From August 5 to 7, I am attending the 56th Convention of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia in Hays in western Kansas. Hays is the Ellis County seat, which, along with Rush County, will celebrate their 150th Anniversary of the settlement of the first Volga German immigrants. The convention theme is “Unsere Leute, Unsere Heimat: Our People, Our Home.” This summer, the Ellis County Museum in Hays is displaying GRHC’s traveling exhibit, “Building Life and Home on the Prairie.”
Driving from Fargo, I will stop in Aberdeen to visit the South Dakota Germans from Russia Center exhibits at Northern State University Library. In Mitchell, I will visit the famous Corn Palace where the “Lawrence Welk Show” performed in 1948, 1954 and 1962-1964. The three appearances in the 1960s drew more than 150,000 attendees. In Freeman, where many Mennonite Germans settled, I will see the Heritage Hall Museum. My next stop will be at Yankton and then Ewing in northern Nebraska to meet Dodie Rotherham, former president of AHSGR. We will drive together to Hays for the AHSGR Convention.
Judy (Weigel) Corradi, of Maple Grove, Minnesota, donated “John and Mary Weigel: The Homestead Years, 1910-1912, From the Journals of Anton Weigel.” This important book is cataloged in the GRHC Archives. I share, in part, the journal of the homesteading story from its pages. The Weigel family immigrated from the village of Selz, Kutschurgan District, South Russia, today near Odesa, Ukraine. The journal’s homestead story is shared in part below.
April 1910, my dad sold our Aberdeen home and brought all the provisions and livestock we would need for our future life out west. Mother and us kids went by passenger train to Lemmon, South Dakota. From there they loaded up the wagons and started [to] trek to the homestead in Perkins County. The Weigels went with three other families. All the wealth was in our wagon and livestock and $100 in dad’s pocket. Four covered wagons and a guide were to make 20 miles a day.
Dad shot a couple of jackrabbits, and with the little food we had, we didn’t go hungry. But little brother George got very sick. He was two years old and a frail little boy. The wagon train trip and the cold was just too much for him; he caught pneumonia and died. With grief and tears, dad made a little coffin with the lumber left over from the shack. Mother laid her little son in that box on a little pillow and tied his hands together in a prayer-like manner. I remember we walked around the little box to say goodbye to our little brother.
It was a beautiful spring day in 1910 when dad picked the site of our homestead — 20 miles south of Bison, South Dakota. In order to prove up the land, we had to plow up five acres, dig a well and live on this land for 14 months. Dad built his sod house a little different than most of them. About four to six people would cut the tough, grassy sod which was always taken from the bottom lands. The share was slanted to cut a swath 12 inches. The plow was pulled by two to four big horses. The men would cut the sod into two-foot-long lengths four inches thick, load them on the wagon and haul the sod to the site where the house would be built. The house and barn were all under the same center to divide the house from the barn. To make the roof, they laid a big timber through the center and then smaller timbers from the center to the side walls.
Dad had to plant his corn by hand with a hand operated corn planter. All he had to do after that was wait for the rains…and the rains never came. We lived off the land. Our meat consisted of grouse, jackrabbits and cottontails The fuel we used was cow chips. Dad, Jack and I gathered cow chips from the surrounding prairie till we filled the wagon and hauled them home and put them up in piles in a cone shape, and then smeared them over with fresh cow dung that would make them waterproof when it dried.
Mother did all the cooking on a cast iron cook stove. Mother would bake pancakes on top of one of the lids, and she baked the best bread you ever tasted. We used to dunk fresh bread in some sweet cream and did that ever taste good. Mother made the best rabbit stew. Mother could make a wonderful meal with what we had on hand, including wild game. She could make the best noodles and prunes. On Fridays, we would have fried noodles made with flour, salt, pepper and onions mixed together then fry them in lard or butter with water in the old, covered dutch oven. When they were done, Mother would put the Dutch oven on the floor, and we would all sit around the kettle on the floor and eat, and they were very good.
We were isolated in our sod house out on the homestead in the winter of 1910 and 1911. There were times when we didn’t see a human being for two months, and it was a lonely place to live. We each got a pair of new shoes when dad went to Lemmon for supplies for the winter, and we made a deck of cards out of empty shoe boxes. In the spring of 1911, the homesteaders in our area formed a committee to see to the education of the young people. First, they picked a site in about the center of the community, and they hired a school teacher, Miss March, a rancher’s daughter. They built a school house the same way they built a house except they had a wooden floor and lined the walls with sheets of white, unbleached muslin. We had a potbellied stove fueled by cow chips. The desks were planks resting on tree stumps. There were 16 pupils from the 1st to 8th grade. I was in the 3rd grade. We lived a half mile from the school. Some pupils lived as far as five miles from school. They either walked or rode a horse to get there.
It was early November when we knew that we were going to leave this God forsaken homestead and go back to Aberdeen. What a winter it was in 1911 and 1912. Our food supply was running low. Dad had sold our two cows, so we had to butcher our pig and cow, and did we ever have the meat to eat. No more jackrabbits, cottontails and grouse. We stayed at the old Dakotas House in Aberdeen until Dad came, and we rented a house for nine dollars a month. Dad got a job at the city water department and worked there for 40 years when he retired. The Weigels lived like city people again.
For more information about donating family histories and photographs, or how to financially support the GRHC, contact Jeremy Kopp at [email protected] or 701-231-6596; mail to: NDSU Libraries, Dept. 2080, PO Box 6050, Fargo, N.D. 58108-6050; or go to ndsu.edu/grhc. You may contact me at [email protected] or 701-231-8416.
