The German-Russians and the Norwegians: Homesteaders Who Reshaped the Prairie

The homesteader who filed on a quarter section in North Dakota after eighteen seventy-eight was often not what eastern newspapers imagined: not a Yankee pioneer family moving west, but a Norwegian fisherman's son who had never farmed, or a German-speaking family who had spent two generations on the Russian steppe and now crossed the Atlantic because the exemptions Czar Alexander the Second revoked in eighteen seventy-one had finally run out. The German-Russians, ethnic Germans whose ancestors Catherine the Great had recruited to colonize southern Russia in the seventeen sixties with promises of religious liberty, exemption from military service, and local self-governance, arrived with specific and valuable knowledge. They had already adapted to a continental steppe climate, to drought and wind and brutal winters.

They brought Turkey Red hard winter wheat, which proved far more cold-hardy than the soft spring wheats American seed companies were selling, and their agricultural methods shaped the grain economy of the northern plains more than any individual railroad or entrepreneur. They clustered in the south-central part of the state, in communities like Kulm and Ellendale and Wishek, where German was spoken in church and school well into the twentieth century. The Norwegians settled the eastern counties and the Red River Valley, building Lutheran churches and organizing Sons of Norway lodges.

By nineteen ten, more than a third of North Dakota's foreign-born population was Norwegian. The dialect communities were tight, same village, same church, same newspaper in the mother tongue, which produced both resilience in hard times and isolation when the drought years came and the young people left. The children of these homesteaders organized the Nonpartisan League.

The grandchildren built the state institutions those farmers demanded. The hyphenated identity, Norwegian-American, German-Russian-American, dissolved slowly over generations, but the food, the church architecture, and the cemetery inscriptions are still out there on the county roads.