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| The old Schilling farm, nine miles north, 2 miles west of Bowdle, South Dakota. July 29, 2019. |
“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
John Steinbeck
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
There is something intrinsically romantic about the American road trip. It is, in many ways, a rite of passage, one we may repeat multiple times over the course of our lives – the first to see what’s there, then again to see what’s changed, and again to see what’s still there, and maybe one last time just to remember.
At the age of just three months old, I went on my first road trip. I’ve had itchy feet ever since.
Before I married a few years ago, I made countless solo trips in every direction from wherever I lived for no apparent reason whatsoever. I am and always have been a terrible tourist. I never map out my driving route and have been known to just turn onto whatever road looks interesting. (My husband has stories about this.) I never eat at restaurants with gift shops attached. I never buy souvenirs and never take the pictures that are expected of a well-known place. There is, in fact, little evidence I’ve ever been anywhere at all. Even when I have to be somewhere, going there and coming back is always more interesting than being there. The journey is my destination. Always has been.
So when a short trip to the Germans from Russia Heritage Society convention in Fargo planned earlier this year became a two week road trip to include the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia convention in Lincoln, I was more than up for it.
Since my latest research is about where immigrant Germans from Russia and their descendants lived in America, I thought it might be interesting to record how many of those places I encountered along the way from my starting point in southern Arizona. I left the path of our trip up to my husband, asking only that we avoid interstates unless necessary and that he take whatever roads look interesting. While I have covered a lot of this area on my own, this was his first time in some of the upper mid-western states. (I once drove him across the prairie in South Dakota to a family reunion, but he was on cold meds the whole time. Still, somehow, he has fond memories of Spearfish and thought we should move there. It was the Ny-Quil talking.) Aside from a few turn-by-turn directions I gave him on one day and a few stops for suppers with cousins along the way, the route we took was what he wanted to see. We had to work around the Sturgis bike rally that was just getting started as we were beginning to head home, otherwise there would've been more Wyoming and Utah.
For days, the view from the passenger window like a flip book went back and forth between ranch land and farm land. I recalled years ago driving my 103-year-old grandfather out to his farm in early September to have a last look at it. He tapped the window with his papery-skinned hand somewhere along the way and said with some concern, “That corn is ripe.” As the descendant of farmers going back nearly 300 years, I naturally pay attention to crops. The purple tinge of an alfalfa field always makes me happy, and I’ll roll down a window to try to get a whiff of it. As we drove along, I noted how many farms had bet on corn versus soybeans this year, what shape of bales the hay were in, how few wheat fields there were compared to my last trip, how the sunflowers weren’t in bloom yet (was it too early or was something delaying it?), how the only sugar beet fields I saw were right outside Alliance, Nebraska, and once we were back in southern New Mexico, saw that harvest had begun in the chile fields along the Rio Grande valley.
As I went off in search of America – German-Russian America – I forgot to ask myself what exactly I was looking for? What does it look like anymore? It’s easy to project our Germans from Russia past onto rural areas and farm and ranch lands because it's easy to overly romanticize rural life. But what about driving between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs? Some farms and ranches still there, yes, but downtown Denver does not scream “Germans from Russia settled here,” although a lot of them did. This is a reminder, perhaps, that while much of our ancestral history is rooted in agriculture, not all of it is. Also a reminder, while many of our ancestors settled in the heart of we commonly think of as American German-Russian country (however you define that), not all of them did.
I am ever in awe of the part of history that our ancestors took part. You and I are results of their choices to leave Germany to go to Russia and to leave Russia and go to the United States. I am humbled by that thought. Our immigrant ancestors contributed to the diversity and fabric of America, and they helped define what America would become at a time when it was expanding and there were frontiers still to be settled. As their descendants, we’re following suit with our lives, our families, our jobs, our contributions to all that is America. Did I find German-Russian America? Yes, I think so. And not surprisingly, it is America.
So, after two weeks on the road – 4,155 miles, 10 states, 73 places with German-Russian ties, one runza , one bowl of knoephla soup, one fleischkuechle, two pieces of kuchen (apple and rhubarb), one box of family stuff (German prayer books, hymnals, negatives, slides, etc.), one pocketful of pilfered hollyhock seeds from an undisclosed location, and 40 pounds of Hatch green chile – I am finally home. The house is back in order. The cats have forgiven me. The sourdough starter has been fed, and the chile pods have been roasted and packed away in the freezer for the year, well ahead of schedule.
The list below is of all the places in the order of their appearance (duplicates removed) that I visited or went through on this trip where there is German-Russian immigrants and their descendants lived. I came in close proximity to many others, but because I didn’t go to them or through them, they are not on this list. They will be on the map that is in progress.
Unfortunately, I could not take every road and go to every place where German Russians lived. I will leave that to a travel writer who wants a really, really big assignment.
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| Map of the trip |
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