Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930In 1904, the first Scandinavian settlers moved onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. These land hungry immigrants struggled against severe poverty, often becoming the sharecropping tenants of Dakota landowners. Yet the homesteaders' impoverishment did not impede their quest to acquire Indian land, and by 1929 Scandinavians owned more reservation acreage than their Dakota neighbors. Norwegian homesteader Helena Haugen Kanten put it plainly: