THE 1880’S IMMIGRATION AND OUTLAWS

 Louisa (Lou) Gellhorn wrote of her early childhood on a farm near Steamboat Rock. Her memories give a vivid picture of what it was like in those early “pioneer” days.

“Father did not like the monarchical government so decided to go to America. In May 1867 father sailed for America leaving Mother in an apothecary shop where she also sold beer and sandwiches with the help of a maid. The income from the shop made a living for the family.” 

“Father was a miller and secured work in a mill in Hardin City, Iowa. In 1868 father sent money for his family to come, and sometime in May we landed in New York and from there went by train to Ackley, Iowa, where Father met us and took us to Hardin City, where we lived for about one year. Father then bought an interest in a mill down the Iowa River, the Carpenter mill. There Emma was born, and I remember Mina Carpenter taking care of the baby and playing “keep house” with us. She was about fifteen years old and her little brothers, Johnny, Willie and Wesley, were our playmates.” 

“This mill which father had bought was a grist and flour mill in the winter and a saw mill in the summer. Father bought eighty acres of timberland, about a mile above the mill, and in the summer sawed the lumber to build a house on the eighty.” 

“While they were building the house Anna and Clara would carry lunches to the men and one day they let me go along. In climbing the stake and rider fence they broke a dish and how they did cry when telling mother about it. Dishes were very scarce with us.” 

“I was four years old when the house was ready and we moved in. It had a large living room and bedroom, with room for two beds, downstairs and all the overhead was one room with four beds. Father and mother and the two smallest children used the bedroom downstairs and the others slept upstairs. The first winter the upstairs was not plastered, but we had plenty of featherbeds which mother had brought from Germany to sleep under and on. By the next winter the upstairs was plastered and partitioned into two rooms. A kitchen and pantry were built against the north side of the house, and we felt we had a pretty fine home.” 

“In 1872, December 24th, Christmas Eve, we all got into the bobsled with hay and blankets and went to the schoolhouse to the Sunday School Christmas tree. We left mother and little Emma at home to keep the house warm. Father and we children all stood in front of the tree and sang ‘Stille Nachte, Heilige Nachte” in German. We were all good singers and with father we made the schoolhouse ring. My Sunday School teacher had placed a little mug on the Christmas tree for me. Mr. Samuel Doud was his name. I kept it for many years. On the 26th Amanda was born. We called her our Christmas baby.” 

“Father had now sold his interest in the Carpenter mill. In the summer he worked at clearing off trees on the farm so we could raise corn and grain. In the winter he worked in the mills, of which there were many along the Iowa River.” 

“Ackley was a small town, north about nine miles from the Carpenter mill. As there was no water power there, they built a mill run by steam which father helped build and then worked for the owners, who were Roosevelt’s, distant kin to Theodore.”

“Once when father came home from Ackley, which he did every two weeks to spend Sunday with us, he came in with his rifle and hunting bag and a couple of rabbits. He had to make the trip on foot and nine miles is a long way to walk.” 

“He would bring a sandwich out of his pocket and call it hason brodt, (rabbit bread). It would be frozen hard, and his beard would be covered with icicles. The winters were very cold in Iowa.”

“Father was very stern and we were rather afraid of him, but he was always gentle and kind to mother who was a cripple. She was continually knitting and sewing and baking and brewing, and in summer working in her garden.”

“We bought a second hand Singer sewing machine, which was the first in the neighborhood, and all the German women came to have mother sew for them, for which she got only ‘Thank you’. Of course, they would do kindnesses for her too.” 

“Mrs. Elzig was a particular friend and had two girls about the age of Martha and me, and whenever mother had a new baby Mrs. Elzig would come and stay a few days to help. She knew all the Grimm’s fairy tales and would tell us the story of Schnee Witchen, (Snow White) and many others. Those were happy days.” 

“During summer we would go to the Elzig’s. They lived near the river and had acres of wonderful bottom land and the hillsides abounded in flowers — Dutchman’s-breeches, spring beauties, Indian paintbrush, and many others. What joy we had roaming the hills and woods.” 

“One winter day we went to the river to skate and Elizabeth Elzig skated into an air hole and went under. She had a long braid hanging down her back and her brother Charlie grabbed it and pulled her out. We rushed her to the house and got her into dry clothes as quickly as possible. She was about eight years old.” 

“Every house for several miles was built of logs except ours, so I suppose we were considered quite somebody. In those days the American children were apt to poke fun at the newly-arrived Germans. Sometimes they called them the “dirty Dutch”, but I once overheard a woman say that Mrs. Gellhorn was such a clean housekeeper you could eat off her floor.” 

“We were always clean and had our hair combed and braided, when, we went to school, which was not the case with many of the children. Their hands would get rough and cracked because of uncleanness. We were kept free of lice which nearly all children had in those days.” 

“We started to school, in the summer term, at the age of six, but it was too cold to go so far the following winter term. At first we had only six months of school, three summer and three winter months. The older children brought their books home and I learned to read and spell before I started school. We also studied the German books that we brought over, as the three older children had attended school in Germany.” 

“Father was very fond of music and played the violin. He would walk back and forth across the room playing away and I would sit and listen, enthralled. He played the Blue Danube Waltz. and Mazurkas– all good music– and when our neighbor, Mr. Williams would play Arkansas Traveler and Turkey in the Straw, father would laugh and say, “Such music! It’s just fiddling.” 

“As the years went by father got quite a herd of cattle, and some hogs, chickens, geese, and ducks. At first the cattle would roam the woods and sometimes we children had to watch or herd them. Martha and I would climb the tallest trees and swing in the top most branches and sing and shout and wish we were birds so we could fly.” 

“Our nearest neighbors were Johnny Williams and his wife. I do not remember Uncle Johnny, as he was called, but I remember Granny, who sat by the fireplace and smoked her corncob pipe. When Uncle Johnny died two sons and their wives came to live with Granny. The men, Henry and Riley, were Civil War soldiers. Henry had been wounded and was drawing a pension. Henry’s wife Liza, was a good neighbor. She would do anything for us.” 

“In those days Indians roamed the woods, and in summer they would put up tents on an open space halfway between our home and the Williams’ home. Then Aunt Liza would come and take us to this Indian village and the squaws gave us beads which we treasured greatly.”

“Some years later the government opened an Indian Reservation in Tama County and the Indians were not allowed to roam so much, but they loved to get back into the woods in summer and weave great mats out of rushes they gathered in the ponds. They used these for the walls of their teepees. The government gave them beads and blankets, and hides to make moccasins.”

“I remember a very nice Indian who came to visit my folks. He spoke English very well and said he wanted a house to live in as we did. Mackintosh was his name, and after the Tama Reservation was opened he had a house to live in and his children were sent to school. He came to tell us how happy he was. Then there was a young buck named Musquaha. He, too, would come and follow us in the cornfield as we gathered corn in the fall. He sang for us in — chianapachiac, chianapachiac, Whoo-oo whoo-oo, whee-ee whee-ee — and strike his Adams apple as he sang the whoo-oo and whee-ee. It was all in a monotone and rather weird.”

“In the early 1870s there was an Indian battle at Spirit Lake, Iowa, which was some hundred miles from where we lived. An Indian runner came through our neighborhood and warned us of the danger of a raid and we had some tense days, but the Indians were subdued after the Battle of Spirit Lake, and that was the end of Indian raids in that part of the country.”

“Soon after that time father took Paul, Anna, mother and me to a Fourth of July celebration. I think it was 1872. I was about five and a half years old. It was a great event to go to Ackley to see the parade and fireworks in the evening.”

“By that time we had two horses, Jack and Kate. They were hitched to the farm wagon and away we went across the ford by the Carpenter mill. It took the horses about three hours to make the nine mile trip. Father took us to the grove where the crowd was gathered to hear the Declaration of Independence read, band music played, and My Country Tis of Thee sung. Then we had a fine lunch from the basket we carried with us and mother and I stayed in the grove and visited with some German women while father took Anna to a dance pavilion.”

“After the fireworks were over that memorable night we got into the wagon and slowly the horses plodded home. When we arrived there after midnight an old man, Mr. Volk, who often came to stay with us, was there but no children. He said on his arrival he found the house open but couldn’t find anybody around. Father and Paul began a search. They shot off firecrackers and also a gun. They went to the William’s and anxiously hunted all night. Before sunrise the next morning here they came. They told how at dusk Charlie, who was then eleven years old, went out to shut the hen house door. He came back in a panic shouting “Wild Indians!” “Wild Indians!” Clara caught up Emma, two and a half years old, and Martha who was straining the milk, kept the strainer in her hand, and away they went into the woods. They intended to go to the William’s but as it was dark they missed them and came out at Mr. Hoyt’s, a mile distant. There they told their story and were comforted and made comfortable on the floor of the log cabin, until dawn, and then Mr. Hoyt came home with them. Of course Mr. Volk was the wild Indian Charlie had seen. He carried a huge featherbed on his back, and with the recent Indian scare in his mind, the grotesque figure at dusk made Charlie think of Indians.” 

“There were many wild fruits in those days and we delighted in gathering plums, crabapples, chokecherries, raspberries, gooseberries, and blackberries. But the first ripe, wild fruit were strawberries.” 

The meadows and open places in the woods were where we looked for them, and there, too, we would find dwarf ladyslippers, white and yellow ones so sweetscented; also the meadows abounded in sweet williams, now called phlox. Those in the meadows were of many colors, mostly white with different markings. Tiger lilies were in abundance and many flowers who’s names I don’t know. We always carried bouquets to school.” 

“The latest fruit were the wild grapes and we would go in the wagon down near the river. One of the boys climbed the trees and we would bring home a tub full or more of grapes. Father washed them, put them in a keg, mashed them, and then headed up the keg, and in the winter we would turn the spigot and drink the juice. Mother would sweeten it and add some water to make a delicious sweet wine. The cold weather kept it from fermenting. Sometimes mother would take this grape juice and make a sauce, thickening it with flour, which we ate on rice.” 

“Our cellar had bins that were always full of all kinds of vegetables, especially potatoes, barrels of salt pork, smoked hams, and sausages. Mother baked the finest of breads, cookies, and German cakes. We made our own sorghum from cane we raised and it was always a picnic when we made molasses. We made little paddles out of wood to “slick the pans” after the sorghum was emptied. First we had to strip the cane, and clip the seed tops off, then chop the stalks down and haul them to the cane mill which consisted of two heavy rollers set on three upright legs. To the mechanism was fastened a long pole to which we hitched old jack and he went round and round while someone fed the stalks into the mill. The juice came from a spout and emptied into a barrel and the crushed stalks fell to the ground. What a pile we would have! And this had to be scattered to dry so it could be used for bedding in the stables.” 

“For Christmas father always bought a barrel of apples. Michigan greenings were his favorites. These were brought up in the evenings and we would pop corn, which we raised, and eat apples. Oh, those happy winter evenings.” 

“I can’t remember that we were ever hungry or ragged. We were in debt for land as father had bought another forty acre tract. We now owned 140 acres.” 

“When Anna was sixteen she went to work for a storekeeper in Steamboat Rock. Father went to see her one day and found her out on the front porch washing the door — housecleaning, I suppose. He was so angry he told her to go in and pack up her clothes and come home with him, which she did. He told Mr. Kelly, the storekeeper, that his daughter was not hired out to wash the outside of anybody’s house.”