German Russians of Ellis County, Oklahoma Territory
German Russians of Ellis County, Oklahoma Territory
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In a previous chapter, George Alexander Ehrlich – Land Patent, it was determined that George Alexander Ehrlich was a neighbor of the the Kirmse and Lohman families near Goodwin, Oklahoma. This chapter examines the immigration story of George Alexander Ehrlich from Russia to the USA as told by Timothy Egan in his book The WORST HARD TIME – The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the The Great American Dust Bowl[1].
Emmigration Story
“George Alexander Ehrlich sat at a wedding table in September 1929 and told his grandchildren what it had been like in the bad years on the Volga River in Russia, in the village of Tcherbagovka. Some of his nine children were around him as well. They were at church in Shattuck, Oklahoma, the one place where a person named Schoenhals or Hofferber did not have to pretend to be somebody else.
He told his family about being chained to horses in barns in the Russian countryside. George used to travel with his father, a leather tanner, learning the trade. One of the tricks his father taught him was a way to deter horse thieves. At night, George and his father locked the horses’ legs to their ankles. They slept that way in the barn, horses and Ehrlichs, bound by shackles. George would have followed his father’s footsteps into the tanning trade if it were not for the draft notice he received from the Russian czar on his sixteenth birthday. The Ehrlichs knew what happened once a boy left the village: he was never seen again. Often, the czar’s army would not even do the family the service of sending a death notice. To avoid this service, they would have to leave Russia.
In 1890, the Ehrlichs boarded a ship out of Hamburg, an immigrant boat with enough supplies to last twenty days. It was supposed to take only two weeks to get to New York. Midway into the voyage, a wind came up with sideways rain and high waves, rising in heaving swells, forty feet, swamping the boat. They had sailed into a late season typhoon, and it played with the ship as if it were a bathtub toy: it was knocked and tossed and slapped. All hands retreated to a lower cabin, where they cowered, listening to the wood beams strain and the winds scream and the ship fall apart. Don’t worry, the captain said, the deck is sealed; the boat is unsinkable. On the second day of the storm, the ship’s mast snapped and crashed into the water, but it did not break clean. The boat listed. The mast was snagged in the ocean, tipping the immigrants’ ship at such an angle that water poured in and swamped the deck. The captain sent out an SOS and told everyone to prepare for death. …
As George told this story — the founding narrative of the Ehrlichs in the New World of Oklahoma — more of his children came around to his table, and they were joined by other adults as well. The older people knew the story, but it was worth hearing again, the way George told it….
Through an improbable journey of 166 years, they had bounced from sout