I’m not Volga German.  I am, however, married to one.  Additionally, the majority of my teenage years were spent living among Volga Germans; both experiences have been an education…

Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long, leading their respective surveys out of the well-watered and forest-covered lands of the Mississippi River Valley, were confounded.  Edwin James, the Long Survey scribe, wrote that the Great Plains “…were uninhabitable by a people dependent upon agriculture…”.  The concept of the “Great American Desert” was thereby introduced and held sway over the country’s imagination for the middle half of the 19th Century.  Walter Prescott Webb, in The Great Plains makes the case that the Northern European settlers coming to a land so unlike any of their experience simply had no idea what to do.

Fortunately, by the 1870’s, help was on the way, and in the form of people who did know.

Ellis County, Kansas is bisected by I-70 at approximately 39º N Latitude.  At approximately 99º W Longitude it sits at the far western end of what geographers today refer to as the Great Plains.  Just a few miles to the west we find the start of the High Plains, which rise gently, but continuously toward the Rocky Mountain Front (Webb’s work, published in 1931, covered both). Morgan County, Colorado, at over 40º N Latitude, is some 90 miles farther north, and at nearly 104º W Longitude occupies the far western end of the High Plains. Stephen Long first saw the peak that bears his name from here.  This is a story of two Volga German communities, found at either end of the High Plains.  There is no ending written, but there is a beginning…

The date was July 22, 1763, the place, the Saratov Oblast, European (barely) Russia.  Catherine, Empress of Russia, issued a decree inviting Europeans – worn out by both religious persecutions and the Seven Years War – to come to her vast, but backward nation in order to help bring it into the modern world.  The decree was broadcast across Europe, but directed particularly to Germans, residents of the land of her birth.

The Saratov Oblast (a regional administrative area, somewhat akin to a state in the US) is found at the far SE corner of European Russia.  To the south is the Volgograd Oblast sitting just north of the Black Sea. East is Kazakhstan and Asia.  The Oblast is bisected by the Volga, flowing roughly N-S, with an S-bend from E-to-W  in the center.  The land is hot in summer, cold in winter, and dry enough throughout that it is prairie, other than along watercourses lacking much in the way of trees.  It will be home for the Volga Germans.

Different communities arrive: Catholic, Lutheran, Mennonite.  A thriving Catholic community is developed on the S-bend to the E-NE of Saratov (the city) along and immediately to the south of the Volga.  The new arrivals quickly established a series of villages in the area, including: Herzog, Katharinenstadt, Liebenthal, and Schoenchen.  Another village which figures in our story, Pfeifer, was established south of Saratov on the west side of the Volga.

A Lutheran community was established further to the south, and initially on the west side of the Volga at Kraft (now the Russian hamlet of Verkhyaya Gryaznykha).  It’s far enough south to be in the Volgograd Oblast, just upriver from the present city of Kamyshin.  Numerous “daughter” communities are established from there, including Morgentau (“Morning Dew”, the present Russian hamlet is Suyetinovka) on the eastern side of the Volga in the Volgograd Oblast, in the common corner with Saratov Oblast and Kazakhstan.

This otherwise dry landscape has one other particular climatic feature:  what rain there is, falls fairly uniformly across the year with perhaps a small peak in late Spring and usually with snow in the winter.  It is a land dominated for millennia by small grain grasses: barley, oats, rye, triticale and, especially, wheat. The small grains are somewhat foreign to the Germans who arrive, but they are the cornerstone for the Black Sea – Caspian Sea peoples…and the Germans are a quick study…

Which they need to be….for 100 years after arriving, the Volga Germans find their welcome wearing thin.  Catherine has passed into history and her heirs (and rulers of Russia) have made conditions more difficult for them; it’s time to leave…

There are climatic similarities between the Catholic villages along the Volga and Ellis County, Kansas:  Summer high temperature, 106F/117F;  Winter low temperature, -35F/-24F; annual precipitation, 20”/23”.  The monthly precipitation patterns are similar.

The same is true for the Lutheran villages in the Volgograd Oblast and Morgan County, Colorado:  Summer high temperature, 107F/109F; Winter low temperature, -35F/-41F; annual precipitation, 15”/14”.  The monthly precipitation patterns here are also similar.

The Lutheran communities, dependent upon rivers in the arid landscape of the southern Volga, found something they could work with in the valley of the South Platte River in Morgan County. My wife’s grandparents made the transition from Kraft and Morgentau to Ft. Morgan, Colorado in time for the great development of the sugar beet industry (an interesting Colorado story in its own right…).

In Ellis County, Kansas you can find (among others) the communities of Catherine (Katharinenstadt), Victoria (incorporating the earlier village of Herzog), Liebenthal, Pfeifer, and (my favorite) Schoenchen.  The great “corn / spring wheat / winter wheat question” was essentially settled as the Volga Germans showed up in the 1870’s, with winter wheat as the winner (an interesting Kansas story…). 

Good thing that people who knew how to grow it arrived…Reflecting for a moment upon this migration, one that covered 10 time zones, a Great Circle distance of 6000 miles, and composed of thousands of individual and community stories, we are once again surprised by something that shouldn’t:  These journeys were not about going some new place, they were about coming home to a place that was the same…just in a different location.