Centennial by James A. Michener

Author:James A. Michener
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical - General, Historical fiction, Action & Adventure, Indians of North America, Westerns, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Fiction, Romance, Sagas, General, Wild west in literature, Frontier and pioneer life, Historical, west (US), General & Literary Fiction, Fiction - Historical, Modern fiction, Colorado
ISBN: 9780449214190
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 1987-02-12T07:33:04.040000+00:00

Chapter 9

THE HUNTERS

Two of the most significant contributions to the use of land in Colorado were made in 1859 by a thirty-two-year-old Russian. He was a goldminer with the good German name of Hans Brumbaugh, and he happened to be a Russian because in the year 1764 his great-grandfather, a German farmer, listened when Catherine the Great, the German princess ruling Russia, issued one of the most enticing colonization promises in history: “Any German subject consenting to settle in my Russia will be given land practically free and will be insured freedom of worship, freedom from taxation, self-rule within your own German settlement, freedom to conduct education in your own language and perpetual freedom from military service.”

The Brumbaughs read this glowing invitation posted on the door of their little church in Hesse, where crops had failed for six years and war had ravaged the countryside for seven. They walked to the Baltic port of Lubeck, took ship to St. Petersburg, and sailed down the Volga River till they found a treasury of arable land at Saratov. The Volgadeutsch they were henceforth called, and for thirty-four years they enjoyed a prosperity and a freedom greater than they could have hoped for. They experienced the usual difficulties of all immigrants-learning Russian, mastering local systems of agriculture, preventing their daughters from marrying Russians-but they were happy, and few would have returned to Germany had they been given the opportunity.

But not even empresses live forever, and when Catherine finally died in 1796, her promises to her German settlements were forgotten, and in time the Volgadeutsch marched in Russian regiments just like other peasants, and their schools were nationalized and the old concordat became a scrap of paper. It was then that stubborn peasants like Hans Brumbaugh began to yearn for the freedom which had been stolen from them.

At age seventeen he started making himself a nuisance to the Russian authorities, so that his mother had to warn him, “Hans, be careful. The Czar’s men will hang you.” At nineteen he was with a group that attacked a military convoy, and that night he left the Volga and clawed his way out of Russia and back to Germany. At twenty-six he had the bad luck to buy a farm in Illinois from a man who did not own it, and when the rightful owner forced the sheriff to dispossess him, he decided to quit that state.

In January of 1859 he heard of the discovery of gold in Jefferson Territory, as Colorado was then calling itself, and he walked across Missouri and Nebraska, a husky, stoop-shouldered, obstinate man willing to face weather that would have killed an ordinary traveler. Like thousands of others, he stopped briefly at Zendt’s trading post to acquire provisions for the last stage of his journey to Pikes Peak. He was pleased to find in Levi a fellow German, and for the better part of two days they talked in that language; Levi’s long stay in Pennsylvania had corrupted his mother tongue as much as the Brumbaugh family’s exile in Russia had altered his.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.