The Worst Hard Time (10 page)

"A queer looking set they are," the
Hays City Sentinel
in Kansas had described some Volga Germans as they passed through, a generation
earlier, surely one of the most exotic species on the Great Plains. "They are here; they are there; and at every corner they may be seen jabbering about this and that and no one knows what. Their presence is unmistakable; for where they are, there is also something else—a smell so pungent and potent as to make a strong man weak."

At the wedding, women served a dish of cabbage that had been shredded by wooden kraut cutters, mixed with ground pork and onion, wrapped in bread dough, and baked. Another table was laden with Kase noodle, made with thick cottage cheese and onion tops. Butterball soup was steaming and rich. A pig's skull had been rendered, boiled again, and transformed into hog's head cheese. Chickens were roasted; tubers peeled, boiled, crowded into tanks of potato salad. The women milled their own grain and from that, using eggs from their henhouses and milk from their barns, baked dozens of cakes and pies. They brought stewed apples and pickled watermelons as well. Men did not cook. Men made beer—strong, thick, yeasty. Men made wine, using grapes that arrived by train from California or were grown on arbors on a protected side of a barn. Men killed pigs and made sausage, the organs chopped with salt, pepper, and garlic, stuffed into casings of large intestines and smoked.

These nesters preferred high-top
filzstiefel
shoes with soft interior linings to cowboy boots, and featherbeds to American mattresses. No house was without schnapps and wurst. In church they sang "
Gott is de liebe
" and made such a month-long fuss over Christmas that customs in America changed as well. They were a culture frozen in place in 1763 and transplanted whole to the Great Plains. Without them, it is possible that wheat never would have been planted on the dry side of the plains. For when they boarded ships for America, the Germans from Russia carried with them seeds of turkey red—a hard winter wheat—and incidental thistle sewn into the pockets of their vests. It meant survival, an heirloom packet worth more than currency. The turkey red, short-stemmed and resistant to cold and drought, took so well to the land beyond the ninety-eighth meridian that agronomists were forced to rethink the predominant view that the Great American Desert was unsuited for agriculture. In Russia, it was the crop that allowed the Germans to move out of the valleys and onto the higher,
drier farming ground of the steppe. The thistle came by accident, but it grew so fast it soon owned the West. In the Old World, thistle was called
perekati-pole,
which meant "roll-across-the-field." In America, it was known as tumbleweed.

The Russlanddeutschen held onto their religion, their food, their dress, their rituals, their epic family narratives, and their seeds of grain. In America, they learned about baseball, jazz, the tractor, and the bank loan.

They were known as tough-nutted pacifists, a migratory people whose defining characteristic was draft-dodging. The German Mennonites from near the Black Sea, conscientious objectors from the beginning, certainly were opposed to war on principle. But many of the other Germans from Russia would kill without flinching, showing their warrior skills in American uniforms when they shot their own former countrymen during the two world wars in the twentieth century. What they would not do is fight for the Russian czar or—worse—fight for the Bolsheviks. They had a promise, dating to a manifesto of July 22, 1763, by Catherine the Great, offering homestead land, tax breaks, cultural autonomy, and no military conscription. When the promise was broken 110 years later, they closed up entire villages and fled to America. Catherine, they always felt, was one of them, a German-born empress who married into Russian nobility just after she turned fifteen. By the age of thirty-three, she had dethroned her husband, Peter, and became ruler of Russia. A forceful monarch, Catherine reigned for nearly forty years and was as crucial—indirectly—to settlement of the American Great Plains as the railroad.

Catherine believed that Russia could use fewer Russians and more Germans. A German peasant was not as slovenly as a Russian peasant. Early on, she worried about the frontier on both sides of the middle Volga River, near the cities of Samara and Saratov, in what was then southeastern Russia. She wanted a buffer against Mongols, Turks, and Kirghiz, who roamed and raided the steppe territory much in the way that Apache and Comanche controlled the High Plains. Agricultural colonies, even with people who were not Russian, would bring stability. Catherine's manifesto promised free land, no taxes for the first thirty years of a colony, and no military service for male heads of family and their descendants. The manifesto was aimed at all of Western Europe except Jews, who were expressly prohibited from accepting the offer. In the poor villages of southern Germany, where families were broken by the bloodshed and poverty of the Seven Years' War, Catherine's representatives found their colonizers.

"We need people," Catherine said, "to make, if possible, the wilderness swarm like a beehive."

Americans like to think that theirs was the first country to open its land to the tired, poor, and opportunistic, to grant religious freedom and property to those who had been tossed aside in older lands. But well before manifest destiny carried tides of pilgrims to the American West, Russia offered its own Big Rock Candy Mountain—a treeless, wind-buffed mantle of ground that could have been the High Plains but for the big river in its midst. In the Volga region, every adult male could claim about thirty acres, and that land would go back to the community upon death of the owner. No taxes would be levied for thirty years. No military service. No restrictions on religion.

"Polygamy would be of great use in increasing the population," Catherine offered, a suggestion the Germans never followed up on until some of them joined the Mormon church a century later. Dozens of villages sprang up in the middle and lower Volga. They were obsessive about keeping dirt from the house; cleanliness was the highest of virtues. If someone spit watermelon seeds onto the street, a punishment of ten lashes followed. Laws required the villages to be clean, the streets swept at least once a week. Each married couple had to plant twenty trees. Upon marrying, the young couple lived with the bride's family until land was reallotted upon the patriarch's death. Their blood enemy were the Kirghiz, a Tartar tribe whose members had grazed their livestock on the steppe, and later honed plundering into a warrior art.

The Kirghiz sacked Schasselwa on the Volga in 1771, riding into town in full war cry, faces painted, lances forward. They burned the church, raped women young and old, grabbed babies from their mothers. Houses were torched, plundered, and the granaries emptied of their food. The kidnapped women and boys were sold as slaves in Asia. To this day, a good ole boy in the Oklahoma Panhandle named
Schmidt or Heinrich can turn ashen and clench-fisted at the mention of Schasselwa. It burns in the memory of a Volga German as Little Big Horn embitters a Sioux or mention of Cromwell's march through Ireland can inflame a Gaelic soul.

By 1863, a century after Catherine's manifesto, there were nearly a quarter-million Germans living on either side of the Volga River. Another group, primarily German Mennonites, had populated higher ground near the Black Sea. Between obsessive street cleaning and house sweeping, the Germans sang. On cold Russian nights, song warmed the stone walls of churches, and it was one of the things that most impressed outsiders. What the colonists on the Volga would not do is become Russian, and this ultimately led to their exile. Russians had grown increasingly resentful of the Germans in their midst, with their snug villages, big harvests, nationalistic pride, and continued exemption from military service. Why special privileges for them?

In 1872, Czar Alexander II revoked Catherine's promises, declaring that German-speaking Russians had to give up their language and sign up for the army. He raised taxes and took away exclusive licenses to brew beer. Both were fighting causes. For American railroads, fighting constant debt and the fallout of a speculative bubble, the czar's orders could not have been more fortuitous. Drought and a grasshopper plague ravaged the American Plains in the early 1870s.

"In God we trust, in Kansas we bust" was the slogan on banners draped on wagons of people who had tried to grow something and had given up. On marginal lands in Kansas and Nebraska, farmers were walking away and denouncing the railroads for promoting fraud. Facing bankruptcy, the railroads found their salvation on the steppes of southern Russia. Their agents in the immigration racket had some experience with Germans and saw them as good clients: they traveled in groups, paid on time, and were considered hard working and thrifty. Some railroads practiced selective ethnic shopping. Burlington printed brochures in German, for example, but not French or Italian. At the same time, reconnaissance groups of Germans were returning to the Volga with firsthand accounts of the land in the middle of America. They liked what they had seen of the Canadian prairie, the Dakotas, and all the way down the plains into the Indian Territory of
Oklahoma. It was brutally hot, when it wasn't cold enough to freeze eyelids shut. It was treeless, windswept, and free. The Promised Land—all over again, just like Russia.

Beginning in 1873, villages folded up and left for the Great Plains. Katherinenstadt, Pfeifer, Schoenchen, and others became near ghost towns. The Germans boarded small boats on the Volga to Saratov. From there, it was a train ride to a North Sea port where they took immigrant vessels to New York, Baltimore, or Galveston and boarded trains for the flatlands. In American ports, many were amazed to see a black person for the first time. Some Germans arrived with little more than a yellowed picture of Catherine the Great and a note pinned to their coat, indicating a family or destination. Before long, in places like Lincoln, Nebraska, or Ellis County, Kansas, more German was heard in the streets than English. In the 1870s, about 12,000 Russian Germans came to Kansas; within fifty years, 303,000 would populate the Great Plains. Often the new towns were given the name of the villages they had left behind. In Kansas, Germans established Lieben-thal, Herzog, Catherine, Munjor, Pfeifer, and Schoenchen, which meant "a little something lovely."

"No one thinks of drouth and grasshoppers—everyone is happy and energetic," the
Chicago Tribune
reported in a typical dispatch on the kinetic Germans in 1876. They plowed the grass and planted turkey red on land that others had not dared to farm. What struck some of the American yeomen about these Russian Germans was that they liked to sing, and they kept the floors of their simple houses clean enough to dine on. Dust inside the house was something they would not tolerate.

George Ehrlich turned eighteen on his journey across the Atlantic in 1890. As he continued with his story at the wedding, he told about his emotions on the immigrant boat: scared, yes—a week into the sailing, he regretted leaving home. His money was strapped to a lower leg, and all his possessions fit into one bag. Part of his family had gone one way to Ellis County in an earlier migration, while others stayed behind, hoping they could hide from the czar's conscription police. George received his draft notice at the same time that a terrible
drought hit the Volga region, another nudge to go to America. When the wind of the hurricane got ahold of the ship's mast and dragged it into the water, he thought he would never see American soil. The mast was broken about ten inches from the bottom. The longer it dragged in the water, the more the ship listed. The typhoon raged, seas engorged, wind and heavy rain clawing at the ship. Another SOS went out. Nothing in response. They were all going to drown in the mid-Atlantic. Another German—George knew him only as a Catholic boy—offered to crawl out on the mast and try to saw it off. The Captain said it would kill him, but if the boy wanted to give it a try—Godspeed. They tethered the boy to a rope, handed him a saw, and sent him on his way. He shimmied out, the sea heaving, salt spray sweeping over him, inching along the downed mast. When he was far enough along the beam, he started sawing. He cut through rope cables and oak until his hands were numb. At last, the mast broke away. As the beam fell to the sea, the boat righted itself. Now the Captain ordered all the immigrants to bail. The ship had only one working propeller; the other was broken by a cable that had snapped in the storm. The boat limped on, steadily west, away from the grip of the typhoon. In New York, it was announced as lost at sea.

Almost two months after leaving Hamburg, the immigrants arrived in New York Harbor, their food gone, many of them desperately ill. George Ehrlich landed in America on New Year's Day, 1891.

Back at the wedding, it was time for toasts. To Catherine the Great, of course. And to America. They raised glasses of schnapps and the spritzy white wine made by the Germans in Oklahoma and thanked God for their good fortune. The accordions and dulcimers came out. They danced the Hochzeit, which was like the fox trot, only faster. The wheat harvest was going to be the biggest ever. In Shattuck and just across the border in the Texas towns of Follett and Darrouzett, the Volga Germans were shedding some of the thrift their forebears had practiced, buying new tractors, Fordsons and Titans, taking out loans from banks to get still more land. Plant more wheat. Fast!

After arriving in the plains, George Ehrlich had stayed with relatives in LeHigh, looking for work. While there, he missed the rush of
1893 in Oklahoma, when the Cherokee Strip was opened and more than 100,000 people dashed to claim a piece of six million acres of formerly Indian ground. Six years later, Ehrlich heard there were still a few sections left in the old Indian Territory, well west of the good land. For many Germans in Kansas, this was the final chance to get a share of America. In the fall of 1900, George and twenty other men traveled from Kansas to Shattuck, scouting for free land. Close to town, everything was taken, staked by Smiths and Richardsons and Winters and Sherills. George took off on foot, heading for a distant rise to the west.