The Children's Blizzard (4 page)

The
City of Chester
arrived in New York Harbor on August 24, 1874, anchoring just off the Battery. A vigorous cold front had pushed through the previous night, dropping temperatures from the mid-80s to the upper 60s and clearing the rank city air. The families gathered on deck to look across the dark water at a city of cobblestone and brick and steep pitched roofs, a hodgepodge of three-and four-story buildings and narrow streets jammed with horses and carts. From the waterfront in those days you could still see the spire of Trinity Church jutting above the rooftops and the granite towers that would soon be strung with the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. White sails and gray columns of steamer smoke rippled on the water, and the crowded buildings loomed at the water’s edge with that ineffable sense of infinite possibility peculiar to New York harbor. Since the
City of Chester
was too big to tie up at one of the wharves that radiated out of the Battery, the ship remained in the deeper water offshore while a smaller boat ferried the passengers and their baggage across.

Family by family, the Kaufmanns and their neighbors from Waldheim and Horodischa—the Albrechts, Grabers, Schrags, Blocks, Gerings, Preheims—marched down the wharf and directly into the low-domed circular building known as Castle Garden.

This curious structure, neither a castle nor a garden, was an early example of creative urban recycling. Built between 1808 and 1811 to fortify the southern tip of Manhattan (hence the name Battery), Castle Garden was reborn as a summer restaurant in 1824; then in the 1840s it was roofed over and converted into an opera house and theater (Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, sang there for an audience of four thousand); and finally, in 1855, it became the nation’s primary immigrant processing center. Over the next thirty-four years, more than eight million immigrants passed through these thick red granite walls on their way to new lives in America.

To the Schweizers, the scene inside Castle Garden looked like pandemonium and sounded like Babel. Immigrants in their heavy woolen clothes filled the rows of benches on the lower level. Overhead hung two tiers of balconies where families who had arrived earlier camped while awaiting clearance. Children shouted and babies squalled. The smell of cheese, rolls, and coffee drifted in from the humid kitchens. Red-faced officials tried vainly to contain and channel the human flood. At the center of the great theatrical rotunda capped by a glass dome stood a dozen representatives of the leading railroads accosting the newcomers with offers of every kind—cheap land out West, easy transportation, temporary lodging while they looked around. A few paces away, an immigration official standing on a kind of rostrum shouted instructions over the hubbub—how and where to get rail or steamer tickets, where to register for employment, how to change money without falling prey to the sharpers and runners and scalpers who were lying in wait outside. Each immigrant was called up for a thorough physical examination, and those with illnesses were removed to a hospital run by the city.

The Schweizers wisely changed their rubles for dollars inside Castle Garden—what few rubles they had left after paying the equivalent of fifty dollars each for Russian passports and the steep fares for the trains and ships they had been traveling on for nearly a month. They had been warned that railway company agents would try to lure them with competitive offers, and they were ready to do business. Before leaving Russia, the families had chosen three leaders to represent the group interests, and these three, with the help of an earlier Mennonite immigrant named David Goerz, who had traveled back to New York to be of assistance, arranged with one of the railroads for a special “immigrant train” to transport them all out to Dakota.

For immigrants traveling alone and without friends or relatives to greet them on arrival, Castle Garden could be a nightmare. John Reese, who was six when his family arrived in New York from Opdal in Norway, remembered that the most terrifying moment of the long journey occurred at Castle Garden. John’s parents entrusted him to the care of a servant girl while they went off to arrange for their train tickets. In the milling confusion of hundreds of families speaking strange languages, John wandered off through the “vast spaces” of the Battery and ended up back at the docks. By this time he was sobbing hysterically for his father. At the dock, an immigration official, assuming the child had become separated from his family on board a newly arrived ship, took him out on a ferry to where this ship was anchored. One of the women on board promptly claimed that John was her son. Had the boy not howled in protest, the official would have left him. Somehow John was returned to shore and found his frantic parents.

A harrowing story was told by Finnish immigrants of one of their countrywomen who went into labor just as her immigrant ship anchored off the Battery. The woman was taken to a hospital on shore and forced to leave her baggage and her two-year-old daughter unattended on board the ship. While she was in the hospital, the ship returned to Europe. "In New York we lost heart again,” wrote Norwegian immigrant Aagot Raaen in her sad and lovely memoir
Grass of the Earth.
“We could not speak the language. We were driven like cattle onto trains that took us to Wisconsin and Iowa. We came from Wisconsin and Iowa to Dakota in covered wagons; we came through a country that had no bridges and no roads; we often traveled for days without seeing anything but prairie. But we again arrived.

Empty-handed, we started to work."

The fifty-three Schweizer families stayed in New York for a week during the last week of August, waiting for an even larger party of their fellow Schweizers to arrive from Europe on the
City of Richmond,
another Inman Line steamship. There were some 440 Schweizers in this second group, most of them bound for Kansas, but fourteen of the seventy-three families decided to split off and throw in their lot with the first group. Among these fourteen were Johann and Maria Albrecht, from the village of Kotosufka. There is no record of a prior friendship between the Albrechts and Anna and Johann Kaufmann, though their villages were just a few miles apart in the Ukraine and their families connected by kinship, as all the Schweizer families were. Nor is there a record that the two families were drawn together in New York once the Albrechts decided to join up with the Kaufmanns’ group. But there was a strange symmetry in their recent experiences that may well have served as a bond between them. Just as Anna and Johann Kaufmann had lost a son on the ocean voyage to America, so Maria Albrecht had borne a son on board the immigrant ship, a baby boy named Johann after his father, delivered on August 28, 1874, three days before the
City
of Richmond
dropped anchor in New York.

For Maria and Johann Albrecht, the birth of their son in the steerage quarters of the immigrant ship came as both a blessing and a terror. Johann at twenty-seven and Maria, twenty-four, had already lost three babies—two daughters and a son—back in the Ukraine. The Albrechts had been married eight years. They were a small couple, hardly bigger than children themselves, with the round faces, fair complexions, and high, fleshy noses characteristic of their people. Just weeks before, they had sold almost all they owned to Ukrainian peasants and Jews back in Kotosufka; they had spent almost all their money to pay their way across a continent, an ocean, and soon half of another continent. Now, with an infant of three days, a trunk, and the clothes on their backs, they were starting over again on the strength of their faith alone.

The Schweizer group, swelled to sixty-seven families by the addition of the
City of Richmond
party, planned to travel by train from New York, or rather from Jersey City, New Jersey, the metropolitan area rail hub then, to Yankton in Dakota Territory, which was as far west as the train went in 1874. They chose Yankton because the previous year a small Schweizer contingent led by the Unruh and Schrag families had claimed homesteads north of the town. Letters were posted back to the Ukraine describing the open land and the deep, rich soil. The advance party had already built sod houses and plowed small fields. They would help the newcomers get established. Yankton was the place.

The special immigrant train that the Schweizer leaders booked proved to be little more than cattle cars fitted with hard wooden benches—no tables where they could sit down to proper meals, seats barely big enough to accommodate children, no possibility of lying down to sleep, a viciously indifferent crew. When the train stopped to refuel, the crew refused to linger long enough for the immigrants to buy food, and soon they were suffering through what one called “sweltering foodless days when some of us almost perished.” A fire broke out in the baggage cars in Buffalo and many of their belongings were destroyed. Chicago, their next stop after Buffalo, was still largely in ruins from the devastating fire of October 1871. At Sioux City, Iowa, the immigrants rebelled. The men descended en masse and marched down the street searching for food. The engineer whistled repeatedly and finally in disgust started the train rolling, but the men paid no attention. When they returned to the station with their provisions, they found the train waiting for them: The conductor, his bluff called, had backed up.

Mennonite stubbornness and communal action had prevailed.

It was afternoon by the time the train shuddered to a stop at Yankton on the Dakota side of the wide Missouri. No accommodations could be arranged for so large a party. The families spent their first night in Dakota sleeping out under the stars using their dusty bags for bedding. The first task at hand the next day was to find the Unruh/Schrag settlement north of town in the bottom lands of Turkey Creek. A delegation set out from town on foot. The trodden earth, milled lumber, and sawdust of Yankton made but a small brown scratch on the prairie. After a few dozen paces the sea of summer grass, as deep as their waists and as wide as the horizon, closed around them. They followed an old Indian trail that had been deepened and rutted by the wagon wheels of pioneers. Prairie chickens scurried out of the grass ahead of them and quail flew up in little panicked explosions. When the flapping of wings died away, the silence was olute but for the drone of mosquitoes and the soughing of wind through the brittle blades. The men sweated in their woolen traveling clothes and by noon they were sun-burned—the sun literally scoured the fair skin off their faces. They yearned for a bit of shade. Miles away they could see the pale green of cottonwoods shadowing the banks of some creek or stream, but otherwise there was not a tree or even so much as a decent shrub to break the flow of grass. The few dugouts and sod huts they passed only made the prairie look vaster and lonelier. The first night out, one man swore they must be approaching a thickly settled part for the horizon twinkled with lights: It turned out he had been gazing at fireflies playing in the breeze over the next rise. The one reassur-ing feature of this strange land was the presence of many small lakes and potholes dotted with waterfowl and thick with tall reeds. It was customary for Schweizers to settle by ponds or streams, so they took the bits of blue water in the midst of all the tawny grass as a good sign. And as farmers they understood instinctively the immense agricultural potential of the prairie. "Where there is such an abundance of grass,” one of the men remarked, “grain can also grow there, if the ground is worked up." By the time they returned to their families in Yankton, they were ready to stake their claims.

The Indian trail through the grass seemed less alien the second time they walked it. About thirty-five miles north of Yankton, the men fanned out across the prairie. Wherever one of them sighted a small lake or stream, he would drop his hat or coat as a sign that this land was taken. This was how the Kaufmanns, Albrechts, Grabers, and their fellow Schweizers, eventually some sixty families in all, came to settle around Freeman and Marion and farther out around Turkey Creek and Swan Lake. The families that still had enough money left to buy a pair of oxen and a wagon and a few boards of lumber moved out to their claims at once, while those who were too poor stayed behind in Yankton and picked up any paying jobs they could get to earn the cash they needed to homestead. Fifty cents a day was the going wage. The ride out over the prairie behind the expensive but often barely broken oxen was what the women recalled with greatest horror. “Oh such a ride!” one woman wrote years later. “I was so afraid the oxen would run away (no lines). There we sat, flat on the lumber load—nothing to hang onto—the wagon and lumber swaying this way and that way and we poor things slipping and sliding every old way trying to hang onto our kids and our belongings. . . . No bridges on the creeks and so much water in those days.” Night fell before they reached the claims, so they made camp near a small lake, using the pieces of lumber for shelter. Some of the younger men who had brought along shotguns from the Ukraine brought down a few ducks as they flew up from the lake—their first taste of wild American game.

Gro and Ole Rollag, the newlyweds, had chosen Decorah in Win-neshiek County in the northeast corner of Iowa on the basis of a sheaf of letters from Norwegian pioneers who had come before them. No mention of the long harsh winters, no word about the grasshoppers that devoured the crops or the prairie fires that consumed the grass in waves of flame. It was all free land, virgin soil, fertile loam, bumper harvests of wheat. So Gro and Ole boarded a train in Boston as soon as they arrived in America and traveled west to Iowa in a boxcar. When they got to Decorah they put up at the house of a relative from Norway named Abraham Jacobson. It was Jacobson who let them know that the “America letters” were not entirely accurate or up to date. The Iowa soil was indeed superb, but the free land was gone, all claimed and proved up by earlier arrivals. Gro and Ole stayed on with the Jacobsons, picking up what work they could in Decorah while they looked around for something better. From Abraham’s son Nils they heard about a nice un-claimed stretch of prairie with many creeks and small rivers clear across the other side of the state, just north of the Iowa state line where Minnesota and South Dakota come together. Sioux Falls, situated a few miles west of this country at a promising spot on the Big Sioux River, looked like it would become the principal “city”: It already boasted a population of 593, and new buildings were going up at a clip. Come spring, Nils was going to move out there and other young Norwegians from Decorah planned to go with him. In May of 1874, almost exactly a year after they arrived in America, Gro and Ole threw in their lot with this small band of Norwegians and headed west to Rock County, Minnesota.