My people were peasant folk who came to America in the middle of the nineteenth century and settled on the prairies of the Middle West. Carl Bergmann, my maternal grandfather, was born in Prussia, May 11, 1835. In November, 1862, when he was twenty-seven years old, he married Wilhelmina Sangbusch, daughter of Jon and Dora Sangbusch. Wilhelmina was born December 10, 1836, and, before her marriage, had worked as a maid for rich families in her native province. During the first few years following their marriage, Carl and Wilhelmina Bergmann managed to save enough money for passage to America. In the early part of 1868 they left their native land, accompanied by three children and Carl/s father. They landed at New York city, they were met by Charles Retzlaff, a German from their native province, who took them to his farm on Stevens Creek in Lancaster County.
Nebraska had been created a State only the year before. There was a newness about the land, most of which was virgin prairie untouched by plow. For two years the Bergmanns lived in Charles Retzlaff's barn, Carl working as a farm laborer and carefully hoarding his earnings for the purchase of a yoke of oxen, a pig, a wagon, a plow; then the family moved to a 160-acre homestead near by. During their first years in Nebraska, the Bergmanns occasionally drove to Nebraska City, forty miles distant, to market their produce and do their trading. Sometimes Carl Bergmann walked the distance, a bag of meal on his back. Nebraska City was then a flourishing river town, its streets full of immigrants, freighters, ox-teams, mule-teams and covered wagons. The city had grown prosperous in preceding years from the great overland freighting business. Stagecoaches operated at the time between Nebraska City and Lincoln, which was town of only five hundred inhabitants. It was not until after 1870, when the first railroad reached Lincoln, that that town developed as a trace center. Before that settlers went to Lincoln chiefly to obtain salt, large deposits of which lay glistening on the flats west of town.
Carl Bergmann's homestead was on a branch of Nemaha Creek in Stockton Precinct. Hungry Oto Indians often stopped at the house to beg for food. The early seventies were hard years for the Bergmanns. Grasshoppers, which came in great swarms, destroyed their crops. Two of their children died of scarlet fever; another died of a skin infection. Of the eleven children born to the Bergmanns, only six - William, Otto, Anna, Minnie, Amanda and August - lived to reach maturity. Two of their first children had been left in graves in the Old Country. During the successive years of grasshopper plague, many of the settlers pulled up stakes and quit the country, but the Bergmanns remained. The most severe visitation of the 'hoppers occurred in 1874. Wilhelmina Bergmann spread quilts over the cabbages in her garden only to have them eaten through the ravenous insects. Even as the discouraged families were moving away, however, the railroads were bringing new settlers to Nebraska. In 1876 came the Umlands.
Heinrich Umland, my paternal grandfather, was born in Prussia, October 1, 1827. His mother died shortly after his birth and his father, a gardener by occupation, died eight years later. When Heinrich was thirteen, he was apprenticed to a carpenter. For seven years he had followed the building trade, then he was called for service in the Prussian army to help guard the Duchies of Holstein and Baden from invasion by the French. When the danger of invasion had subsided, Heinrich returned to his trade of carpentry. In the spring of 1851, he embarked on a sailing vessel for the United States, arriving at New York after a voyage of ninety days. He traveled west to Chicago and Milwaukee, but found in neither city the opportunities he was seeking.
In the fall of 1851 he went to St. Louis where he engaged in carpentry and farming. He bought land across the river in St. Clair county, Illinois, which he farmed for a short time, then sold it and devoted his time wholly to carpentry, taking up his residence in the town of Mascoutah, Illinois. On September 20, 1855, he married Anna Herter, daughter of Rudolph and Margaret (Huber) Herter, Swiss immigrants who had settled on a farm near Mascoutah the previous year. Anna had been born August 25, 1833, near the foot of the Alps, in the Canton of Zurich. There she had resided until she was twenty-one years old, when she embarked with her parents at Havre, France, for America. to Heinrich and Anna Umland seven children were born, six of whom lived: Eliza, Jacob, Rudolph, Annie, William, and Sophia.
Heinrich Umland remained at his trade in Mascoutah until 1876, when he migrated with his family to Cass County, Nebraska. He bought eight acres of land, fourteen miles east of Lincoln, on which were a small one-room house and a dug-out. the children slept in the dug-out until the following year when an addition to the house provided quarters for them. Heinrich Umland farmed his land and, during his first years in Nebraska, continued to do a little carpentry. One winter, during an epidemic of scarlet fever, he was kept busy making coffins.
When the Umlands came to Nebraska, large herds of cattle grazed on the grasslands around Lincoln. There were few fences and the cattle were herded on the open pastures by boys from the farms. Coyotes prowled the draws and sloughs. Prairie chickens and quail winged over the tall grass. Lincoln, growing rapidly, was a city of over five thousand inhabitants, bet it still bore the stamp of the frontier. Immigrant wagons continued to trek through the capital westward, though in fewer numbers since the coming of the railroad. The city’s Haymarket Square was usually cluttered with the teams and wagons of immigrants and farmer-folk. The Umlands did most of their trading in Lincoln. Sometimes they hauled produce to the towns of Greenwood and Palmyra.
Heinrich Umland gradually acquired more land. By 1885 he owned five hundred acres. He built a new frame house and planted an orchard and grove to provide shade and protect his farmstead from the winds. The Missouri Pacific Railroad laid the rails of a branch line through part of his land, and a mile away, the town of Eagle was laid out, providing a near trading point. The Umlands prospered during the eighties and were content with their new home in Nebraska.
Rudolph Umland, my father, was the fourth child of Heinrich and Anna Umland. Born at the old home in Mascoutah, Illinois, May 25, 1864, he was twelve years old when the family came to Nebraska He spent his first summers in Nebraska herding cattle for neighbors on the open pastures near home. Riding horseback, he explored the sloughs, hills, and level expanses of prairie which had known only hunting parties of the Oto and Pawnee a few decades before. One morning he found a slough full of the bones and horns of a herd of Texas cattle that had perished during a blizzard some years previously. In the winter months he attended country school. When he was eighteen he left home and worked for several months in a brickyard and pottery at Lincoln. Falling ill with typhoid fever, he returned home and again assisted his father. During the next ten years he broke many acres of virgin sod for his father and for neighbors.
In 1892 Heinrich Umland deeded Rudolph the north quarter-section of his farm lands. Upon this Rudolph erected a house and barn. He was twenty-eight years old and ready to start life on his own. One day in March, 1893, he accompanied a neighbor on a visit to the Bergmanns to buy cattle. A few days later he visited the Bergmanns again-this time alone. He spent several hours with Carl Bergmann talking about crops, livestock, and the weather. Thereafter he made frequent visits to the Bergmanns, but it was some time before the real object of his visits became known. One of Carl Bergmann's daughters had taken his fancy. Minnie Bergmann, born April 2, 1876, was a slender handsome girl who had just passed her seventeenth birthday. When informed of Rudolph Umland's interest, she felt piqued. "But he doesn't come to see me; he comes to see Pa!" she exclaimed. Nevertheless, she felt flattered. Her parents encouraged her in accepting the attentions of the young farmer. "Rudolph will make you a good husband," they said. "He's rich. He owns a farm."
The courtship of Rudolph Umland and Minnie Bergmann-if a buggy-ride or two can be called such-was brief. In the May 27, 1893 issue of the local weekly, the Eaglet, appeared the following item: "Married-Mr. Rudolph Umland to Miss Minnie Bergmann, Wednesday, May 24, 1893, at the home of the bride's parents, seven miles south of Eagle. Mr. Umland is a wealthy young farmer and has lived in this community a number of years. The bride is a daughter of a well-to-do farmer and is liked by all her acquaintances. May their pathway be strewn with flowers and their shadow never grow dim is the wish of the Eaglet."
On December 15, 1896, Minnie Umland's mother died. A typical German peasant woman, Wilhelmina Bergmann had worked hard all her life; she was inured to privations. When she was a young girl in Prussia her mother had told her stories about the great reformist Martin Luther and these stories she had remembered and told her own children in the New World. The coffin containing her remains was placed in a lumber-wagon and carried to the top of a pasture hill on the Bergmann homestead. There, beside the graves of the three Bergmann children and Carl's father, it was deposited in the frozen earth. Minnie Umland, twenty at the time, had shortly before been delivered of her third baby. The thought of her mother in the lonely grave on the pasture hill was to haunt her the rest of her life. When her father, Carl Bergmann, died April 1, 1906, the sixth and last mound was added to the little group of graves on the hill. A board fence was put around the graves to keep off the cattle, and a few evergreen trees were planted.
One by one the first-comers to the land west of the Missouri died and their bodies were claimed by the prairie earth. Heinrich Umland died May 15, 1905, and Anna, his Swiss wife, June 22, 1913. The pioneers passed on and their sons and daughters remained to take their livelihood from the sods their parents had broken. For over forty years Rudolph and Minnie Umland, my parents, were to live on their farm near Eagle, Nebraska, working its soil and rearing their five children. Some of these were happy and prosperous years; others were disappointing and lean. In 1894, hot winds burnt the corn so badly that only a few nubbins were gathered. An item in the Eaglet, April 4, 1896, stated that prairie schooners were passing through town, some going east and some west. The wagons going east carried families who had given up the struggle in Nebraska. In 1910, when drought was curling the leaves of the corn, Rudolph Umland bought fifty acres of land adjoining his quarter-section. H had four sons growing up, four pairs of hands to help soon with field work and chores; and a daughter to help Minnie with the housework.
During the warm years of 1917-1918 farm prices in Nebraska soared. Land that the pioneers had purchased from the government for a dollar or two an acres sold for over two hundred dollars an acre. Rudolph Umland refused all offers for his farm; he kept his faith in the land. Perhaps, too, he felt a sentimental regard for the acres which he had been tilling for a quarter of a century. Each year there was the work of planting the corn, harvesting the wheat, putting up the hay in stacks; each year the ties that bound my parents to their farm grew stronger. And the years passed so quickly!
The sparsely-settled prairie to which Heinrich Umland had brought his family underwent many changes. In every section of land now, there were three or four farmsteads with white houses and red barns, sheltered by orchards and groves of ash, box elder, walnut and cottonwood. Everywhere you looked, you saw fields of corn, wheat, oats, and alfalfa. During the nineteen-twenties, automobiles almost wholly replaced the hose on the road; tractors were replacing the horse in the fields. The children of the pioneers in turn were growing old, their own children marrying and leaving home. My mother, although only fifty, was already starting to complain, “Ach, I feel the weather in my bones." Like her mother before her, she worked hard; she worked all the time. She had grown heavy after bearing her children and she had grown stooped from work.
In the nineteen-thirties hard times came again to the farmers. Corn sold for eight cents a bushel, hogs for two cents a pound. Land prices dropped to less then fifty dollars an acre. In1934 came drought and hot winds which burnt the crops. My father was getting along in years. One day, in the fall of 1934, he stood in a plowed field examining a handful of dirt. The last few acres of prairie on his farm had been broken and there was something pathetic about my father standing there in a furrow examining that handful of dirt. It was virgin earth that had never been turned over before. The few acres of prairie had been spared all these years, the grass cut for hay each summer and stored in the barn loft. He let the dirt trickle through his fingers.
The bit of prairie on his farm had somehow held my father to the past, when all the land was prairie. Now that it was gone, it was like the severance of a last thread. Thoughts passed through his mind as he stood there in the plowed field - the many changes he had seen come to the land, the hard work, the disappointments, the realization that he was growing cold. To him the passing of the prairie presaged the passing of his own life. When he was young, the prairie had dominated the land. Roads had been mere wagon tracks through the grass. In crossing sloughs and low places, one heard the swish of the tall grasses against the bottom of the wagon-box. Now that the last of the prairie was gone, my father felt his own time running out. It was as if the dirt tricking through his fingers spoke to him and said, "Your work is done." In the fall of 1935, he and my mother moved to a house at Eagle. But their adjustment to town life was slow. My father missed the cows, the pigs, the earth to dig in. My mother missed her chickens and the old farmhouse in which she had lived 42 years.
My mother died in a hospital at Lincoln April 27,1941. During the last two years of her life, she suffered much pain. Lying in bed, she frequently talked of her girlhood. She had attended country school until she was fourteen, then had attended classes in catechism at the German Lutheran church of the neighborhood. Following this she had worked for a time as a maid in private homes in Lincoln, then had returned home and married. One of her earliest childhood memories was of an Indian riding up to the door of her parent's house on a horse. The Indian had dismounted and tied his horse to a sunflower growing in the yard. He wore a red shirt and a pair of dirty grey trousers which had a hole in the seat out of which his shirttail stuck in a ludicrous fashion. He came to the door, pointed to his mouth, and said, "Me hungry!" Grandmother Bergmann gave him a plate of ham and my mother sat on the doorstep and watched him eat. In recalling this, my mother laughed and exclaimed, "I can still see the poor starved Indian eat!" Grandfather Bergmann had always raised a few sheep on his farm and the wool from the sheep was made into yarn. My mother remembered how her mother used to sit out-of-doors under an apple tree on warm days spinning the yarn and singing German songs. "My mother could make the spinning wheel turn so fast," she exclaimed. "My! that wheel would whirl!"
One evening, a few weeks before she died, my mother lay in her hospital bed and cried. It had been raining at intervals for several days and the patter of the raindrops on the hospital windows had filled her with foreboding. She thought of the grave of her mother on the pasture hill of the old homestead. She thought of how the rains for years had been seeping through the earth and through the rude board coffin now rotted and broken through by the weight of the earth. "Poor mother," she murmured. "Oh, how terrible! Please bury me so the rain can't get at me." slowly my mother wasted away, the malignant disease from which she was suffering extending itself through her body. her mind became clouded and confused. Finally she called upon God for deliverance, "Oh, God, oh, my God, help me!" she moaned. "Oh, my God, help me! Come down out of the sky and take me!" After four days of pleading thus to God, she passed into a coma. She was buried in a cemetery near Eagle in a steel vault so that the rains could not reach her.
After my mother's death, my father was a lonely old man. He stayed for short periods of time at the homes of his children and neighbors, but was never contented. When staying in Lincoln he liked to walk downtown on sunny afternoons and loiter in the vicinity of Tenth and O Streets, formerly the hub of the farm trade, watching for oldsters like himself with whom he could converse about happenings of years long gone. Such happenings were more important to him than anything that was contemporary, even including the dramatic events of World War II. H had been born in Abraham Lincoln's home State while the Civil War was in progress, and the gap of the years from that far period to the birth of atomic warfare was too great for him to want to bridge. In the early part of 1948, when he was 83, an illness left him helpless and senile. H was place in a nursing home in Lincoln and, this first night there refused to go to bed until he had been assured that the oxen had been fed and bedded down for the night. His mind dwelt almost wholly in the past. When asked what he had been doing during the day, he was likely to reply the had been breaking sod or husking corn with a peg. Sometimes he would move his hands over his face and say, "I can't seem to remember anymore. I keep forgetting." Life continued to flicker in his tired, worn-out body until the evening of January 22, 1949; then the night closed in mercifully.
In bitter cold weather, with snow and ice covering the slope of the cemetery hill, the remains of my father were lowered into a grave beside my mother. The prairie earth covered his body as it had that of hers eight years before. It covered, too, something of the pioneer past of Nebraska.
FINALEPermission is granted without fee for you to post the article on the internet site. Please use the following credit line: From the Prairie Schooner, volume XXIII, number IV (winter 1949) by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1949 University of Nebraska Press. Copyright c renewed 1977 by the University of Nebraska Press. From the Prairie Schooner, volume XXIII, number IV (winter 1949) by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1949 University of Nebraska Press. Copyright c renewed 1977 by the University of Nebraska Press.
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