Courtship, Wedding and Honeymoon

Sigurd met Elizabeth Uhrenholdt sometime after he began his first year of college in 1916. One of Sigurd's Northland College friends (quite possibly Elizabeth's brother Andrew) attempted to plant the seeds of a relationship by getting Sigurd to visit a young woman who was recuperating from pneumonia in the local hospital. He obliged, but found himself completely tongue-tied. Finally, out of sheer embarrassment and possibly hoping to break the ice, Sigurd picked up a pillow and threw it at her. "He certainly was a dandy!" she said afterward to her nurse.

Elizabeth got a much better impression of him during the summer of 1917, when Sigurd worked at her family's farm in Seeley, Wis. Over the course of the summer they grew attracted to each other, and began to visit in the evenings and take long walks together. When Sigurd returned to Ashland for school in the fall, he often took the five o'clock train to Seeley to spend a couple of hours at the farm, and then took the nine o'clock train back home. On weekends he frequently went down for a whole day. Elizabeth became attached to him, and assumed they would marry.

But then Kathryn Darke entered the picture. During the 1917-1918 school year she was on Northland College's Dramatic Club with Sigurd, and she co-starred with him in the school play, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. Sigurd became infatuated with her, and wrote a breezy letter to Elizabeth Uhrenholdt, describing his new relationship and saying that Elizabeth would always be like a sister to him. Elizabeth was churning butter when the letter came. Her heartache was still painful to recall many years later.

Sigurd soon regretted the letter. When he went out on a date with Kathryn and some other friends, he was shocked and dismayed when she and the others pulled out some liquor and began drinking. Sigurd, who was not yet ready to break with the Swedish Baptist injunction against alcohol, refused to join in; he left them and walked home in the cold night air. He soon wrote Elizabeth an apologetic letter. She did not respond, nor did she answer any of the other letters he sent during the rest of the school year. They did not see each other again until Sigurd returned to the Uhrenholdt farm to work there the following summer. By then, as Elizabeth told me many years later, "he was a lot more attentive."

Even so, Sigurd came close to losing Elizabeth again early in 1921, when a miner named Al Kennedy (on the right in the photo above) invited Sigurd to come with him to the Flin Flon region of Manitoba for a year or two or three and pan for gold. Drawn by the promise of adventure, Sigurd badly wanted to go, but Elizabeth delivered an ultimatum: if he went to Manitoba she would not wait around for him to return.

Elizabeth would say after Sigurd's death that she regretted making him choose between her and the Flin Flon because his dream of traveling through the Far North haunted him for decades. He turned down Kennedy's offer. He also told Elizabeth that if they were to marry she had to understand his deep need to spend a lot of time outdoors. Elizabeth's mother, Kristine Uhrenholdt, urged her not to rush into marriage. "Sigurd belongs in school for a couple of years yet and not as the head of a family," she wrote on February 18, 1921. "And if your love is not so strong but that it grows cold in a couple of years then it is better that you never are married. Life is not play, my girl, remember that, and even in the heavens of the warmest and truest love can come dark clouds." Nevertheless, Elizabeth and Sigurd began planning and August wedding.