The Children's Blizzard Read Online Free PDF Page B

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