Immigrant roots

The old man front-and-center has a hooded lady behind him. Behind her is a couple--a tall man and a woman with a hat who appears to be his wife. Peeking over the right shoulder of the tall man is a bearded man with a round face, almost hidden. That's my great-great grandfather. He came to America in 1845, lived in pioneer Milwaukee (at a time when the Milwaukee was little more than a village, thirty percent Hollanders, like himself). There, he lost a wife and three children to some disease not recorded, then picked up and hiked up north, following a path set along the shore of Lake Michigan, a path still called the Sauk Trail. 

He homesteaded land several miles from a immigrant village the Hollanders called, blessedly, Amsterdam, a place distinguished by its own mighty pier into the lake, a place from which the some Hollanders hoped to snare lake traffic and deal in cordwood from the forests that had to be cut if the Hollanders wanted to farm. 

Here he is up close.

His name was Edgar Hartman, and his grandson, yet another Edgar Hartman, was a WWI doughboy who died from a grenade thrown somewhere along the Vesle River in France, just about exactly one hundred years ago in the "war to end all wars." 

This Edgar Hartman, that hero's grandpa, along with others, gathered at some park somewhere, I imagine, and posed for this shot behind American flags to make perfectly clear that even though most of them didn't speak much English, they were, without a doubt, Americans--Hollanders, of course, but Americans, first and foremost. This is the 50th-year reunion of Dutch immigrants to Holland Township, Oostburg, Wisconsin, 1898. I have no doubt many of the men wore leather boots; but if you could peek behind the flag, my guess is there'd be some folks still in wooden shoes.

Lots of American immigrants from Holland had it much tougher than these people. Clearing all those trees was rough work--a man couldn't do it by himself; but it had to be done. But some who already in the 1860s left for the west had it much tougher, even though many who did leave were sure that farming would be easier if they didn't have to clear trees. When the immigrants in this old picture settled along the lakeshore, there were cabins already built. Where there weren't, wood wasn't hard to come by.  These families in eastern Wisconsin didn't have to live for years in huts dug from dirt.
  

What's more, trade was relatively easy. Milwaukee was only fifty miles south, Sheboygan only ten miles north. They weren't alone. The Sauk and the Fox and Sioux were already out west, away from the advance of the white man. Edgar Hartman's obituary says by the time he came to Sheboygan County, what Indians were left on what was their land were a headache, beggars. But there were Germans all around and Luxembourgers just south.

Comparatively, those who study 19th century Dutch immigration claim these Wisconsin Dutch-Americans, Calvinists all, had it quite easy. My great-great grandfather lost a wife and children--don't forget. But since a place to live and a ready market for what they could produce was already established and the Native people were gone, the time that passed before first arrival and the establishment of a functioning community passed quickly. 

All of that is, of course, a tribute too to their industry and vision. They left their homes in Holland (Gelderland and Zeeland) in want of a better life, a life with possibilities, a life where they could become something more than what they all too easily determined lay ahead of them in "the old country." Without their energy and sweat and tears, they would not have succeeded. I wouldn't show you this old picture. I wouldn't have it, wouldn't know it.

These Dutch people were pioneers in the lakeshore woods, the rag-tag immigrants Emma Lazurus called "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." They were Hollanders who only rarely had to deal with people they called, I'm sure, with some fear, Americans. 

And they suffered. Horribly. On Sunday, November 27, 1847, the steamer ship Phoenix, full of two hundred immigrants burned and sank just off the coast, in sight of their new home in the new land. For  years, no one knew for sure how many had been aboard because who cared, really? They were, after all, immigrants. Who cared?

Had they arrived, I suppose this 50-year reunion portrait would have been much, much bigger.

Should the immigration debate in this country become the issue some people want to make it in the next election(s), it would behoove those of us with immigrant roots like mine to remember their stories, remember who they once were before deciding who they are.