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
Sign In to E-Mail or Save This Print Reprints Share
Del.icio.usDiggFacebookNewsvinePermalink

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?

Skip to next paragraph
Related
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.

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.

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.

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!