I just finished Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time, which won the National Book Award. Egan writes about one of the most difficult periods in 20th century America: the Dustbowl (Staubschüssel) of the Great Depression. Egan tells the stories of different families who settled in the southern plains, prospered from wheat farming, but then lost everything during the prolonged drought and dust storms during the mid-1930s.
One of the groups that Egan follows is the Volga Germans, descendants of the 25,000 Germans who in 1763 settled Russia’s Volga River Valley at the invitation of Catherine the Great. There they cultivated rye, wheat and flax. Fiercely pacifistic, many emigrated to America in the late 19th century after Czar Alexander II threatened them with conscription and tried to force them to speak Russian.
Egan writes:
"They were tough-minded pacifists, a migratory people whose defining characteristics was draft-dodging. The German Mennonites from the near the Black Sea, conscientious objectors from the the beginning, certainly were opposed to war on principle. But many of the other Germans from Russia would kill without flinching, showing their warrior skills in American uniforms when they shot their own former countrymen during the two world wars in the twentieth century. What thy would not do is fight for the Russian czar or – worse – fight for the Bolsheviks."
The Volga Germans finally arrived in Oklahoma in the first decade of the 20th century. They brought with them the techniques of dry farming, which would prove invaluable in the arid new land:
"On this bewhiskered and blackened land, the Volga Germans would try to recreate what they had in Russia. Te second day in Shattuck, a blizzard hit Oklahoma. It snowed for two days. The Germans camped near the train station but their animals strayed into the storm. They spent the next week collecting the beasts, but some died in the chill, with no grass to eat. Shopkeepers in Shattuck refused to sell to the Germans; others tried to pass an ordinance prohibiting the language from being spoken in the city limits. It seem odd to the Anglo ranchers that these singing, beer-making, strangely dressed people hurried about their business as if predestined to the southern plains."
The Volga Germans would prosper as farmers on the south plains for two decades. But their dreams were blown away in the "dusters" of the Dust Bowl; like everyone else, they were ruined and scattered to the four winds. Still, there are pockets of Volga German descendants to be found in the remaining small towns in Kansas and southeastern Colorado.
Their story is just one of the many stories of suffering and survival Egan tells in his wonderful book.
