The Danes of Lake View

Peter Madsen was born on April 6, 1824, in Vejle, Denmark. In 1847 he married Mary Ann, a young woman from Bredstrup, and the next year he was called up to fight in Denmark's war with Prussia. Their first son was born soon after he left. He was gone three years, and his wife supported herself and the baby by selling coffee and lunches to the soldiers camped nearby. On June 12, 1853, Madsen was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by Elder Rasmus Nielsen.

From Vejle to the river mouth

The family left Denmark on Christmas Day with three children. Two of them died on the way and were buried at Liverpool. Two months after leaving home the family landed at New Orleans, where cholera ran through their company. Their daughter later wrote that Peter and his wife sat up whole nights beside their one surviving son, praying he would live to reach the valley. He did. The family crossed the plains in the Hans Peter Olsen wagon company, which left Westport, Missouri, on June 15, 1854, and reached Salt Lake City on October 5.

Church leaders first sent the Madsens to Sanpete County, but they soon moved to the mouth of the Provo River. Andrew Jenson's history of the church counts Madsen as the first settler of what became Lake View, arriving in the summer of 1855. He fished with a seine he had knitted during his first Utah winter, and he farmed about a mile northwest of Fort Utah along what became the lower Geneva Road. When grasshoppers destroyed the crops of 1855, his nets fed hundreds of hungry people, and barrels of his fish went to the neighboring settlements for the poor.

His daughter's account says Ute families came each year to take their supply of fish from his seine, drying the meat on sticks and camping in his pasture for weeks. Once, she wrote, a band from the north arrived and the Utes accused them of coming to steal their fish. Madsen promised there was plenty for both and fished until each camp had what it wanted. During the Black Hawk War he served as a lieutenant. In 1866, rather than abandon the place, he and his neighbors built a small fort around his home, with men coming down from Provo to help. It became known as Fort Madsen.

One long room

Madsen married five women: Mary Ann, Johannah Kristine Anderson, Karen Knudsen, also known as Caroline, Wilhelmina Jorgensen and Lena Johnson. He fathered 35 children, 19 sons and 16 daughters. The household lived together in one long building. Its main room served as living room and, often, as the neighborhood dance hall, with an adobe kitchen and bedrooms behind. All the children called the first wife "mother" and their own mothers by name. The wives rotated the work, two in the kitchen while the others kept the house, and took over a sick woman's share as well as nursing her.

About twice a year Madsen invited every Scandinavian within traveling distance. An ox was barbecued, the women baked for days, and guests who had come far stayed a week, trading news from the old country. Caroline had come from the island of Falster with four sisters and married Peter in 1860; for some years she was president of the Lake View Ward Relief Society. Wilhelmina, born in Denmark in 1847, came to Utah in 1863 and walked nearly the whole way from the Missouri River. She married Peter the next year.

The fishing settlement became a ward in 1877, with Madsen as bishop. One of his counselors was another Dane, Mads Jorgensen, born on March 7, 1827. Jorgensen served missions to Denmark and to the Northwestern States, and he left thirteen children. When his wife Eveline, also a native of Denmark, died of typhoid in 1901, her funeral was held in the Lake View schoolhouse. Jorgensen died of pneumonia in April 1905, and Peter Madsen, by then past eighty, spoke at his funeral in the Lake View meetinghouse.

Missions and a courtroom

Madsen's church service took him far from the lake. Called to preach in his native Denmark in 1870, he caught typhoid fever and was released in 1871. In February 1886 he left for the Hawaiian Islands, where he served until 1889. When he fell gravely ill there, Wilhelmina crossed the Pacific to nurse him and stayed more than a year and a half. That journey brought them into a Provo courtroom. In November 1889 the case of the United States against Peter Madsen came to trial before Judge Blackburn.

Caroline testified that she knew Wilhelmina, who lived about a block away, but would not say whether she was Peter's wife. Wilhelmina said she had gone to the islands because Peter was sick and had sent for help, and that since their return they had lived within the law. She also told the court, "according to our belief I claim I am his wife." The jury acquitted him, and the Utah Enquirer reported that Madsen went free.

The last of the first generation

Madsen was released as bishop in 1892, after about fifteen years, and spent his last years in Provo. In April 1909 his children, grandchildren and friends filled the Lake View hall for his 85th birthday. The Provo Herald noted that David Starr Jordan of Stanford University, one of the officials and scientists who came to Utah in the interest of fish culture, had visited Bishop Madsen and praised him in his lectures. Madsen died on August 20, 1911, remembered by his family as the pioneer fisherman of Utah.

Three of his wives survived him. The last two, Wilhelmina and Caroline, both died of old age in February 1919, Wilhelmina in Provo and Caroline at her home in Lake View. Their deaths were a day apart, and a double funeral was held for them on Sunday, February 23, in Provo's Second Ward chapel. The Madsen name stayed on the lake bottom for generations: Spencer Madsen served as Lake View's bishop from 1928, Alfred J. Madsen later held the same office, and a P. W. Madsen led the community in prayer when Lake View dedicated its new chapel in 1938.