Now back to the tree-roots. If the stone was a fake, buried deliberately, that must have taken place years before 1898- but not necessarily before the tree started growing. Ohman found the stone by doing exactly what you would expect a pioneer to do with inconvenient trees- trying to grub it up. If you wanted to bury something with the intention that it should be found by a mid-West settler, deliberately entangling it with the roots of a young tree would be a very good idea. For a 40-plus-year-old tree this could take us right back to 1858, the year Douglas County (in which Kensington is situated) was first settled, but that's not very likely, because the earliest settlers, according to the 1860 census, included only a single Scandinavian family. However, by 1870, the situation was very different, as shown on the state map here- the census listed 1,227 people born in Sweden or Norway, over a quarter of the county population and the largest Scandinavian community on the Minnesota western frontier. Bizarrely, the exact plot where the Runestone was found was one of the last to be settled in the township of Solem. For decades it was set aside as "Internal Improvement Land" and not allocated to anybody (the Solem plat map of 1886 does show a couple more such plots, both at the south end of Solem, but at least one of those, four times the size of the KRS find plot, was almost certainly intended for urban development around the proposed railroad, forestalled by a smart application from a private landowner to develop the community which gained the name of Kensington). That "coincidence" in itself has to be a point for the "fake" claimants- but as Solem was first settled in 1866 and officially established as a township in 1870, it suggests a fairly long-term arrangement. Why would anybody do such a thing?