On the 150-year anniversary of settlement, Germans from Russia remain strong part of South Dakota life

Jun. 16—MENNO, S.D. — The history of the country — and the world — can be surprising.

How is it that a handful of small European villages could transform the Midwest into the breadbasket of America using a crop strain from Turkey?

How is it that all of that might've hinged on a lucky encounter with General George Armstrong Custer in a historic blizzard?

Earlier this month, Dan Flyger and the SoDak Stamm group celebrated the 150th anniversary of the South Dakota settlement of the Germans from Russia — the ancestors of the hundreds of tight-knit communities that exist in the state today, who came to South Dakota in a singular wave of westward expansion in 1873. That wave spawned dozens of communities of varying Christian denominations.

SoDak Stamm — which translates in German roughly to South Dakota "roots" — is a regional chapter of an organization that is intent on preserving the legacy of a wave of Germans who emigrated from the United States after a 100-year stay in Russia. SoDak Stamm members have archives of documents and meet to discuss and preserve the history of the Germans from Russia. Locally, they are based in Menno, a town in Hutchinson County.

Today, there are hundreds of villages settled in South Dakota who are descended from the Germans from Russia. They have since expanded throughout Texas, reaching down as far as Texas, and stretching up to Canada. But they remain religiously and ethnically distinct. And none have remained so starkly unyielding to modern change.

"I would say that more than any other ethnic group the Germans from Russia have shaped the face of agriculture on the Great Plains," said Flyger, the president of SoDak Stamm, who has also taught English for 35 years at the Hutterite colony south of Freeman.

Despite being steeped in tradition, Flyger says that the Hutterites he teaches are surprisingly uninterested in their history. He said that many times they tell him that he knows their history better than they themselves do.

"They tell me, 'We don't care. The past is the past," he said.

That occurs despite Hutterites using the same sermons as they did a hundred years ago, and who speak dialects of German that are now extinct in Germany today. But Flyger is also an admirer.

"They raised this certain strain of wheat that had come out of Turkey. It was called Turkey red wheat," said Flyger. "It was well adapted to that climate. When they went to Ukraine, they turned that barren wasteland — which is what it was — into the breadbasket of Europe. And they brought that wheat with them when they came and they sewed it here in 1873.

That variety of wheat turned Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas into the breadbasket of America. The first turkey red wheat ever grown in America was sown in Yankton and Hutchinson county in the then-Dakota Territory in the year of 1873.

But the original SoDak Stamm group might have turned around and went home if not for a lucky run-in with Custer, who would die at the battle of Little Bighorn some three years later. As Flyger retells it, the contingent was in the Vermillion and Yankton area in April 1873, when the Great Easter Blizzard hit, and the newly arrived immigrants believed they were in a land similar to Siberia.

In a camp three miles west of Yankton, Custer and his men — some of whom spoke German — were riding out the storm. Flyger said they advised the crying women, 'No, don't worry. It's not always like this. This was a freak storm. It will warm up fast.'

The effort to homestead continued and before the summer was over, hundreds of German families from Russia had poured into Dakota territory.

150 years on, the celebration marks the history of a group who remain fiercely independent. It's a study into how circumstances can shape a people, why the Germans from Russia have remained cloistered for so long.

The Germans from Russia arrived in South Dakota under the Homestead Act, which guaranteed settlers 160 acres of land if they farmed the land, in an effort to expand the country. As a result, the 1873 wave lived far from others, unlike other previous populations who arrived before the act was passed.

"Farming in Europe is different. People would live in their villages together and go out to farm," said Donna Zeeb, a historian with SoDak Stamm. "But the act said that they had to build a house on each parcel, so they were forced to live away from the existing community."

But maybe it's because of an even deeper history, stretching back to their migration to Russia. During Catherine the Great's rule of Russia in 1763, she called for Germans to immigrate, offering a lack of taxes and parcels of land in an effort to transform Russia's agriculture. Entire villages from Germany up and left, traveling together to Russia to seek economic opportunity. When they left some hundred and twenty years later, due to falling out of favor with Catherine's great grandson, they came to the United States with their village cohesion still intact.

Their singularly strong cultural identity is what SoDak Stamm is celebrating, which lives on strong 150 years later.

"They maintain their identity even now, much more so than other ethnic groups, ethnically and religious-wise, they didn't become part of the melting pot," Flyger said.