The Children's Blizzard (3 page)

Four years later, in the summer of 1874, Anna and Johann Kaufmann and all the families in their congregation piled their remaining possessions into wagons they had borrowed back from the Ukrainian peasants they had sold them to—the first wave of a mass decade-long migration that would bring some eighteen thousand Mennonites from Russia and the Ukraine to America between 1873 and 1883. For Anna, the hardest part was that she would be leaving a child behind, her first Peter, who died at the age of four the year before. It was not callous of Anna and Johann to use the name again when another son was born just months after Peter’s death. So many children died in those days that it was customary to keep the name alive with succeeding children. Before the day of departure, Anna’s father, Johann Schrag, led a daylong prayer service at the Mennonite church in Waldheim. That would have been Anna’s last visit to Peter’s grave. A small woman of twenty-four, five years younger than her husband, fair-haired and open-faced, Anna was gentle and tenderhearted and devout. In later years her grandchildren remembered that when she came to greet them Anna always had “a smile on her face and tears in her eyes, which were tears of joy. She laughed and cried at the same time.”
“Die
freundliche Grossmutter,”
they called her—“the friendly grandmother." Anna wept at Peter’s grave, knowing it would be the last time, thanking God that He had given her two more sons, praying that these boys would live longer than their brother.

Before they left Waldheim, the Schweizer families raised their voices in a song of farewell.
“Jetzt ist die Zeit und Stunde da, dass wir
zieh’n nach Amerika”
(Now the time and hour are here that we should move to America). Then all bowed their heads and folded their hands in prayer. Supposedly, the peasants from surrounding farms gathered in large numbers and cried as the caravan of swaying wagons rolled by, although one boy remembered an old Ukrainian peasant telling his parents solemnly that their ship was sure to sink, or if it didn’t, then they would certainly be killed and eaten by Indians.

It was the logistics of the journeys that the immigrants wrote about in greatest detail. The emotions they either took for granted or were too shy to record, especially the Norwegians, who were famous for their reserve. (There is a Norwegian joke about an old farmer who, in the grip of powerful emotion, once confessed to his best friend, “I love my wife so much I almost told her.”) So there is a great deal in the Norwegian memoirs about their heavy trunks and chests, often painted blue, and the difficulty of transporting them from their villages to the train stations or harbors from which they embarked. Osten wrote that he and his mother began their journey to America on board a small steamship called the
Rjukan,
which took them down the long narrow Tinnsjo to the village of Tinnoset at the southern end of the lake, where they spent the first night. From there it was sixty-five miles to Kongsberg, the nearest train station—a long way to haul the chests. After some searching and negotiating, Osten finally found a farmer named Anderson Moen who was willing to take their chests in his wagon. A few yards out of town it became apparent that Moen’s horse was so wretched that he could not possibly haul both the chests and the passengers, so the two men walked while Kari rode. They must have been a striking sight in the middle of the road—Osten a mus-cular young man of medium height, not yet twenty, with reddish blond hair, a mustache just coming in, and blue eyes that “sparkled with intelligence and humor,” as a relative wrote; the dignified and artistic Kari, a handsome widow of fifty-two, outspoken, well read, opinionated, a fierce advocate of female suffrage; and the bumbling Anderson, whose nickname was “Bi Litt” (Wait a Little)—his favorite expression. “Anderson was a strong and sturdy fellow,” wrote Osten. “I believe that he pushed more than that little horse pulled.

It was some fine procession that struggled through the parishes on its way to Kongsberg." An immigrant named John B. Reese remembered setting out from the mountain town of Opdal in central Norway with a group of families in April 1880. It was a “strange and significant scene," he wrote years later. “Here comes a procession of twenty or more sleds, each drawn by a single small horse. The sleds were heavily loaded with large, blue-tinted chests, as also trunks, satchels and numerous smaller articles of household and family use. Riding on top of these loads are mothers with little children as also a number of grandmothers, the latter upwards of seventy years of age.” Reese recalled turning around for a final view of the snowcapped mountains and evergreen forests before a bend in the road swept the familiar landscape from view. Another Norwegian child remembered boarding a ship at 4 A.M. and standing on deck to watch hundreds of people standing at the edge of cliffs waving pale handkerchiefs in the midsummer twilight.

Osten and Kari Rollag had a week in Oslo (then called Christiania after the Danish king Christian IV, who conquered it in 1624) before embarking on the ill-fated steamship
Kong Sverre.

This 310-foot-long two-masted iron-hulled ship was the pride of the Norwegian-owned Norsk Line, with elegant cabins for 75 first-and second-class passengers and accommodations belowdecks for 650 steerage passengers. But the
Kong Sverre,
named for an especially brutal twelfth-century king, lasted only two years—from her maiden voyage out of Bergen on June 29, 1873, until she was wrecked near the entrance to Dunkirk harbor on October 16, 1875. The wreck of the
Kong Sverre
bankrupted the Norsk Line, forcing Norwegian emigrants to embark for America thereafter from foreign ports. For Osten and Kari, the voyage on board this grand vessel was the experience of a lifetime. Osten wrote of the great crowd that gathered at the wharves in Christiania to see the steamship off: “When the ship pulled away from the dock there was waving of handkerchiefs as long as we could see land, and then all stood and sang the national anthem, ‘Ja, vi elsker dette landet.’” The ship stopped at Bergen, where she took on more passengers, so that by the time she left for America on June 4, 1874, she carried emigrants from every corner of the country, “from Vestland, from Nordland, from Trondheim, in all 800 people,” according to Osten, “all Norwegians." In the endless days of June there was little sleeping and, for the first-and second-class passengers, much dancing on the decks—at least at first. Then the ship hit the deep swells of the open ocean, and sea sicknesses put an end to the dancing. “The fine ladies who had danced so joyfully during the last days in Bergen lay around on the deck and vomited,” wrote Osten with a touch of malice. Of his own quarters belowdecks, Osten mentioned only that he and his mother were shocked to find “nothing more than hard boards—and . . . plenty of lice,” but one can imagine the squalor of the un-ventilated bunk rooms packed with 650 immigrants. On Sunday the faithful gathered for prayers in the morning and again in the afternoon. Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic a powerful storm hit the
Kong Sverre
and “giant waves rolled over the great ship and the water flooded some areas.” Part of the rudder broke in the storm and the ship stood idle for two days while the crew repaired it.

Fearful passengers begged the captain to turn around and head for England, but he refused. In the event, the weather quieted and they steamed into New York harbor on June 20, 1874, eighteen days after embarking from Christiania. "We enjoyed ourselves very much on the ship,” Osten concluded the saga of his voyage. “The trip was outstanding but there were a few cranks who complained about everything on board and went around with a list in order to send complaints to the company. No one signed it."

The Tislands, also from the Telemark region, were not as fortunate in their crossing as the Rollags. Of the nine children born to Ole and Karen Tisland, five had died of diphtheria and were buried in Norway. Though their son Andreas survived the disease, he was left deaf and weakened. Andreas was six and a half when Ole and Karen emigrated to America with their three other children. Their crossing was rough. In the course of the voyage, twenty-two children and one adult died. Ole and Karen watched helplessly as Andreas shivered with fever in the unheated steerage quarters. When he died his body was sewn into a canvas shroud with weights attached to either end. The ship’s captain read the last rites, and then the bundle was tipped off the side of the ship and into the sea.

Some mothers on board immigrant ships kept the deaths of their children secret so they could bury them properly on land. Even burying a child in the strange land of a country they had never seen was better than losing a child’s body to the ocean. About one in ten steerage passengers died on board immigrant ships.

The Norwegians journeyed to America on the strength of rumors, railroad company propaganda, hearsay, and letters from friends and relatives, “the America letters,” singing the praises of the New World. But the Swiss-German Mennonites, characteristically, wanted to see the country for themselves before making up their minds to emigrate. In the summer of 1873, three years after the Czar revoked their protections, two Schweizer leaders left on a scouting party to America with ten other Ukrainian Mennonites. Shortly after their arrival, the somber black-clad elders managed to secure an audience with President Ulysses S. Grant in Washington, D.C., to request the same privileges and exemptions they had enjoyed under Catherine the Great. Strangely, General George Armstrong Custer attended the meeting and conversed with the Mennonites in German (he had picked it up from his German family). Grant promised nothing—no military exemption, no tax incentive, no guarantee of German schools—but the scouts decided to have a look around the country anyway. They spent the spring and summer touring the re-public, traveling by train out to Chicago, Saint Paul, and Duluth, then westward by horse and wagon through the still largely unsettled expanses of Dakota Territory, north into Manitoba, and then south to Nebraska. They liked what they saw, especially the great empty prairies of Dakota. It was July and the unbroken grass looked rich and beautiful and full of promise. No trees to clear, no neighbors to disturb them, abundant sun. In the few homesteads scattered on the river bottoms, they examined the potato patches with approval.

By the time the delegation returned to the Ukraine, the Schweizers among them had decided that Dakota was the place.

And so the following July, Anna and Johann Kaufmann and their two young sons began their journey from Waldheim to America in a long caravan of wagons. It took two days to reach the nearest train station at the Ukranian city of Slavuta, some fifty miles east of the border of the Austrian Empire. Most of the Schweizers had never laid eyes on a train before—and there were many prayers offered for their safety. They traveled by train to Brody near the Ukrainian-Austrian border and on to Lemberg (Lvov) in Galicia and then, changing trains, on to Breslau, the principal city of Sile-sia, where they spent the night on the floor of a spare room next to a beer hall and endured the taunts of drunken patrons. From Breslau they took another train to Berlin and from Berlin to Hamburg, where they found lodging in an “immigration house.” A German Mennonite preacher who was invited to pray with the Schweizers at Hamburg left a moving account of the “unforgettable worship service” with some three hundred faithful in attendance. Gathering in the evening in the close quarters of the immigrant house, the congregation began by raising their voices in the migration song, “In all my deeds I let the Lord rule,” and then sat in silence as the text of Isaiah 44:24-28 was read aloud: “I am the Lord that maketh all things . . . that saith to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be inhabited; and to the cities of Judah, Ye shall be built, and I will raise up the decayed places thereof: That saith to the deep, Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers. . . .” At the end, after the preacher “pronounced the blessing of the Lord for the last time in this part of the world,” the Schweizer men sang in four-part harmony.

Thus fortified by prayer, the group boarded a steamship at Hamburg and crossed the North Sea to Hull. Then yet another train from Hull to Liverpool. Here they boarded the 4,770-ton 445-foot steamship
City of Chester,
one of the largest ships on the Inman Line, bound for New York. What struck them most about the ship was the fact that all the waiters and cooks were black—they had never encountered people of African descent before. One little boy was convinced that the first black man he saw was “old Nick himself." Traveling in steerage, the Schweizers did not even glimpse the ornate luxury of the first-class staterooms and public rooms above—dining room tables set with linen and crystal, velvet sofas, carved paneling in the saloons. But they were better off than most emigrants.

William Inman, the principal owner of the Liverpool-based line that bore his name, was determined that his modern iron-screw steamers provide steerage passengers safe, sanitary passage without “the discomforts and evil hitherto but too common in emigrant ships." The passage of the Schweizers was not without tragedy. Anna and Johann Kaufmann’s baby, Peter, died before the
City of Chester
reached America. For a group as tight-knit and community-minded as the Schweizers, the loss of one child was a loss to all. Anna’s father gathered his congregation into a quiet corner of the steerage quarters and led them in prayer for the eternal life of his unbaptized infant grandson. Johann Schrag may well have chosen a text from Revela-tions, his favorite book of the Bible, to weave into the prayer service.

A pious and austere man, even by Mennonite standards, Schrag was quick to see dire signs and portents in the tragedies of life. When the prayers were ended and the last hymn sung, the small body was taken up to the deck and consigned to the Atlantic Ocean.

It was some comfort to Anna to have her entire family on board the ship with her—her four brothers and their wives and children, her two unmarried younger sisters. And there was her three-year-old son, Johann, to look after. After seven years of marriage, after the births of three sons, Johann was all Anna and her husband had left. One small child to bring with them into the unknown reaches of the New World.