The Children's Blizzard Read Online Free PDF

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