Village News

At about midnight July 31, 1874, in what would be the first large bloc settlement of Europeans in the new province of Manitoba, the first boatload of 332 Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites aboard the paddle-wheeler International of the Kittson line passed the confluence of the Red and Rat Rivers and continued to Winnipeg. On Saturday August 1, they spent about $20,000 on necessities like farm tools, wagons, housewares, and groceries (especially flour, potatoes, and barley) in town before returning by steamer to the Rat and Red River landing site. Here they stayed for the night.

The next day, Métis carters hired by William Hespeler began moving the Mennonites eight kilometers east to the four rough sheds (“reception houses”) Jacob Y. Shantz had hired Métis men to build in June. These measured 100′ x 20′, with twelve compartments and a central eating area. They were erected just west off the Crow Wing Trail, a short distance south of what is now Niverville. The carts transported infants, the infirm and the luggage, while all able-bodied immigrants walked. Since an ox can pull a cart only about ten miles a day, and a Red River cart is relatively small, it took three days to transfer everything to the sheds. This experience was replicated during the summers of 1874-6 when other paddle-wheelers like the Dakota, Selkirk, and Cheyenne among others, most pulling barges filled with passengers as well as freight, brought about 3,500 Mennonites to the Rat and Red landing site. The press reported at least two instances in which Mennonites, a six-year-old male and later a 20-year-old female, fell off barges pulled by the Selkirk, and drowned.

Without shingles or floor, the sheds were at best poor shelter, with a leaky roof, and inadequate cooking facilities. There was no good source of water, a factor that occasioned much discontent, and led to the well accident where two men almost died in a cave-in. Nonetheless, the sheds were the staging area for the immigrants, where the women and children stayed with the luggage while Métis carters took the men around the Reserve, searching for suitable village sites, often for several days at a time. Once a village site was selected, the men applied for 160-acre homesteads ($10) in a cluster around it within the township grid. This process was expedited by Hespeler since very few Mennonites spoke English. However, the Mennonites wished to settle in villages as they had in Imperial Russia and not on isolated individual homesteads. For such villages to exist within the township grid, a special amendment named the Hamlet Privilege was enacted by Ottawa in 1876.

In the meantime, Métis surveyors laid out the Feuerstelle (house plots) along a village street on one quarter section, and lots were pulled to see who got which plot. The first two village sites were the Old Colony/Bergthaler village of Chortitz, now Randolph, and Grünfeld (Kleine Gemeinde), later moved south to become Kleefeld. For most Mennonites, the stay at the sheds in 1874 was about three weeks. In 1875, demand for the sheds diminished as relatives who came a year earlier fetched newcomers from the Rat River landing, and Shantz dismantled two of these sheds to build a storehouse. Over the three years the sheds were used, about 35 people died there, mostly children, and were buried in a cemetery nearby next to the Crow Wing Trail, exact location unknown.

Trips to Winnipeg brought wagons, oxen, plows, glass panes, and tools to the villages to break some land before freeze-up, and to build shelters. The villages consisted mainly of sod huts (often shared with a cow) and A-frame sheds (serai).

Even in the fall of 1874, most farmers managed to break a few acres before the first snowfall on October 29. Winter was spent hauling firewood and heavier logs for building from further away. The climate in Imperial Russia was considerably milder than southern Manitoba, and the sudden blizzards in winter caught many men underway, occasioning the death of one man who fell behind his companions on the way home from the bush hauling firewood, and froze to death. The winter of 1874-75 is still recognized as the coldest on record.

By early winter 1874, 21 villages/hamlets were founded, seven Kleine Gemeinde and the rest Bergthaler. Some of the Kleine Gemeinde chose to winter in Winnipeg and settle on the west side of the Red River instead, establishing two villages at Scratching River in 1875.

Their diet during the first year was monotonous: flour ($3 per sack), barley ($3.55 per sack), potatoes ($1.20 per bushel), lard ($.14 per lb) and homemade coffee (prips) from roasted barley grains. Cooking had to be relearned on the unfamiliar iron stoves. Once only flour was left, the immigrants would eat Wota-moos, flour cooked in water.

By the end of 1874, it was clear that only five of the eight townships were suitable for farming, and more land would be needed, which Shantz negotiated as a West Reserve, west of the Red River. In 1875, many Mennonites landed at Fort Dufferin instead, on their way to this West Reserve.

Then, in 1875, a grasshopper plague wiped out the entire first crop. Facing starvation, loans were extended by Ontario Mennonites and the Canadian government (the Brotschuld), tiding the pioneers over. Some immigrants arriving in 1875 stayed in Ontario to earn some money and get an earlier start in spring. Heavy snowfall beginning in fall of 1876 and excessive rainfall in the next three years reduced the best land on the East Reserve to a bog. Consequently, about half of all the settlers abandoned their claims and moved to the West Reserve by 1883.

A proverb often quoted by Mennonites from bitter experience – “Aller Anfang ist schwer” (all beginnings are hard) applies doubly to the start on the East Reserve in 1874.