Hi,
This is by no means an area I am an expert in. However, that being said, I will attempt to answer in general about European immigration to the United States in the 19th century because I've been teaching subjects like this for nearly a decade. This answer is general and wide-ranging and not an in-depth look at Norwegians as immigrants, per se. Think of it as a Freshman-level survey lecture. One final disclaimer that, I think, fits with any question about historical motivations and actions; "It's complicated."
With those out of the way, let's delve a little into the phenomena of American migration and the immigrant story as a whole:
Basically, both officials from the US government and citizens alike 'sold' life in the United States as a golden opportunity. Mind you, this was not unique to the United States itself; the [British government used to advertise owning farms and land and opportunity in Canada] (http://data2.collectionscanada.ca/e/e350/e008748903-v8.jpg) to the swelling populations of the 19th century. In fact, some have argued that ['transportation'] (http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/convicts-and-the-british-colonies) to Australia was also a release valve for excess population. Essentially, there was a wide-ranging 'sales' pitch to draw Europeans (and Asians) to "The West" (a vague, wide term that includes many places we would not think of as 'western' today.)
A good example of this sales pitch, though coming at the tail end of the 19th century, is the adventuresome ["dime novels"] (https://blogs.baylor.edu/texascollection/2013/08/13/dime-novels-the-rise-of-the-american-hero/) which, tall tales aside, painted the West as an empty land ready for exploitation. Newspaper reporters and fiction writers alike jumped upon the bandwagon of these tales because appetite for them in Europe pretty much guaranteed newspaper sales (and writers' incomes). Moreover, and perhaps more famously, ["Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows"] (https://centerofthewest.org/learn/western-essays/wild-west-shows/) romanticized America to the European market; America was a place where a man could prove his manliness through near-mythical deeds! He was immensely popular and his act performed for Queen Victoria and the Pope by the end of the 19th century.
Can't imagine getting swept up in the fever of a new land? Well, imagine if a newssite broke the story of a previously-unknown continent that was 'empty' and ready for settling. A place where you could start a new life with a new name and a new identity. How many 21st century Americans themselves would leap at the chance to abandon debt, shitty credit scores, acrimonious politics, social inequality, economic disparity, and the banal evils of corporate life for an opportunity for adventure and excitement?
Add to this stories of immigrants who 'made it' in the USA - people like [Levi Strauss] (https://www.biography.com/people/levi-strauss-9496989), [Andrew Carnegie] (https://www.biography.com/people/andrew-carnegie-9238756), and [Adolphus Busch] (https://shsmo.org/historicmissourians/name/b/busch/) - and you have a powerful incentive to risk literally everything in a voyage to the USA and traversing unknown regions of a dangerous continent.
Unlike Europe, the Canadian/American West had lots of 'unused' land, according to boosters (please know it certianly wasn't "empty" nor "unused" but that's a different conversation). This goes hand-in-hand with the above point; it was a tradition in North America to offer cheap or free land to entice Europeans over to the New World, but these (such as the Headright acts in 1600s Virginia) were met with mixed results. The difference between 1600 and 1800 boils down to changes in agriculture and medicine in Europe which led to higher populations and over-crowding of the land and cities. This, in turn, led to high land and property prices (as well as taxes) for new families, meaning many people's dreams of having their own farm/land/business would always be a 'dream.'
Comparatively, the US government offered free land periodically through things like the Homestead Act of 1862 which opened up millions of acres of land for a pittance in order to get European (read "White Europeans" from North and West Europe) and American presences in the region; this would lead to settled farmers producing food and forcing out the Native Americans whose land it really was (though the US gov't conveniently neglected to tell Europeans as such). About 1.5 million homesteaders, not all of whom were US citizens by birth, took up the offer of free or nearly-free land during the lifetime of the Act and its 'spin offs' (smaller, more regional acts that hoped to have the same draw) continued well into the 20th century, drawing people to places like Nebraska. Best of all, taxes - if they existed at all in the region - were miniscule compared to Europe. Free land and no taxes? Sign me up, right?
So, Europeans had a choice; stay and maybe scrape enough together to maybe afford some land or sell pretty much everything and take a gamble on snagging some 'free' land.
While not quite as applicable to Scandinavians, most of Europe at the time was going through some pretty scary political, social, and economic upheavals that made staying in Europe in the mid-19th century particularly dicey. German, Italian, Irish, Polish, and many other Europeans were faced with [political revolution, unemployment, and literal starvation] (http://www.ushistory.org/us/25f.asp) in the mid-19th century. The option then was to stay and maybe die or to take a gamble and maybe live. A good example is the Potato Blight which most famously affected the Irish (leading to over half the population dying or fleeing to foreign shores), but Germany and Belgium were also affected deeply, especially the poor and working class whose diet was extremely dependent upon the humble spud. Comparatively, with the exception of 1860 to 1865, the United States seemed relatively stable and prosperous.
Stay and die or move and live (probably)? Which would you choose?
Only a relative few immigrants 'blazed the trail' so to speak. Many were enticed to come to the USA by relatives and friends who had gone before. Immigrant communities - speaking their mother tongue primarily (or exclusively) - were common in the "West." Many frontier cities had newspapers and laws passed in the mother tongue, despite being in the USA. Why? Comfort and familiarity. Immigrants banded together in order to look out for each other and provide a sense of continuity and 'normalcy' to their new lives. Larger communities drew more people and made possible more success stories. Usually, more immigrants settled relatively stable areas and only the truly desperate or foolhardy settled 'frontiers.'
I like your term "unbuilt"; the immigrant experience allows the newcomer to craft a world closer to their liking. It gave immigrants agency in crafting their future; a world that had all the good stuff of the homeland and all the stuff they liked about the new place. This is something they could never really have done even in the most liberal of European countries. Interestingly, the act of "building" reinforced cooperation and community while, ironically, perpetuating the myth of rugged individualism and made the transition from settled Europe to 'unbuilt' USA more palatable and less scary.
In conclusion, there are a LOT of reasons why a Norwegian would come out to the badlands of the West and persevere in the face of such hardships. But a combination of sales pitch, free land, a desire to remake the world as you see fit, and the lure of 'making it' all combine into a rather powerful impulse to "go to such a far distance."
Sources:
Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People by Alan Brinkley 2014
Immigrant America: A Portrait by Alejandro Portes et. al 2006
Norwegians and Swedes In America: Friends and Neighbors Ed by Philip Anderson et. al. 2012
Immigrants in the American Civil War History channel, American History in Film database, 2008
[The Buffalo Bill Center of the West] (https://centerofthewest.org/)
[Library of Congress: The Homestead Act] (https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/may-20)
EDIT: Spelling mistakes here and there (how did you guys let me get away with that?)
Norwegian Immigration in the 19th century is actually one of my research focuses and I published an honors thesis on the topic especially pertaining to the western-most edge of what is now the Midwest (the Dakotas and Nebraska). Which is rather specific so excuse me for the wall of text here, but it's not every day I get an opportunity to explain! So, if your question is on the subject of the settling of the frontier in the later 1800s, u/VetMichael 's post is fantastic, but if you are interested in Norwegians specifically I would add that that migration was a bit of a departure from the typical pattern of the time and was largely done by choice rather than desperation, which is a major reason for the larger rural norwegian-american population. These immigrants were often not as destitute upon arrival that they were pulled into military service, industrial work, or indentured servitude as was common for groups like the Irish, but instead were able to strike out to actually collect their homestead land.
This migration was during one of the largest migrations in human history and the exodus from Norway was astounding, Norway occupied the second highest emigration per capita before 1910, behind only Ireland, and a full one tenth of the population had relocated to the Americas during the 1880s. Norway was, during the nineteenth century, a rural nation, but nevertheless boasted a level of economic development beyond the average for Europe at that time and by the middle of the century local government was common. It is in this climate however that the seeds for the massive exoduses from Norway to America are found. In 1814 only 10% of the Norwegian population enjoyed suffrage, the nation was democratic in name only, while the rest of Western Europe gained self-governance the Norwegian citizenry had very little power. Dissatisfaction with this situation grew, this feeling, however, did not precipitate in a migration as it often did in other nations at the time. Instead, the migrations began in earnest only after (between 1884 and 1900) the Norwegian government became parliamentary (previously it had been answerable to the king in Sweden) and the economy grew by more than 50%. This is the first indication that this migration was not due to a political pressure beyond the powers of the immigrants, but instead due to something altogether different.
It would seem, from the timing of these major events in Norwegian history, that rather than the mounting of oppression acting as a push factor in Norwegian emigration it was the sudden influx of freedom and democracy that facilitated, in part, the migration from Norway. It is necessary to think of the presence democracy in a more broad fashion than a simple dualistic approach of democratic or not when considering the effects of political situations on phenomena as dynamic as emigration and immigration. This being borne in mind, one cannot attribute the mass emigration from Norway solely to the development of a more democratic government. It is very likely, however, that the (relatively) sudden development of Norwegian control over Norwegian affairs, being a radical restructuring of the Norwegian state, caused Norwegians to look with more interest at the systems similar to their new one. This would lead them to look, naturally toward the United States, by this point small numbers of Norwegians had already made the voyage across the Atlantic and had sent thousands of letters home causing people in every part of Norway to measure their own nation’s success ad democratizing against the idealized depiction of the United States their relatives provided. With there being no irresistible agent of social change pushing for the leaving of Norway in the way of economic downturns, famines, or political repression it seems necessary to look for another factor. This missing factor must be able to link the previously discussed factors and culminate in a compelling reason for the massive spikes in emigration from Norway between 1865 and 1910. More generally it should be seen as singular that people should so suddenly depart a homeland that had been, like the rest of Europe, stagnant in terms of large movements of people for the previous eight centuries. Unlike the rest of Europe, however, land ownership was much more common in Norway but one’s status was, still, traditionally measured in land ownership and this land was parceled out in inheritance. By the nineteenth century, however, land ownership had become increasingly rare with only the very wealthiest Norwegians holding any land. In this system most inland and rural Norwegians were forced to make their livings as cotters and laborers, together referred to as husmenn. This arrangement, coupled with the undeveloped nature of Norway’s infrastructure and trade systems caused a proverbial ceiling to develop, keeping un-landed Norwegians from accruing any wealth or status either in land or commerce. While this situation is not by any means desirable, it would not necessitate the undertaking of the expensive and dangerous venture of travelling to the United States for reasons of survival, but rather to gain status and pride. This arrangement and problem affected, almost solely, the rural poor of the interior of Norway, but rather than the energy from the divide between landed and un-landed resulting in violence or reform, as might typically be expected in a society in which most of the population does not hold property, the energy was instead directed toward an exodus of the un-landed. The assertion that the pull of available land, and therefore status, is corroborated by their tendency, during the same period as the exodus to America, to migrate northward to occupy the unclaimed northern segments of Norway without regard for their inhospitable nature.
The one element that is characteristic of the massive emigration from Norway at the close of the nineteenth century is “chain migrations”. These are large emigrations from regions that are sparked by the departure of a few members of a group who then entice their friends and family to follow suite. It is in this aspect of the migration from Norway that the effects of a globalizing world are most clearly seen. From 1865 to 1910 untold number of letters were sent between the United States and Norway, those from the United States, like with many other immigrant groups, idealized their new homeland and made a concerted effort to attract their loved ones to follow them. It is also here, in the discussion of what has been termed “chain migration”, that the distinction between immigration and migration becomes important and it becomes clear that the term “migration”, in reference to the immigration of Norwegians, the term is a misnomer. In this case it should, in reality be termed “chain immigration” or “chain emigration” depending on one’s perspective, this is because when the Norwegian immigrants arrived in the United States the overwhelming majority were intending to stay, and the only migrating they would do once in the country would be westward. With the number of push factors previously discussed it took only, the simple pull factor of a flood of letters extolling the virtues of America to spark “America Fever” through the whole of Norway, but particularly in the areas with the least mobility in the interior of the nation.
A few thoughts to add to the excellent answer by /u/VetMichael ...
The term "American frontier" is problematic here since it conjures different things for different people. Most Scandinavian immigrants of the late nineteenth century settled that narrow, ever moving transition zone that existed in the "next section over" that was available for sale or homesteading. It was hardly the wild, wide-open frontier at the time. Rather it was a few miles to the west of fairly established settlement. As the century - and the next - unfolded, available land generally decreased in quality as opportunity shifted from the rich farmlands of Iowa and Minnesota to the more challenging land of the Dakotas and Nebraska, where soil wasn't as rich and rainfall was less reliable. Still, this was damn good land. One should not underestimate the hardship - and hard work. But immigrants rarely traveled alone; chain migration caused friends, relatives and others from the same community to settle nearby, and so the shock of moving to a new continent could be lessened.
Immigration studies typically talk about the factors that "pushed" and "pulled" people into making the giant effort to move. Lack of opportunity (in the form of land, jobs, etc.), the stifling nature of traditional society and politics, and other factors contributed to what "pushed" people to leave their homes. The "pull" of perceived opportunities - cheap/free land and/or jobs, and perceived freedoms attracted people to North America.
Also, it is easy to see this as purely a matter of farmer and would-be farmers coming to North America, but one shouldn't discount the Nordic settlement of places such as the Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where copper mines offers employment. And there were, in general, a lot of jobs with higher pay than one might hope for in Scandinavia.
A nice fictionalized account of Norwegian immigration to the Dakotas can be found in Ole Edvart Rølvaag's 1924-1925 classic, Giants in the Earth (Norwegian: Verdens Grøde), set in the 1870s. Life wasn't easy, but one could count on the idea that all one's labor was for oneself as one built a home for the future - and future generations.
edit: Since writing this, I note also the excellent post by /u/Jtjens - well done!
Pretty much the same things that drove immigrants from other countries: overpopulation, famine, religious persecution, and the promise of free land.
The first Norwegian settlers were a group of six families who came to the US in 1825 seeking a haven from the official Norwegian state church. After a difficult crossing they arrived, destitute, in New York and (aided by local Quakers) eventually settled up state. Because they were arrived in an undersized single-masted sloop unsuitable for the Atlantic crossing, they caused a local sensation and were called "sloopers".
Word of the sloopers' success reached other disaffected Norwegians back in Norway, and many became enamored of the idea of immigration, particular after some emigrants returned to Norway (sponsored by financial concerns in the US) to speak publicly about the opportunities in the United States:
A farmer from Houston County, Minnesota, returned on a visit the winter of '70-'71. He infected half the population in that district with what was called the America fever, and I who was then the most susceptible caught the fever in its most virulent form. No more amusement of any kind, only brooding on how to get away to America. It was like a desperate case of homesickness reversed.
Additionally, in the late 1860s, famine, unemployment, and the lack of open land for farming, all encouraged many Norwegians to consider immigration. The Homestead Act of 1862 gave free land to settlers in the United States who developed it for at least five years. From 1825 to 1925, about 800,000 Norwegians immigrants are recorded, with many settling in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota.
Many Scandinavians did eventually migrate to the Pacific Northwest. An 1870 survey reported 65 Norwegians in Washington Territory and 47 in Oregon. A much larger number migrated west after cross-country railroads were established in the 1880s, with more than 150,000 Scandinavians settling there between 1890 and 1910.
The depiction of Norwegians in typical "wild west" territories like New Mexico in the 1880s (the setting for Godless) is probably creative speculation, but not unlikely. Some 22 Norwegian Mormon families did migrate to Utah from Fox River, Illinois in 1849, with other converts coming later, from both the US and from Norway. It's not clear how many moved from Utah to other parts of the country after that, but it's reasonable to assume that, like so many others, some Scandinavians came to the infamous boomtowns seeking their fortunes.
Sources:
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