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One thinks of them as the people who at first gave a deaf ear to Gustaf Vasa's appeal to drive out the Danes, but who eventually followed him shoulder to shoulder through the very gates of Stockholm, to help him lay the foundations of modern Sweden. The Swedish people regard their Dalecarlians as a reserve upon whom to draw in times of crisis.
Twice he had made a revolution in his kingdom, twice he had striven single-handed against the gigantic power of Russia, and had he been seconded by Prussia, Austria, and Turkey, Russia would have found a rampart against her in the north. The first time, abandoned by his troops, in his tent by his revolted generals, he had escaped, and alone, made an appeal to his brave Dalecarlians.
Some time ago a proposition was made to place a portrait of Gustavus Vasa in the church at Mora. "No," said the Dalecarlians, "we will not have it: we do not need any picture to remind us of what our fathers have done." The landlady was a little woman, who confessed to being forty-nine years old, although she did not appear to be more than forty.
Here, every one had evidently been washed and combed: the men wore clean shirts and stockings, and the women chemises of snowy whiteness under their gay boddices. They were mostly Dalecarlians, in the picturesque costume of the province.
"Every new season there was a new General tried; but without the least improvement. There was mockery enough, complaint enough; indignant laughter in Stockholm itself; and the Dalecarlians thought of revolting: but the Senator Committee-men held firm, ballasted by French gold, for four years.
Our postillion, a fine young fellow of twenty-two, over six feet in height, put on his best blue jacket and knee-breeches, with a leather apron reaching from his shoulders to below his knees. This is an article worn by almost all Dalecarlians for the purpose of saving their clothes while at work, and gives them an awkward and ungraceful air.
We gazed out of this window, and below it we saw the deep moat in which he sank. We enter the yeoman's hall, and the council hall, where, in the recesses of the windows, on each side, are painted yeomen in strange dresses, half Dalecarlians and half Roman warriors.
One of its leaders asked the country folk what kind of men the Dalecarlians were, and when he was told that they drank water and ate bread made of bark, he cried out, "Such a people the devil himself couldn't whip; let us get out." But his advice was not taken and the Danish army was wiped out.
In this dire dilemma, Gustavus strained every nerve to avert the threatened disaster. With a small force, chiefly of Dalecarlians, he marched day and night, and hastened to Waxholm in the hope of surprising the Danish fleet which had been detained by adverse winds.
The Dalecarlians are represented to us as the simplest, the most faithful, and the bravest of the sons of men, men undebauched and unsuspicious, but who devoted themselves in the most disinterested manner for a cause that appeared to them worthy of support, the cause of liberty and independence against the cruelest of tyrants.
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