A related question- if the best land in Holmes City was already taken by May 1867, why did settlement of the next township site to the west (i.e. Solem) not get off to a good start until several years later? Were there political machinations in progress, attempting to restrict expansion in case it should become necessary to negotiate with the Sioux? In this edgy time, how could the immigrants be given some sort of bargaining power of their own? One of the things which brought so many Scandinavians to the USA was probably a book written a generation earlier by Carl Rafn, called "Antiquitates Americanae". In this book and various spin-off publications and exhibitions over the following decades, Rafn presented to a wide audience the evidence for the Norse voyages to "Vinland the Good"- not just the sagas and descriptions by medieval Scandinavian writers, but archaeological finds supplied by American historical researchers. Norse America was a hot topic in the mid-19th century. If evidence could be found that those Swedish and Norwegian immigrants in Minnesota had their own ancestral claim to the disputed land... But of course that wasn't going to happen. Minnesota is a long long way from the New England sites which had supplied most of the finds for Rafn's book. No landowners then, but explorers from Vinland; good for propaganda even if it wouldn't actually establish a land claim. Faking medieval Norse artefacts would be difficult without specialist knowledge and some very ingenious ageing techniques- and plausibility was very important, because a discovered fake could actually have negative propaganda value. At which point, enter our hypothetical person with access to a genuine source of runic text. Suddenly, the plan might just work. All this theoretical plotting is taking place in Holmes City, one of the most vulnerable communities, consisting of a small trading centre and a few outlying farms (the map here is copied from an original made in the early 1870s, but probably based on earlier surveys, as it shows no settlement at all in Solem, and more woodland than one would expect). The idea is to create a runestone, with a tale of violence against a Norse/Swedish expedition. The runic source document has nothing to do with massacres, let alone American natives, so phrases like the old Swedish equivalent of "murdered by Injuns" can't be included, but a coherent text can be constructed with a little ingenuity. One potential problem is probably avoided at the last minute- if the stone is to be found by innocent newcomers, who couldn't possibly have transported a large rock across the Atlantic, they might not recognise the runes, and would probably destroy the stone in case it was created by the Injuns. So find an excuse to include recognisable letters- as this is supposed to be a long time before Luther, the Roman Catholic invocation "AVM" will do nicely (even without the connotations discussed earlier on my Larsson Runes page). Actually, choosing a date is a bit of a challenge. The source document is likely to be quite late; also quite a lot is known about Norse activities in the western Atlantic until the 14th century, as Rafn shows in his book. So the date is set a few years after the mysterious disappearance of the western Norse settlement in Greenland- to be precise, in a moment of chutzpah, 1362- exactly 500 years before the 1862 uprising.