughter named Kathleen - who also had a nickname, Sunny. One afternoon we had been playing together with our dolls, and when suppertime approached

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