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To begin with, what do you call these people? Courtesy
of the research programs of the Canadian Embassy, my associate Jessica
Clark and I had the opportunity to look into the history of the Germans
from Russia living in Saskatchewan. Most of them, after they left Russia
but before they went to Canada, lived for a generation or so in North
Dakota or South Dakota. So, are these the American Germans from Russia
in Canada? Anyway, you get what I mean. Because of settlement patterns
early in the twentieth century, lots of North Dakotans have kin in Saskatchewan.
And many of these are of that wonderful tribe, the Germans from Russia.
It was Jessica’s job, with her husband Will packing the equipment,
to record the oral history of the Germans from Russia in Saskatchewan,
or at least make a good start on it. We concentrated on three settlement
areas: southeast of Regina, with homesteading around the town of Kronau;
southeast of Saskatoon, the settlements there being near the town of Allan;
and southwest of Saskatoon, with settlements in the Tramping Lake vicinity.
This made for Jessica an expedition providing quite a bit of adventure
along with the work, about which I’ll tell you another time.
It was my job to mine the provincial archives in Regina and Saskatoon
for written documents that would help ground the oral lore in the specifics
of settlement. Yes, I had to sneeze my way through the dusty documents,
but those homestead files compiled by the dominion lands office, they
were just full of the gritty details of making a home on the prairies.
To begin with, it was a delight to learn in that in Canada, the land of
peace, order, and good government, people cheated on the homestead laws,
although for good reason, of course. German-Russian homesteaders poured
into the region southeast of Saskatoon during the 1890s. The law required
them to live on their individual homesteads. They didn’t like this.
In the old country they had lived in villages, with the men going out
to the fields together to work. So, partly by getting their neighbors
to swear to white lies, and partly through the sufferance of generous
bureaucrats in the land office, the German-Russian homesteaders made improvements
on their homesteads, but they built houses and lived in the town of Kronau.
Every homestead file, too, contains details that help you to visualize
what life was like on the homestead. Here, for instance, is the file of
Joseph Brossart, who homesteaded the NE/4 of S14 T32 R1 W of the PM, not
far from the town of Allan. He first visited the land office on April
29, 1907. Two days later he was building a sod house 14x24 on his claim,
where he took up residence with his wife and two children. I suspect this
fellow had some farming experience and family support in North Dakota,
because he had five horses and used them to break prairie at a good pace—50
acres turned in 1907, 30 in 1908, 40 in 1909. He built himself a sod stable
for the horses and put up a wooden granary, then he moved the family into
a wood frame house 14x30. Taking neighbors August Weimer and Christian
Schon to the land office to swear for him, Brossart had no trouble getting
patent to his homestead in 1910.
Over at Tramping Lake, John Kohlman, a Volga German from Saratov, who
probably lived in Nebraska for a while, was pursuing a savvy strategy
for acquiring land from the Canadian government. He had horses and capital
and was in no hurry to prove up, because when he did, he would have to
pay taxes on the land. Kohlman filed on one quarter in 1907, then another
in 1911. He proved up on the second filing first, in 1911, but also kept
the first, expanding both his cultivated acreage and his cowherd. Then
in 1916 he paid the modest cost to preempt the other quarter, leaving
him with a half-section farm free and clear.
Land was the heart’s desire of every good German-Russian in those
days, and land they got. Their descendants remain to tell the stories—that’s
another column, another day.
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