Monday, December 10, 2007

A TALE OF TWO LADIES: CURZON AND CAMERON

This piece was first posted in 2007.  An update is in order with the advent of Downton Abbey and the loose connection of the Leiter family to the characters in the series.  Julian Fellows, the writer and director of the series, acknowledged that the American heiress Lady Grantham payed by Elizabeth McGovern and her mother played by Shirley MacLaine were of a type characteristic of Victorian society as recounted in To Marry an English Lord: Victorian and Edwardian Experience by Gail MacColl, Carol Wallace, which contains copious references to Mary Victoria Leiter.   The permanent presence of Levy Z. Leiter in a Washington,  DC cemetery has also been the subject of a lcoal interest piece in the Washington Post. 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/is-that-a-greenhouse-no-its-a-tomb/2013/01/12/5fd2256e-5b3c-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html

The appearance of the Washington Post piece, and its focus on residence after death, prompted some further research a necessary correction to note that Mary Victoria Leiter's final abode is a Gothic Chapel, not a replica of the Taj Mahal.  There is an exquisite Taj Mahal model at Kedleston, probably related to George Curzon's efforts to restore it while Viceroy of India, but perhaps also because of his beloved wife's fascination with it.

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I might have named this piece the "Princess and the Pauper" or "Country Mouse, City Mouse" after one or the other of two memorable yarns from the Ginn Reader of my elementary school days. As you will soon see, these two remarkable women of the late 18th and early 19th century have almost diametrically opposite, but equally dramatic, arcs to their lives and careers.

Evelyn Cameron, the daughter of a wealthy upper middle class English merchant, married an impoverished Scot ornithologist and set out to raise polo ponies in eastern Montana. When that enterprise failed, catastrophically, she turned to photography and the hard work of wresting productive crops from the Badlands of Montana to make ends meet and to care for her hapless husband. She left an astonishing legacy of photographs and a painstakingly detailed account of her life in diaries spanning three decades in Montana, a worthy life well-lived as beautifully recounted in Donna Lucey's book, Photographing Montana : 1898-1924 The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron and also in the PBS Documentary largely based on the book. Evelyn appears atop one of her favorite horses in a photo of her own composition. In other self-portraits, she appears with an eagle perched on her arm and her perched on a natural arch high above a ravine carved from the desolate landscape.





Mary Victoria Leiter, the daughter of a fabulously wealthy department store and real estate magnate from Chicago, was reared by her socially ambitious mother to be a stunning debutante in the highest social and political circles of Washington, DC and London. She did, in fact catch the eye of the rising George Curzon, soon to be Lord Kedleston and then soon after that Viceroy Curzon of India with Mary Victoria as his Vicereine. Levy Leiter, her father, sealed the terms of the highly successful marriage by transferring enough wealth to unencumber the heavily debt ridden Kedleston estate. She appears in the picture in the famous "peacock gown" that she designed especially for the coronation of her husband and herself. The Indian peacock, pictured below, inspired the costume and materials of which it was made.








By this time you should be wondering why these two women should be crowded into the same space, apart from the whims and whimsy of the writer. The answer: they serve as book-ends to a genealogical tale of time and circumstance. Mary Leiter, like all of the Bell relatives who are following this saga, descends from Johann Friederich Vogeler and his wife Anna Maria (possibly Julianna), who arrived in Maryland around 1750, received communion as an Evangelical Lutheran at the same time and from the same pastor (Schwerdtfeger) as Peter and Anthony Bell, most likely in the first organized congregation near what is now known as the Leitersberg District in Washington County, Maryland. In 1769, Johann Friedrich Vogeler signed the constitutional articles of St. John's Lutheran Church in Hagerstown, Maryland though probably not may the Johann Friederich Vogeler who signed the 1747 constitution, written by Reverend Muhlenberger, for the Monocacy congregation near present day Frederick Maryland, where Schwerdtfeger also served for a time as the pastor.

The Vogelers had three daughters. Two married Leiters and the other, Elizabeth, married Peter Bell. The Bells bought land on the Mason-Dixon line where the stone house started by Peter and finished by his oldest son Frederick still stands on a farm still known as Bell's Choice. Peter also became a successful merchant leading up to the Revolutionary War, when he served on the Committee for Observation for the Elizabeth Hundred, then as Captain of a company of Maryland militia in the Pennsylvania Campaign and may have spent the winter of 1777-78 in Valley Forge before succumbing to the rigors of the campaign. His family buried him, and he rests still, where the west wing of the current configuration of St. John's Lutheran Church stands in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Many of the Leiters belonged to the same churches, were educated in the same schools and were buried in the same cemeteries as the Bells. Their names appear as witnesses on each others' wills and deeds. The following generations of the Leiters, like the Bells, moved west. Levi Leiter did not do well in school and had no inclination toward farming. He struck out on his own and ended up in Chicago. It turned out that he had a knack and a nose for the dry goods business and also a sense for the real estate market.

He co-founded the Field and Leiter dry goods business which developed into the Marshall Field retail empire. He had a falling out with Field and then devoted his attention to acquiring (and insuring) a lot of Chicago real estate. The famous Chicago fire had little effect on his fortune. The Leiter family moved to Washington, DC in 1881 and entered the exclusive circle of official society there. They lived for several years in the former home of James G. Blaine near DuPont Circle, about two blocks from where I have practiced law for the last quarter century or so. That residence not being substantial enough to reflect their social status, the Leiters then built a massive mansion immediately on the socially exclusive DuPont Circle, since replaced by a 200 room hotel.


Mary Victoria Leiter came out as a debutante in DC. To prepare the way, she learned and, by all accounts, perfected the necessary social skills: dancing, singing, music and art. These she acquired at home from tutors and learned French from her French governess. Mother Leiter arranged for a Columbia University professor to teach her history, arithmetic and chemistry. The Leiters traveled and lived abroad to cultivate her powers of observation and breadth of mental vision at an early age. In the vernacular of the times and class, her poise and finish made her charming to those with mature and brilliant intellect. Her younger sisters did not "finish" quite so well, but Mary's accomplishments, in the end, was a rising tide that lifted all boats.

Mary stood a striking six feet tall with a perfect hourglass figure. She had large grey eyes set in an oval face, glossy chestnut-brown hair drawn back into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, and delicate hands and feet. She debuted in DC in the winter of 1888. Most accounts hailed her as an equal in beauty and breeding, and frequently the peer in manner and intellect, of daughters of better known and longer established families in eastern U.S. society. She had the good fortune to have, as her closest friend, Frances Folsom Cleveland, six years her senior and the wife of the much older President Grover Cleveland. She caught the eye of George Curzon while he lived in Washington, as he did hers, and she pursued him relentlessly until they married. Her private letters make no bones about her ambitions.

The U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Thomas F. Bayard, introduced Mary to London Society in 1894. Following a very favorable audience with Queen Victoria, she and her sisters had little difficulty igniting the interest of all available and eligible suitors, with the exception of the elusive Curzon, who seemed more deeply engrossed in politics and his scholarly studies. Had it not been for the desperate economic straits of the Kedleston estate, the marriage might not have come about. But her uncommon persistence paid dividends eventually.

Mary Leiter and George Curzon married on 22 April 1895 at St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. Bishop Talbot, with the assistance of the Rev. Dr. Mackay Smith, the pastor of the church joined their prodigious talents, apparently because so important event required very heavy clerical lifting.

She played an important role in the reelection of her husband to Parliament that autumn. Many thought that his success had much to do with winning smiles, striking appearance, beauty and the irresistible charm of his wife than to his own speeches. Over the next decade, three daughters were born to them, but she failed (as did he) to produce the male heir so important to the aristocracy at that time.

Queen Victoria made Curzon Viceroy of India and elevated him to the Peerage of Ireland as Baron Curzon of Kedleston in the summer of 1898 at age 39. On December 30 of the same year, they arrived in Bombay, India amid royal salutes and great excitement.

In 1902, Lord Curzon organized the Delhi Durbar to celebrate the coronation of King Edward VII, "the grandest pageant in history", which created a tremendous sensation. At the state ball Mary wore an extravagant coronation gown, known as the peacock dress, stitched of gold cloth embroidered with peacock feathers with an emerald in each eye and many precious and semi-precious stones sewn into the fabric. The skirt was trimmed with white roses and the bodice with lace. She glittered with diamonds, pearls and precious stones: a huge diamond necklace and a large broach of diamonds and pearls. She wore a tiara crown with a pearl tipping each of it's high diamond points.

Lord and Lady Curzon were loudly criticized for the huge expense of this extravagant event and their own personal lifestyle, but their defenders pointed out that no money went out of the country. It all came out of the pockets of the rich and was paid into the hands of the poor. What the government and the native princes and nobles expended in their splendid displays was paid to working people who needed it, and by throwing this large amount into circulation the entire country was benefited. Imelda Marcos made a similar argument to deflect her own extravagant lifestyle at the expense of the Philippine population.

No surprise that Lady Curzon was an invaluable commercial agent for the manufacturers of the higher class of fabrics and art objects in India. She made many of them fashionable in Calcutta and other Indian cities and in London, Paris and the capitals of Europe. She placed orders for her friends and strangers. She assisted the silk weavers, embroiderers and other artists to adapt their designs, patterns and fabrics to the requirements of modern fashions. She wore Indian fabrics. She kept several of the best artists in India busy with orders and soon saw the results of her efforts revive skilled arts that were almost forgotten.

She did, however, take her vice-regal duties seriously. Lady Curzon learned Urdu from the Mohyal patriarch Bakhshi Ram Dass Chhibber. She also helped found and fund a large medical complex, the Lady Curzon Hospital in Bangalore, now known as Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital. Progressive medical reforms were initiated by English women in India under the leadership of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Lady Curzon by supplying women doctors and hospitals for women. A Lady Curzon Hospital still operates in Bangalore. William Elroy Curtiss dedicated his book "Modern India": "To Lady Curzon, An ideal American woman."

After no so long a time in India, the tropical climate, a prolonged near fatal infection following a miscarriage and fertility related surgery eroded her health. She took convalescent trips to England, but failed to improve. When they returned to England after Curzon's resignation in August 1905, her health continued to fail rapidly. She died July 18, 1906 at home in Westminster, London, 36 years old.

Legend has it that Lady Curzon, after seeing the Taj Mahal on a moonlit night, exclaimed in her bewilderment that she was ready to embrace an immediate death if someone promised to erect such a memorial on her grave. Curzon did so at Kedleston. [NOTE:  It is unclear whether the alabaster model of the Taj Mahal at Kedleston was created for this purpose or for the restoration work that he attempted while Viceroy of India.]  He had the reputation, because of his demeanor and condescending attitude, of insufferable arrogance captured and immortalized by the doggerel of his Oxford classmates:


My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person,
My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim once a week.

Nevertheless, this privileged, pampered and brilliant son of the Victorian aristocracy fell deeply in love with the finished daughter of a failed farmer turned peddler and land speculator.

Having buried Mary Victoria with her Taj Mahal, let's turn to her contemporary Evelyn Cameron, 40th on the Missoulian Newspaper (as in Missoula, Montana) list of the 100 most influential people in Montana history. Her biographer, Donna M. Lucey, summarized her life, borrowing from Evelyn's own aspirations confessed to her diary and the words of a contemporary:

"In her remote frontier world Evelyn became a respected, almost mythic figure. Yet she saw nothing unusual or noteworthy in her life. Until she died she remained very much the twenty-five-year-old pioneer woman who wrote wistfully in her diary, 'I wish I could lead a life worthy to look back upon. I am far out of the path now.' Her neighbors thought otherwise. Among her papers there is the typescript of an article by an English writer, Marguerite Remington Charter, who had visited Evelyn on a trip through Montana. Charter wrote that 'From the moment we got into Billings, Mont., we were never one whit surprised when whoever we might happen to be talking with would say: 'Oh, be sure to go to the Eve Ranch and see Mrs. Cameron, she is one of the wonders of Montana.' "

What made her one of the wonders of Montana, the big sky treasure state that boasts the most spectacular glaciers in the lower 48, the thermal wonders of Yellowstone, the moonscape wind scraped Badlands and the isolated valley where the river runs through it? As Lucey pieces together the tale from her diary and her photographs, this British woman of privilege who could have followed a path not unlike the career of Mary Victoria Leiter, fell in love with Montana and went native in her own reserved and independent way.

Evelyn Jephson Flower, born Aug. 26, 1868, on a rambling British country estate south of London, first came to Montana in 1889 on her honeymoon, a hunting trip with her newlywed husband Ewen Cameron. They met and mingled with a British expatriate community of romantic adventurers, some of whom thought they would strike it rich on the open range as cattle barons or breeders of horses, then return in their wealth and glory to their homes in England.




Her husband Ewen, a naturalist and something of a scholar, found much to observe and describe among the prairie bird species. He wrote several pieces over the years for the ornithological journal The Auk. With uncanny skill and nerve, Evelyn photographed many of these birds, including nesting eagles, in their natural habitats and without a telescopic lens. They returned to Montana within a year of the honeymoon trip with plans to take up ranching, horse raising and bird watching. Given his temperament and fragile health, Ewen succeeded with his birds and left everything else to Evelyn.



After two attempts at other ranches, one a catastrophic failure to breed and break polo ponies for the British market, they eventually settled in 1893 on a ranch they christened the Eve Ranch, for Evelyn, six miles south of Terry. To help make ends meet, Evelyn took in boarders, sold vegetables that she raised, and cooked for roundup crews. And, with a mail-order 5x7 Graflex, she taught herself photography. She began taking photographs of her neighbors and the wildlife near the ranch. She photographed cowboys, sheepherders, farm wives, homesteaders and the tough sheep-shearing crews who worked near Terry's railroad tracks. These people were the subjects of her photography, and she generally arranged them within the backdrop of the vast and empty spaces, as though she were using them for accents in a giant sized and barren English garden. The people, except for her British friends and her self-conscious self-portraits, generally feel remote from the viewer on the other side of the lens.

She did, however, fully adopt and thrive on the hard-scrabble work ethic necessary to survival on the edge off the Badlands. Her weathered looks eventually made her indistinguishable in appearance (if not in speech and learning) from her subjects. "Manual labor is about all I care about," she once wrote. "I like to break colts, brand calves, cut down trees, ride and work in the garden." Ewen and her sometime boarders did little in this vein, much to her annoyance and aggravation.

Lucey portrays her, and Evelyn no doubt saw herself, as distinctly self-sufficient and at odds with conventional Victorian attitudes toward the role of women. She did, for example, refuse to ride side-saddle and introduced the split skirt which apparently caused some commotion among the citizens of Miles City. She also prided herself on her swimming ability, venturing to cross the Yellowstone in current when many of the cowboys and others feared to do so.
My sense is that Evelyn's self-sufficiency was widely admired among the XIT cowboys and the German-Russian farming community, two groups with which she shared her attitudes and work ethic.

There may have been some division of labor among the men and women in the farming community; they did, after all, average about 10 children per family, and none, so far as I know were birthed by men. Most woman, on the other hand, could and did handle a plow team, cut a cord of wood, plant and harvest a very large garden and ride a horse (though few, I expect, had ever seen a side saddle). The families worked, for the most part, on implicit and explicit assumptions of a partnership between equals, a practical necessity for scratching out a living in dry land farming.

It is tempting, but wrong, to dwell too much on facile contrasts between these two fin de siecle Victorian women, viewing Leiter as the last vestige of the bird in the gilded cage and Cameron as the pioneer, literally and figuratively, of the modern woman. Both received the benefits, albeit for different ends, of a classic liberal arts education, and both had the mental faculties to benefit greatly from it and both were highly successful in adapting it to their unique circumstances.
In the next few stories we will see how Victorian aspirations and pioneer character merged in the woman from whom the Guelffs, Bells, Siegles and Holzworths descended. I wager the reader will see shadows of Cameron's character as well as a Leiter side in all of them.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

POSTSCRIPT TO HEAD 'EM UP, MOVE 'EM OUT

POSTSCRIPT: On December 5, 2007, a news item appeared in the New York Times reporting a recently published study on the transmission of the Spanish Influenza and other flu viruses based on, literally, an experiment on guinea pigs. The HEAD 'EM UP, MOVE 'EM OUT posting has been revised to include the article and some additional material on the westward trek from Maryland to Montana.

In one of those odd juxtapositions of genealogy and life, I spent part of yesterday in the offices of Senator Max Baucus, Montana, three steps across the hallway from the offices of Senator Benjamin Cardin, Maryland. The Cardin family and that of my father-in-law grew up together in Baltimore, Maryland, not far from where Montana and Maryland met again when my wife and I were married.

Study Shows Why the Flu Likes WinterSign In to E-Mail or Save This Print Reprints ShareDel.icio.usDiggFacebookNewsvinePermalinkBy

GINA KOLATAPublished: December 5, 2007Researchers in New York believe they have solved one of the great mysteries of the flu: Why does the infection spread primarily in the winter months? Skip to next paragraphRelatedTimes Health Guide: The FluThe answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.“Influenza virus is more likely to be transmitted during winter on the way to the subway than in a warm room,” said Peter Palese, a flu researcher who is professor and chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the lead author of the flu study.Dr. Palese published details of his findings in the Oct. 19 issue of PLoS Pathogens. The crucial hint that allowed him to do his study came from a paper published in the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic, when doctors were puzzling over why and how the virus had spread so quickly and been so deadly.As long as flu has been recognized, people have asked, Why winter? The very name, “influenza,” is an Italian word that some historians proposed, originated in the mid-18th century as influenza di freddo, or “influence of the cold.”Flu season in northern latitudes is from November to March, the coldest months. In southern latitudes, it is from May until September. In the tropics, there is not much flu at all and no real flu season.There was no shortage of hypotheses. Some said flu came in winter because people are indoors; and children are in school, crowded together, getting the flu and passing it on to their families.Others proposed a diminished immune response because people make less vitamin D or melatonin when days are shorter. Others pointed to the direction of air currents in the upper atmosphere. But many scientists were not convinced.“We know one of the largest factors is kids in school — most of the major epidemics are traced to children,” said Dr. Jonathan McCullers, a flu researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. “But that still does not explain wintertime. We don’t see flu in September and October.”As for the crowding argument, Dr. McCullers said, “That never made sense.” People work all year round and crowd into buses and subways and planes no matter what the season.“We needed some actual data,” Dr. McCullers added.But getting data was surprisingly difficult, Dr. Palese said.The ideal study would expose people to the virus under different conditions and ask how likely they were to become infected. Such a study, Dr. Palese said, would not be permitted because there would be no benefit to the individuals.There were no suitable test animals. Mice can be infected with the influenza virus but do not transmit it. Ferrets can be infected and transmit the virus, but they are somewhat large, they bite and they are expensive, so researchers would rather not work with them.To his surprise, Dr. Palese stumbled upon a solution that appeared to be a good second best.Reading a paper published in 1919 in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the flu epidemic at Camp Cody in New Mexico, he came upon a key passage: “It is interesting to note that very soon after the epidemic of influenza reached this camp, our laboratory guinea pigs began to die.” At first, the study’s authors wrote, they thought the animals had died from food poisoning. But, they continued, “a necropsy on a dead pig revealed unmistakable signs of pneumonia.”Dr. Palese bought some guinea pigs and exposed them to the flu virus. Just as the paper suggested, they got the flu and spread it among themselves. So Dr. Palese and his colleagues began their experiments.By varying air temperature and humidity in the guinea pigs’ quarters, they discovered that transmission was excellent at 41 degrees. It declined as the temperature rose until, by 86 degrees, the virus was not transmitted at all.The virus was transmitted best at a low humidity, 20 percent, and not transmitted at all when the humidity reached 80 percent.The animals also released viruses nearly two days longer at 41 degrees than at a typical room temperature of 68 degrees.Flu viruses spread through the air, unlike cold viruses, Dr. Palese said, which primarily spread by direct contact when people touch surfaces that had been touched by someone with a cold or shake hands with someone who is infected, for example.Flu viruses are more stable in cold air, and low humidity also helps the virus particles remain in the air. That is because the viruses float in the air in little respiratory droplets, Dr. Palese said. When the air is humid, those droplets pick up water, grow larger and fall to the ground.But Dr. Palese does not suggest staying in a greenhouse all winter to avoid the flu. The best strategy, he says, is a flu shot.It is unclear why infected animals released viruses for a longer time at lower temperatures. There was no difference in their immune response, but one possibility is that their upper airways are cooler, making the virus residing there more stable.Flu researchers said they were delighted to get some solid data at last on flu seasonality.“It was great work, and work that needed to be done,” said Dr. Terrence Tumpe, a senior microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Dr. McCullers said he was pleased to see something convincing on the flu season question.“It was a really interesting paper, the first really scientific approach, to answer a classic question that we’ve been debating for years and years,” he said.As for Dr. Palese, he was glad he spotted the journal article that mentioned guinea pigs.“Sometimes it pays to read the old literature,” he said.

Monday, December 3, 2007

MOTHER LODE IN MARSH MONTANA

In genealogy, more often than not, better to be lucky than smart, though repeated attempts to get in luck's way does seem to improve the odds. On a recent junket to Billings, Montana, to celebrate Uncle Bill's 100th birthday, my sister and I tacked on a scenic, though short, two day trip to Miles City and Glendive. For those of you on the right and left coasts, the 460 mile circuit takes the average Montana driver a little bit under 6 hours. For those of you who know Montana, using "scenic" to describe a trip anywhere in the state is, of course, unnecessary.

In the Holzworth tradition (shared with the Great Santini), we set off from Billings before the crack of dawn. However, dawn did catch us partway to Miles.

Among several objectives, we intended to stop coming or going at the Evelyn Cameron Museum in Terry, Montana. The little town of Terry (Pop. 600 or so) figures in the family history as the place where grandfather Dudley Howard Bell died of the Spanish Influenza hauling a wagon load of sugar beets to the railhead in September 1918 and again when Dick and Doris Holzworth eloped on her 18th birthday (January 30, 1937) and got married there by a justice of the peace. We knew about the museum from the website, and we wanted to see full scale prints of the famous photographs many of which can be viewed on-line. I also wanted to purchase a copy of Photographing Montana by Donna Lucey, a purchase I had not done on-line thinking that perhaps the museum would get some small benefit if I purchased it in Terry instead. I did not think about the absence of a sales tax in Montana, but if I had, that reason would have been at the top of my list.

Terry fit into the return trip following a quick drive through Fallon Flats, where the church of my father's childhood had been moved from Marsh. The church, typical of Montana, had the lights on and the door unlocked, though no one at home. A high school girl waiting for the yellow rural school bus couldn't tell us much about it, mainly because she went to a different church up the road a piece. Her eyes widened when we asked about a notorious murder that happened 70 years ago. I imagine she had something out of the ordinary to report at dinner that night.

We arrived in Terry a little before noon on Veterans' Day, but learned at the gas station on the edge of town that only the Post Office, a federal building, was closed. Everything else -- schools, banks and businesses -- swapped Veterans Day for the day after Thanksgiving. More time that way for hunting, gathering and stuffing.

We got directions to the museum, probably saving 30 seconds of driving time. Basically Terry consists of a few more streets than the number of cross-hatched lines you need for tic-tac-toe. We went to the door of the "World Famous" Evelyn Cameron museum and found posted "If door is locked, go to main museum building" with an arrow pointing to the right ---->. Posted on the door of the main museum. hand printed in heavy black permanent marker: "OFFICE HOURS OPEN Most Days About 9 or 10 Occassionally as Early as 7, But SOMEDAYS As Late as 12 or 1. WE CLOSE About 4 or 5, But Sometimes as Late as 11 or 12, SOMEDAYS OR Afternoons, We Aren't Here At All, and Lately I've Been Here Just About All The Time, Except When I'm Someplace Else, But I Should be Here Then, Too." Directly below the printed hours, tacked to the door I saw a neatly typed list of the museum directors and their home phone numbners. How nice and folksy, I thought! I called the first three, all of which had interesting and imaginative voice mail greetings, all ending in something like "Gone deer hunting, be back at the end of the season." I put my cell phone away, looked around for the hidden camera or laughing locals, saw none and walked back to the car.

Amazon.com got my book order when I returned to DC. The book arrived 4 to 5 days later and qualified for the "free shipping" treatment. All packages arriving in the mail excite a childish glee no doubt conditioned in a Pavlovian way during my formative years by the annual anticipation associated with gaily wrapped packages magically appearing under a tree that should only have produced pine cones. Freed of its corrugated restraints, the book revealed the beginning of a wonderfully crafted narrative of Evelyn Cameron's life as a rancher and photographer during part of four decades as the 19th became the 20th Century in Prairie County, Montana. Beautifully illustrating the biography, prints of a hitherto unknown archive of photos invited the eye to move through the book at a faster pace than reading, in an ordered way, would allow.

My eye caught the caption under a congregation -- upwards of fifty men, women and children -- standing in front of a church built just like the one we had seen less than an hour before in Fallon Flats. Here stood the entire 1920 congregation of the church that my father's step-father built. Somewhere in that crowd also stands my father, grandmother, aunts and uncles. One thing leads to another, and within a few days the Montana Historical Society has been enlisted to photocopy and send all Marsh, Fallon Flats and other pictures of the German-Russian community included in their collection of over 1000 Evelyn Cameron photos, one set to me and another to my Aunt who must also be frozen in time in front of that church and may be able to name nearly everyone captured there with her.

MONTANA 1948: BOOK REVIEW


A lean sparse narrative evokes, almost unerringly, the time, place and ghosts inhabiting the semi-Badlands of the northeastern Montana high line and the lives of the departed survivors. The author Larry Watson, through the voice of boy and man, lures the reader and quickly sets the hook:

"From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them...

A young Sioux woman lies on a bed in our house. She is feverish, delirious, and coughing so scared I am afraid she will die.

My father kneels on the kitchen floor, begging my mother to help him. It's a summer night and the room is brightly lit. Insects cluster around the fixtures, and the pleading quality in father's voice reminds me of those insects--high- pitched, insistent, frantic. It is a sound I have never heard coming from him.

My mother stands in our kitchen on a hot, windy day. The windows are open, and Mother's lace curtains blow into the room. Mother holds my father's Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun, and since she is a small slender woman, she has trouble finding the balance point of its heavy length. Nevertheless, she has watched my father and other men often enough to know where the shells go, and she loads them until the gun will hold no more. Loading the gun is the difficult part. Once the shells are in, any fool can figure out how to fire it. Which she intends to do."

A slim book of 169 pages races to the climax at the pace, intensity and inevitability of a Great Northern Empire Builder streaking and shrieking its doppler effect across the Mercer County prairie. As one of the many enthusiastic reader blurbs noted, you can start reading at 10:00 a.m. and finish in the wee hours of the morning. I think he reads very slowly.

Apart from cowboys and Indians, gun smoke and coyotes, the book mostly recounts a densely packed psychodrama of unspoken though overheard skeletons rattling in the family closet, or basement rather. For a genealogist, skeletons rattling lead to further investigations, for instance the Heid Janssen murders featured in a previous and future postings. A generation or two of separation serves to make these ghosts abstract and bearable, but the immediately surviving generation leaves most of the telling unsaid.

Those that stay with the serialized saga of the extended Bell, Holzworth, Siegle, Guelff, Metzger, Schwinden, Grein, Beck, Smith (Schmidt), Repogle, Vogeler, Mauch, Schlichenmeir, Emerick, et al families, Montana 1948 may be a useful guide to achieve some empathy with the the survivors of these tragedies.

Watson writes a well crafted story as attested by the many awards conferred upon the book, but the literary pretensions do not get in the way of a good read. Sometimes Watson does not leave quite enough to the reader's imagination, and the narrative voice becomes a little intrusive, but this hardly amounts to more than an occassional minor annoyance. Because the book strives so hard to reflect the time, mood and place, one or two anachronisms will catch the attention of the native reader, e.g. a reference to Montana State University in Bozeman when, in 1948, Montana State College in Bozeman had not yet attained university status.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

HEAD 'EM UP, MOVE 'EM OUT!

You might say, to get somewhere, you have to come from somewhere. It's almost a Euclidean axiom of the human condition. Moses came out of Egypt, wandered around the desert for a Biblical amount of time, never made it to the land of milk and honey, but had some notable adventures along the way. But for Moses, Joshua would not have led the tribe into Canaan, and so on.

Let's ratchet back a generation and a half to a farm in western Maryland and then to a homestead or two in Kansas or Missouri. Albert Bell, son of Samuel Bell and Elizabeth Smith, breathed air for the first time on June 25, 1847 on a parcel of land near a little town almost on the Mason-Dixon line called Leitersberg not far from the much larger Hagerstown on the upper Potomac River. In 1849, Samuel and Elizabeth moved the family that by then included four children to Pleasant valley near Weverton also in Maryland.

By 1850, three female slaves appeared on the list of household members, possibly part of Elizabeth's dowry as she came from Virginia stock. When Samuel moved the family west in 1852 to Hagerstown, Indiana, the slaves must have been manumitted or sold. The naming of the Indiana town after the town in Maryland probably resulted from a vote taken among the Pennsylvania Dutch, mostly from western Maryland and south central Pennsylvania, who comprised the majority of the founders. There he farmed, fathered another four children and prospered until retirement. His children, like all the children in the community, were raised, schooled and churched in a German speaking Evangelical Lutheran congregation.


But this does not get us to Missouri. The War of the Rebellion, as as it was called then, the Civil War as we call it now, broke out with the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, when Albert Bell had not quite reached the age of 14. At least one of Albert's Bell cousins had risen to the rank of general in the Union Army, and other cousins received commissions in the Confederate Army. In 1863, Albert lied about his age and enlisted in the 9th Indiana Cavalry, 121st Regiment when just 16; left his father's homestead in Hagerstown, Wayne, Indiana; saw action in Tennessee and Georgia; was wounded and then discharged in Missouri at the end of the war. We know his name, rank and whereabouts for most of his life from census and military pension records.

In the army, Albert served under Lieutenant Colonel Eli Lily. Appalled by the loss of life due to poor medical equipment and care, Lily devoted his career after the war to building a large pharmaceutical company, which bears his name. Lt. Col. Lily has the mustache, but no beard, in the picture to the left.

After discharged from the army, Albert Bell met up and married Lucinda Metzger on September 28, 1871 in Lawrence, Douglas, Kansas. Samuel must have known Lucinda from his childhood days in Hagerstown, Indiana, where they both most likely attended the same German speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church and school. The Metzker family moved west to Missouri right after the civil war. Astute readers, like my brother, will notice three different spellings of Metsker in this paragraph. These are not typographical errors. The genealogical records contain instances of each variation, the kind of inconsistency that occurs with increasing frequency the further that we dig into the past. Just wait to see what happens when we try to trace the arrival and movements of the first Bell ancestors in Colonial Pennsylvania and Maryland!



Albert and Lucinda began to raise a family and had six children by 1888, all but the first born surviving to adulthood. Albert and Lucinda named them, in order of birth, Minnie, Charley, Victoria, Walter, Dudley and Vincent. In the picture to the left, Dudley appears on the far left behind the sitting dog and Charley next to Albert with the dog standing of its hind legs. Walter and Victoria fill out the line-up and Vincent may be inside Lucinda making the probable date of the picture 189 .



Charley Bell, born on September 28, 1874, probably struck out on his own before any of the others. Around the turn of the century, he joined up with the XIT ranch in Texas as a cowboy and went north on a cattle drive that ended at the rail head in Glendive, Montana. From there he spent some time on the XIT ranch in Dawson County, then became the first sheriff of McCone County, formed by carving off pieces of Dawson and Richland Counties in 1919. As of the 2000 census, McCone boasted a population of 1,977 people, 810 households, and 596 families. A sing once posted on the "city" limits of Circle, the McCone County seat tells the story of how it came to be.



Evelyn Cameron, a British expatriate and rancher, photographed the cowboys working for the XIT. Most of her collection can be viewed on-line at http://www.evelyncameron.com/. Two of her photographs show an XIT herd crossing the Yellowstone near Terry, MT and the XIT outfit working that drive.
For present purposes, Wikipedia tells us all we need to know about the origins of the XIT ranch:

"In 1879, the Sixteenth Texas Legislature appropriated 3,000,000 acres (12,000 km²) of land to finance a new state capitol. In 1882, in a special legislative session, the Seventeenth Texas Legislature struck a bargain with Charles B. and John V. Farwell, under which a syndicate, led by the Farwells, agreed to build a new $3,000,000.00 Texas State Capitol and accept the 3,000,000 acres (12,000 km²) of Panhandle land in payment.

The ranch started operations in 1885 and at its peak averaged handling 150,000 head of cattle within its 1,500 miles (2,400 km) of fencing. The ranch also erected 325 windmills and 100 dams across its land.

The famous XIT brand imprinted on the backside of the ranch's cattle arose from the low-cost, practical use of a single-bar brand being able to make an "X", an "I" and a "T" with a single heat iron (no custom-ordered shape being required!).




However timing was bad for the XIT as cattle prices crashed in 1886 and 1887. By the fall of 1888, the ranch was unable to sell its cattle and break even. The cattle on the ranch were constantly plagued by cattle rustlers and predators, especially wolves leading to further losses for the syndicate.

In 1901, the syndicate that owned the ranch, began selling off the land to pay off foreign investors as the bonds became due. By 1905, most of the land was subdivided, with large tracts being sold to other cattlemen and small amounts of land being sold to farmers. The last of the XIT cattle were sold on November 1, 1912, and land sales subsequently increased."

Once established in Montana, Charles encouraged his younger brother Dudley born December 20, 1887 in Carthage, Missouri, to join him. Most likely Dudley worked on the XIT ranch for awhile before he staked a homestead near another claim where the numerous Guelff brothers and sisters resided. Dudley may have met Elizabeth Guelff through one of her brothers, perhaps Nicholas who appears in this photograph with Charles and Dudley. Doris Bell's handwriting on the back of one print of this picture indicates that Dudley stands and Charles sits. Another print has handwriting of Elizabeth Bell on the back identifying the slouching cowboy on the right as Nicholas. Both prints are postcard pictures, the second one Dudley addressed in pencil to Elizabeth's younger sister Kathryn Guelff in Brockway, Montana, another metropolis not far from Circle. Doris Bell dates the picture "about 1916," three years after Dudley and Elizabeth married.



By 1916, two children had been born to them, Kenneth the oldest on November 21, 1914 and Lucille on January 18, 1916. Two more children came along in orderly succession, Gerald on September 19, 1917 and Doris on January 20, 1919. The family came about in sync with the annual spring planting with the children arriving on schedule after the fall harvest. A little over two months before Doris arrived, Dudley loaded up a wagon with sugar beets and headed off to the railroad station at Terry, Montana. Everyone in the house had the flu, but Dudley (as told by Doris) felt a little better and compelled to make the trip and the sale to cover a payment due on the farm mortgage. A few days later he died from an attack of the Spanish Influenza. On December 27, 1918, Charley Bell's wife, Merle Alberta Malvern Bell, also perished in the Spanish Influenza, leaving Charley with their only daughter, Joyce, one month past year fourth birthday. On the 26th of November 1921, Nicholas Guelff died of a botched appendectomy, leaving behind his bride of six years and their four small children. None of the surviving spouses remarried.


POSTSCRIPT: On December 5, 2007, a news item appeared in the New York Times reporting a recently published study on the transmission of the Spanish Influenza and other flu viruses based on, literally, an experiment on guinea pigs.

Study Shows Why the Flu Likes Winter
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By GINA KOLATA
Published: December 5, 2007
Researchers in New York believe they have solved one of the great mysteries of the flu: Why does the infection spread primarily in the winter months?

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Times Health Guide: The Flu The answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.

“Influenza virus is more likely to be transmitted during winter on the way to the subway than in a warm room,” said Peter Palese, a flu researcher who is professor and chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the lead author of the flu study.

Dr. Palese published details of his findings in the Oct. 19 issue of PLoS Pathogens. The crucial hint that allowed him to do his study came from a paper published in the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic, when doctors were puzzling over why and how the virus had spread so quickly and been so deadly.

As long as flu has been recognized, people have asked, Why winter? The very name, “influenza,” is an Italian word that some historians proposed, originated in the mid-18th century as influenza di freddo, or “influence of the cold.”

Flu season in northern latitudes is from November to March, the coldest months. In southern latitudes, it is from May until September. In the tropics, there is not much flu at all and no real flu season.

There was no shortage of hypotheses. Some said flu came in winter because people are indoors; and children are in school, crowded together, getting the flu and passing it on to their families.

Others proposed a diminished immune response because people make less vitamin D or melatonin when days are shorter. Others pointed to the direction of air currents in the upper atmosphere. But many scientists were not convinced.

“We know one of the largest factors is kids in school — most of the major epidemics are traced to children,” said Dr. Jonathan McCullers, a flu researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. “But that still does not explain wintertime. We don’t see flu in September and October.”

As for the crowding argument, Dr. McCullers said, “That never made sense.” People work all year round and crowd into buses and subways and planes no matter what the season.

“We needed some actual data,” Dr. McCullers added.

But getting data was surprisingly difficult, Dr. Palese said.

The ideal study would expose people to the virus under different conditions and ask how likely they were to become infected. Such a study, Dr. Palese said, would not be permitted because there would be no benefit to the individuals.

There were no suitable test animals. Mice can be infected with the influenza virus but do not transmit it. Ferrets can be infected and transmit the virus, but they are somewhat large, they bite and they are expensive, so researchers would rather not work with them.

To his surprise, Dr. Palese stumbled upon a solution that appeared to be a good second best.

Reading a paper published in 1919 in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the flu epidemic at Camp Cody in New Mexico, he came upon a key passage: “It is interesting to note that very soon after the epidemic of influenza reached this camp, our laboratory guinea pigs began to die.” At first, the study’s authors wrote, they thought the animals had died from food poisoning. But, they continued, “a necropsy on a dead pig revealed unmistakable signs of pneumonia.”

Dr. Palese bought some guinea pigs and exposed them to the flu virus. Just as the paper suggested, they got the flu and spread it among themselves. So Dr. Palese and his colleagues began their experiments.

By varying air temperature and humidity in the guinea pigs’ quarters, they discovered that transmission was excellent at 41 degrees. It declined as the temperature rose until, by 86 degrees, the virus was not transmitted at all.

The virus was transmitted best at a low humidity, 20 percent, and not transmitted at all when the humidity reached 80 percent.

The animals also released viruses nearly two days longer at 41 degrees than at a typical room temperature of 68 degrees.

Flu viruses spread through the air, unlike cold viruses, Dr. Palese said, which primarily spread by direct contact when people touch surfaces that had been touched by someone with a cold or shake hands with someone who is infected, for example.

Flu viruses are more stable in cold air, and low humidity also helps the virus particles remain in the air. That is because the viruses float in the air in little respiratory droplets, Dr. Palese said. When the air is humid, those droplets pick up water, grow larger and fall to the ground.

But Dr. Palese does not suggest staying in a greenhouse all winter to avoid the flu. The best strategy, he says, is a flu shot.

It is unclear why infected animals released viruses for a longer time at lower temperatures. There was no difference in their immune response, but one possibility is that their upper airways are cooler, making the virus residing there more stable.

Flu researchers said they were delighted to get some solid data at last on flu seasonality.

“It was great work, and work that needed to be done,” said Dr. Terrence Tumpe, a senior microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. McCullers said he was pleased to see something convincing on the flu season question.

“It was a really interesting paper, the first really scientific approach, to answer a classic question that we’ve been debating for years and years,” he said.

As for Dr. Palese, he was glad he spotted the journal article that mentioned guinea pigs.

“Sometimes it pays to read the old literature,” he said.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

PASTOR POISONS GIRL, GETS LIFE

Rush N.D. Minister To Prison Cell After Midnight Sentencing -- Mercer County Man Confesses He Killed Maid, Fired Parsonage After She Threatened To Tell Wife of Illicit Relations

--Mandan, N.D. Aug 19 [1938]--Sentenced at a midnight court session, Rev. Heid Janssen, Evangelical Lutheran pastor at Krem, began a life term in the state penitentiary today a few hours after pleading guilty to poisoning his 16-year old housemaid and firing the parsonage containing her body.
Feeling in the community ran so high trial was ordered immediately after the minister, 51, admitted he killed Alma Kruckenberg because she was pregnant.
Sentence was passed by District Judge H.L. Berry. Janssen was taken immediately to the penitentiary.
The arraignment followed swiftly after Janssen signed a confession before States Attorney Floyd Sperry of Mercer County admitting he perp[etrated the crime Monday.
"The devil overcame me," the pastor said impassively. "I did wrong. I have a very good Christian wife and two boys any father would be proud of and I feel only sorry that I bring such grief to them."
The girl's father after hearing the pastor admit his guilt told him:

"I FORGIVE YOU."

"We were the best friends he had," John Kruckenberg said. He described the minister as "the best preacher I ever heard.
"He was especially good for children and was very well respected, not only in this community but ministers over the state as well," the father said.
Kruckenberg described his daughter as "not very healthy" and said he had placed her in the churchman's care because he thought she was safe there and that the work would not be too hard.
Miss Krickenberg was one of 10 children in the family of Mr. and Mrs. Kruckenberg, farmers near Krem, 60 miles north of Mandan. She had been employed at the parsonage since last January.
Sperry and Special Assistant Attorney General James Austin began questioning Janssen early Tuesday. During two days of incessant interrogation, Sperry said, the minister denied any connection with the fire and burned body.

PARENTS ASK TRUTH

Thursday evening the parents of the murdered girl confronted Janssen and pleaded he "tell the truth." The confession followed.
Janssen told the court he gave the girl poisoned wine Aug. 13, and then burned teh house. He admitted illicit relations with the girl. He said the girl threatened to tell Mrs. Janssen, and he decided "to do away with her."
Janssen's wife was in Bismarck for medical treatment when he confessed to the crime and Sheriff F.W. Vreeland of Mercer County did not believe she knew either of the confession or the sentence.
The minister was calm throughout the trial and did not break down. He seemed pleased he would be taken immediately to the penitentiary.

FORMERLY AT HARVEY

Serving a parsonage of almost 50 members in the Krem area, Janssen has been there five years, previously serving in Montana for 18 years and before that at Harvey S.D. for eight years.

From The Fargo Forum Friday Evening August 19, 1938

I requested a copy of this news article from the Germans for Russia Historical Society after a research librarian there generously offered to run a check for the appearance of an Evangelical Lutheran Pastor by the name of Heid Janssen in connection with the murder of a servant girl sometime between 1930 and 1940. This genealogical investigation into an otherwise long forgotten crime was triggered by a story my father once told me when I asked him why he only went to church when his mother was buried and his children got married. He said he did not like the hypocrisy of church goers who sinned all week and held themselves out to be holy and righteous for an hour or so on Sunday mornings. Then, after a short pause, he told me about a pastor he knew when he was young who raped and killed a girl working at the parsonage. He never mentioned it again, and I never asked. But I never forgot the story.
A week ago, I returned to eastern Montana to celebrate the 100th birthday of my Uncle Bill, who was married to my father's sister, the oldest of the five children in my father's family. While there, I also reconnected with my 92 year old Aunt Martha, the widow of my father's older brother. It turns out that my Aunt Martha and my father were confirmed by the same Lutheran Pastor in a little church in Marsh, Montana, not too far from Glendive, both on or near the Yellowstone River. So I asked her about my father's story. Without hesitation she recited the particulars pretty much as I remembered my father's account and added to it, the names of the pastor's wife and two boys as well as the last name of a servant girl, whose body was found in the well of the Marsh, Montana church after Rev. Janssen was arrested and convicted for a similar crime in North Dakota.
As I write this piece, I am looking at "Zur Erinnerung an den Tag der Konfirmation" with the written inscription at the bottom "Evan. Luth. Jehovah -- Kirche, Marsh Montana" and in the same hand signed "H. Janssen ev. luth." Pastor, dated 23 June 1929.








Monday, November 5, 2007

URSUS HOLZWORTHI

While foraging at the Washington, DC branch of Second Story Books, my favorite noon-time habitat, I came across a book that perfectly intersected two of the main themes of this website, evolutionary biology and genealogy. The author's name on the spine, John T. Holzworth, first caught my attention. The title of the book further arrested me -- The Wild Grizzlies of Alaska: A Story of the Grizzly and Big Brown Bears of Alaska, Their Habits, Manners and Characteristics, Together with Notes on Mountain Sheep and Caribou, The Appendix sold me: C. H. Merriam on a new grizzly from the Talkeetna Mountains, Alaska 'Ursus holzworthi'.

With a nod to my literary friend Jonathan Swift, I have a modest proposal to make for a compromise in the ongoing screaming match between Biblical literalists and scientific dogmatists. This grizzly book, it appears, would provide substantial evidence for a unified field theory of genealogy and evolutionary biology, one the tracing of ancestors through a nomenclature of maternal and paternal surnames and the other through cladistics that focus on commonalities of structure, function, behaviors and, of course, genetics.

No reader of the Bible can be ignorant of the importance of genealogy; the Bible, in fact, more or less follows a genealogical structure starting with the first man and woman (Genesis 1:26 and then again in Genesis 2:15). The Bible then catches us up at various points along the way to the flood, the aftermath and through Abraham to the time of David on the family history. All of this phylogeny is recapitulated as ontogeny in the "begats" that begin the beguine in the first book of Matthew, a dance that gets us from Abraham to Jesus of Nazareth.

For their part, the scientific dogmatists have debts to pay, at least initially, to the brilliant classification system devised by Linnaeus that essentially laid out the familial relationships of all living things. Until Darwin, and the lesser known Wallace, religious and proto-scientists thought of the relationship as an essentially static and unchanging hierarchical chain of being. Darwin, and the lesser Wallace, upset the paradigm with the dynamic explanation of evolution through natural selection.

Why not, I ask with my friend Swift whispering in my ear, make the inferential leap of faith that my ancestors, at least, descended from bears? It would get the monkey off our backs, so to speak, and the the ursus holzworthi does bear the family name. It seems to me that the Biblical literalist should be delighted to swap the monkey for a bear.

What more noble ancestor can one have than the grizzly bear and the larger Alaskan variety known as the Kodiak? For one thing, we need no longer feel humilated by that embarrasing trait of monkeys and apes, beings prone to brachiambulation, tails that remind one of devils and those odd looking feet that look more like hands. Bears seem to get around quite well on two feet, rising to the occasion of their essential humanness. And their diet is far more interesting as well. Omnivores just like us, and no natural enemies, except us. In addition, we have a celestial objective-corelative to seal the deal. What better sign of divine intent than the incorporation of the pole star into Ursus Minor (the baby bear beaing a symbol of the Nativity) whose location can be found by extending the points of the Big Dipper, essentially a cup or Holy Grail, found in Ursus Major (a symbol of the father bear).

Now the taunting dogmatists of reductionist science must admit that somewhere along the line, ursine and homonid had a common ancestor. So let's go back in time, forget the monkey business, and celebrate the bear facts of necessity.

I have made my case and submit it to my readers to accept or reject.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

ARBEIT MACHT DAS LEBEN SUSS

One of the fascinations of genealogy arises from the discovery in the remote, and sometimes near, past the genesis of a family trait or attitude. A capacity for hard physical work, which evolved into the more strenuous mental kind in succeeding generations, surrounded and permeated the immediate Siegle/Holzworth families as well as the greater clan of German immigrant farmers in Eastern Montana and the Western Dakotas in the late 1800's and first half of the 20th Century.

Oddly enough, like the seven dwarfs whistling while they worked, strenuous activity seemed more a source of pride and pleasure than any kind of burden. One might expect this from Calvinists or Catholics (works being evidence of election for the first and necessary for salvation for the second), but these were peasant farmer types of the Evangelical Lutheran variety among whom faith alone was sufficient for the afterlife. Faith alone, however, obviously did not suffice for a lengthy stay in this world on the storm swept steppes at the edge of the Black Sea in 19th Century Russia or the even more hostile Badlands of the Dakotas and Eastern Montana.

In these twin and sometimes grim environments, they did indeed sing and laugh and joke and even whistle while they worked. Among the last of those hardy pioneers, my Uncle Bill, will celebrate his 100th birthday on November 10. Some will say it's all a matter of good genes; others will point to the strength of religious belief; and others still will attribute it to hard work and clean living. And they will all be right. The life style (if such a term can be translated and applied) makes one coherent whole uniquely adapted, not only for survival, but for prosperity under the harsh and challenging conditions that faced this group of people.

Among their accomplishments after the Bubonic Plague took out a third or more of the population of Europe they: (1) lived and survived in the battle fields of 16th, 17th and 18th century Europe along the Rhine and the Danube; (2) migrated in large family groups down the Danube to the Black Sea in the mid and late 18th Century; (3) established large and prosperous farms that fed the rest of Russia; (4) migrated again to the most desolate regions of North America in the late 19th Century to avoid slaughter and extermination from rising Slavic nationalism followed by Bolshevik purges; and (5) established new farms that supplied 80 percent of several U.S. grain crops by 1900.

The first migration from Wuertemberg to the Black Sea was not a leisurely raft float down the Danube. Many died en route of cholera. Many of those who survived the trip died during the first harsh winters and the failure of the Russian Czars to deliver on the assistance promised in exchange for settling and populating the lands that had recently been wrested from the Ottoman Empire. They did, however, deliver for a time on the promises of freedom to worship, exemption from military service and the right to hold and transfer to their children cultivated land. They maintained their ethnic identity, their language and their chiliastic religious beliefs (at least until the predicted apocalypse in 1826 failed to materialize).





The Siegle and Holzwarth families settled in the Black Sea village of Hoffnungstal. Their houses were immediately next to one another, and were built to withstand the hard winters as well as the scorching heat of the summers.

Uncle Bill and his immediate family were among the last groups to leave the Black Sea colony of Hoffnungstal after the horrific purges had already begun. Like many others who escaped, they made a long trek back to Germany and then booked third class passage aboard an immigrant ship from Breman to New York. They came on the Neckar, a sister ship of the Main depicted here.





The conditions on such immigrant ships improved measurably in the last decades of the 19th Century, but the Neckar hardly qualified as a luxury liner. Operated by the North German Lloyd Line, the ship was built by J. C. Tecklenborg & CO., Geestemunde, Germany. With a gross tonnage of 9,835 and about one and two thirds of a football field in length (499' x 58'), it is a bit difficult to imagine how it carried 370 second and 3,000 third class passengers. We know from the ship manifest, however, that Wilhelm Siegle was aboard when the Neckar arrived in New York on April 7, 1912 in the company of his father Christian (age 29), his mother Margaretha (age 32), brother Johann (11 years and 3 months)and Leontine (2 years and 7 months). Wilhelm was four years, five months and 2 days old upon arrival.


The typical dwellings first built on the homesteads in the Dakota did not differ much from those left behind in Russia. In fact, neighbors continued to be neighbors, and the name of the church -- Hoffnunstal, German for Valley of Hope -- continued unchanged in the Dakotas.


Compared to the alternative, the trek out of Russia and the ocean voyage was not much of an ordeal. The official Soviet history gives a chillingly banal account of the slaughter and oppression that soon after extinguished the colony:

"The village [of Hoffnungstal] had its origin during the latter part of the 18th century. Its first residents were Ukrainians and Moldavians. In the beginning of the 19th century the German colonists began to settle. In the summer of 1919, the wealthy colonists staged an uprising against Soviet authority. The revolt was crushed by regiments of the Red Army assisted by the local poor populace. In 1920 a party organization was established. After the Great Patriotic War residents from the western Ukraine came to Tsebrikovo. Near the village are many ancient burial mounds."

Now back to the title of this piece: "Work makes living sweet." So much a part of the ethic and culture of this enterprising group, I doubt that it took more than a minute of discussion before it became the motto of Germans from Russia Heritage Society on a seal also depicting a sod house next to a plow and a windwill.

Happy 100th Birthday, Uncle Bill!