PART NINE

Unpublished Reports, Short Stories, and Poems by Richard Scheuerman

I. "Finding Otis", by Richard Scheuerman (2003)

for Mary Katherine, who makes us so proud, on her birthday and forPhyllis, Dorothy, and Edwin, who reminded us of Otis

Inset from the “lautenschlager and Poffenroth” harvest crew, 1911 on the present Pat Kleweno farm north of Endicott. Grandpa Karl Scheuerman is under the derrick table holding the pitchfork. No sign of Otis.

Ninety-four degrees outside today—"thrashing weather." Even at the distance of four decades, that expression conjures up sensations of stifling July heat and a neck rubbed raw from combat against wheat and barley chaff. Our grandfather, Karl Scheuerman, spoke the words every July with a combination of both enthusiasm and reverence. The gleam in his eye was all but incomprehensible to an adolescent grandson who looked upon another searing day in 1960s Palouse Country grain harvest as indentured servitude without hope of escape. Our family had been farming as far back as the memory of our experience and Grandpa was the repository of this knowledge. He cut a stately profile, a tall man with Kaiser Wilhelm eyebrows, and his perpetual smile lifted the spirits of anyone whose presence he countenanced.

Grandpa‟s stories stretched back beyond the transatlantic voyage of his parents from the steppes of Russia nearly a century earlier to our ancestral Vogelsberg homeland in Germany. The tales he seemed to favor most, however, were about folks he had encountered during a lifetime in

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the hills from which he had never greatly strayed. Yet his outlook on life was anything but parochial. Pioneer immigrant church life had instilled in him a reading knowledge of High German, though his native tongue was the sibilant 18th century Hessian dialect of the Volga Germans, and a few years of formal schooling had introduced him to the literature of Longfellow and Tennyson. My aunts later told me he had once considered studying for the ministry until family circumstances confined him to our rural home.

Even far into retirement, Grandpa couldn't let summer pass without at least one trek to harvest field where he would hitch a ride from the elevator in Endicott for the ride out to the "home place," five miles north of town. The late morning breeze flooding the cab of our '49 black Ford truck heading back to the field brought welcome relief from the stifling temperatures inside after the twenty-minute crawl into town fully loaded with 250 bushels of wheat. Temptations to push the rig to at last thirty miles and hour were difficult to resist on the way to town, but anything near that speed would send a cascade of kernels over the warped bulk ranks that contained the load. Should Dad ever see a trail of grain on the road leading from our field, there would be hell to pay. Driving in the presence of Grandpa, however, always brought easy conversation and laughter. While not given to idle talk about the sylvan joys of yesteryear, he would patiently and thoroughly respond to youthful questions about our past and and myriad topics on the mind of a kid like me at that age--the prospects for a good basketball team this fall, destination of the fire truck crew yesterday afternoon, and which city cousins would be visiting the ranch this week.

"The Brewster bunch is coming over this weekend," Grandpa announced with obvious pleasure. "Millie and the kids are going to stay the week." His only grandchildren living beyond the community resided half a state away so the prospect of their coming was something to celebrate. To Grandpa, family was bound together like shocks of grain. The presence of our cousins brought some hope of novelty to the humdrum schedule my older brother and I felt condemned to endure on the Scheuerman acres during harvest season. Two years older than me, Don whittled away the hours between trips to town in his truck, a newer red Chevy with blue racks, by reading from his mobile library of paperback Ian Fleming novels. I wanted to drive his truck because the hoist was much more cooperative when unloading the grain in town. But farm life teaches lessons about age and rank early on. Still, cruising through town in the Ford had its advantages as the lusty grunt of its engine turned the appropriate heads. Some of my more mechanically-inclined classmates spent hours in the shop trying to get their cars to howl the same tune. I spent most of my time in the field dreaming or trying to catch up on rest deprived us from the new regime of thirteen hour work days and wasn't sure I'd ever be cut out for the farming life. Dad's ability to keep the oldest machinery in the countryside not only functioning but raise some of the area's finest crops was something of a marvel to me. Keeping our operation going on "Jap tape and bailing wire" was not hyperbole.

I contributed to the effort in minor ways--keeping the speed down on the road, shoveling up any grain that errantly fell to the ground while the combine unloaded its plenty, and dutifully cutting the heads off any offending heads of wild rye that dared infest our father's fields. We carefully placed into sacks for his careful incineration at the end of the season. I liked hearing

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Grandpa's stories about the old days and on such days when he spent that morning with me in the field, I would ask for more details on how we had come to live on our half-section wheat ranch, small even by 1960s standards. I drove down the lane past our house and around the old orchard of stripped apples and pears that he and my grandmother had planted around the turn of the century. I took a run at the steep hill leading back along a slope above our house, a box trimmed in wavy white shakes, and gunned the engine to a trail in the stubble that led to resting place shaded by the branches of a crab apple tree oddly positioned up in the field. The remnants of a dilapidated McCormick reaper had fused with the lower branches of the tree as if mother clutching child.

Grandpa pointed to the field across the road where we would be cutting in a few days. The entire field was a cresting sheen of full ripeness. "Your great-grandfather turned that piece from virgin sod with a footburner plow soon after settling here in 1891," he said with a wave of his sunburned arm. "Took him two months to do just that hundred acres with a two-horse team. Of course that meant a day starting at 4:30 in the morning to feed the horses." We still had that plow down in the farmyard, a proud rusted tribute to Sisyphean struggle, stored away behind the old smokehouse a long stone's-throw from our home where Grandpa had also lived in his youth. I had seen in an old photograph that in his day the house had been ringed on two sides by a fancy veranda of beams and spindles. Just across a grass lined ditch that drained acreage behind our house stood one of the most remarkable chicken houses in the region. Spacious enough to accommodate a couple dozen pupils in its former one-room country schoolhouse days, this imposing shingle structure of yellow ochre and cream exterior now held class for a large flock of white leghorns and a dozen sheep. A congregation of rock doves kept house in a cupola of concave sides that seemed from a palace of the great khan.

Grandpa had served as director for the Litzenberger School, named for our cousin neighbors, in the 1920s and welcomed each year's schoolteacher into the Scheuerman home as if a member of the family. He would not accept payment for board and room as the commitment of young educators like Vera Longwell, who arrived from Kansas in the fall of 1920, to the wellbeing of Grandpa and Grandma's six children was sufficient reward. The only evidence of its former use in my time was a string of six tin cups suspended from a post in what Dad told me had been the kitchen. Miss Longwell's subsequent sixty-year correspondence with our family recalled many instances of pioneer pedagogy now considered innovative--cross-age grouping, classical and interdisciplinary curriculum, and relevance. I asked Grandpa about the Midwest schoolmarm. "Once after school your Aunt Evelyn told me she had a math lesson about Babe Ruth. I said, 'What does baseball have to do with arithmetic?' 'Well, Dad,' she said, "He's playing with the Yankees for $125,000 a year. Miss Longwell wanted to know how long it would take for him to become a millionaire."

I knew from our weekly Sunday afternoon feasts of boiled roast beef with boiled potatoes, carrots, and parsnips--the menu rarely varied at his home, that he also had intimate knowledge of the Bible. His offerings of blessing at mealtime, sometimes rendered in German, included passages appropriate for every occasion: "All eyes wait upon thee, O Lord, Thou givest them meat in due season. Thou openest thy liberal hand, and satisfieth the need of every living

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thing." The archaic King James humbly offered in slight German accent defined reverence. The multivolume leather-bound Bible commentaries I had seen in his bedroom (Doeschel's Biblewerk) showed evidence of substantial use. He also served as church president when plans were made to construct a grand new vaulted sanctuary for Trinity Lutheran in town. But when asked about the most memorable part of that experience, resulting in a Palouse Country architectural wonder in Prussian blue, turquoise, and lavender with gold embellishments, Grandpa softly smiled and said in German, "'Not unto us, not unto us, but to thy name give glory because of thy lovingkindness, because of thy truth.' This was our dedication verse."

Grandpa had the peculiar ability to respond in immediate and specific terms to all manner of youthful inquiry. When did our family arrive in America? "April 27, 1888." What did our farm cost? "$10 per acre." How many stitches when wheat was sacked? (Nine, in about as much time as it take to say the word. Grandpa had done his share of sack-sewing.) How much grain could a sacker fill in one day? "Sack of wheat weighed 130 pounds--fill and sew it in half a minute, then carry it twenty feet away and run back for the next one. You could put up 800 sacks in one day. Knew a fella' who put up a thousand once--that's thirty ton of wheat." What kind of person could handle that kind of harvest in such heat? "Hard workers make the best crews. Why Otis could lift a sack a wheat with his teeth! The man had a marvelous gift with horses, too."

My grandfather's values seemed a world away from the Sixties world I inhabited where most anything could easily be loved or hated. Yet he didn't need to speak to his grandchildren about the meaning of devotion. My grandmother's health had declined when she was still in middle age and Grandpa devoted himself to her welfare. He learned to cook and take care of the household and lived at her bedside during her last months. Like most widowers, Grandpa prepared grave decorations of fresh cut flowers, usually red, for her and other family members every year. When helping him place memorials in the cemetery, we could always count on Grandpa to patiently translate an epigraph in German or explain to us how anyone with a familiar name might be related. These expeditions could consume most of an hour and on such occasion I once noticed him stoop down among the wreaths of plastic somethings to place yet another tinfoil-covered can of red blossoms on a small granite marker far from our family plots.

I strolled over to glance at the stone and read, "Floyd G. E. Duchow, 1933-1949." A peculiar sensation struck at the thought of someone my very age dying here. I couldn't imagine it happening to one of my friends, and suspected a farming accident--a tragically periodic farmland reminder of youthful mortality. I asked the obvious question. "The Duchows had been in town less than a year; the boy's dad pastored the church down the street so that kind of made them my neighbors," he said placing the arrangement on the flat stone. "He was their only boy and fell terribly ill the day of his birthday. The family had gathered for a big picnic and the doc suspected he must have eaten something bad. Died the next day." The Duchow family left town soon afterward. Grandpa never heard from them again but through him and others they had entered community memory. And because of their brief friends, no Memorial Day never passed without red blossoms on the Duchow boy's grave.

The throat of "Three-fingered Draw", a fertile defile several hundred yards long with a trio of smaller wedges to the southwest, was directly across the road in full view as brother Don's 229

heavily loaded truck slowly roared past our shade en route to the highway and sent great choking clouds of dust suspended along is route. Now it was our turn to move into position for an eighty- bushel sidehill dump from the combine. Positioning the truck a few feet to near the wheat would crowd the tractor and combine. A nefarious skip of even a few uncut heads was an unacceptable violation of father's harvest code. Stopping a few inches too far downhill on a steep side could send the shot of unloading augered grain spilling beyond the truck's bulk ranks--an equally grave offense for which a scoop shovel was tied beneath the frame. I was grateful for Grandpa's presence to help confirm a decision on placing the vehicle with a second opinion.

Once we came to a stop, he looked again across the road to the sodpatch where I had shot a badger that spring, and conjured up another memory. He recalled the process of harnessing the two Belgians who pulled his plows and harrows before the appearance of the Caterpillar tractor in the Palouse in the 1920s. Gaines winter wheat stiffly pulsed a sigh in the slight midday breeze. Apart from two small dusty brown patches of infernal tarweed, the whole scene before us was of one lush golden expanse as if on the canvas of a Thomas Hart Benton triptych. Grandpa's first tractor, a small Cat D-4, still remained in operation on the farm while Dad's main mobile command post was a newer D-6. The former was an embarrassment for me or my brother to drive since all our neighbor friends rolled along in air-conditioned comfort with radio headphones pulling implements twice as wide. I'm not sure if the D-4 ever had a muffler and its penchant for emitting diesel fumes like body odor attracted enough dust turned dark and damp for one to wonder if it had ever been Caterpillar yellow. A few faded splotches on the manifold cover testified to its maker's signature color.

As a young teen, I couldn't imagine how someone at any age could so obviously relish the thought of sweating views of the slow-moving mechanical dinosaur of red speckled skin that served as our combine. A mammoth contraption of Rube Goldberg imagination, our International Harvester 160 pull-type thresher should long before have joined its companions in retirement to one of the ryegrass covered sodpatches. These were areas of northeast facing slopes too steep to farm that doubled as habitat for ring-necked pheasants and chukars, badgers and white-tailed deer. In these quiet places abandoned John Deere springtooth and weeder sections, Van Brunt seed drills, and other equipment from Grandpa's generation rested amidst the plaintive songs of meadowlarks and fragrance of wild rose brambles heavy with deep pink and white summer blossoms. Many of the sodpatches, swails, and most of the hills on our place carried distinctive names that were passed down to us giving some hint of peculiar geography or incident. We knew Jimmy's Draw and Spud Draw, Windmill and Powerline hills, The Saddle, and Clay Face.

More fearsome than navigating the steepness of these hillsides--sometimes marked on the ridges by rows of daredevil spray plane tiretracks, was the long descent down into the dreaded Huvaluck. This horseshoe basin of deep black soil was in the farthest northwest corner of our ranch. I had once asked my father about the origin of it peculiar name and he advised me to ask Grandpa. Recalling the mystery during our afternoon visit, I made inquiry. "Huva is from Hafer- -oats," he explained, "so it is the Huvaluk, the 'Oathole.' We raised that back there years ago. Had to cut slow or that stuff would wrap up the cylinder tighter 'n Hogan's goat." I could only imagine the misery of oat harvest on a sweltering afternoon in a deep draw devoid of vagrant breeze.

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"We'd take a twenty-five mule hitch down there when it was in crop," he added as if to compound the challenge. "And just think, we used to swear by long underwear all season long to keep the chaff off and sun from blisterin'." I reached for the glass gallon jug wrapped in damp burlap we kept on the floorboard and offered a cool drink to Grandpa who politely refused. "Never forget Hanya Morash, ran our separator a few years," Grandpa mused as he swatted a grasshopper off his knee. "Most every day he‟d steal a squirt of machine oil; claimed it kept him „lubricated.‟"

Due to the original land surveys of the 1870s applying all the sensibility of a checkerboard tablecloth to the twisted gunny sack labyrinth of the Palouse, the Huvaluck was cut off by a Mel Kleweno's rusty barbed-wire barrier to forgotten ruminants atop a sod embankment making the hole's only access straight down a steep descent. Venturing down in an empty truck was bad enough, but time and again I wondered what would happen if the old Ford died or popped out of first gear while I was struggling back out with a full load of wheat. In such an event I knew the brakes would probably hold, but how to get it started again in soft ground without breaking the axle would be another matter. Most all my friends could already testify to that rite of farm boy passage that my brother and I had somehow managed to avoid. Timing such a mishap for the presence of my grandfather would be humiliation of the worst sort.

As we sat on top of the hill watching the combine slowly roll below, Grandpa propped open the uphill door of the Ford open to afford a bit more breeze. He then stepped out to grab two bearded heads and undertook an agrarian rite that probably reached back to Mesopotamia. In a single violent motion both commonplace and marvelous, Grandpa rubbed the wheat between his palms and chaff exploded from his hands. He then slowly lifted his upper hand away and carefully blew upon the lustrous brittle mass. The remaining husks flew away leaving several dozen plump kernels in the pit of his hand as if nuggets in a propector's pan. "Thrashin' weather!," he repeated, as his frame casted a broad shadow down the slope against the crop's pulsing white sheen. "Let's keep that header in the wheat," he said as the combine emerged over the rise heading our way with another load of Palouse Country treasure.

In the summer of 2004 the extended Scheuerman clan including Lautenschlagers, Reiches, Cooks, Larsons, Riggans, Parrishes, and others gathered at the home of Phyllis and Al Kreins near Sedro Wooley, Washington. While reminiscing about memorable event backs on the family farm from our youth, Phyllis, Dorothy, and Edwin recalled experiencing some childhood fear in the presence of one of Grandpa's harvest hands. "His name was Otis," Phyllis recalled, "and he was black." Upon further inquiry among older relatives into the matter, we learned that Otis Banks was an itinerant laborer who sought seasonal employment among Palouse Country farmers willing to hire a black man in the 1940s and 50s. Few would. The harvest tale related by Grandpa of a man with whom he worked putting up thirty tons of wheat in one day was probably Otis Banks. He had fought with the US Cavalry in World War I and could be found every fall at the Palouse Empire Fair tending the horses. He often worked long hours to make ends meet and was killed in an automobile accident near Colfax in August, 1957 while headed out to plow through the night. It did not occur to Grandpa Scheuerman to ever mention to us that he employed a black man or that some folks in the neighborhood objected to his presence among us. We know now that both were true. Apparently to Grandpa none of that especially mattered.

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II. “Hillsong 1935”, by Richard Scheuerman (2008)

Reminiscences in Verse from Bygone Days by Evelyn Reich, Millie Lautenschlager, Roland Cook, and Don Schmick

Endicott and Colfax, Washington

March-April 2008

Compiled by Richard Scheuerman from oral histories with Millie Lautenschlager (April 20, 2007; Vancouver, Washington), Evelyn Reich (June 10, 2007; Colfax, Washington), Roland Cook (May 10, 2008; Endicott, Washington), and Don Schmick (April 5, 2008; Colfax, Washington).

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Spring

At five and at five, the abiding ritual, Mammoth creatures, tons of muscled horses. Hands working in ancient rhythm Fanny, Sam, Mable, Hank! Milk the Holsteins, rich Guernsey cream Short names for friendship, ready for the In the cool dimness of the closed barn, season, Low sounds, breathing, thinking. Curry-combed backsides, gettin‟ into Hissing stream sputtering to the shape, bucket, Easy walks around the yard, settle them White foam and begging barn cats. colts down, Lambs and calves jumping, Oiled leather collars and shiny hames, Fresh garden lettuce for Salaud Supa, Jingling bridles, bits, and rings on shaking Cabbage and onions and lots of greens, heads, Carrots and parsnips and corn and beans, Harness pulled back in small caresses, Squash and melons down Windmill Hill, Hooked under tails, trace chains and Good Friday seed spuds—eyes on top! singletrees— Sliced red Pontiacs, husky netta gems, Don‟t get kicked. “Send ya „cross the barn.” Dropped in the furrow, behind the horse, Hook those reins so they feel your pull, Next pass covers, and opens another row. “Easy now, girl,” and out to wet April fields, Barnyard ducks and geese and raucous Great hooves, thrown mud, manure and guineas, clods. White leghorn chaos and Plymouth Rocks, “But Rhode Island reds,” says Aunt Kate, Find the backland „round the draw, “Only brown eggs for best noodles.” And follow that plow all day long, Spread out, surgeon-cut on experienced Three bottoms behind nine head, breadboards. Plowshares smooth and shining like silver service, Sheep bands back toward mountain Five in the back, four out front, meadows, Through sleet and sunburn, Rivers of fleece headed up the flat. Slicing, turning moist earthen braids of Hold on to Smitty, he‟ll blend right in. black. So timid and spooked, till shears appear Red-tailed hawks methodically coursing In leather hands that know the work and For mice suddenly set to sprint. words, Ten acres a day of snail‟s pace standing, Sit „em on their butts and calmly cut, Then harrow those clods before it dries, Sack the wool and wagon stacked, Rod-weed the ground and watch that chain; To Colfax, Lewiston, and Snake River Singin‟ in the dust. landings, Steamer carried to warm the world. Hold the kids and seek your fortunes! Mend the fences, check the steepled posts, Gypsies down the road, selling what‟s not Hogwire and three lines of barbed wire needed Hold the Herefords from trespassing. Along with medicine shows—the first rate Reassuring early morning stable talk, stuff, And good for what ails Pete and the Bafuses.

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Summer

Hoe those spuds like Grandpa says, All day, few breaks, roll, knead, bake “Komm yunge, move fast.” Rye bread, white rolls, sugar cookies, Pie cherry time, buckets red and bings, Momma, sisters, aunts, daughters Brothers throwing more than eaten, Side by side, teasing, gossip, laughing, Spread out on basement ground, Dreams and sadness and laughter— Kept cool for neighbors‟ takin‟, Die Ald Reppin and those lost town kittens! Crab apples smashed for amber jelly. Grandpa Pete‟s stolen river honey. Penawawa treks for peaches and „cots, Headers in wheat, experienced pilots Simmering slopes to cool green trees, Guiding reels o‟er windy waves, silver Scale weighed bins, “Watch for snakes!” sickles singing, Head home to blanch, peel, cut, syrup, “Ferris-reels” plunging down draws of Mason jarred in boiling granite kettles, honey stalks, Summer kitchen clatter and laughing, “Don‟t fail me now, Fanny and Sam!” Sweet peach syrup sticking on fingers. Four on header-boxes, keep straight Dad‟s gooseberries, cut the branches As fifty bushel treasure falls. (Careful of stickers!), The barley itches, but oats are worse. Raspberries, strawberries, keep that trough Noon feasts on meat and boiled spuds, stream steady. Hot bread, dripping butter, apple pies, Yellow tulips, purple fence-line iris, Mashed potato and gravy dinners “with all Tubular trellised honeysuckle, crimson the fixins.” hibiscus coronets, Hot coffee and longjohns in July heat, Leaning and beaming in corner sunshine. A squirt of oil for what ails „ya. Fishing on the river, lines dangle from Wagons to the derrick, hoedowns pitch. Matlock Bridge, Twisted anaconda tractor belt, Worms and grasshoppers tempting catfish to Engine cranked, pops, …pops and runs jump, And she moans, galvanized metal thresher Slimy, writhing black in buckets, moans. Batter dipped, lard fried, and mixed with salt Heaves and bucks and thumps, and pepper, Great clamored crashing, ancient dust. Tails rise, skin lifts, crunchy, delicious, Long-necked oil cans at ready, steaming bites. Mechanic tends the grinding symphony, First and second sprockets and chains, Every day now, Dad on the hillside, Pulleys and belts; percussion drums, fan, A crisp golden ear rubbed in hands, ancient and walkers, ways, With wrenches, guns, and cans to tighten, Wisp of breath and chaff explodes, kernels grease, and oil chewed. A blur of poking, digging, wiping. All expectant judgment, till one day… Then the pulse, the pulse of tumbling Verdict soberly rendered: Ready. augered kernels of gold. And all hands to harvest! Touch the warm, squeeze it, chew it; great Breakfast spuds, eggs and Woosht, harvest smiles. Cookies for dessert! Thirty-five cent wheat, figures in dust, Women set to peel potatoes and apples. Delicious cool water in soggy gunnysacked But stay inside, no hex first round. jugs. Flour across the Bitufka, up arms, in hair, Tenders and jigs and flailing sewers, over aprons, Engine staccato, mile-long shush belt, Sacks stacked and hauled to flathouses, Headers and boxers mine, 234

Engines whine, threshers refine, Sweat for cords, stacked and hauled, And then the dew. Greased plowshares and sickles. Sounds die, teams unhooked, Thick black coffee, monstrous dinner. Three days‟ dancin‟ till midnight above Bindlestiffs in the barn, hayloft hornets, Wakefield‟s Store, Bedrolls over straw, exhaustion sleep. Lust marry Lust, Morasch a Morasch, Week after week: The Grand Grain Refrain! Schmick takes a Schmick,

Fall

Big tent canvas smells with straw, Old ones kicking up heals till milkin‟ time, Rodeo time down by the tracks, Then back for more, three days running, “Faye Hubbard comin‟ out on Home Schottisches and reels happily danced to Brew!” solid beat. Ride like the wind, then down to Pendleton Skirts out, women whirl, men laugh, kids With Alec and the boys, see that Injun camp, watch. Marlo, Yakima Canutt, Jackson Sundown, Monday back to school, screaming fans at Never been their like, just like Otis, Friday‟s game: Dark as pepper in a sea of salt, “Rummy seeds, rummy seeds, sauerkraut Lifts a hundred pound wheat sack with his too, teeth! Get that blue vitrol seed in the ground, Watch those Dutchmans go right through!!!” Take your risks beyond mid-September. LC, Gonzaga Prep, Central in Spokane, Harvest grain sacked for trade, Taking all comers, foes head home with Wagons to Lancaster and Pataha Mills, busted bones and tales of woe. Long treks to bring back flour; Church on Sunday, black Fords and horses Oh, those watermelons at Central Ferry. on dusty roads, Cabbage heads piled high, green scalps Sittin‟ in rows, white shirts and dresses, peeled away, Men on the right, women on the left, Knock the Dawzha, grab it fast, Music and prayer to salve the soul. Hovel slices dropped and crocked, rock salt, Dinner back home, men talk of weather and clean cloth, prices, A fifty gallon barrel of kraut, Women tending meals and news. Two weeks to work, with Arbuza Wondrous gifts of God. Watermelon bites, little striped apples, deliciously sour inside. Butchering knives in smooth, circular push, Rhubarb stalks thick as thumbs, sugared for Fine oil on whetstones, blades to razors. sauce. Hogs down at dawn with .22 pops, Backing under trees in Pierce‟s orchard, Bled out on cold ground, steam rises Green transparents and golden delicious, Cats and dogs at the ready. Cleaned and canned, sliced and Schnitzel Tendons hooked, raised on pulleys, and dried. dropped. Crusted spud plants dug, filled gunnysacks Roiling, boiling black vats. and basement bins, Pull, scrape and turn, lift and hang, Standing cellar guard, eyes cut off on Zipper down, coiled innards dropped into Saturdays, tubs Resting next to carrots, beets, and parsnips Cleaned casings and Schwatamahga. for Sunday dinner. Carcass sawed and split, hams and ribs, Cross-cut saws made tight and sharp, bacon and belly, Union Flat cottonwood, Palouse pine, 235

Bone and brine, salted and cured; “Everything but the squeal!” Feet pickled, snout and head cheesed, The best ground with salt and garlic and casing stuffed, Savory Gehinks slung over blackened smokehouse bars, Whispered secrets: “No flame, slow smoke.” Sshh! Schmicks use cherry, Scheuermans apple (Reiches willow).

Winter

First snow hits and the ground rests. Pine clad sleighs with steel shoes, Flour, eggs, and milk, resourceful mothers, Sam and Fanny prancing to town like colts, Men head outside, fresh air; but women bear Tight reins pulled, geyser breaths Exploding the brunt. in frigid air, First light, hot kitchens, Thrilled to pull, to run, to see. Feed the children, do the chores: Winter games and Christmas. Monday washing, iron on Tuesday, mend on Sanctuary gaily decorated, Wednesday, Green boughs and candlelight, Thursday churning, Friday to clean Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht, And maybe to town, And then the treats, signposts of ancient Six loaves of bread baked on Saturday, past: Maybe Sunday rest. Sunlike oranges of winter solstice, Potato fare daily: boiled spuds, fried spuds New life in unshelled nuts. (with onions), Racing back home, children‟s expectations, Mashed potatoes, potato soup; Katovel The glistening starlit wonderland Pleena, Katovel Woost. Of rolling white beneath gleaming moon. Cold nights and radio warmth; Turn down the lane to barks and rush inside, “Colder than back in ‟18, when the ducks on Past rime-iced gate and frost-framed Sutton froze.” windows Firelight stories of the year and of the clan, To mellow kerosene lamplight. The harvest, the Hochzeit, the hunt. Rustling paper and presents— Gathering to laugh with “Amos and Andy”, Gray wool socks, colored rag doll, red scarf, “Jimmy Allen and the Flying Cadets” the pocketknife! Swooping down each week. Thankful hearts gather, Father reads Grandma‟s quilt frame stretched with Of Wise Men, Herod, and Jesus, colored patterns. The Blessed Hope for coming year.

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III. “The Gift”, by Richard Scheuerman (2008).

A Christmas present for family and friends

“There‟s nothing higher, stronger, more wholesome, and more useful in life than some good memory, especially when it goes back to the days of your childhood, to the days of your life at home. You are told a lot about education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since, is perhaps the best education of all.” --Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“„And when they came into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.‟” Anna Marie almost knew the story by heart. Each year in the December Advent season, her father, the village schoolteacher Martin Fischer, gathered the family before bedtime near the rounded earth oven in the center of their home and read from Luther‟s Book of Sermons. Twelve-year-old Anna Marie and her younger brother, Phillip, listened attentively as their father recounted the story of Mary and Joseph, guiding star and stable, and Nazareth and Bethlehem. The children‟s mother, Katya, rocked quietly nearby in the evenings where lately she had been knitting a brown woolen shawl. “Herod and Judea were not much farther away from our Volgaland,” Father informed the children, “as, say, the tsar and St. Petersburg.” “Then might we see the bright star?” eagerly asked Phillip. “No, no,” replied Father with a kindly smile, “the heavens above are bright with starlight these cold nights, but there‟s nothing like the one God provided to lead the Wise Men.” “And Jesus isn‟t in Bethlehem anymore,” Anna Marie informed Phillip and then turned back to her father, “but can I go feed Rudy and the colt with you tonight and see outside anyway? The windows are too frosted to see the stars.” “Yes, you can be a shepherd tending our stable scene, Anna,” Father replied before Katya could protest, “but you‟ll need to bundle up after we finish the story.” Martin then continued reading. “Though the Wise Men saw but a tumbled-down shack and a poor young mother with a little babe, not like a king at all, …they did not shrink. In great, strong faith they cast out all misgivings of common sense, and, following simply the word of the prophet and the witness of the star, accepted him for a king, fell on their knees, worshipped him, and presented their treasures…. If we Christians would join the Wise Men, we must close our eyes to all that glitters before the world and look rather on the despised and foolish things, help the poor, comfort the despised, and aid the neighbor in his need.” Martin looked up and asked his children, “So do you understand now what sacrifice means?” “Like helping others,” Anna Marie said matter-of-factly. “Like when we fill Grandpa‟s root cellar with potatoes and carrots from our garden,” added Phillip as he fidgeted on the floor. “Yes, all that and more,” said Martin. “Only Jesus came to fully give himself.” “Stop poking my feet, Phillip,” Anna Marie complained before Katya leaned down to touch his shoulder. Martin carefully closed the black leather book and reached for his pair of felt boot liners that Katya had lined up with three other sets near the oven. Nearby sat a large tin can half full of dark caramelized sugar syrup. “Put your Feldshtievel on, too,” Katya told Anna, “if you‟re intent on going or a few minutes out there will chill your feet to the bone. And Phillipya—it‟s off to bed for you.” Martin then put on his black wool coat and gloves and took the warm can. Moments later Anna followed her father out the side door to the adjacent barn that sheltered the family‟s milk cow, four sheep,

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and two horses, a powerful roan gelding named Rudy and the unnamed colt Martin had recently purchased from his brother-in-law, Anna Marie‟s Fedda Honna. She stepped on ground hard as stone and heard the movement of animals against the far wall of the enclosure. There tall Rudy‟s head appeared amidst the shadows as he gave a snort of anticipation. Martin took a three-pronged wooden fork from its familiar place near the hay pile and began to toss the green roughage over the stalls. “Sprinkle the oats on top of the sheep‟s hay,” he told Anna Marie, and after she did so Martin poured on the dark steaming concoction. “The old ewe has been moving slowly of late,” he said. “This should help give her some strength.” The animals eagerly munched the fodder while Anna Marie walked to a door in front of the barn and lifted the wooden catch to peer outside. The sky was alive with glistening jewels. As she marveled at the sight, Anna Marie felt her father‟s gentle touch on her head. “Even with a new moon it seems the starlight is bright enough to cast shadows,” he whispered. Anna Marie looked up to catch a twinkle in his eye and ventured the question she had pondered all day. “So what did Momma say? May I go?” she asked expectantly. “Yes, Schotsche, Mother says you may go to Saratov in the morning with me and Fedda Honnas, but before….” Anna Marie turned her head and interrupted her father with a great hug and sigh. “But before we go,” he continued, “you must be prepared for colder weather than this. Winds on the steppe and even in the forest can be as unforgiving as the wolves, and we‟ll need to be ready to go by daybreak. The city is a full sixty verst away and we can‟t risk a late start. “I‟ll be ready!” Anna Marie said excitedly, “I can even make breakfast!” “No need for that,” said Martin. “Just get a good night‟s sleep and don‟t worry your mother.” “Can I let the colt lick what‟s left of the syrup?” Anna Marie asked her father. “Ah, such a treat for that spirited one. Why not?” Martin replied as he handed Anna Marie the warm can. “After all, he‟ll need his strength, too, since he‟s coming with us tomorrow.” “Oh, that‟s wonderful!” Anna Marie exclaimed, but then paused with concern. “You‟re not thinking of selling him, are you?” she asked. “No, no Anya,” Martin reassured her, “but everything has a purpose and besides, he‟s dying to stretch out those long legs.” With that Anna Marie stepped over to the attentive colt and held out the can to its muzzle. He licked the sweetness and whinnied in delight. Anna Marie tried her best to follow her father‟s advice to get to sleep. But her mind simply couldn‟t rest at the prospect of visiting the grandest city—the only city, in the entire region. Anna Lise, Marikia, and most of her other friends had already been to Saratov and told her of the wonders it held. But not even they had traveled so far in the dead of winter. Imagine seeing the majestic Volga, Mother of Rivers, now so frozen that horse-drawn sleighs were said to travel beyond sight far to Pokrovsk and Samara on the other side. Samara. It now occurred to Anna Marie that it sounded like “Samaria” from the Bible. Maybe the places her father had been reading about were closer than she thought. At school Marikia had told of an Orthodox church in Saratov with a two-story entry of multicolored jeweled glass as if something from a fairy tale. And Anna Lise described a brick Lutheran church with bells that were truly deafening. No wonder she didn‟t hear very well. Anna would be careful to keep her distance. The next morning Anna Marie awoke to the familiar sounds of her parents‟ hushed voices in the kitchen. She also recognized the laugh of Fedda Honna and dashed from under her thick covers to the warmth of the kitchen to give him a hug.

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Russian Troika

“Adyea, good lady,” he said, and gathered her up in his arms where she felt his soft black beard. Fedda Honna twirled her around in a circle while singing a familiar melody.

Anna Marie, Anna Marie, (Anna Marie, Anna Marie Ich habe ein schöner Traum, I had a wondrous dream: Ein Baum wuchs in die Höh, A tree grew up into the sky, Ein wunder, ein schöner Baum. A wondrous, beautiful tree.)

Anna Marie giggled while Katya shushed her older brother to keep his antics from waking little Phillip. “Anya,” her mother smiled, “hurry to dress and eat while the men get the horses harnessed. You mustn‟t be on the road at night and it‟s a long ride to Saratov.” As the men went outside to tend the animals, Anna returned to the room she shared with Phillip who was still sleeping beneath the patchwork quilt and put on her warmest underclothes. She rushed to the table and drank a glass of milk her mother had set out next to a warm bowl of Hirsche and piece of rye bread. “Momma,” she asked, “what shall we bring you from the city?” “Yourself in good health,” Katya replied. “It‟s a long way and you‟ll only have time for your Papa and Fedda Honna to pick up supplies for Fedda‟s shop. After that outbreak of influenza last month he‟s running very low on medicine, and with all the New Year‟s weddings he wants to be sure there‟s enough ribbon and candles.” Katya then reached across the table to a pile of soft brown wool. “Here, this is for you, Anna. I finished it last night so you could stay warm during the trip.” “Oh, Mamma, thank you!” Anna Marie gushed, “It‟s beautiful and soft as down.”

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She used her bread crust to wipe the bowl clean of sodden oats while Katya closed the metal fastener on a leather valise and put it next to the door just as Fedda Honna entered it wearing his black bearskin coat. Tiny icicles hung to his beard beneath his nose. “Get going all you,” scolded Katya playfully, “or Phillip will wake up and think the Belznickle has come for him!” “Well if he keeps pulling my niece‟s braids that‟s exactly what will happen to him!” Fedda Honna laughed. He took the bag and walked back outside with Anna Marie as Martin stepped inside to kiss his wife. “There‟s half a loaf of rye bread, some Wusht, and cheese wrapped inside,” Katya said, “and two pairs of socks in case any of yours get wet. They‟ll smell so nice you won‟t know whether to wear or eat them. Do be safe.” “Don‟t worry;” he reassured Katya, “we‟ll be back by supper time.” He then turned to join Honnas and Anna Marie in the wagon that the men had converted to a sleigh by replacing its wheels with long iron runners attached to the box with a sturdy wood frame. Rudy and Fedda Honna‟s dappled gray mare, Dotchka, were harnessed in front and Anna Marie noticed the colt‟s bridle was tied by a long rope to the side of the wagon. “So does this mean we have a troika like the Russian people do?” joked Anna Marie. “We wouldn‟t go without the colt,” Martin said as his eyes met those of Fedda Honnas, “but we‟re mostly just a dvoika.” There was enough room on the high front seat for two persons but Martin sat behind with Anna Marie on a bench in a make-shift enclosure of thin boards. Behind them rose a small pile of hay covered by a sheet of dark canvas. Anna Marie was bundled in a heavy coat with the brown shawl wrapped around her head. Martin had a placed a heavy folded quilt beneath their feet and Anna Marie felt something hard inside it. She gave a kick and looked down to see the end of her father‟s single-barreled shotgun sticking out. “Are you afraid of the Belznickle too, Father?” she asked nervously. “I don‟t think we‟ll be seeing him on this trip, Anya” he replied; “but you never know when a hare might scamper across our trail and offer a meal.” Fedda Honnas gave the reins a jolt and the wagon suddenly lurched forward toward down the lane to the main road that led south through the village. In minutes they were beyond Anna Marie‟s beautiful home and she turned to see tiny clouds of smoke arising in the hazy distance from the chimneys. Soon the village disappeared among the gentle curves of the road that led through Aspenwald. She leaned against her father and settled into the lulling tempo of Rudy and Dotchka‟s gait and fell asleep to another of Fedda Honnas‟s melodies: Hei dei dolga! (Hei dei dolga! Fahren m’r iwer die Wolga, We‟re going across the Volga, Fahren m’r iwer die Nei-Kolonie, To the village of New-Colony, Mit mei Schotsche, Anna Marie. With my sweetheart, Anna Marie.)

The wagon sped over the gently rolling hills and light snow fell as Anna Marie and her father and uncle continued farther and farther south. She awoke at the sound of Fedda Honna‟s shout to the horses to slow down. She looked up just as another sleigh met them carrying a load of logs. “Where are we, Father?” she asked and then felt the cold sting of fresh air against her face. “Almost to the city, Anya,” Martin said. “You‟ve been sleeping all morning like a bear in winter,” Fedda Honna turned to say. “Did you get any sleep at all last night?” “A little I think,” Anya replied, “but I mostly thought about the city.” “Well look up, little one,” Fedda Honna said, “those buildings in the distance are the outskirts of Saratov. See there the golden dome of Starii Zabor.”

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In another half-hour Anna Marie found herself riding along the city‟s main boulevard amidst more sleighs and pedestrians than she had ever seen in one place her entire life. Snow was piled high on both sides of the way and in the middle. The horses trotted on for several more blocks and Anna Marie marveled at the opulent green, turquoise, and mustard colored building facades rising four stories and crowned with ornate white cornices. Finally Fedda Honna reined the horses left where through a small snow pile and stopped in front of a store with enormous windows. Above the door a sign read “Schmidt Brothers” in both German and Cyrillic script to identify the familiar name of a leading Saratov merchant firm. “I‟m sorry we‟re not here on a pleasure trip, angel,” Martin said to Anna Marie as he jumped down from the wagon and turned to lift her. “You‟ll have time to look around the store and we‟ll eat here, but then we must head back.” Fedda Honna tied the two lead horses to a wooden post and brought the colt up next to them. He tossed some fresh hay beneath the animals, and then stepped up to the boardwalk alongside Anna Marie who was peering in a display window. Fedda Honna reached into both his pockets and pulled out two fists. “Candy kopecks for one niece, none for the other;” he said, “better make your choice.” Anna Marie had played against her brother in this game before, and knew there would be little risk. “That one!” she shouted, pointing to her uncle‟s left hand. “Ach, du liebe.” Fedda Honna mumbled, pretending defeat as they walked inside. “Your daughter beat me again, Martin.” As the men walked up to visit with a clerk standing behind a wide counter counting colorful banknotes, Anna Marie looked around in wonder at the vast storehouse of goods neatly arranged on the two floors she could see from the entryway. Kitchen tinware, colored bolts of cloth, brass samovars, birch baskets, dried fruit and nuts, and jars of ribboned hard candy and other konfekt were on display near an enormous wooden abacus. But before she made her way to the sweets, Anna Marie stepped closer to the window display she had seen when they arrived. A beautiful teapot of bright blue enamel decorated with painted flowers in yellow, pink, and white was surrounded by six matching teacups. Then she felt her father standing near. “So you saw it, too?” he asked. “Yes, Papa, wouldn‟t Mama just love it?” Anna Marie cried. “And I have two rubles I saved and the money from Uncle to contribute. Please let me help.” “I had my eye on it for her myself,” Martin said. “You buy some candy for yourself and Phillip with the kopecks,” Martin told her; “and if you wish to help with the rest then it will be from both of us.” The thought of seeing her devoted mother open such a present was delightful, and Anna Marie watched as a clerk came to fetch the vessel from the display and carefully box it up. Fedda Honna‟s transactions took longer than expected which gave Anna Marie time to consider the many flavors of hard candy. She eventually settled on two berry flavored sticks and a pair that tasted of horehound. As the men carefully loaded the supplies into the wagon, Martin noticed that a bolt was missing from one of the metal brackets holding the right runner to the wagon frame. “That won‟t do with the distance we‟ve yet to travel,” he observed, and led all three back inside to find a properly sized replacement. A clerk led them into a back room lined with small wooden boxes on all four walls that contained nuts, bolts, and fasteners of every size imaginable. Soon the proper one was found and put into place while Anna Marie ate the lunch her mother had prepared. After the repair was finished, Martin thanked the storekeeper and checked his pocket watch while Fedda Honna helped Anna Marie back into the wagon. “Time to bundle up again, Anya,” he told her as he glanced at the leaden skies to the north. He then turned to his brother-in-law. “Hannas, looks like we‟ll need to make up some time on the way back home. Now it‟s my turn.”

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Martin then sat at the front of the wagon and Fedda Honna settled in next to Anna Marie. She turned to look in every direction so not to miss a single detail of Saratov‟s wonders and smiled when she heard the clanging afternoon church bells as they drove through the outskirts of city. Soon they were riding through the creamy white countryside again and she looked back to see to see the colt keeping pace with the wagon. A flock of rooks swooped low along a field to the left where fuzzy rows of stubble were barely visible rising from the snow. The air felt colder to Anna Marie and she noticed that Rudy and Dotchka‟s breaths exploded in geyser-like blasts to the tempo of their gait. She wondered what her mother would say when she opened their special gift, and soon Anna Marie drifted again into dreamland. Anna Marie couldn‟t tell how much time had passed when awakened. She had been leaning against Fedda Honna, felt him move, and opened her eyes. She didn‟t recognize the vicinity and sensed it was late afternoon. The road was shrouded in dense stands of birch and linden with occasional patches of evergreens. She noticed Fedda Honna held the shotgun in his right hand and was scanning the right side of the trail. “Did you see a hare, Uncle?” Anna Marie inquired. “No rabbits hereabouts,” replied Fedda Honna, “but best stay awake now and hold tight to my coat and the seat.” Anna Marie became attentive at Fedda‟s cautious tone. She looked up to her father who snapped the reins to advance the horses‟ pace. “We can‟t be sure, Anna,” her uncle explained, “but Rudy‟s seems a bit spooked. May be some sign of wolf.” The very word “wolf” sent a shiver down Anna Marie‟s spine. She had heard tales of their presence in the countryside but nobody her age actually claimed to have seen one. An instant later her father nodded to the right toward a shadowy phantom only momentarily visible. “Off there, Johann!” he shouted and Fedda Honna raised the gun. “Get under the bench, Anna,” he ordered sternly, “and cover your ears.” The lead horses seemed to pull in jerks and Fedda Honna looked back and forth the icy road. He suddenly swung the weapon to the left as Anna Marie curled up under the bench while the horses struggled. But she didn‟t cover her ears. A moment later she heard the loudest explosion she thought possible and was instantly seized with terror. She plunged her head into the quilt as Fedda Honna clicked open the barrel to reload. The blast immediately thundered again and Anna Marie heard her uncle shout something about the trees. She risked looking ahead in the wintergloom and felt pieces of snow thrown by hooves hitting her face. She then glimpsed the fearsome dark profile of a speeding wolf lunge at Rudy‟s underside. A third shot thundered and the creature disappeared amidst the noisome melee of panicked horses, careening wagon, and the men shouting. “It‟s a pack,” yelled Fedda Honna. Her father hollered back, “Cut it now!” Anna Marie was paralyzed with fear but opened her eyes to see Fedda Honna drop the open gun on the floorboard next to her. She winced at the acrid smell of gunsmoke and watched her uncle grasp his lower right leg with both hands. With a single motion he pulled a hunting knife from its sheath in his boot and drew it to the taut rope beside him. Suddenly the line he had grabbed went limp and seconds later Anna Marie heard a fiendish howl. She closed her eyes tighter than before and sensed her heart beating. Anna Marie then felt Fedda Honna‟s hand on her head and heard him say, “Thank goodness your father brought the colt.” The wagon soon resumed a steady motion as Rudy and Dotchka settled down. The horses kept a brisk pace in the growing darkness and Anna Marie heard nothing more from her father and uncle. She remained motionless under the seat for the rest of the way. Her fright abated and they finally reached home in another hour. The horses pulled up to the barn and she heard the men step down from the wagon. Anna Marie felt exhausted and lay still until her father whispered her name. Martin then leaned over the sideboard and lifted Anna Marie into his arms.

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This story is based on experiences told to me by Mollie (Amalie) Hergert Bafus of Endicott, Washington in 1980. She emigrated from Russia as a young girl and had vivid memories of life in the German colonies on the Volga. I often visited Mollie in her tiny home “across the tracks” until her passing in 1994. Whenever I returned from a visit to Russia, I would stop by to see her with an update on my travels. She and her fun-loving husband, John—whom she survived by many years, were great friends of Lois‟s Fedda Kunna (Conrad) and Mary Morasch, who lived just down the street. All of them had grown up in Russia and loved entertaining us younger ones with stories of the Old Country. Molly and John had no children and sometime after I had given her a souvenir tea set painted in Russian Kokhlama berry style, she asked for two peculiar favors. She wanted me to sing at her funeral since she felt her time was near (as it was), and also asked that I safeguard the precious blue teapot mentioned in this story, which we cherish to this day. I don‟t know for certain what happened to the plush brown shawl her mother knit or the tea set, but they may have gone to relatives living in Oakesdale and Pendleton. Reference to the terrifying Belznickle comes in part from the dark and dank basement of our youth on the farm near Endicott. A large black bearcoat hung from a post there and I once asked my father about it. He told me it was Uncle Yost‟s “Belz” that likely came with the family from Russia in 1888. Years later I heard the story of the Belznickle, a monstrous Russian ogre clad in such a bearcoat or sheepskin who terrorized naughty children in the villages at Christmastime. Fortunately his threats were tamed by the Christkind, an angelic maiden dressed and veiled in white and gold who followed to give a gift of nuts, dried fruit, and candy.

“Fedda Honna” (Uncle John)

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IV. “„Telling, Sharing, Doing‟: Origins and Iterations of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities Russia Initiative” (2008).

Recent tensions between the United States and Russia have led many observers of international relations to fear a return to Cold War politics and of spurring another arms race at incalculable cost to the wellbeing of peoples worldwide. These prospects bring to mind experiences and lessons from the period 1989-1994 when a small group of citizens in the US and USSR reached out to each other in largely unheralded ways that bore unexpected benefits for the participants as well as their nations.

“Tell what you know. Share what you have. Do what you can.” With these words, Rev. Peter Deyneka, Jr. expressed to an audience of mission workers in the spring of 1991 the three abiding principles that had long framed his ministry to the peoples of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. The phrase was drawn from familiar biblical accounts of individuals who perceived needs of others and endeavored to make a positive difference in their lives. Deyneka reminded his listeners of the “telling” by Naaman‟s captive servant girl about Elisha‟s healing ministry in Samaria (II Kings 5), and of the “sharing” of five loaves and two fishes by the lad in John‟s retelling of the feeding of the five thousand (John 6). Finally, he recounted how Jesus‟ story of the compassionate Good Samaritan involved “doing” in multiple ways—tending wounds, seeking others‟ assistance, and paying expenses (Luke 10). Deyneka then observed the profound shared aspects of these selfless acts: God‟s miraculous intervention in personal affairs, consideration of physical as well as spiritual needs, service to those of other cultural traditions, and the anonymity of effective witness. In a word, Peter Deyneka, Jr. was advocating a vision for holistic ministry in a new era of mission opportunity to the East. His views reflected the “whole gospel” mandate expressed by the authors of the 1974 Lausanne Covenant to integrate witness and service, evangelism with social action.

Opportunities to freely undertake such ministry in the Soviet Union had long been severely restricted under the policies of communist leaders. Ministry to the East in the twentieth century had been undertaken by organizations like the Slavic Gospel Association, founded in Chicago in 1934 by Deyneka‟s father, Byelorussian immigrant Peter Deyneka, Sr. Missions like SGA established an international radio ministry to listeners in the USSR and to Slavic populations throughout the world. By 1975 over 140 SGA missionaries were working in twenty countries and 600 monthly evangelistic broadcasts were being directed at the USSR. Upon his father‟s retirement from the mission in 1975, Wheaton College and Northern Baptist Seminary graduate Peter Deyneka, Jr. was named president. Under his leadership, SGA‟s radio and publishing ministry continued to flourish.1

In 1978 the mission established the Institute for Soviet and East European Studies (ISEES) as a research and educational division affiliated with the Wheaton College Graduate School. The institute‟s founding director was Deyneka‟s wife, Seattle Pacific College graduate Anita Marson Deyneka, who shared a missionary family heritage. Her grandparents, Elverage and Veta McIntosh, had served as Episcopalian missionaries to Athabascan Indians in Alaska in the 1920s. The Deynekas worked closely together as mission partners from the time they were married in 1968. Peter‟s international contacts and public presence combined with Anita‟s scholarly endeavors and writing skills were mutually reinforcing.

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Their combined contributions and subsequent prominence in international ministry circles sometimes overshadowed the capacities each possessed as scholar and mission strategist.

The emergence of ISEES under Anita Deyneka‟s leadership in the late 1980s as a leading US evangelical setting for the study of religious history and contemporary life in the Soviet Union was seen as a superfluous endeavor by some longtime associates of the Deynekas, while the mission‟s continued substantial support for officially registered Russian Evangelical Christian-Baptist Church was criticized as too narrowly focused by others. The institute represented an academic forum to consider these and related matters of burgeoning mission relevance. Such issues included contextualizing ministry in the East and establishing relationships with Russian Christians and Soviet educators seeking to learn from their counterparts in the West. Anita Deyneka also served in the 1980s as an adjunct professor in Wheaton‟s Missions/Intercultural Department teaching an occasional course, “Missiological Implications of Church- State Relations in the Soviet Union.”

The Deynekas established a committee of mission scholars and Russian studies experts to guide ISSEES‟ work including Dr. Michael Bourdeaux of London‟s Institute for the Study of Religion and Communism (Keston College), Thomas Kay and Mark Elliot of Wheaton College, and historian Kent Hill at Seattle Pacific University. Both Wheaton and Seattle Pacific were members of the Washington, DC- based Christian College Coalition (later the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities [CCCU]) which was led in the 1980s by individuals with special interests in Russia. CCCU President and Mennonite theologian Dr. Myron Augsburger was a scholar of the Anabaptist experience in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, while Dr. John Bernbaum, a former State Department Russian affairs specialist, served as executive director of the eighty-member organization. Seattle Pacific offered one of the CCCU‟s strongest programs in Russian studies with specialists in language, history, and geography. The school had risen to prominence in the field in part through efforts in the 1970s by historian Kent Hill to draw international attention to the cause of the “Siberian Seven,” a group of Christian dissidents who had taken refuge in the US Embassy in Moscow. Christians from Barnaul, Siberia, who had taken refuge in the American Embassy were the subject of Anita Deyneka‟s 1977 book, A Song in Siberia. Comparative education was a focus of interest by SPU‟s Arthur Ellis, professor of doctoral studies in the school‟s curriculum and instruction program.

New study and ministry opportunities in the USSR significantly opened with Mikhail Gorbachev‟s selection as USSR Communist Party General Secretary in 1985. His rise to power ushered in an era of unprecedented domestic political change in global rivalries between the United States and Soviet Union. Gorbachev‟s policies of glasnost and perestroika found expression during his initial year in office in an effort to confront a serious national issue with moral implications—the nation‟s widespread problem of alcohol abuse. Although laws were enacted to limit the sale of alcohol and prohibit public drunkenness, they resulted in severe economic dislocations. Many provisions of the new legislation were repealed or not enforced. The Chernobyl nuclear accident one year later further revealed deplorable working and environmental conditions, but Gorbachev‟s ire was especially aroused by conservative bureaucrats‟ campaign of misinformation following the disaster. In the wake of these events, Gorbachev asserted increasing authority to implement a progressive domestic agenda and by 1989 had enacted reforms in most government ministries that substantially separated civil operations from party control. The Ministry of Higher Education, however—long the bastion of doctrinaire communist ideology, remained the most

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resistant to the new thinking. Leaders in other ministries and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, however, actively sought international contacts in order to study comparative approaches to solve problems and effect progressive change in a nation long burdened by economic stagnation and ideological control.2

An Empty Box

To better understand the dynamic circumstances unfolding in the USSR, which they had not been permitted to visit since 1976, the Deynekas applied for visas in 1989 after the new openness provided an opportunity to participate in a religious writing conference and the annual Moscow Book Fair. Throughout the thirteen years of their involuntary absence, the Deynekas had remained in close communication through intermediaries with leaders of both registered and unregistered Protestant churches. In meetings with church leaders in Moscow and Leningrad in 1989, they learned that Christians remained highly skeptical of the talk in government circles about proposed new laws guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion. They also experienced firsthand the intense hunger for copies of the Bible. The Evangelical Christian Publisher‟s booth was mobbed by visitors and within hours all available copies of Russian language Testaments were rapidly dispersed. A man approached them afterward and told of his protracted journey across the entire country from Siberia just to procure a single Bible at the fair. Upon learning that no more copies were available, the weary traveler pled to carry home an empty box in which some had been packed.3

The Deynekas‟ 1989 visit to Russia also acquainted them with the remarkable ministries of progressive Russian Orthodox priests including Father Alexander Menn and Father Alexander Borisov. The Bible studies and liturgical worship conducted by both men in their congregations near Moscow had endeared them to local Orthodox believers, young seminarians, and intellectuals from the city including a prominent mathematician and senior curricular programs advisor to the Russian Ministry of Education, reformer Alexander Abramov. Father Menn‟s parish of Novaia Derevnia had become a center for weekly teaching and prayer services while Father Borisov served the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian. For many years both priests had been regularly harassed by KGB agents through interrogation and surveillance of their activities. Their appreciation for Protestantism had also brought both priests into conflict with Orthodox Church officials and contributed to their assignment to parishes outside the metropolitan area. Menn was known to have high regard for his Jewish heritage and taught that believers should not reject other Christian churches but understand them to be expressions of the same true faith. According to Menn, limitations in human understanding through sin had resulted in the various Christian churches and denominations. No one interpretation had a monopoly on spiritual truth, and individuals should appreciate the spiritual insights and distinctives that characterized each confession.4

Some Russian Protestant church leaders impressed with these teachings and outreach sought a dialogue with priests like Menn and Borisov. Editor-in-Chief Alexander Semchenko of Protestant Publishers, a division of the Evangelical Christian-Baptist Church Union, informed the Deynekas and their mission publishing director Michael Morgulis about Menn‟s work and introduced them to the priest in 1989. Morgulis, a Jewish émigré from Moscow who had been converted by Christian missionaries in a resettlement camp in Rome, remained a corresponding member of the Russian Writers Union and was familiar with Father Menn‟s works. Menn asked for assistance in obtaining Bibles to distribute to his parishioners and the many visitors that continued to flock to his weekly services. The Deynekas arranged

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to provide a limited number of copies through Morgulis and Semchenko which helped lead to the organization of open air evangelistic and Bible distribution meetings later in the year.5

Fr. Menn‟s book, Son of Man, was especially popular with Russian readers because of its clear presentation of salvation through personal faith in Jesus Christ. Menn‟s compelling style of writing included recurrent reference to expressions of belief through Russian art and literature, themes that evoked special appreciation by many Russians seeking beauty and truth in their fallen world. Of special significance to Russian Protestants was Menn‟s emphasis on encounter with the contemporary world. Rather than advocating withdrawal from society through a monastic lifestyle popularly associated by some with Orthodoxy, Son of Man taught the way of Christ as “anything but an aloof ascetic.” Menn similarly warned against a “gloomy dogmatism” and preoccupation with eschatology that individuals like Abramov had come to associate with Russian Protestantism. The spiritual life, Menn wrote, was centered upon Christ in “an atmosphere of love, joy, and faith.”6 To a population beleaguered by decades of discredited atheistic teaching, religious oppression, and economic deprivation, the message in Menn‟s sermons and writings carried the dynamic possibility of an overcoming new life.

When the Deynekas returned to Wheaton in September 1989 following their trip to Moscow, they participated in a series of mission and scholarly meetings that addressed the changing circumstances of life and ministry in the Soviet Union. Peter traveled throughout the United States to meet with foundations and churches to raise funds for the printing of Russian Bibles and other publishing projects facilitated by such sister missions as Johann Pauls‟s Bibel Mission in Germany and work by Bill Kaptianuk in Poland. Under the auspices of ISEES, Anita Deyneka was invited to lecture on the implications of glasnost for ministry in Russia at the Overseas Ministry Study Center in Connecticut where she joined other scholars and Father Borisov who shared perspectives on the challenges and opportunities for cooperative Orthodox-Protestant mission endeavors. In November 1989 she participated in a seminar at annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Chicago and offered an analysis of factors promoting stability in the USSR in light of the dramatic collapse that year of the Eastern Bloc. Speakers throughout the week had offered commentary on a range of political and economic factors influencing the breakup and implications for Soviet stability. Deyneka spoke on the role of Christian literature in the new climate of Gorbachev‟s glasnost, emphasizing that the thirst for such literature was evidence that the root cause of the dramatic changes evident throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR was a spiritual crisis. Marxist ideology ruthlessly imposed by Lenin and his successors could not be sustained indefinitely and glasnost had publicly exposed to Soviet citizens the moral bankruptcy of their system and leaders.7

Academies and Ministries

Immediately following Deyneka‟s presentation, she was politely approached by a visiting scholar from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, sociologist Mikhail Matskovsky. He informed Deyneka that research conducted by his institute based on a comprehensive series of interviews with Soviet youth and adults had led him to the same conclusion. “I am not a believer,” Dr. Matskovsky explained in excellent English, “but I am in great sympathy to the religious foundation of morality. Our experience and study has shown that when such a basis is destroyed, the fabric of the nation unravels. I am especially interested in the role of the Ten Commandments, which has historically been the basis of morality in so many societies.” He then expressed interest in establishing a cooperative project on the Ten 247

Commandments between ISEES and the Academy‟s Institute on Social Research on their relevance in contemporary society and especially among Russian and American youth. Deyneka was highly intrigued by Matskovsky‟s proposal and impressed with the sincerity of his request. She pledged to fully consider the possibility and arranged to introduce the determined academician to her husband the following day. Peter shared his wife‟s enthusiasm over the prospect of ministry through an academic relationship with the USSR‟s most prestigious academic institution. Since Matskovsky specifically sought expertise in Western approaches to vospitaniye (literally “upbringing,” or moral education), the Deynekas introduced Matskovsky to sociologists Ivan Fahs and Paul DeVries from Wheaton College who agreed to help direct in the project.

During this time of openness, the Deynekas were invited to participate in a roundtable of CCCU schools in Washington, DC to consider the possibility of student exchanges with institutions of higher learning in the Soviet Union. At this meeting, Anita Deyneka met John Bernbaum, and International Programs Director Karen Longman who was appointed to serve as group‟s liaison for this project. The Deynekas offered to contact the Russian Ministry of Higher Education (RMHE), and journeyed to Moscow to meet with Deputy RMHE Minister Yevgeni Kazantsev who responded to their query about this seemingly unlikely prospect with the assertion that the ministry would be highly interested because of the moral values embraced by Christian schools. Bernbaum and Longman had been instrumental in establishing Coalition foreign study programs in Europe and Latin America and were interested in exploring the possibility of such an arrangement in Russia.

Longman‟s visit to Moscow in March 1990 coincided with the Kremlin‟s announcement of Gorbachev‟s election by the Congress of People‟s Deputies as the first (and only) president of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev continued to serve as General Secretary of the Communist Party but in spite of his professed and demonstrated intentions to reform government bureaucracies, many reformers expressed concern at his new efforts to consolidate executive power. Among his most outspoken critics was Moscow political leader Boris Yelstin, who had been elected the previous year to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. Gorbachev responded that dealing with the scope of nationality and economic problems warranted his widening power.

The second week of March, Longman participated in the first informal meetings to establish a reciprocal relationship between the CCCU and Russian institutions of higher learning at Moscow‟s Belgrade Hotel with Minister Kinelev and Kazantsev‟s RMHE liaison, Oleg Marusev. An atmosphere of suspicion was still apparent, and after a brief session to establish trust and ascertain each other‟s true intentions, Marusev returned to report his favorable impressions to the Ministry while Longman then traveled to Moscow State University on the city‟s south side for a similar meeting in the school‟s imposing main building with Dr. Svelana Ter-Minasova, Foreign Languages Department Chair. Longman was introduced at this meeting to the complexities of the Soviet system of higher education and learned that the university and RMHE functioned separately from the Ministry of Public Education and its system of public elementary and secondary schools and the teacher training institutes which remained a focus of CCCU interest.8

In a subsequent meeting with Russian secondary teacher Ivan Obukov, Longman inquired about the extent of religious influence on education in Gorbachev‟s Russia. Obukov, who had recently toured high schools in America, characterized Gorbachev as “a clever and able man of the time but… faced with 248

overwhelming challenges.” The country‟s economic plight and resistance from conservative apparatchiks prevented Gorbachev from addressing the country‟s central problem: “The Russian Christian tradition was effectively extinguished as a national force for renewal and strength by the terrorist policies of the early Communist leaders. They then sought to replace this world view with a Marxist-Leninist ideology which has utterly failed now to give meaning to our lives. So our nation is now adrift and is in despair.” Obukov encouraged Longman to press ahead with the Coalition initiative and that with persistence she would find leaders in the Academy and Ministry willing to risk their careers by reaching out to their Western counterparts. Following the meeting at the university, Longman attempted an excursion across Red Square but was prevented by police who had cordoned off the area in preparation for Gorbachev‟s presidential inauguration inside the Kremlin. Two months later, Boris Yeltsin was elected chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet and in June the legislative body declared the precedence of Russian law above All-Union legislation.9

Matskovsky arranged for Longman to meet officials of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences for the remainder of her March visit. To facilitate discussions, he had procured the services of Alla Tikhanova, an able translator from the Institute for American-Canadian Studies. She and Matskovsky accompanied Longman to the offices of Mikhail Plotkin and Boris Wolfov who headed the Academy‟s Laboratory of Educational Problems and Upbringing. Both scholars expressed some skepticism in Longman‟s mission, but agreed to assist in circulating information about the opportunity among their colleagues. Longman perceived a special interest in Christianity by her translator who then offered her services to Matskovsky in the event any conferences with Christian educators from the West might be organized. Tikhanova would soon come to play a key role in the success of the Coalition‟s emerging conference series on moral education. A formal conference proposal emerged in meetings later that day with officials from a secondary school who offered to host such a gathering—Moscow School 345. The anticipated gathering, tentatively named the Soviet-American Conference on Moral Education, would be co-sponsored by the Ministry of Higher Education and take place during the regular school year to facilitate maximum attendance by professional educators.10

Longman then traveled to Leningrad on the overnight Red Arrow Express train to investigate the prospects for similar arrangements with education officials there. The son of a pastor at one of city‟s Protestant churches studied at the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute and the pastor, a close friend of the Deynekas, had offered to arrange a meeting for Longman with a representative of the prestigious teacher training school. The following day, Longman met there with Dr. Vladimir Nikitin, professor of scientific atheism, in a cavernous office beneath a large portrait of Lenin. The exchange was cordial and Nikitin pledged his consideration to sponsor a similar conference in Leningrad, but was more reticent at the prospect than officials in Moscow. Longman returned to the Russian capital the following morning and learned details of protocol from Matskovsky and Tikhanova that would be required in order to obtain permission directly from Soviet Minister of Education Gennady Yagodin for an official visitation to the US in order to formalize an agreement on exchanges and the conference series. In accordance with these instructions and in partnership with the Academy of Education (Pedagogical Science), ISEES and CCCU staff submitted the proposal through formal channels later in the month.11 During a mission trip to Moscow by the Deynekas several weeks later, Matskovsky informed the couple that the Ministry had authorized the project. His announcement was soon followed by a report to the Deynekas by Marusev that

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RMHE Deputy Minister Kazantsev had accepted the CCCU invitation to lead a delegation of Soviet university and technical college presidents to Washington, DC in September.

Protocol of Intentions

The Kazantsev delegation‟s ten-day visit to United States in September 1990 represented a turning point in relations between Russian educational officials and leaders of Christian higher education in the United States. The Soviet delegation consisted of sixteen officials representing the Ministry and seven institutions of higher learning in Moscow, Gorky, Tula, Yaroslavl, Ivanova, and Lvov. Augsburger and Bernbaum hosted the gathering at the Council‟s spacious headquarters on K Street near the Capitol Building.12 In opening remarks to the assembled Council representatives, Kazantsev directly addressed his intentions for the trip. “We understand that [religion] has made great contributions to our nation and to the world…. We are finding enormous interest in the study of religion among our youth and seek your partnership in helping us rediscover our spiritual heritage.” Dr. Alexander Khokhlov, Rector of Gorky (Nizhni Novgorod) State University and Supreme Soviet Deputy added, “The values which are affirmed by the Christian colleges are valuable to the Soviet Union, although they were lost over the years.”13

Delegates were then taken on a three-day excursion to area CCCU schools including trips to Virginia‟s Eastern Mennonite College and Messiah College and Eastern College in Pennsylvania. At Eastern in St. David‟s, the Soviets met sociologist Dr. Tony Campolo who escorted the group to Philadelphia to witness firsthand a range of Christian outreach ministries to inner-city single mothers and at-risk youth. At Messiah, Minister Kazantsev, a nuclear physicist by profession, made an unscheduled visit to the science building where he encountered ninety-one-year-old Raymond Crist, professor of environmental science and former director of the Manhattan Project‟s Columbia University Group from 1945-46. Upon learning each other‟s backgrounds, the two men warmly embraced and while Kazantsev had used a Russian translator throughout his journey, the two men began communicating in scientific terms largely unintelligible to speakers of both languages. After several minutes, Dr. Crist poignantly observed, “When I think of the untold billions our nations have invested in weapons of mutual destruction, I rejoice that by the grace of God we should now devote our efforts to peace and the renewal of spiritual values.”14

The Kazantsev RMHE delegation returned to Washington, DC and began work to formulate concrete plans for possible cooperative endeavors. Washington press reports carried news that week that the Supreme Soviet had voted overwhelmingly to “end the Bolshevik policy of atheistic education and state controls of religious institutions and permit organized religious instruction.”15 After two long days of convivial discussions, including attendance at an evening performance of the National Symphony under the direction of renown émigré composer-conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, the parties unanimously agreed to five core objectives: student exchanges and foreign study opportunities, faculty exchanges and visits, instructional materials development and distribution, promoting Russian and English language programs, and joint humanitarian, scientific, and “other programs in areas of mutual interest.”16

Bernbaum credited the Deynekas for their vision of outreach to Russian educators that had led to confirmation of the ambitious agreement. Asked to summarize the significance of the negotiations, he responded, “This is truly one of those rare „moments of truth‟ in a nation‟s history when basic decisions are being made that will set the future course for millions of people. Our desire is to be witnesses of Jesus 250

CCC-Soviet Higher Education Exchange delegations at the organizational meeting in Washington, D. C., 1990. Minister Kazantsev and CCC Executive Director John Bernbaum are on my left.

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Christ to our Soviet friends and to help them restructure their educational system so that moral and spiritual values are integrated into their academic programs. The roots of Russian spirituality lie deep in their collective history and must be rediscovered. We also hope to challenge our own students to gain a vision for their lives that might include building bridges between our two cultures.”17 Kazantsev echoed Bernbaum‟s remarks when asked about overtures to the Ministry by other organizations. “Few have approached our government about work in this area. Many in the West seem more interested in joint- ventures to make money than working for humanitarian reasons to spend money helping our nation and its youth at this critical time. The Deynekas have a genuine concern for our people and we look forward to working with them and the American Christian colleges in this new effort to help our young people rediscover their spiritual heritage. Such teaching is the true source of friendship among peoples and personal fulfillment.”18

The CCCU reciprocal visit to the Soviet Union led by Bernbaum and assisted by Deyneka associate Elaine Stahl took place in October 1990. The Deynekas traveled separately to Moscow at the same time to confer with Evangelical Christian-Baptist leaders as well as with Matskovsky and education officials. The American delegation representing eleven Council colleges was greeted in person at Moscow‟s Sheremetyevo Airport by Minister Kazantsev and then taken downtown to the University Hotel. Kazantsev briefed his guests on the “war of laws” between the Russian parliament and the All- Union Supreme Soviet that was escalating into open political battle. Kazantsev, an ally of Yeltsin but with sympathy for Gorbachev‟s policy of perestroika, feared that the movement to republic secession might lead to bloodshed. He reported that the Supreme Soviet had just announced is refusal to recognize the sovereignty of the Russian Republic. An aide to Kazantsev also reported on the “great tragedy” of Father Menn‟s murder just days earlier by an axe wielding assassin. Both men expressed hope that the country‟s present chaotic situation would not cast pallor over their shared agenda. The following day, the American delegation of members who had gathered in Washington, DC divided into two groups that departed on three-day tours of six technical institutes and universities in Tula, Yaroslavl, Stavropol, Ivanova, Nizhni Novgorod, and Leningrad.19

The Americans met with an especially warm reception in Nizhni Novgorod, a recently closed city of 1.4 million at the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers in Russia‟s heartland. Rector Alexander Khokhlov headed one of the nation‟s preeminent universities and pledged personal and institutional support to establish exchanges with CCCU members and to host American professors of religious studies and business administration. Hundreds of students packed an auditorium to overflowing to hear the delegates speak briefly on the purpose of their visit. In a brief question-and-answer time, the group was bombarded with questions about “life values,” belief in God, and future relations between the US and USSR that made news on national television and was widely publicized in the Russian press. Anita Deyneka appeared later in the week with Wheaton sociologist Ivan Fahs on one of the country‟s most popular evening television programs, “Good Evening Moscow.” The broadcast was preceded by the story of a joint housing construction project for Chernobyl evacuees featuring Jimmy Carter with Habitat for Humanity and Russian Orthodox Church volunteers. Following the group‟s return to the US, Bernbaum reflected on the trip‟s significance: “Both Soviets and Americans have a great deal to learn from each other, and the newly signed protocols open the way for exciting programs for both students and faculty. Building bridges across cultures, especially culture that were „at war‟ with other for decades, is a great step forward in building world peace. We‟re grateful that we can play a small role in these unique times in 252

1990 CCCU-RMHE Protocol of Intentions Signature Page

During Minister Kazantsev‟s 1991 visit to American universities, he was a guest in my parent‟s home in Endicott where he greatly enjoyed several days in the “tikhnaya derevnya” (peaceful village). Oleg Marusev arranged for my trip to Saratov and Yagodnaya Polyana.

world history.” Bernbaum moved to form an executive committee of CCCU Russian Initiative participants to explore possibilities for establishing a CCCU foreign study center in Russia.20

A detailed article on the ISEES-Matskovsky moral education “Ten Commandments Project” appeared in an October 1990 issue in the influential Teachers Gazette with a favorable editorial commentary by Academy of Pedagogical Sciences President Vasily Davydov.21 Matskovsky also made arrangements to introduce members of the October CCCU delegation to Russia‟s preeminent educational futurist, Dr. Boris Guershunsky, director of the Academy‟s Theoretical Pedagogics Institute and author of nine books on teacher training and school reform. Guershunsky had carefully studied the recent journal

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article about cooperative East-West projects on educational renewal and informed his guests that “this kind of moral and spiritual perspective would contribute significantly” to progressive change in Russia. Following a lengthy meeting during which Guershunsky learned of the Council‟s “Through the Eyes of Faith” college text series, he requested copies of the volumes on literature, history, psychology, and business for consideration in a cooperative publishing or distribution project. As the noted pedagogue rose to escort the group from his office, they turned to notice Guershunsky standing in front of a large color poster of Christ on the Cross suspended over the planet Earth. In a subsequent luncheon opened by one of the delegates with an invited prayer, tears welled up in the noted academician‟s eyes and he whispered that it was the first time anyone had ever shared a prayer in his presence.22

Representatives of the American team met on October 25 with Vladimir Belyaev, Gorbachev‟s appointed Chairman of the Soviet State Committee on Education, and Moscow Regional Education Committee Chair Luybov Keyzina in order to explain their intentions in person and request financial support on behalf of their Russian counterparts. Both officials knew of the initiative through the Teachers Gazette article and pledged their support. Belyaev informed the group of his meeting two days before with President Gorbachev at which they discussed the need to consider “new paradigms” for promoting the moral education of the nation‟s youth. Belyaev was especially encouraged to learn of the group‟s favorable meeting with Boris Guershunsky whose criticism of the Soviet education system he believed to be among the most insightful of the day. He supported participation in the project by both Guershunsky and Matskovsky and noted it was among the few Soviet-American ventures that facilitated a domestic partnership between the sometimes fractious academies of sciences and education.

Keyzina, a tenacious administrator who oversaw operations of 1200 schools for Moscow‟s 1.5 million students, expressed particular interest in sharing perspectives on special education and orphan transition programs to better meet the needs of the city‟s growing numbers of dispossessed youth. A similar relationship was arranged in Leningrad through the office of Red Guard Municipality Mayor Sergey Belyaev, a close associate of the city‟s reform minded chief executive and Yeltsin rival Anatoli Sobchak. Belyaev also met CCCU representatives, personally thanked them for risking travel to the country at a time of heightened domestic strife, and offered use of a public building at which the organization‟s Russian affiliate might be headquartered. He also arranged for a series of introductions between the group and other city officials and encouraged participation by local school officials at the proposed Russian-American Conference on Moral Education in Moscow.23

The Americans‟ visit concluded on October 27 with a gala dinner hosted by Minister Kazantsev at the Rossiya Hotel adjacent to Red Square. Kazantsev asked John Bernbaum to open the gathering in prayer and following the meal concluding remarks were offered by both men. The dinner was also attended by Peter and Anita Deyneka with whom Kazantsev had developed a close personal friendship. He informed the missionary couple and Bernbaum of Yagodin‟s decision permitting the distribution of the proposed Christian Education Library to schools of higher learning in the Russian Federation, including those most resilient to change—the teacher training institutes. Kazantsev further informed the Deynekas that the Russian Ministry of Education pledged to organize a national distribution campaign as an initial response to the recently signed “Protocol of Intentions” if funds could be procured in the West to purchase the books. The Deynekas and Bernbaum expressed confidence that the necessary support could be raised soon after their return to the US.24

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“If they offer open doors….”

While the CCCU delegation was visiting Russian colleges and institutes, the Deynekas participated in the October 22-26, 1990 Congress on Evangelism held at the Ismailovo Hotel in a suburb of northeast Moscow. The couple had served on the Congress‟s organizing committee since their appointment to a Lausanne closed country focus group at the International Congress of World Evangelism held the previous year in Manila. In this capacity, one of their responsibilities had been to facilitate relationships between the Moscow Congress‟s organizers and Protestant church officials in Russia and Eastern Europe and Anita Deyneka participated in a session on women‟s ministry.25 The Moscow gathering also gave Rev. Deyneka an opportunity to privately discuss with Dr. Grigori Komendant, President of the Evangelical Christian-Baptist Union of Russia, and other Protestant leaders the recent overtures from the government ministries and academies to American Christian colleges and missions groups to establish exchange programs and publishing projects related to moral and spiritual renewal. Russian believers had been greatly encouraged by Gorbachev‟s reform policies and newly announced freedoms of speech and worship, but had good reason to be wary of official partnerships with the same agencies that had so long acted with hostility against all religious groups.

Although realms of life and national experience separated Deyneka and Komendant, both leaders realized that Gorbachev protégés like Kazantsev and Kinelev represented the hope a new generation, were themselves at risk for initiating such dramatic changes, and genuinely sought foreign cooperation. Moreover, word that had reached the men that very week from CCCU representatives brought encouragement to act in good faith upon the recently drafted protocols. Political science professor William Harper of Gordon College, a veteran organizer of educational exchanges for four decades, reported that he had “never met a more cordial, forthcoming and fundamentally decent group of people…. With the Soviets specifically seeking contacts with our kind of institutions, there is not time for stunted imagination and retreat to parochial seclusion. We talk a lot in our circles about „open doors‟; this is one of „historic proportions.‟”26 Komendant used similar imagery when asked by Deyneka about the propriety of Western Christians partnering with Soviet educators without direct involvement by local church members. “If they offer open doors that we cannot enter, you must walk through it for us,” Komendant replied. He then offered the biblical example of the Apostle Paul and quoted from I Corinthians 9:22: “I have become all things to all men that by all possible means I might save some.”

The Deynekas had also often voiced to missionary colleagues and Western church audiences the distinctive aspects of ministry needs in Russia: understanding identity, offering hope, and building relationships. Fostering personal relationships they knew to be especially significant for Christian witness in the East, where opportunities to meet others and share the gospel whether in a formal office meeting or home visit invariably began with the Russian host sharing tea and sweets and exchanging information about family. Such understandings were expressed in an article Deyneka later recommended to inquirers about ministry in the East in which missiologist Peter Lowman wrote, “The rational, sequential, and doctrinal are all indispensable; but we may well communicate better initially with story-telling and testimonies, with the symbolic, the intuitive, and the supernatural. Even more important, what is said needs to be clothed in relationships, clothed in time spend together, hence the value of anything that can

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resemble an evangelistic weekend away. And most of all, of course, we transcend our limited Western backgrounds by presenting the one whose revelation touches every human level, Jesus.”27

In the spring of 1991, Christian educators and longtime Deyneka associates Ray and Cindy LeClair relocated from Wheaton to Moscow to serve as missionary liaisons between ISEES and the CCCU, and leaders in public and nascent Christian education in Russia. They also formed close relationships with Komendant and other Protestant leaders of the Evangelical Christian-Baptist Union, Association of Pentecostal Churches, and the US-based Association for Christian Schools International (ACSI). The LeClairs‟ first task was to facilitate arrangements for the Soviet-American conference on moral education and to work out logistical details with RMHE officials for delivery and distribution of 3,000 Christian Literature Libraries they had requested.28 The LeClairs found that dramatic political changes in the Baltic States had recently empowered officials throughout the USSR to decide matters without interference from bureaucrats in the Communist Party or at the All-Union level. Minister Kazantsev supplied them with a letter to be enclosed with each library parcel explaining their purpose and origin and introduced them to the ministry‟s supervisor for the project, Fyodor Steplikov.

The LeClairs and other Deyneka associates also met prominent Russian scholar and Russian Democratic Party founder Yuri Afanasyev whose USSR State Historical Archive Institute would serve as the clearinghouse for the nationwide distribution of the libraries. En route to the conference with Afanasyev, they passed boisterous groups of pro-democracy demonstrators waving the traditional blue and white colors of Old Russia. Although a national March 1991 referendum to continue the USSR had recently passed overwhelmingly in Russia and the Central Asian republics, the five Baltic and Caucasus states and Moldova had refused to participate, and the measure failed in Ukraine. (The referendum in Russia also established the office of president to which Boris Yelstin was elected two months later.) Afanasyev warmly greeted the Americans but warned that the demonstrations increasingly evident throughout the city and nation might not long be tolerated by Communist Party hardliners.29

After confirming details of the library distribution plan, Afanasyev spoke of his hope for the creation of a liberal arts Russian Humanities University that would contain departments specializing in Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish history and theology. Although suspicious of the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy due to its years of “manipulation by state authorities,” Afanasyev expressed high regard for the church‟s “evangelical wing” as represented by such individuals as Alexander Menn. For this reason, he found the Deynekas‟ proposal for joint publishing endeavors of works by Menn to be of particular significance. Meetings earlier in the week with Russian Orthodox Publishing Center staff at the Novodivedichy Monastery indicated contrasts in religious perspectives. The church‟s publishing headquarters were located in the building that housed Afanasyev‟s Institute prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. Chief Editor and Archpatriarch Innokentiy had suggested a collaborative publishing project with the Americans to produce a lavishly illustrated version of the 1499 St. Gennady Bible in Old Church Slavonic.30

In meetings at the Ministry of Higher Education the following afternoon, the Americans were received with special courtesies by ministers Kinelev and Kazantsev. They expressed similar resolve to establish a university guided by Christian values with Western assistance to renovate a former Orthodox monastery located along the Moscow River and to shape the academic program. “We are in special need of Reformation thinking and history,” Kinelev explained. “Our people do not know Luther, Calvin, or 256

these other great thinkers of that time. When our Marxists taught…, we heard only about the Peasants Revolt and how these uprisings were the first stirrings of the proletarian masses. Now we understand that such events were important but in some ways peripheral to the real significance of that time: the change in people‟s thinking because of reformist religious teaching.” The Americans returned to the Historical Archive Institute on March 19 to deliver lectures on Christianity and to present Afanasyev and his faculty with the first of the libraries of Christian literature that had recently arrived via Pauls‟s Bibel Mission in Gummersbach, Germany. Bernbaum also solicited CCCU institution libraries and faculty members to contribute remaindered and duplicate copies of academic books and journals on history, literature, and political science which resulted in the donation of thousands of works sought by the Archive Institute and RMHE affiliates.31

A Crust of Bread

The LeClairs established offices for Christian education initiatives at Matskovsky‟s newly organized Center for Humanitarian Values which was located near a primary school in the Sevastopol district of south central Moscow. Over the next several years, the two-story brick structure became a half- way house for innumerable groups of Western visitors representing a wide range of mission interests who sought the LeClairs for services ranging from organizational registration and translations—both were fluent in Russian, to citywide transit and medical treatment. Through introductions by Matskovsky and Kazantsev, the indefatigable couple became acquainted with dozens of Moscow schoolteachers, administrators, and internat (orphanage boarding school) staff in preparation for the inaugural Russian- American Conference on Moral Education held May 5-8, 1991 in the Sevastopol district. As the US colleges signatory to the Washington, DC protocol were heavily involved in organizing faculty and student exchanges with their Soviet counterparts, Bernbaum invited other coalition members with exemplary education departments to participate in sending delegates to the conference. Anita Deyneka contacted former associates at her alma mater, Seattle Pacific University, and at Wenatchee Public Schools in central Washington, where she had once taught high school English, and encouraged them to organize the delegation.32

For these reasons the American team consisted of SPU professors of education Arthur Ellis and Jeff Fouts, Tony Bryant, high school principal Dennis Bolz, and two other public school officials. The group was courteously welcomed in Moscow by an audience of some 300 Soviet educators representing elementary, secondary, and higher education who listened intently to presentations on the literature of C. S. Lewis and Nicholai Berdyaev, effective schooling practices in the US, and intervention programs for at-risk adolescents. Russian translators were provided by the US-Canada Institute and other agencies. (At least two were converted through the experience.) At the end of the morning session that featured two American and two Russian lectures, the floor was opened by the Russian moderator to questions from the audience. After several minutes of polite inquiry, the director of one of the city‟s largest Communist Party-affiliated Komsomol (Young Communist League) Clubs rose to passionately express her outrage that privileged Westerners might assume they had anything worthwhile to contribute to solving uniquely Soviet problems. The day‟s session hastily adjourned on a clouded note and the visitors were escorted to nearby banquet hall for a formal dinner.

The Americans were seated in a row facing city officials and conference hosts. Amiable conversations began until the same woman who had confronted the delegates entered the dining room and 257

sat in an open chair directly opposite Dr. Fouts. During the course of the meal, the customary round of toasts was offered, smiles reappeared, and the exchanges inevitably led down the rows to Fouts. He slowly rose, paused for several moments, and said, “This week celebrates a great holiday in your country—Victory Day, to mark the time we fought together as Allies in the Great Patriotic War. So I am going to tell you a story my father told me about that time on his deathbed last year.” When Alla Tickhanova‟s translation reached the word “deathbed,” an awkward hush descended upon the room. Fouts then quietly described an incident that had taken place in the final days of World War II as his father languished in a Nazi POW camp in eastern Germany. The guards had repeatedly threatened the prisoners‟ lives and in the closing weeks of the war they became severely malnourished. Rumors soon spread throughout the camp that the Red Army was rapidly approaching and one guard informed the captives that their treatment from the Soviets would be far more brutal than from the Germans. He offered to kill any prisoners to spare them further misery.

One morning the captives awoke to the sound of tanks approaching from the east and went outside their barracks to find that the guards had fled. Few of the men had strength enough to attempt escape. Eventually the lead tank rumbled up to the prison‟s front gate, paused momentarily, and then roared through to flatten the barrier. Red Army soldiers immediately flooded the compound and one found the elder Fouts lying on the stoop of a building, too weak to move any farther. The soldier carried a rifle and the two men looked at each other. The Russian reached inside his coat to pull out what Fouts thought surely was a pistol to finish him off. Instead, the man then smiled and drew out a crust of bread. “Moments before he died,” Fouts concluded, “my father asked me to someday do something good for the Russian people, and I came to return the favor.” The utter silence following Fouts‟s words was abruptly broken as Lyubov Petrovna, the confrontational Komsomol official, immediately stood and struggled through tears to say she had been among the young women of Moscow who had taken up arms against the Nazi invaders. That she had now met someone whose family had so suffered on behalf of her and the Russian people was a special honor. She hurried around the long tables, heartily embraced the American, and pledged her full support to the program organizers‟ intentions. The incident transformed the spirit of the symposium and attendance at the following day‟s sessions outgrew the capacity of the spacious auditorium.33

Minister Kazantsev and other officials from the ministries of education and Academy of Sciences participated in the proceedings and on May 8 the American and Russian team met separately with Vladimir Yegorev, President Gorbachev‟s Chief Advisor on Cultural and Educational Affairs. Yegorev expressed the administration‟s support for the conference and exchange initiatives and also expressed hope that groups of American teachers of English might come to work in Soviet colleges and schools. He also spoke about the present “difficult period” President Gorbachev was experiencing due to the prospect of withdrawal from the USSR by the Baltic States.

The final day of the May conference featured a presentation by Academician Guershunsky on the need for moral renewal in Soviet society in which he called on conference leaders to take concrete steps to perpetuate cooperative endeavors. “There is a need to radically revise the attitude… to international contacts, to establish and drastically extend multilateral and bilateral ties with foreign scholars and to take part in joint research projects. The narrow critical analysis of foreign pedagogics should give way to a constructive examination of channels of international cooperation in education.” Guershunsky also

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challenged his listeners to join together with academicians in unprecedented collaborative efforts to establish new educational settings long forbidden or restricted under the Soviet period. In place of schools that until 1990 had promoted a rigorous atheism, he called for the creation of private colleges, international pilot schools, lyceums, and even Sunday schools.34

The Americans also met during the week of the conference with Russian Minister of Public Education Edward Dneprov who pleaded for technical assistance for comprehensive secondary revisions of humanities, health, and economics curricula. (A similar proposal communicated a month later by Dneprov to the US Information Agency for books on political science and economics was later denied without explanation.) Dneprov also informed Sevastopol District Education Director and conference sponsor Galena Venedictova that he would approve future meetings between professors from Seattle Pacific University and other CCCU schools. At this time the Americans were also presented with an extraordinary appeal from Alexander Plugatar, chief of economic planning for the education ministry. The two-page document called upon the “citizens, politicians, businessmen, and organizations of the United States of America” for assistance since “Russia now goes through complex and stormy times caused by deep political and economic reforms” complicated by the nation‟s long “distortion and separation from world civilization” during the Communist period.

Vast numbers of dispossessed youth persisted throughout the Soviet era because of war and social dislocation, and the Ministry of Education maintained a vast national network of internat boarding schools. In the early 1990s, approximately one million youth resided in such settings who were threatened with severe shortages of food, clothing, and medicine. With declarations of independence by the Baltic republics in September 1991 followed by Ukraine on December 1, the Soviet Union would officially cease to exist on December 25, 1991. President Yeltsin abolished price controls in January and subsequent economic dislocations in the transition to a market economy seriously threatened availability of basic goods and services to ministry schools and children‟s hospitals. Education Ministry officials reported that conditions were especially severe in the Russian Far East given the logistical challenges of sending aid from European relief agencies. The crisis threatened to undo Russia‟s nascent democracy, and the Americans attending the conference pledged their willingness to share news of the need with government officials and their school constituencies in the States.35

Textbook publishing

Summary remarks closing the historic gathering were given by Dr. Alexander Abramov, an individual who would come to play a key role in educational reform efforts under Dneprov. Abramov offered sober analysis of deteriorating political and economic conditions throughout the country and the impact these events were having on the education system. His thesis was that only the prospect of a spiritual and moral transformation could reverse the destructive conditions caused by decades of communist oppression. The audience, which had grown restive hearing the platitudes offered by two previous Soviet academicians, listened raptly to the Abramov quiet eloquence. “Here we are like Moses in the wilderness,” he said, “but we do not have forty years to find deliverance.” Moments after receiving an ovation, Abramov approached the Americans and shared that he was an Orthodox believer who had been following the conference proceedings with special interest. He reiterated Yegorev‟s remarks about threats to progressive change in Russia from “dark forces” within the Communist Party and state security apparatus that strongly opposed Gorbachev and Yelstin and threatened to overthrow them. He then told of 259

his decision regarding the most significant step he could take in these days of openness to promote the spiritual transformation of the country through its youth: provide as many secondary students and teachers as possible with the Gospel of Mark as a “literature textbook,” a biblical “Proverbs and Parables” reader, and other works by Christian authors like Alexander Menn, with whom he had met only four days before the celebrated priest‟s brutal murder.36

Abramov‟s immediate goal was to print and distribute 500,000 copies of each title and was prepared to begin as soon as possible if at least $100,000 in initial funding from the West could be procured. Abramov‟s plea was communicated that week to Peter Deyneka, who was in Moscow at that time for meetings with Protestant church leaders. Deyneka arranged to meet with Abramov shortly before his return to the States and pledged his support to the ambitious undertaking. Days later he was aboard a return flight to the US and found himself seated next to Vancouver, BC businessman Garth Hunt, president of the International Bible Society of Canada. Deyneka shared Abramov‟s ideas with Hunt who told Deyneka his organization had been seeking opportunities to publish Bibles and other Christian literature in Russia rather than continuing the usual practice of printing books in North America and Europe for shipment abroad. Following subsequent meetings with Hunt‟s board of directors and communication between Deyneka and Abramov, the Canadian group pledged the entire amount. Within weeks of Abramov‟s initial proposal for the venture, the funds were transferred to the Institute for the Development of Educational Systems. A half-million copies of the complete Gospel of Mark, which appeared with short stories by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in The Gospel and Sacred Russian Literature, was published in March 1992. Other titles in the multi-volume series appeared later in the year including Proverbs and Parables and Father Menn‟s Son of Man.37

Peter Deyneka presented his “Tell, Sharing, Doing” address to mission board members and staff in the spring of 1991 in order to express the biblical basis, dire need, and unprecedented opportunity across the Soviet Union for holistic ministry. After recounting the Old and New Testament examples of anonymous witness and care-giving for Russia‟s “new day,” he also spoke of continued constraints to ministry experienced by the national church. After decades of hostile suppression in which believers had been denied opportunities for higher education and public service, participation of church leaders in these realms remained limited in spite of new-found freedoms emerging across the country. Deyneka shared that for this reason he had sought the counsel of Evangelical Christian-Baptist Union President Komendant only to be challenged by him to “walk through” the “open doors we cannot enter.” While inspiring to many of his co-workers, Deyneka found a mixed response from some staff and board members to the prospect of new ministry initiatives to Soviet political and educational officials and to other Christian denominations and confessions. Rather than limit the scope of service, therefore, Deyneka decided in September 1991 to organize a separate mission, Peter Deyneka Russian Ministries, in cooperation with several longtime missionary associates. The new organization‟s Eastern Europe affiliate, headquartered in Moscow, was named the Assotsiatsiya Dukhovnoye Vozrozhdeneya (Association for Spiritual Renewal).

The Deynekas encouraged plans to expand exchanges and the moral education conferences and Coalition school representatives presented during September in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They also facilitated a November meeting in Moscow between ACSI International Programs Director Phil Renicks and the LeClairs. Their discussion would lead to the LeClairs‟ affiliation with ACSI one year later and

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subsequent organization by the end of the decade of over 100 elementary and secondary Christian schools in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus. John Bernbaum also journeyed to Russia in late 1991 on sabbatical from CCCU as a Visiting Scholar at Nizhni Novgorod State University to teach a ten-week course on “Democracy and Moral Values.” Readings for the class included such works as The Federalist Papers, D‟Tocqueville‟s Democracy in America, and contemporary documents. At the same time, Bernbaum‟s wife, Marge, served as visiting professor and taught “The Life of Jesus” for the Department of History and Religion.

Cover Proof from The Gospel and Sacred Russian Literature (1992)

The Bernbaums‟ time on the Volga also coincided with a visit to NNSU by Professor Kent Hill, now executive director of the US Institute for Democracy and Religion, who had recently moved to Russia with his family. All three participated in a weeklong seminar on “Education, Christianity, and Social Change” held at the university in May that was attended by overwhelming numbers of students and professors. The Bernbaums then returned to the US and organized a meeting of the “CCCU Russia Initiative Strategy Council” the following September to facilitate an expansion of the Council‟s exchange programs with member schools. The group also considered establishment of a CCCU foreign study center 261

in Russia based on the 1990 joint “Protocol of Intentions” and the organization‟s successful models operating in other countries. The Council‟s perseverance laid the foundation for the Russia-American Christian University, Russia‟s first state accredited interdenominational institution of higher learning, which opened in Moscow five years later.38

Praying with the KGB

Peter and Anita Deyneka visited the Pacific Northwest in August 1991 to raise support for the new undertakings and were in Anita Deyneka‟s hometown of Plain, Washington on Sunday, August 19. After speaking at church that evening, they heard a radio announcement about a coup underway against Gorbachev led by Communist Party hardliners including Defense Minister Gennady Yanayev and Vice- President Dmitry Yazov. As Afanasyev and Abramov had earlier warned mission workers, Gorbachev‟s failure to reign in the breakaway Baltic republics had launched clandestine plans among Communist Party hardliners to overthrow him and turn the clock back from democratic reform to authoritarian repression. While the dramatic events of the August coup played out before a world audience, observers worldwide witnessed how the convictions of a small group of democratic defenders expressed the aspirations of many to confront the corrupt remnants of the communist system.

Yanayev, who declared himself president of the country, depended on military commanders throughout the Moscow region to execute his orders, but was informed by his chief of political administration, Air Force Colonel Nikolai Stolyarov, that neither he nor area field commanders would obey the plotters‟ commands. Stolyarov also informed coup leaders that Mstislav Rostropovich and other prominent advocates of democracy were forming to protect the Russian Parliament Building from any attack and that he would support them. Among the most prominent “White House” defenders were unarmed dissident priests including Father Borisov and Gleb Yakunin. Stolyarov then flew to the Crimea, where Gorbachev had been vacationing, and arranged for his safe return to Moscow where Yanayev and other coup leaders were deposed on August 21. In return for his service, Gorbachev promoted Stolyarov to the rank of major general and named him vice-chairman of the KGB in order to reform the Soviets‟ dreaded intelligence service.

Among Stolyarov‟s first acts was to help organize a national “Day for Remembering Victims of Repression” on October 30, 1991. In connection with this event he hosted a delegation of Western religious leaders invited by the Supreme Soviet to meet with USSR President Gorbachev, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and government leaders like Stolyarov. “In the difficult, often agonizing transitional period that our country is experiencing,” the invitation read, “…spiritual and moral values acquire a great, if not paramount significance…. We know the role which your Christian organizations are playing as you follow the great words of Christ, „Faith without works is dead.‟ You are able to assist in the social development of a country and you are able to establish friendly relations with other countries, including the Soviet Union. All of this has caused us to address you with words of brotherhood and cooperation.” The US “Christian Bridge” delegation was led by Peter and Anita Deyneka, Michael Morgulis, and Rev. Alex Leonovich. Other participants included John Bernbaum, Kent Hill, Philip Yancey, Editor-at-Large of Christianity Today, and a dozen other American evangelical leaders.

One of the group‟s first meetings was with Stolyarov at KGB headquarters adjacent to infamous Lubyanka prison. The stocky reformer opened the meeting with a reference to the recent historic events in 262

the city: “We realize that too often we‟ve been negligent in accepting those of the Christian faith. August 1991 shows us what can happen. But political questions cannot be decided until there is sincere repentance, a return to faith by the people. That is the cross I must bear. …In the study of scientific atheism, there was the idea that religion divides people. Now we see the opposite: love for God can only unite. Someone we must put together the missionary role—absolutely critical for us now—and also learn from Marx that man can‟t appreciate life if he is hungry.” Stolyarov spoke further of repentance by referring to the controversial Tengiz Abuladze film by that name detailing the KGB‟s war against religion under Stalin during which 42,000 priests were killed. The movie closes with a poignant scene in which a man informs a peasant woman asking for directions to a church that she is in the wrong place. She replies, “What good is a road that doesn‟t lead to a church?”39

Following several days of meetings with other government officials in Moscow and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church at Zagorsk Monastery, President Gorbachev hosted the American delegation at an elegant morning reception inside the Kremlin. After initial introductions, the Soviet leader offered thanks for their efforts to build a spiritual bridge between both nations, and confessed his “worries” about deteriorating conditions throughout the country. “We are in a crisis, including a spiritual crisis, as the country undergoes so many changes so quickly. Civil strife and divisions are springing up everywhere. In the past change in my country has come with a circle of blood; now we are trying to bring about change democratically.” Gorbachev expressed his belief in atheism, but also “profound respect” for the beliefs of his guests. “This time, more than ever before,” he continued, “we need support from our partners, and I value solidarity with religion. …We welcome your help, especially when it is accompanied by deeds.” He closed by restating the words of James 2:20: “„Faith without deeds is dead.‟”40

The Americans pledged to “carry back a message” to American Christians, “and to do our best to direct aid to the Soviet Union—both spiritual and material.” During the same week, Patriarch Aleksy, Russian Protestant leaders, and the Deynekas attended meetings in Moscow to commemorate the reopening of the ecumenical Russian Bible Society. Learning of its mission to print and distribute Bibles but need for financial support, General Stolyarov contacted the Deynekas for assistance to provide New Testaments to members of the Russian armed forces. The missionary couple arranged for meetings between Stolyarov‟s representatives and officials of the International Bible Society in Canada and the United States who funded the first press run of 100,000 Soldier‟s Bibles in 1992. Stolyarov‟s efforts also significantly contributed to the reemergence of the Russian Armed Forces Chaplaincy program, which had not functioned since the First World War.

Stolyarov met again with the Deynekas and Morgulis in February 1992 when the three Americans were guests of the Gorbachev Foundation, an organization publically committed to solving global economic and social problems, and to “cultural and spiritual development.” During the reception, Anita Deyneka was seated next to Raisa Gorbachev, who spoke defensively of her husband‟s leadership and the belief she held that he would have been able to reform the communist system and preserve human rights. She told of the recent coup attempt against her husband and muttered, “He is not Jesus Christ, but he had his Judases.” At the same occasion, Stolyarov informed the Deynekas of the potential for dangerous social and political instability in the wake of thousands of returning servicemen from recently decommissioned Russian military units that had been serving in Warsaw Pact nations. Formal dissolution

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of the Soviet dominated Eastern Bloc alliance the previous July had contributed to high unemployment and widespread dissatisfaction among veterans who were unable to adequately provide for their families. “The situation is critical,” he observed, “but there is hope and positive change; the first steps have been taken on the long road back to the civilized world,” but specifically cited problems with lack of housing, provisions, and “the absence of hope for the future” for thousands of men and women armed and trained in the use of modern weapons.

Three million people were unemployed in Russia by late 1991 and retirees were attempting to subsist on monthly pensions averaging 250 rubles when the official exchange rate rendered a ruble worth about one US cent. Moreover, the 1991 Russian grain harvest was 30% below expectations, and the social fabric of a nation with 27,000 nuclear weapons seemed to be careening into the darkness. Stolyarov noted that Secretary of State James Baker had convened an international conference the previous month to avert catastrophe in Russia, but the aid pledged by the US and coalition of NATO members and Asian allies would take weeks or even months to arrive. The general ended by reminding his foreign friends of the words of Ivan in Dostoevsky‟s The Brothers Karamazov, “…that there is nothing in this world worth the tears of a child.”41

Operation КareLift

To facilitate humanitarian work in the Russian Far East in response to government special appeals for aid to internat boarding schools for orphans and children‟s hospitals in that region, Deyneka Russian Ministries operated a field office in Washington State in late 1991. With Stolyarov‟s request for assistance to military families in Western Russia, this branch of the mission simultaneously undertook to provide returning servicemen in the Kaluga district with crop and garden seed and medical supplies. PDRM staff contacted commodity producers throughout the Pacific Northwest and received an outpouring of goodwill from residents who sought to intervene on behalf of their former Cold War adversaries. The Deynekas reached out to Arthur Ellis at Seattle Pacific University who was then organizing the SPU International Center for Curriculum Studies to provide a forum and funding to continue the CCCU Russian-American Conference Series on Moral Education. Ellis had recently returned from Russia where he organized the second conference in Moscow under the aegis of the RMHE and Matskovsky‟s center, and was making plans to expand the work with a third round of conferences in Moscow and Kiev.

The meetings were lauded by Ellis‟s Russian counterparts for the balanced presentation of various viewpoints on pedagogy and the organizers‟ cooperative efforts to promote civil discourse about educational methods to promote democratic governance, tolerance of minority views, and religious liberty. Ellis procured support through Seattle philanthropist Richard Spady and others to bring notable Russian academicians to the United States including Boris Guershunsky and Ernest Grigorian where they taught and conducted research at SPU and other CCCU schools. Ellis and his Russian colleagues then organized annual cadres of recent graduates from Seattle Pacific University and CCCU institutions in the US and from Canada to teach English and other subjects in Moscow internat and municipal schools. For his civic and scholarly contributions, Ellis was subsequently made a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Education and received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of the Academy of Education in Moscow.42

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Ellis had witnessed firsthand the deteriorating situation of the Russian populace and recurrently sought means to materially assist students and teachers, especially those living and working at Moscow‟s and St. Petersburg‟s many internaty where conditions had grown increasingly desperate. He had longtime associations with Seattle-based Crista Ministries, a multi-faceted Christian education and humanitarian enterprise that operated World Concern. Ellis‟s liaison between Deyneka Ministries and World Concern led to a work with Stolyarov and his associate, Major General Victor Andreev of the Russian Military Reserve Association, to procure eighteen tons of crop and vegetable seed from Northwest growers for transport to the Kaluga region where significant numbers of discharged soldiers were allowed to settle on former collective farms. Valued at more than one million dollars, the shipment was among the first transportation projects successfully undertaken by the US State Department‟s Fund for Democracy and Development and touted as a model for secure and effective delivery.43

Deyneka mission staff in cooperation with CCCU affiliates and Russian education and social service agencies sought similar means at this time to direct humanitarian aid to boarding schools and children‟s hospitals in the major cities of the Russian Far East including Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Ussirisk, and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Since the US State Department did not prioritize funds for trans-Pacific delivery to Russia, transportation expense represented a significant initial stumbling block to these efforts. For this reason, the Deynekas reached out to longtime mission and Seattle Pacific University supporter Bruce Kennedy, who had recently retired as president and CEO of Alaska Air Group, and whose daughter, Karin, had worked for Deyneka Ministries. Kennedy had personally directed Alaska‟s 1988 inauguration of the first regular flights by an American carrier to the Russia cities of Magadan, Providenya, and Khabarovsk. He privately confessed these had been “more of a humanitarian than business endeavor” in order to foster better relations between both countries.

Although Kennedy explained that the cost of air cargo for delivering relief supplies would be prohibitive, he advised contacting Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro, whom he had recently accompanied on a state trade and goodwill visit to Sakhalin Island. Munro had extensive experience in Russia since leading a “People to People” group of Northwest business and community leaders to Russia and Ukraine in 1984, and had recently conferred in Moscow with officials of Yeltsin‟s administration on election reform in Russia. Like Ellis, Munro and Kennedy had witnessed the plight of the Russian populace in the difficult time of transition to democratic systems and a market economy. Upon learning of the Deynekas‟ interest in providing assistance, Munro quipped, “Anything you can get to a West Coast port I‟ll get over there if I have to take it over on my back!” The pledge would be often invoked by mission staff in the coming weeks.44

A non-profit relief campaign christened “Operation КareLift” was launched in January 1992 involving a partnership among Deyneka Russian Ministries, the Office of Washington State Secretary of State, and Northwest educators and students. Commodity cooperative members from Northwest wheat, barley, pea, lentil, and other producers donated seventy-seven tons of dry measure and dehydrated food products packaged as nutritional soup mixes, flour, and in bulk. Washington and Alaskan Rotarians packed an additional twelve tons as food parcels for families in greatest need. Other private donors contributed forty tons of clothing and substantial amounts of medical supplies for total deliveries exceeding 250 tons by the end of March. In order to transport the cargo, Munro and his deputy, Michelle Burkheimer, successfully solicited support from the Russian-American joint venture Far East Shipping

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Rosemarie Oehler Adcock became our special friend through the PDRM Operation KareLift. This is one of several paintings she did to raise funds for humanitarian relief in Russia. Her work is deeply influenced by the style of Ilya Repin, who was her Russian art instructor‟s tutor.

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Company which operated КareLift-bearing vessels departing the ports of Astoria, Gray‟s Harbor, Tacoma, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC.

The generous outpouring of assistance coupled with reports of dire needs in the Russian Far East prompted Munro to request military airlift flights from Washington State to Khabarovsk. These were personally authorized by President Bush in late February 1992 using a C-130 Hercules cargo plane based at McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma—the first time American military aircraft had landed on Russian territory since World War II. Shipments of all commodities and medical supplies were accompanied in the Russian Far East by Deyneka Ministries staff and distributed to boarding schools and children‟s hospitals by the unlikely combination of members from two institutions determined by officials in both countries to be the most reliable—Russian army personnel and interdenominational Merciful Samaritan Mission workers. Russian and American reporters extensively covered the campaign in articles featured in Izvestia, The Seattle Times, and Spokesman-Review Although the total volume of relief was a fraction of that pledged by the US government, the project was of special symbolic value to a Russian government beleaguered across its vast territory by mounting civil unrest. Almost all other Western aid at the time was being directed to European Russia while КareLift focused on the hardest hit areas in the Russian Far East. Moreover, the work was almost entirely undertaken by a partnership of private donors and volunteers with state officials, school administrators, and Deyneka Ministry contacts in the US and Russia.45

In June 1992, Boris Yeltsin was invited by President Bush to Washington, DC and addressed a joint session of the US Congress at which he received thirteen standing ovations. He announced that “the idol of communism, which spread social strife, enmity, and unparalleled brutality everywhere, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed.” Yeltsin expressed special thanks for American efforts to relieve Russia‟s economic crisis, and offered explicit quid pro quo for his continued support of US foreign policy objectives in financial aid to avoid “new trillions of dollars for the arms race” should democracy fail in Russia. The moment marked the firmest pro-Western foreign policy statement made in recent history, and was accompanied by the Russian president‟s announcement that Russia had already begun to unilaterally dismantle SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Such auspicious moves in the international political arena prompted new opportunities to establish forums for educators and ministry workers interested in Eastern Europe and Russia. Wheaton‟s Mark Elliot met in June with the Deynekas, Peter Kuzmic, director of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osiejek, Croatia, and others regarding plans to publish what became the East-West Church and Ministry Report. This scholarly publication, launched in early 1993, provided valuable case studies of effective outreach, information on the interface of Orthodox and Protestant theology and practice, and demographics on Russian social, educational, and religious topics.46

President Yeltsin visited to the United States a second time in September 1994 to address the United Nations and for the summit meeting with President Clinton. Yeltsin had surprised White House officials just days prior to his visit with a request to visit Seattle in spite of myriad invitations from other larger Eastern cities. On the morning of September 29, Yeltsin‟s Ilyushin jetliner emblazoned with Russia‟s new double-headed Eagle insignia landed in Everett and he was taken to Seattle to attend a luncheon in his honor at the Westin Hotel hosted by US Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Governor Mike Lowry, and Ralph Munro. “He threw away his prepared speech,” Lowry observed, and spoke

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extemporaneously to the enthusiastic crowd of 800 invited guests. The Russian president sought to encourage investment by American and Russian entrepreneurs in Russia as a secure place of political stability, and thanked his listeners for their special role in contributing to progressive civic change. “We have a real opportunity to foster friendship and democracy, a real chance to help make the world a better place,” Yeltsin observed, and then referenced the uncommon mission recently undertaken by the region‟s citizenry: “Your willingness to help in our hour of need was a major factor in my decision to normalize relations between our two countries.”47

Yeltsin and Russia‟s US Ambassador Vladimir Lukin then met with representatives of Operation Кarelift and the CCCU‟s Russia Initiative to offer thanks for their partnerships to improve relations between both countries. The encounter provided an opportunity for an aid worker to retell an incident that had taken place when the first shipment of КareLift supplies was unloaded at the port of Vladivostok. A group of burly stevedores clad in wool coats and black stocking hats had labored throughout the morning to hoist pallets laden with foodstuffs out of the hold of the Russian ship Pestova. American supervisors kept an uneasy distance as the proud workmen transported load after load from the vessel to railroad cars along the dock. No conversation passed between the two parties until an American found himself sitting near the stoic leader of the dockworkers who had taken a break on a mountain of burlap sacks filled with lentils. The two maintained an awkward silence for some moments until the Russian pointed skyward to a large bird circling high above the ship. “In Russian folklore this bird‟s appearance is a good omen,” he said with a smile, and then ruefully added, “You know, we should have been friends all these years.”48

Conclusions

When asked to characterize the significance of the various aspects of the CCCU Russia Initiative since its inception in 1990, Dr. Anita Deyneka spoke in terms of the distinct challenges and opportunities of service in the former USSR. “Contributions to long-term progressive change through Western contacts can only be developed by fostering personal relationships of trust and consequence that endure through the changing winds of international politics. The efforts of persons like John Bernbaum, Arthur Ellis, Kent Hill, and other participants in CCCU endeavors bore fruit because they sought to forge friendships and understand Russian culture.” She cited their familiarity with Russia‟s classical writers and poets, Orthodoxy, and regard for the complexities of the Russian personality”; and profound appreciation for its peoples‟ historical and cultural contributions to Western and especially American society. Given these perspectives, “…the Russia Initiative has been experienced on both sides of the globe as a full partnership of substantial mutual benefit.” In this way, the next generation of Russian educators has been introduced to the Christian faith and new ideas about citizenship, while Americans have learned the relevance of Vygotsky‟s reflective practice and about Tolstoy‟s Peasant School pedagogy.49

Russian Christian scholar Alexander Melnichuk characterizes a distinctive aspect of the CCCU Russia Initiative and the Deynekas‟ diverse ministries as examples of “biblical dialogue.” He notes that Russia and other former republics of the Soviet Union were inundated in the 1990s with Western missionaries, teachers, and businessmen who generally came with good intentions. “Too often, however,” he observes, “they came with confidence in their message but indifference to our society and its context. And someone‟s monologue is not biblical dialogue.” Melnichuk cites the New Testament example of respectful exchange in the relationships between Peter and Cornelius, Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, and Paul with the Athenians. Believers in each case “first listened to others‟ needs” and, in the case of 268

Paul, sought “to understand prevailing philosophies and the national culture” in order to be more effective and considerate servants. Moreover, they often pledged themselves to long-term, sustaining associations with their hosts.50

Evidence of such associations has also been evident in more tangible ways. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist disaster, not only was Vladimir Putin‟s call offering assistance to President Bush the first one from a foreign power, but numerous Russian scholars and teachers immediately contacted their American counterparts with words of solidarity and encouragement. Three years later when Chechen terrorists killed over 300 children and other hostages in the Beslan School Massacre, SPU‟s Arthur Ellis was just days away from convening the school‟s annual Conference on Citizenship Education, successor to the series he had helped launch a decade earlier in Russia. The crisis precluded attendance by delegates from Russia, but others from China, Nigeria, England, and the US participated. The disturbing photograph of a bullet-riddled classroom in Beslan prompted a proposal by conference participants to raise funds to provide a backpack of school supplies for each of some 900 hostage survivors. To facilitate reliable distribution, Ellis and his colleagues contacted Anita Deyneka and ASR President Sergey Rakhuba regarding the idea and learned of efforts underway to establish a trauma crisis counseling center in Beslan. They encouraged the educators‟ campaign which was undertaken in cooperation with both organizations as the “Backpacks of Blessings” project. Within weeks the initial appeal was oversubscribed and ultimately provided 5,000 backpacks to children in areas of North Ossetia most affected by the tragedy.51

Missionary author Paul Semenchuk laments Westerners who “triumphantly invade Russia without any preparation, not having read one Russian book, not even one book about Russia.” Cultural relevance takes time and dedication, acquired by individual and societal “caring, curiosity, observation, scrutiny, questioning, [and] association.” Qualities such as these evident in the life of CCCU Russia Initiative participants spawned a range of mutually beneficial humanitarian and educational endeavors since the inception of the project in spite of recurrent political, religious, and economic challenges. “Work like this demonstrates the possibilities that can emerge from risking new friendships,” observes Diana Antonova, director of international relationships for the University of the Russian Academy of Education, “and holds the promise of still greater things to come.”52

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1Peter Deyneka, Jr., oral history, Wheaton, Illinois, December 13, 1987; Peter and Anita Deyneka Collection, File T1, Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. 2Gorbachev relates his perspective on the “erosion of moral values” in the USSR during the 1980s in Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper & Row,1987). Informative studies on the emergence of glasnost include Roy Medvedev and Giuletto Chiesa, Time of Change: An Insider’s View of Russia’s Transformation, New York: Random House, 1989; Alec Nove, Glasnost in Action: Cultural Renaissance in Russia, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989; and Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire, New York: Random House, 1995. 3Anita Deyneka, “USSR Trip Report,” Box 6, File 2, September 1989, Peter and Anita Deyneka Collection, Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections, Wheaton, Illinois; hereafter cited as PADC/WCA. 4“Khristianstvo,” Russkaia Mysl, No. 3850, October 19, 1990; James Billington, Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope, August 1991, New York: The Free Press, 1992. 5Alexander Semchenko to Peter Deyneka, July 5, 1991, Box 5, File A3; and Anita Deyneka, “USSR Trip Report,” September 1989, Box 5, File IV2, PADC/WCA. 6Alexander Menn, Syn Chelovecheskii, 1990:50. 7 Anita Deyneka, “AAASS Address,” Box 6, File A5, November 1989, PDAC/WCA. 8 Karen Longman, “USSR Trip Report,” March 1990:6, Education Ministries File, Peter Deyneka Russian Ministries, Carol Stream, Illinois; hereafter cited as EMF/PDRM. 9Karen Longman, “USSR Trip Report,” March 1990:8-11, EMF/PDRM. 10Ibid:12-14. 11Ibid:20-21. 12Coalition representatives who had responded to Bernbaum‟s invitation to participate included Allen Carden, Spring Arbor College; Mary Dueck, Fresno Pacific College, Orval Gingerich, Eastern Mennonite College; William Harper, Gordon College; Clarence Hebert, Tabor College; Harold Heie, Messiah College; Stephen Hoffman, Taylor College; Rex Rogers, King‟s College; and David Wollman, Geneva College. Consistent with Soviet practice at the time, one of the delegates who traveled in the guise of an education ministry “public information officer” was found to be a KGB agent assigned to monitor activities of individuals in the group. 13Sandra Hoeks, “Building Educational Bridges Between the US and USSR,” Christian College Coalition Bulletin (Special Section), December, 1990:1. 14Elaine Stahl, Washington, DC Trip Report, September 1991:5, EMF/PDRM. 15Washington Post, September 27, 1991. 16”Protocol of Intentions,” October 3, 1990, Delo Gosudarstvennogo Protocola, Assotsiatsiya Dukhovnoye Vozrozhdeniye (Government Protocol File, Association for Spiritual Renewal), Moscow, Russia; hereafter cited as DGP/ADV. 17Sandra Hoeks, 1990:1-3. 18Elaine Stahl, interview with Yevgenii I. Kazantsev, October 2, 1991, EMF/PDRM. 19Elaine Stahl, “Russia Trip Report,” October 1990:2, EMF/PDRM. The vehemence of opposition among some clerics to Menn is illustrated in Pilar Bonet, “Poslednee Interviu o. Aleksandra Menia,” Panorama, 1990 (13):2. The likelihood of ideological or political motivations of his assassination is examined in Sergei Bychkov, “Khronika neraskrytogo Ubiistva,” Moskovsky Komsomolets, October 25, 1991:2. 20 Sandra Hoeks, “Soviet Officials Explore Spiritual Values in Higher Education.” Christian College Coalition Bulletin (Special Section). November 1990:1-4; John Bernbaum, “Report on Sabbatical in Russia, February-May 1992,” May 29, 1992; Russian Conference Series File, Center for Global Curriculum Studies, School of Education, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, Washington, hereafter cited as CGS/SPU. 21Uchitel’skaia Gazeta, October 22, 1990:1. 270

22Elaine Stahl, “Russia Trip Report,” October 1990:7-8, EMF/PDRM. Titles in the Coalition‟s HarperCollins college text series distributed in Russia included Ronald A. Wells, History Through the Eyes of Faith, 1989; Susan Gallagher, Literature Through the Eyes of Faith, 1989; and Daryl G. Myers and Malcolm A. Jeeves, Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith, 1990. A fourth volume in the series, Business Through the Eyes of Faith by Richard Chewning, was published in 1990 and translated into Russia for use in RACU‟s business and economics classes. 23Elaine Stahl, “Russia Trip Report,” October 1990:13-14. 24Anita Deyneka, “USSR Trip Report,” October 1990:14-16, Box 6, File C2, PADC/WCA. Although an ardent advocate spiritual renewal in Russia, Kazantsev remained staunchly opposed to the breakup of the Soviet Union and scrupulously sought approval at the All-Union level for his reform initiatives. 25Anita Deyneka, “Lausanne Address,” Box 6, File A10, PADC/WCA. 26William Harper, “Reflections,” Christian College Coalition Bulletin (Special Edition). December 1990:4. 27Peter Lowman, “Perceptions of a Great Country: Hunches and Pointers in Understanding Russia,” East- West Church & Ministry Report, Summer 2000:3. 28 Cindy LeClair to Peter Deyneka, March 25, 1991, Box 5, File A3, PADC/WCA. 29Richard Scheuerman, “USSR Trip Report,” March 1991:5, CGS/SPU. 30Ibid:11-12. Under Afanasyev‟s guidance the State Historical-Archival Institute in Moscow became the Russian State Humanities University. In his capacity as head of both institutions, Afanasyev decried the purchase of distribution rights by foreign business interests. See his “Proizvol v obrashchenii s obshchestvennoi pamiatiu nedopustim,” Izvestia, March 9, 1992. 31Richard Scheuerman, “USSR Trip Report,” March 1991:14-15, CGS/SPU. The libraries also included works by C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton translated into Russian. Requests by Afanasyev, Matskovsky, and other Russian pedagogical officials for educational materials in Russian or English on the democratic process were delivered by Deyneka Ministry representatives to the US Information Agency in Washington, DC. Agency staff responded indifferently since Russia was outside the Print Materials Branch‟s normal sphere of operations and because the use of discretionary funds for such an undertaking was not a priority. Washington State Senator Slade Gorton subsequently pressed for such allocations in the summer of 1992 which Congress authorized, but funds for the measure were never appropriated. See Congressional Record, 102 Cong. 2 sess., No. 97 Part II (July 1, 1992). 32Anita Deyneka, “Notes on Conference Proceedings,” May 1991, Box 6, File 12, PADC/WCA. 33Jeff Fouts, oral history, Seattle, Washington, October 4, 1993, CGS/SPU. Interviews with Anita Deyneka, Ivan Fahs, and other conference participants were published in Ada Baskina, “Moral Values in a Changing Society, Soviet Life, June 1991 (6:417). 34 Boris Guershunsky, “The Humanization of Education in the School of the Future,” 1991, pp. 28-29, unpublished typescript, CGS/SPU. The success of the conference in Moscow prompted Minister Kazantzev to travel to the US in late May 1991 to confer with teacher training faculty at the National College of Education in Evanston, Illinois; Seattle Pacific University, and at Michigan‟s Spring Arbor College where he delivered the school‟s commencement address. 35Richard Scheuerman, “USSR Trip Report,” March 1991:3; Alexander Plugatar and Igor Ivanov, “Appeal to Citizens of the United States of America,” RSFSR Ministry of Education, May 7, 1991, CGS/SPU. Dneprov was Gorbachev‟s first appointed public education minister in the post-Communist era. The ministry administered the nation‟s elementary and secondary school system while Kinelev‟s Ministry of Higher Education oversaw Russia‟s institutes, colleges, and universities. The Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences was nominally under RMHE‟s jurisdiction but operated with considerable autonomy. Religious and benevolent social service organizations, which had proliferated in Tsarist Russia after the 1861 liberation of the serfs, ceased to officially exist after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. As expressed in the 1927 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the Communist Party considered such assistance to by “hypocritically given by representatives of the ruling classes” and

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inimitable to “revolutionary struggle.” Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia,vol. 5 (Moscow: Sovetskia Entsiklopediia, 1927), p. 466. 36“Obrashchyeneye k Ledyeram Xresteanskekh Dvezhyennii SSA”, September 19, 1991, DGLP/ASR; Richard Scheuerman, “USSR Trip Report,” March 1991:34-5. 37Alexander Abramov to Peter Deyneka, June 4, 1991; and Ivan Ivanov, Evgeny Zyablov, and Ray LeClair, “Protocol of Agreement between the RSFSR Ministry of Education and Institute of Soviet and East European Studies,” Moscow, Russia, July 5, 1991, DPG/ADV; Randy Frame, “Christian Values Open Doors to Classrooms,” Christianity Today, March 9, 1992; Ray and Cindy LeClair, oral history, Kyiv, Ukraine, October 23, 2008, CGS/SPU. 38 Kent Hill subsequently served as president of Eastern Nazarene College and as USAID Assistant Administrator for Global Health under President George W. Bush. RACU‟s first classes were held at Moscow‟s People‟s Friendship University in June 1995 through the support of PFU rector Nikolai Trofimov and Yevgeny Kunitsyn, international programs director, who had been members of the original 1990 RMHE-CCCU delegation. RACU operations later relocated to Moscow‟s Christian Ministry Center where its first students graduated in May 2000 with Rev. Peter Deyneka offering the commencement address. The missionary statesman died of lymphoma cancer on December 23, 2000. 39Philip Yancey, Praying with the KGB: A Startling Report from a Shattered Empire, Portland: Multnomah Press, 1992:31-33, 64-67; Christianity Today, January 13, 1992:17-25. 40Ibid. 41The original Russian Bible Society was established by Alexander I in January 1813 amidst the turmoil of Napoleon‟s invasion of Russia and occupation of Moscow through the encouragement of Scottish Congregationalist John Patterson and the tsar‟s influential advisor and mystical Pietist, Prince Alexander Golitzyn. Although the society was disbanded in 1826 after political and religious opposition under the conservative rule of Nicholas I. Nevertheless, the society was an influential force for 19th century popular education and publishing in Russia. See Stewart J. Brown, “Movements in Christian Awakening in Revolutionary Europe, 1790-1815,” in Enlightenment, Reawakening, and Revolution, 1660-1815 of The Cambridge History of Christianity (2006:587-88). Anita Deyneka, oral history (Raisa Gorbachev quote), Wheaton, Illinois, August 8, 2007, CGS/SPU; Nikolai Stolyarov to Peter Deyneka and Michael Morgulis, April 10, 1992, CGS/SPU. For an overview of conditions faced by Russia during the winter of 1991-92 and the international response, see Russell Driver, “DSRD and the Russian Winter,” unpublished typescript, January 1992, CGS/SPU. Stolyarov was elected to the Russian Duma in 1993 representing a Moscow oblast and became an outspoken advocate of democratic reform. He was seriously injured in a political assassination attempt in 1999 and forced to resign his position. 42Duane Goehner, oral history, Redmond, Washington, March 10, 2005, CGS/SPU. Annual sessions of the Russian-American Conference on Moral Education have continued under Ellis‟s leadership at Seattle Pacific University‟s Center for Global Education Studies. Since 1994, meetings have been held in Moscow, Shuya, and Sochi; and in Kyiv, Ukraine. The annual SPU teacher cadres begun in 1993 were led by Duane Goehner and Karman Friessen, who had lived with other team members in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and continued until 1998. In 2000, Friessen was introduced by the Deynekas to Atlanta psychologist and businessman Dr. Ron Braund who was instrumental in establishing that year the CoMission for Children at Risk, a network of one hundred organizations seeking to coordinate outreach to orphans and street children in Eastern Europe. Friessen became program director for the CoMission which grew by 2008 into an association of over four hundred NGOs and mission agencies involved in HIV/AIDS education, foster care, and orphan outreach ministries. 43Lewis Townshend (Fund for Democracy and Development) to US Non-Governmental Organization Providers, October 4, 1993; George Law to Lisa Sawicki, November 1, 1993; and V(ictor) Andreev to Yuri Sabotnikov, February 2, 1994, CGS/SPU. The companies providing substantial quantities of seed included the Charles Lily, Ed Hume Seeds, and Northrup-King.

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44Anita Deyneka, oral history, Wheaton, Illinois, August 8, 2007; CGS/SPU. For the role of Alaska Airlines and Bruce Kennedy in Russia see New York Times, March 30, 1997; and Seattle Times, June 30, 2007. 45Mikhail Morgulis and Constantine Lubenchenko to Ralph Munro, Russian Parliament Center, Moscow, February 15, 1992; Michelle Burkheimer to Vladimir Prudki and Sergei Savinskii, Olympia, Washington, February 27, 1992; Ralph Munro to Interested Citizens of Washington State, Washington Secretary of State Memorandum, February 21, 1992; Heather Bomberger, “Humanitarian Aid to Russia,” US Senate Memorandum, Washington, DC, March 31, 1992; David Cannon, “[FESCO] Humanitarian Delivery and Dispersal of Cargo,” February 27, 1992; Operation КareLift File, CGS/SPU. For a report on the origins and impact of the КareLift project, see journalist Eric Sorenson‟s eight-page feature edition “Feeding a Dream,” Spokesman-Review, April 26, 1992. Sorenson traveled to Khabarovsk and Vladivostok in early March to observe distribution of donated supplies to boarding schools, orphanages, and children‟s hospitals. For his contributions in promoting Russian-American diplomatic and business relationships and КareLift relief efforts, Munro was presented the Russian Medal of Friendship by President Yeltsin in 1998. 46 Mark Elliot, “The East-West Church & Ministry Report: History, Coverage, and Readership,” East- West Church & Ministry Report, Spring 2003 (11:2):14-15. 47Michael Dobbs, “Yeltsin Appeals for American Aid,” The Washington Post, June 18, 1992; Imbert Matthee, “Visit Here a Sign,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 29, 1994; Arthur Gorlick and Karen West, “Yeltsin‟s Pitch: Let‟s Trade, Missile Era Behind Us,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 30, 1994; Mike Lowry, oral history, Seattle, Washington, December 3, 2007, CGS/SPU. For an overview of Russia‟s relations with the US under Yelstin contrasted with Gorbachev and Putin, see Archie Brown and Lilia Fedorovna Shevtsova, eds. Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia’s Transition. Washington, D. C.: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001. 48Ralph Munro, oral history, Olympia, Washington, March 20, 1996, CGS/SPU. 49Anita Deyneka, oral history, Wheaton, Illinois, August 8, 2007, CGS/SPU. In January 2001, Peter Deyneka met with Paul Kienel, president of the Association of Christian Schools International; International School Project (Campus Crusade) director Paul Eschleman; Moody Bible Institute president Joseph Stowell, ACSI school administrator Margaret Bridges, and other mission leaders in La Habra, California to organize the CoMission, a consortium of over eighty evangelical groups to work in cooperation with the Russian Ministry of Public Education to provide a five-year series of convocations on moral education to elementary and secondary schoolteachers. The project was publically launched at the annual ACSI Teachers Convention in Anaheim in November 1992 with Alexander Abramov, Deputy Minister of Public Education Alexander Asmolov, and other ministry officials in attendance. For perspectives on this effort, see Bruce Wilkinson and others, The CoMission, Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2004; Perry L. Glanzer, “A Troubled Troika: The CoMission, the Russian Ministry of Education, and the Russian Orthodox Church;” and Alan Kent Scholes, “The Trouble with Glanzer‟s Troika,” East-West Church & Ministry Report, Summer 2000 (8:3):1-3. 50Alexei Melnichuk, “Experience and Perspectives on Missions in the CIS,” conference lecture at Missions Today Forum: History, Analysis, and Perspectives for International Partnerships, Irpen, Ukraine, October 24, 2008, CGS/SPU. 51Anita Deyneka, oral history, Wheaton, Illinois, March 10, 2005, CGS/SPU. The Beslan Counseling Center has continued since 2005 to provide services to children and their families traumatized by the massacre. In August 2008 it served as a sanctuary for forty refugees who had fled fighting in South Ossetia between Russia and Georgia. 52Paul Semenchuk, “Western Christians Working in the CIS: Are They in Tune with Russian Evangelical Nationals?” unpublished typescript prepared for Trans World Radio; Diana Antonova to Richard Scheuerman, Moscow, Russia, September 17, 2008, CGS/SPU

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PART TEN

Richard Scheuerman Publications List

I. A History of Whitman County‟s German-Russians. Pullman, Washington: cooper Publications, 1971

II. Pilgrims on the Earth: A German-Russian Chronicle. Fairfield, Washington: Ye Galleon Press, 1974 (Revised 1976).

III. “From Wagon Trails to Iron Rails: Russian German Immigration to the Pacific Northwest,” American Historical Society of Germans from Russia Work Paper, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Fall 1979).

IV. The Volga Germans: Pioneers of the Pacific Northwest. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1980.

The following selection is from a portion of this work that describes the formation of the Volga German “Palouse Colony,” which significantly influenced Northwest settlement throughout the region. Full citations indicating references, many of which are oral histories and articles from issues of the Walla Walla Statesman in the 1880s, are in the complete text of this book. Another useful source was the Thomas R. Tannatt Papers at WSU (MASC).

Russia‟s Germans remained the predominant ethnic group in many areas of colonial settlement along the lower Volga River far into the nineteenth century which led to a decree in 1871 that thousands of them considered to be unacceptably mendacious. By that time the flourishing colonies had attracted an element of suspicion among some groups within the wider Slavic population because of their comparative prosperity. A century after Catherine had called the Germans to the Volga, they had progressed to a level of farming leadership in Russia as their farms were models of productivity.

The Ukase of June 4, 1871 was promulgated by the Council of Ministers just as routinely as other policies of the day. But its effects on the Germans in Russia were to be far-reaching. The decree repealed all privileges originally granted "for eternal time" under the terms of Catherine's 1763 Manifesto including military exemption. Attempts by a sympathetic tsar and his foreign minister, Prince Alexander Gorchakov, to modify the military exemption clause succeeded only in allowing a ten-year grace period in which colonists would have the option to legally emigrate although few of these landed people seemed eager to do so. Grievances expressed to the authorities brought no redress and even Alexander II remarked with reference to the sudden abrogation that "a hundred years is an eternity!"

A decisive preemption of the ordered transition toward assimilation with the Russian populace occurred with the unexpectedly early issuance of the law of universal military conscription and corresponding annulment of the grace period on January 1, 1874. The dread of serving in the Russian army was widespread among the males in the nation and especially the Germans, many of whom had a poor command of the Russian language and were often looked upon with disdain in the predominantly native Russian regiments. Discipline was cruel with minimum chance for advancement and terms of 274

service lasted up to six years. Wages were pitifully low and the eligible draft age began at twenty. Lotteries were held to fill the ranks of the standing army.

The threat of conscription became the chief motivating factor for the initial emigration of Germans from Russia to North and South America and in 1874 over 6,000 Germans, predominately Mennonites, immigrated to the United States. A tragic drought struck the Volga region in 1878 along with cattle diseases as well as epidemics of typhus and smallpox among the people. The resulting economic decline prompted continued German emigration from Russia as did events during the reactionary reigns of Alexander II (l881-94) and Nicholas II (1894¬1917).

Ethnic identity in Volga colonies was increasingly threatened with the rise of the Slavophile movement in 1840s and Pan-Slavism after 1870. Conceived among a group of romantic intellectuals during the reign of Nicholas I, Slavophilism came to embrace a vision of superior nature of the Orthodox Church and Slavic people. It held that they were on a supreme historical mission that would lead to peace and fraternity among all men. The traditional peasant commune was as reflective of Slav's primordial union with freedom and social harmony. While the rightist Official Nationality policy of Nicholas I tended to conflict with the liberal notions the Slavophiles, his disastrous involvement in the debacle of the Crimean War led his son, Tsar Alexander II to inaugurate the Era of Great Reforms in Russia to modernize the nation and abolish the onerous state of serfdom.

As early as 1840, Count Paul Kiselev, as head of the Ministry of Imperial Domains, was commissioned to study the implication of a general emancipation of the serfs. His investigations led to little constructive change under Nicholas I although Kiselev's study of the rural populace revealed the conspicuous isolation of the German colonies. His findings were essentially confirmed by an earlier report a Kontor official who related that "there are only a few of the colonists who enlighten themselves as much as they should concerning the Russian language, wherefore they do not know the Russian laws ... and evidently take pains to avoid every intercourse with Russia." 't was realized that contributing factor to this situation was their status as kolonisty which guaranteed certain advantages not available to the general public. Accordingly, legislation altering their judicial and political systems was introduced in 1860s. 1861 Russia's twenty-five million serfs were freed from serfdom and in 1864 zemstvo reform established district and provincial assemblies among all classes through an indirect electoral and within a decade were functioning in the Volga, uniting both Germans and Russians in common assemblies. Local colonial autonomy was now replaced by the integrated zemstvos which had jurisdiction over education, public finances, and other matters.

In some respects, Russia and the United States were undergoing similar in the late nineteenth century. Both were becoming more aware of their great natural wealth and had recently met the problems of servile emancipation while looking forward to growth in transportation and industry. Relations between the two countries were good and as William Cody supervised a spirited buffalo hunt on Grand Duke Alexis' United States tour in 1872 both nations' diplomats referred to mutual "manifest destinies." However, the United States, though not especially oblivious to ethnic distinctions, molded a new order in the nineteenth century through unprecedented achievements in transportation, agriculture, and education. Revision of Homestead Act of 1862 led to grants of available land to foreigners who simply declared their intentions of becoming United States citizens through which they could secure a deed to a 160 acre tract after having cultivated a portion it for five years. Preemptions could be obtained under the same 275

qualifications but only six months of residence at $1 per acre. Supplementary federal legislation such as Timber Culture Act of 1873 and Desert Land Act 1877 eventually succeeded in filling what Abraham Lincoln had earlier termed a labor deficiency in agriculture.

The completion of the first transcontinental in May, 1869 was another event that sparked a new era of settlement in American West. Not only were new areas now made readily to settlers, but the scheme to subsidize the construction over 1,000 miles of Union Pacific track was to lands adjacent to the lines, the sale of which would then become a profitable enterprise for the railroad. Through this arrangement mandated grants totaling millions of acres to the Union as well as other railroad companies operating lines west of the Mississippi River. 1872 the Kansas Pacific Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe were given the claim to seven million acres in Territory consisting of alternate sections along right of way for twenty miles on both sides. Carl Schmidt, a native of Saxony who had settled Lawrence, Kansas was selected in 1873 to head immigration office of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa His contacts with German ethnic groups throughout the country led to seek communication with dissatisfied Germans in Russia in order to arrange their settlement in America. He supervised the inspection of property near Bend, Kansas leaders of a contingent of mostly Volga German Catholics from the Wiesenseite, who arrived in Baltimore on the SS Ohio on November 23, 1875 and went to Topeka, Kansas days later.

Among few Protestants on board the November Ohio transport were the following family most locating near Great Bend, George Brach, Peter Ochs, Henry Scheuermann, and two Conrad Scheuermanns. They were soon joined in Kansas by the families of George H. Henry Rothe, and Conrad Aschenbrenner who had arrived in New York on January 6, 1876 on the SS City of Montreal. These families began forming the nucleus from which Russian German immigration to the Pacific Northwest would first undertaken in 1881.

Soon of lament grew in intensity on the Volga as more Germans tore the bonds of family and homeland to immigrate to America. The news of local V'shteyeroongen became more frequent as families auctioned off most household wares to pay travel expenses. They took little more than the physical necessities of food and clothing along with the Wolga Gesangbuch and family Bible which were carefully packed in a wooden-ribbed trunk. Travel from the Volga region was facilitated by the linking of Saratov in 1871 by railroad with southern and northern points. This also opened the region to foreign contact through visits by American railroad immigration agents with literature extolling the virtues of life in the Midwest.

The general pattern of travel began upon receipt of a port from the provincial capitals Saratov or Pokrovsk. Since the often denied for permanent residence abroad, some applicants registered for temporary certification while intending to induction into the army. Railroad service from Saratov made connections for travel to Bremen, Hamburg, or other European port cities where enormous passenger vessels transported them across the Atlantic in a normal two-week journey to Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Castle Gardens, New York. Like so many other immigrants to the United States, many Russian Germans had their first experiences in dealing with the New World at one of these unpleasant receiving stations, particularly Castle Gardens which was the largest in all of North America prior to 1892. The principal passenger lines used by the Volga Germans included the Hamburg American Line, the Inman Line of Liverpool, and North German Lloyd (of Bremen).

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Other Volga Germans who were among the first to settle in the Pacific Northwest traveled aboard the SS Mosel which arrived in New York on October 24, 1876 carrying over 200 Volga Germans largely from Wiesenseite where most had lived the daughter colonies along the Jereslan of Neu Jagodnaja, Schöntal, Schoönfeld, and Schöndorf. Villages there had been established the 1850s principally by residents of Jagodnaja Poljana and Pobotschnoje on the Bergseite but unfavorable conditions along the Jereslan prompted another move. Having brethren who had settled in Kansas 1875 (those noted previously on the SS Ohio and City of Montreal), these Volga Germans also chose to emigrate and eventually formed the basis of a "Kansas colony" that would be the first group of Russian Germans to move to the Pacific Northwest. Some first settled in Portland, Oregon in 1881 and in Whitman County, Washington Territory the following year.

Families aboard the October Mosel transport included those of Conrad Appel; Christian, John, and Phillip Kleweno; Henry Litzenberger; Mrs. Henry Brach; Conrad, Henry, Phillip, John, John Phillip, and two Peter Ochses; Adam and Henry Repp; Adam Ruhl; John, Henry, Peter, and two George and Adam Scheiermanns, and Henry Scheuermann. This group traveled to Lawrence, Kansas where they stayed about a month in the fall of 1876 while they considered where to settle. They eventually moved to Great Bend and Pawnee Rock where some established small businesses or worked for the railroad. Most, however, selected lands to farm and many settled areas along the border of Barton and Rush County.

Intermarriage solidified relationships between the various pioneer families to form a close-knit ethnic group that would soon relocate westward. These early pioneers of the Northwest often lived in isolated areas where the bond of the groups of families was extremely important for their physical survival and their social well-being. This was certainly true for Henry Rothe (Rodie), a native of Frank and former resident of Schönfeld on the Wiesenseite, who migrated to the United States with his family and settled in Bison, Kansas. Through his daughter's marriage with Phillip Green in 1878, the Rothe family formed a formal bond with the Green family. Phillip's father, George Henry Green originally was from the Volga colony of Norka but moved to Rosenfeld, had traveled with the Rothe family to America and settled Otis, Kansas. Thus the two families had known other for some time, but a strong bond was welded between the two families as a result of the marriage of Phillip and Anna Margaret. This example of a marital relationship developing into family bonds occurred often and strengthened the ethnic identity of the Volga Germans.

Like the Rothe and Green families, others ventured to Great Plains seeking prosperity. Mrs. Henry Brach, for example, settled with sons near Otis where they later became prominent in business and farming. Her son Peter's wife, Sophie (Kniss), was the sister-in-law of one of the Ochs cousins, John Peter, who remained in Great Bend, Kansas with seeking employment on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Railroad. They had all come from the colony of Schönfeld. Many Volga Germans were compelled to live in railroad boxcars due to their lack of finances and the lack of suitable housing in the area. One of the Schierman brothers, John, was a skilled carpenter and butcher, who opened a small store in Great Bend. John and Anna Marie's daughter, Mary, married one of the Ochs cousins, Peter. Henry Litzenberger and Henry Repp were brothers-in-law as their wives, Anna Elizabeth and Mary (Barth), respectively, were sisters and all of these people were from Neu Jagodnaja.

Volga Germans who migrated to the Great Plains did not experience the extreme forms of discrimination that other ethnic and religious groups experienced. This was due in part to the character of 277

the Russian Germans. Besides being recognized as a hard-working industrious people, they were known for their willingness to learn the English language and to participate in the educational opportunities of the American frontier. Many Volga Germans deemed the system of public education superior to the educational institutions of Russia. One Kansas newspaper, the Russel Record, noted in 1876 that "what pleases us the best is to see them (the Russian Germans) sending their children to public school. We will risk any people becoming Americanized, who patronize free schools."

A Kansas Homestead

The Kansas colony suffered considerably from the grasshopper plagues in the late 1870s. Particularly from 1875 to 1877, massive hordes of these insects so infested fields and air that the settlers were left with little seed to replant. A gloom hung over the land as swarms of the pests darkened the midday sky. The drought adversely affected them and some remarked of the terror felt during the frightening electrical storms. The Germans were not accustomed to such storms in Russia, and they dreaded the devastation of the plains tornados. One pioneer humorously related an Oz-like fantasy in which a cyclone was said to have taken a small lake and team of horses from a Rush County homestead 278

which his father, after he came out of the root cellar, attempted to find. En route to town he found road leading into a new lake and nearby the two horses stood -still harnessed and unharmed!

Because of these conditions across the Great Plains, many disgruntled immigrant in the Midwest increasingly considered the possibility of settling in the Pacific Northwest. The settlers learned from those who had worked in the Oregon Country on railway surveys that the land was fertile, beautiful, and available. Their interest was further stimulated by the favorable descriptions provided by transportation companies from the Pacific Northwest. In order to encourage immigration, these companies promoted the lush regions of the Inland Northwest known as the "Great Columbia Plain."

Not only were transportation companies that owned land interested in selling acreage, they also wanted to tap an unskilled labor source for the construction of their lines. In order to fill this need, company officials turned to immigrants for a solution. Various railroad companies formed associations offering reduced rates to those who would travel westward to settle while guaranteeing employment until such arrangements were possible. The Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Oregon Steamship Company, and others were particularly interested in encouraging the development of the West in order to profit not only from service but the anticipated shipment of industrial and agricultural commodities that were to be developed by the transportation companies.

Improvements transportation and agricultural mechanization led to agricultural production east of the Cascades. Only half of the crop 1879 could be exported before navigation of the rivers ended in December for winter. Up to 1800 settlers were moving to the Columbia Plain each month by wagon up the south bank of the Columbia en route to fertile lands in the Walla Walla area, Big Bend country, and the Palouse Hills. To facilitate the orderly settlement and exploitation of their holdings in this region, NPRR President Henry Villard incorporated the Oregon Improvement Company in October, 1880 with capital stock of $5,000,000 provided by American investors. The O.I. Co. then purchased the Seattle Coal Transportation Company and the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad, forerunner of the Pacific Coast Railway.

In addition to other land acquisitions, the new company bought nearly 150,000 acres (alternate sections in fourteen townships) from the Northern Pacific in the heart of the Palouse Country These were carefully selected and varied in price from $5 to $10 per acre, selling on a six-year installment plan at 7% interest. Many of the early Volga German arrivals in the area, however, found that property could be freely claimed by homesteading. Work on the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company line from Portland to Wallula continued at a brisk pace with the last rails laid on October 20, 1882. The first through passenger train left Portland a month later. By July of that a year a number of branch lines had begun fanning out in the Walla Walla country, one extending north from Walla Walla to the Snake River at Texas Ferry and the Columbia and Palouse, incorporated in 1883 by Villard, continued construction from Palouse Junction to Endicott.

The program launched by Villard and O.I.Co. director Thomas Tannatt, a former Civil War general from Massachusetts, to induce settlement east of the Cascades fruit among many immigrants in the Midwest, including the Volga Germans of the Kansas Colony in Rush and Barton counties and a Nebraska Colony from Hitchcock County. Members of the former group elected to immigrate via the Union Pacific to California in 1881 followed by the latter in 1882 by rail across the Plains to American 279

Falls, Idaho and northwest by wagon to Washington Territory. The Kansas party took advantage of reduced railroad fares to San Francisco where steamers of Villard's Oregon Steamship Company transported them to Portland. In Oregon some of the immigrants labored on the construction of the huge Albina fill while worked at a local lumber mill.

Crossing the Rockies

Their intention to settle on prime farmland remained on their minds, however, and finding the surrounding forested areas unsuitable for this purpose, some were directed to officials with the Oregon Improvement Company to explore the possibilities of settlement east of the Cascades. Having just completed the purchase from the Northern Pacific of the odd sections in townships across the Palouse country totaling 150,000 acres, a scouting party was selected to view the area. Both Phillip Green and Peter Ochs were fluent in English so were selected to go with others on the tour. The Walla Walla Weekly Statesman noted their activities through a letter of May 11, 1881 received from Agent R. W. Mitchell of the Oregon Improvement Company's Colfax Office of the Land Department:

“Five locating of the Kansas colony, composed of about 70 passed here Thursday on their way to inspect lands of the Oregon Improvement Company. Col. Tustin is in charge of the party. They look like solid, progressive farmers, such as we are willing to welcome to our broad acres. One of them remarked, „If the land is anything like what we've seen around Dayton, I guess we can be suited. We are surprised

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and delighted at what we have seen.‟ Mr. Mitchell of the Oregon Improvement Company will meet this party in the Palouse Country next week.”

Writing from Dayton to Villard's office, Tannatt relayed his intentions for dealing with the group in a note on May 10. Tannatt wanted "to sell them a township will on Mr. Oakes‟ (Ochs‟s?) return if there is any trade with them." Indeed, the vanguard returned favorably impressed with the area, and Tannatt planned to meet them in Portland in order to arrange the sale. However, he found them reluctant to enter into such a massive bargain on behalf of the others in Kansas without consulting them, first. The negotiations took time, and it was not until the fall of 1882 that members of this Portland group moved on company lands in Whitman County.

Volga settlement in the Northwest took place at the beginning of a pivotal decade in regional development. Prior to the 1880s the range cattle industry had been dominant east of the Cascades since as early as the 1860s stockmen had capitalized on the vast unfenced grazing lands of the region. In the 1880s, however, their presence was challenged by the growing number of colonist farmers who were clustering in the area's fertile valleys and prairie districts. The bitter winter of 1880-81 resulted in the financial ruin of many cattlemen with some herd losses fifty per cent. Grain marketing problems had long stalled agricultural development but the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883 facilitated farm exports to both coastal and eastern markets. At the same time, farmers were fencing their properties with barbed wire and joining together to enact "herd laws" in order to prevent cattlemen from freely ranging their stock on the recently claimed lands.

A large region of steeply undulating hills north of the Snake River in Washington formed a distinct geographic entity known the Palouse Country, and with continued settlement a considerable portion of it was organized in November, 1871 into Whitman County. Pioneers from the Walla Walla Valley had first settled in the Palouse along Union Flat Creek during the previous decade. In 1870, settlement began at present Colfax and Farmington and during the next two years pioneers located along Rebel Flat Creek, Pine Creek, Four Mile Creek, near present Genesee and Moscow, and at the foot of Rock Lake. By 1872 the population of the area totaled about two hundred whites with this rising to about one thousand the following year. In the summer of 1873, surveys began to extend the existing Territorial Road from Walla Walla to Penawawa northward to the forks of the Palouse River at Colfax and north to Spokane Falls. Other main roads intersecting the region all led from Walla Walla to Spokane and Colville country, including the Texas Road which crossed the Snake at Texas Ferry (Riparia) and the Mullan (Colville) Road which, crossing the Snake at Lyon's Ferry, paralleled the Palouse River and Cow Creek leading near the future sites of Ritzville and Sprague. A portion of this route was later followed by the Northern Pacific Railroad which greatly enhanced immigration to the area.

Members of the Kansas colony soon entered the region. According to a newspaper account quoting Kansas Colony spokesman Phillip Green, the Volga Germans from Kansas were rapidly approaching the Palouse and “would be at Texas in a day or so, and asking for several four-horse teams to convey them to Plainville”, a point between Endicott and Colfax, Washington. Green commented that the immigrants were looking forward to their new home because "the land climate and general outlook of this country, was all that could be " He reported that three separate colonies from Kansas had sent inspectors to Pacific Northwest to examine the land, and all were convinced that the region would make an excellent choice for a new home. Several of the early Volga Germans from the Kansas colony encouraged their 281

Midwest families and friends to move to the inland Northwest. The response was so that the Walla Walla Statesman reported on September 30, 1882, "There is to be an exodus from Kansas this fall."

Members of this group were determined to locate on suitable farmland. Their previous expedition to the Palouse Hills reminded them of the terrain on the Volga Bergseite and they were convinced that the Palouse had soil as rich as they had ever known. Tannatt's Oregon Improvement Company provided their fares over the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company line as far as Texas Ferry where some arrived on October 17. Some of the men then walked over twenty miles to Endicott, enlisting the aid of residents Henry D. Smith and J. T. Person to procure wagons so they could return the following day to transport the families and belongings.

Carrying their pioneer necessities, the Phillip Green family traveled from Portland in a covered wagon drawn by balky mules. On a warm morning late in September, they began following the Emigrant Road and soon began ascending the Cascades. On the other side of the pass it began snowing and raining with such intensity that the wagon and occupants were soon drenched. The Green's infant, Magdalena, celebrated her first birthday on October 3rd under miserable circumstances. Despite the weather, they made their way to Walla Walla. After traveling north for a time out of Walla Walla, weary settlers finally reached their destination, on October 1, 1882. They were to build their home and a new life for themselves four miles east of Endicott, Washington Territory.

Mountain Trail Crossing

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O. I. Co. officials were instrumental in aiding the Volga Germans, and it was reported that, “Every help possible will be given these people by General Tannatt and his subordinates." Communication between Tannatt and the newcomers was close and facilitated successful settlement of the Palouse region by the immigrants. The editor of the Statesman encountered the immigrants during a visit to the Walla Walla office of the O. I. Co. first visited the office of the Oregon Improvement Company and reported on their progress: “Calling at the office of the Oregon Improvement Company on Monday to introduce gentlemen from the East we found quite a delegation to whom General Tannatt was explaining the Palouse Country and for settlement. Some weeks since a portion of this Kansas Colony was met by the Oregon Improvement Company's teams at Texas Ferry and are now building on lands purchased of the Company. The portion of the Colony now here, with their own teams will be met by additional teams at Texas Ferry, to carry out household goods sent by train. Gen. Tannatt will meet them in to complete contracts and outer houses built for their use. This organized method of handling immigrants is doing much for the Palouse Country, directly and indirectly for all of eastern Washington. The ample capital of the Oregon Improvement Company and their simple method of dealing promptly with newcomers, upon an easily understood plan, is most proper Mr. Greene who is with those who left on Saturday says twenty-four families are on the way hither and those now at Endicott are much pleased with the country and their reception.”

Large tents were staked out the newcomers in the bustling young community of Endicott which had grown rapidly since it had been platted by the Oregon Improvement Company early in 1882. The town was named for one of its directors, William Endicott, Jr. and an ambitious build campaign was launched through the resident O. I. Co. agent, John Courtright. Phillip Green was one of the first immigrants to arrive in the area and his first experiences there are indicative of other immigrants who settled the Palouse Country. One of Green's first activities was to fashion an earthen home in a hillside on his farm, similar to the zemlyankii dug by the first German colonists on the Volga, and Indians were blamed for stealing his horses shortly after their arrival. Enduring a difficult winter, he hauled lumber from Colfax the following spring and built a four room house. To supplement his income, like many others, went to work on the construction of the Palouse line of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Some of the men were accompanied by their families who lived in tents. The rails reached Colfax in 1883 and grading continued toward Pullman and Moscow.

Tannatt further reported that the settlers were learning a great deal about their new home and how to tend the land. He wrote, “Seeding in the Palouse Country as late as June 1 with certainty of crops. This season being measurably backward we can seed as late as June and continue plowing for fall sowing much later. The policy of buying but a limited number of teams has proven itself correct. Our teams have been fully employed up to plowing season in hauling lumber and The Co. have now erected Boarding house, Company Building, Smith Shop, tool shed and three cottages (in Endicott). Grain for feed. Spring and fall sowing was brought in early fall at an extreme low is well cleaned and sacked. Seven acres are just in garden which will supply us with and in ample quality. Temporarily our lands are isolated. The advancement of line from Snake River to Willow Springs have left our lands in a position where immigration cannot reach them except when entering Washington Territory from the East with their own teams.”

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Adding new impetus to regional development was the final completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad on September 8, 1883 when the gap was closed on the transcontinental line at Gold Greek, Montana. More Volga Germans came to the area and in the fall of 1883, Mrs. Green's father, Henry Rothe, arrived with his daughter but died within two weeks. Other Volga Germans who came to the region about this time were Henry Repp and Henry Litzenberger (their wives, Mary and Anna [Barth], were sisters), and the families of John Helm, John and George Schreiber, Conrad Wilhelm, and John Peter Ochs. Within five years of the completion of the Northern Pacific line, other Volga German families who immigrated to Whitman County included those of Conrad and Peter Aschenbrenner, Henry Fisher, Christian Hagen, Conrad Kammerzell, Christian and Henry Kleweno, Henry Litzenberger, Conrad Machleit, and Adam Weitz. When these families settled in the Palouse, they often wrote their relatives and friends living in the Midwest and Russia and encouraging them to follow.

One million acres of potential crop land were said to be within the revised 1883 boundary of Whitman County which conformed by that time to its present shape. The Volga German settlers from Kansas were anxious to establish a colony in the area and set out to find a suitable site. Shortly after Conrad Schierman arrived in the Palouse, he rode north from Endicott to explore the surrounding countryside. Waves of knee-high tawny bunchgrass blew in the breeze across the broad hills. After riding about five miles, he came to the crest of a massive basaltic bluff overlooking the Palouse River Valley. Finding it too steep to descend, he followed the river's course upstream until he came to a more gentle slope near its northernmost point in that area. Descending here and riding back a short distance to the expanse spied earlier, he found a beautiful meadow bordered on the west by the river and sheltered on the east by the steep rock bluffs. He returned to the railroad camp and shared the news of his discovery with the other families who proceeded to investigate the site together. They were taken by the beauty and fertility of the site, and soon traveled to the federal land office in Colfax to arrange for the purchase of the land. Their request was rather unorthodox since their intention was to collectively purchase a quarter- section adjacent to the river. Officials complied and the property was divided among them reflecting the communal mir model to which they had been accustomed in Russia.

This original “Palouse Colony” consisted of the Peter and Henry Ochs families together with those of Conrad, Henry, George, and John Schierman. John Schierman became the group's treasurer and chief carpenter. Other Volga Germans joined these families in the small collective, including John Schreiber and Phillip Aschenbrenner. Daily life in the commune was busy for both parents and children, as everyone assisted in the building of the first eight homes which were simple, but adequate, three-room structures. It soon became apparent that with the abundance of prime farmland and mechanized methods of cultivation, an individual could acquire and manage larger estates in relative self-sufficiency. In later years, therefore, this led members of the Palouse Colony to purchase their own farms and resettle on nearby land. Others, however, chose to pursue business ventures in neighboring towns that served the interests of the agrarian populace.

A large brook provided all the water for the colony and farming was confined at first to large gardens of potatoes, corn, and melons. The settlers soon found that wheat and barley grew particularly well on the chestnut brown soil as well as oats which were planted they learned a great deal from other farmers whom they met through their dealings with the Oregon Improvement Company. Much practical

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information was gained on their trips to Colfax or Walla Walla where they purchased food, hardware, and clothing.

The colony developed with the planting of a substantial fruit orchard of fruit trees and livestock raising. The pasture land was thick with wild grasses in the spring and summer and the herd prospered rapidly. A watchful was ever focused on the livestock as they grazed along the river since large packs of coyotes roamed the hills and cougars were sometimes seen on the rocky precipices. Phillip Schierman was made quite aware of their when one boldly attacked him while was riding one evening. Luckily, he escaped with only cuts and a clawed rifle stock to verify his ordeal.

Many Indians of the Palouse bands often passed the settlement en route to the ranches of Steve Cutler and the Matlock brothers, several miles upstream, where they traded salmon for fruit and meat. Some expressed a special appetite for Mrs. Aschenbrenner's biscuits. They often stopped to barter but sometimes succeeded only in frightening the women. In a minor incident in the 1880s, the J. H. Lairds, a pioneer family of 1872, was compelled to flee their home near the river and seek refuge in the colony when several Indians forced their way into their house. Mr. Laird returned with several armed members of the colony to his place to find the house abandoned but in complete disarray.

The chief task of the Russian German settlers was always farming. The warm weather brought on by spring marked the time for them to begin plowing, and the first turning of the sod was extremely difficult because of the fibrous root system of the native vegetation. The men used as many as six horses to pull the single shear of the walking plow which constantly had to be cleared of the roots which collected on it. It took days to plow even a few acres of ground, and following this operation, it was sown by hand from horseback or on foot. Harrowing the field with a crude wooden implement completed the process until the summer harvest.

Improvements in farm equipment enabled farmers in the Pacific Northwest to increase productivity and manage acreages. Mechanical broadcasters and self-rake reapers were introduced to the region about 1884, both of which allowed the operator to cover a significantly larger area in the long work day. Seeding by broadcast and harrowing was not an effective method in the drier areas of the inland Northwest since the seed often laid for weeks in the dry chernozem soil before seasonal rains induced germination. The appearance of the mechanical shoe drill by 1890 and the later disc drill marked important advancements in agricultural mechanization as the seed could then be deposited in uniform rows below the surface nearer to the moisture level.

The river colony soon became a clearing house for newly arriving Volga Germans, serving as a temporary until they located nearby. John Ochs, for example, had remained in Kansas but migrated to the Palouse Colony soon after his cousins. He added greatly to the colorful history of the Palouse Colony. The sound of his whistle filled the air of the colony as he worked in the fields. In the evening his voice echoed throughout the valley in which the colony was nestled as he sang the familiar German hymns.

The transition from familiar Old World routines to life in the Northwest frontier could be difficult for adults and children alike. Many had anxieties about the far-off lands of America, but parents were convinced that their move to the United States would benefit family significantly. To convince children and perhaps themselves that the overseas move was in their best interest as well, mothers and fathers,

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grandmothers grandfathers told the children fascinating tales of America "the land where milk and honey flows." Shortly after their arrival in the area, the children would wild honey from hollow trees along Palouse River and herd the cattle home each evening, their udders bulging with milk after grazing in the thick green pastures. Then the parents reminded them, "Look see, you have the milk flowing from the cows and the honey flowing from the trees, just like we said it would be like when we were in Russia."

V. “Streams in the Desert: A Centennial Tribute to Russian German Pioneering in Central Washington,” American Historical Society of Germans from Russia Work Paper, Vol. 8, No. 8 (Fall 1985).

VI. Peoples of Washington: Perspectives on Cultural Diversity. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1989 (European American Chapter).

VII. “A Heritage of Hills,” from Palouse Country: A Land and Its People. Walla Walla, Washington: Color Press, 1994 (third edition).

"Many of the most lively, intimate expressions of spirit spring from the joyous continuous contact of human beings with a particular locality. If life can be made secure in each community and if the rewards are distributed justly, there will flower… not only those who attain joy in daily, productive work well done; but also those who paint and sing and tell stories with the flavor peculiar to their own valley, well-loved hill, or broad prairie.” --Henry Wallace

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Stretching across the heartland of the Inland Pacific Northwest is a mystical expanse called the Palouse Country which was transformed between 1860 and 1920 from open prairie into one of the nation's premier dryland farming and ranching districts. Although the region's name has become synonymous with the steeply rolling hills in its center, the greater Palouse is a tousled tapestry of contrasts with valleys, hills, and mountains woven together by the twisted course of the Palouse River and its tributaries. My father's fields were located on some of the highest terrain near the Palouse River between the communities of Endicott and St. John, Washington near the geographic center of the Palouse. Our house stood in the shadow of a steep hill capped with a towering yellow pine growing in the protected northern arc of a "sodpatch," or slope too steep to farm that remained in wheatgrass. A favorite boyhood hiking route led across this hilltop to the wild beauty of the river bluffs a mile north. From the hill I could see Kamiak and Steptoe buttes standing advance guard for the forested Clearwater Mountains on the eastern horizon. Surrounded by undulations of waving grain and corduroy furrows, a person depends on fence lines of rusty barbed wire to provide north-south orientation while the river's flow tends westward. The hills decline in that direction toward the channeled scablands where massive elongated islands of fertile soil lay like capsized hulls in a mottled sea of basaltic detritus.

Some of my most memorable jaunts through the Palouse were in the company of my uncle, Ray Reich of Colfax, whose hearty disposition, wit, and size earned him friends throughout the region and visibility in most any crowd. Most comfortable in a bolo tie or on horseback, Ray led the famed "Gentlemen on Horseback" after the passing of its founder, Chuck Glover, and never missed its annual ride from the time of the group‟s inception in 1948 to his death in 1993. After a lifetime in the Palouse, extensive work with area agricultural cooperatives, and horse rides throughout the region, Ray probably knew the rural Palouse and its people as well as about anybody. I envied his grasp of local lore which was characteristically demonstrated on a springtime pick-up excursion in the early 1990s to locate the route of the historic Colville Road in eastern Adams County.

As teacher and principal at Endicott-St. John Middle School, I was planning to take the eighth grade class and kindergartners by wagons for a few miles along a trail devoid of cars, fences, and any form of electronic entertainment. I remembered that Ray had once mentioned something to me about the old trail and when I asked if he could give me some specifics, he volunteered to show me its location. Traveling in the company of rancher Louie Gaiser, who uses draft horses to this day during haying season and for other farm work, Ray pointed out remnants of the Texas and Mullan trails as we passed points along the road west of Winona where they intersected the high-way. I recognized one rutted stretch he identified as the Mullan route as the dirt road I had used to haul grain for our neighbor, Pat Kleweno, during harvest season when I was in high school. Louie then conferred upon me the honor of being a Mullan Trail teamster and offered me any of his Percherons on my "next run to Ft. Walla Walla." I had no doubt he could manage the haul but recalled having enough trouble navigating Pat's International Loadstar truck the short distance needed to get out of his field using that route.

We finally left the highway several miles north of Benge to follow a dirt trail until it deteriorated into two faint ruts which appeared to drift endlessly southward. Satisfied that we had established the trail's location, I suggested turning back but Ray would hear nothing of it. He loved the spring scenery and wanted to show us the entire course down to another highway we could take back home so I settled back between the two men to hear a litany of tales about Ray and Louie's earlier ranching experiences. Louie, I

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learned, was among the charter members of the Palouse Empire Appaloosa Horse Club, an organization that helped launch one of the nation's largest breed registries headquartered in Moscow. As the stories and green Chevy rolled on, the trace we had been following gradually faded away entirely and, seeing no sign of life for miles in any direction, even Louie began to have doubts about our scout's memory. Still, Ray was undeterred. "I know where I'm at," he reassured us, "I just don't know exactly where I'm at." I decided this was an appropriate moment to ask Ray if it was true that he had once ridden his blaze-faced sorrel Topper through the front door of the tavern in St. John and out the back. Louie chuckled while Ray glanced furtively out the side window. "Folks can't believe everything they hear, though I do have some special memories of the Rialto," he grinned before turning the conversation to deep-furrow seed drills and Hamley saddles.

After another half-hour of bumps that were starting to damage my hat and approaching the edge of the Palouse universe, we came to a knoll and spotted a solitary figure far to the south. Louie volunteered that it might be Captain Mullan himself since no one else apparently had been this way for at least a century. On closer inspection we saw a man in overalls feeding some Herefords and apart from wondering how we had come to that point, Dick Coon was glad to see an old acquaintance in Uncle Ray. Dick confirmed that we had indeed been following the old trail all the time, and I never questioned Ray's bearings again. Three weeks later the air above that prairie was punctuated with the shouts of sixty kids from our school and tiny Benge rolling along in five wagons with my two mentors serving as drivers. Other volunteers included teacher Arden Johnson who insisted we also partake only of pioneer fare while on the trail-hardtack, sardines, dill pickles, and warm water. Not even the Johnson family's Fonk's Variety Store in Colfax, famed for carrying supplies of every sort, stocked hardtack so we settled for soda crackers.

Standing next to Ray for most of the stretch was ninety-year-old Dick Parrish who had lived his entire life in the vicinity. He shared some boyhood memories with the students which included witnessing the last teamsters and mules hauling freight on the Mullan Trail. He also shared how in "earlier days six yokes of oxen were needed to pull one large freight wagon" for the two-week journey from Walla Walla to Ft. Colville. The contributions of people like Ray Reich, Louie Gaiser, and Dick Parrish to the quality of life for persons of all ages and to the research of historians and other scholars have been significant. Theirs is the spirit of Henry Wallace's "joyous contact" between persons and locality that has enriched historical perspectives and engendered preservation efforts in a land as fragile as it is beautiful.

My maternal grandparents, Edward and Emily (Sunwold) Johns, had settled in "the upper country" and farmed in the Waverly, Fairfield, and Chester areas of southeastern Spokane County. Grandfather Johns had come West as a young bachelor from Missouri in a futile search for gold and silver at famed Cripple Creek, Colorado but found better opportunity in provisioning the miners and he steadily moved further westward. Grandma's people were from the Hallingdal Valley in Norway. Her father, Andrew Sunwold, came to America in the 1870s long before he brought his family. The Amerika-briefe he frequently sent home described the Northwest's boundless landscapes and his work supplying wood for steamboats at Ft. Benton, Montana. The fort was the eastern terminus for the legendary Mullan Road, the primary immigrant route to Washington Territory before the advent of railroad travel, which linked the upper Missouri River with Ft. Walla Walla. This was the path he was to follow. In later years his hopes for land of his own were fulfilled when he and his two sons established farms near Fairfield.

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On the Palouse River about a mile west of our farm, near a rickety swinging footbridge, several clapboard houses remained clustered together at a remote place known locally as the "Palouse Colony." Our Grandpa Scheuerman made sure we knew that this was the first home for our people in the Pacific Northwest. My great-grandfather, Henry B. Scheuerman, was among the region's Russland-Deutschen, or Germans from Russia. They were people of the soil who for generations had sown their grain and gathered harvests in a progression that led from the Hessian countryside and Volga steppe to the Palouse prairies. H. B. and his family had arrived in 1891 and lived with earlier colonists on this fertile bottomland until arrangements could be made to acquire land nearby.

Some of our favorite family photographs depict the everyday scenes of their life in the Palouse Hills. One shows Great-Grandma Sunwold feeding her agitated flock of Plymouth Rocks; another casts Uncle Art in a sea of stiff club wheat on his farm near Waverly. While the pioneering experiences of our first-generation relatives living throughout the region were as varied as the languages they spoke, a common theme framed the stories they told us children: The Palouse was a Promised Land and we should be grateful for our blessings here and work hard to ensure an equally secure future for our families. Having eked out a hardscrabble existence in the Colorado Rockies, on stony Norwegian slopes, inclement Swedish coastlines, and in politically unstable Russia; they seemed in a position to know.

My grandfather, Karl Scheuerman, knew his land intimately. He and my father taught us to distinguish the swales, saddles, and other unique topographic features and soil conditions of the Palouse meaningful to a farmer. As with farm families throughout the Palouse, many features on the landscape hold a special significance. We learned such names and locations as the Huvaluck (Hessian dialect for "Oathole”—a notoriously steep horseshoe basin), "Barley Hill," and "Three-Finger Draw." Grandpa would recount the experiences of the first Russian German inmigrants to the region who had labored for years to turn the tawny, knee-high bunchgrass and plant the Turkey Red wheat that their Mennonite countrymen had brought from Russia. Grandpa knew of their exploits first-hand and understood that other groups had shared in these pioneering experiences. He also was aware that the area's native population had succumbed to the pressures of European-American immigration and he spoke wistfully of the days his father traded flour and fruit on the river for the Indians ' salmon.

Faith, Family, and Farm

Our tiny half-section farm clung precariously to economic vitality by the thrift and uncanny ability of my father to keep second-hand machinery running indefinitely with sufficient supplies of bailing wire, canvas, and "Rock Hard”—a gritty gray goop that turned to stone moments out of the can and guaranteed to plug up any hole in sheet metal. Like his talent for picking up a guitar, mandolin, or most any other stringed instrument to play while singing plaintive country tunes, this mechanical aptitude was not passed down to my generation. Grandpa Scheuerman was also a musician-farmer who loved to visit the ranch long after his retirement, especially during August's sweltering hot "thrashing weather," as he called it, a desire entirely lost on an adolescent bondservant. We would sit in a black Ford grain truck that Dad would insist be polished before harvest, perched for view as he reaped some of the finest crops around with a growling mechanical dinosaur of speckled red skin that slowly ate its way through rolling seas of wheat. The high yields produced year after year reflected an agrarian sense in both men that had been passed down over centuries from the viridian fields of Hesse and Volga steppes to the Palouse Country. 289

Grandpa was a citadel of understanding and I greatly enjoyed his presence. Though deeply informed of the struggles his German ancestors had endured in Russia and on the plains of frontier Kansas, he did not allow the siren sounds of memory to romanticize our people's history. He encouraged me to ask questions, to listen and read for fuller understandings. While David's Psalms and the Proverbs of Solomon were his favorite readings, a couple winter terms of country schooling in the Palouse had introduced him to Tennyson and Wordsworth whose lines he could quote but only upon request. I thought it peculiar that various corners of our household were inhabited by objects foreign to my generation. Hanging on a beam downstairs was a monstrous greatcoat of bear fur called the Belz (Hessian for "pelt") that Grandpa said had come from the Old Country and that he had often worn while herding a team of horses or driving tractor in bitter weather.

From Grandpa Scheuerman I learned that folks in our area had come from places all over America and across the globe. While Dad's people fan's hailed from Russia and the Ukraine, Mom's were from Norway and Sweden, the Wakefields, Brookfields, and Mansfields were of English extraction; the Bachmanns, Shermans, and Kackmans had German roots; and the Cutlers, Dollarhides, and Smith- Rockwells qualified as frontier Americans since they had been here when the Indians had traveled through to dig camas along Rebel Flat and Union Flat creeks. Other pioneer families were more transient but still left melancholy evidence of their passage. Once while hunting only a mile from our farm, I happened upon a dreary lilac bush far past bloom and strangely out of place on an eastern slope sodpatch far from any farmhouse. On closer inspection I spotted a small squared post, tapered at the top, and still bearing a few flecks of white paint. When I reported the oddity to my grandfather, he told me that an immigrant family had once lived near there lost child when a boiling cauldron of water fell upon him. The boy died from severe burns and was buried in this anonymous hillside. For years we had witnessed Grandpa putting a flower on Floyd Duchow‟s grave in Endicott‟s Mountain View Cemetery every Memorial Day. The boy, son of the Zion Lutheran preacher and his wife, died the day after his thirteenth birthday. Grandpa had not been a member of the congregation, but thought the boy needed remembering.

My grandfather also told me about venerable Phillip Ochs, a kindly ancient man I knew from a respectable distance who had to be the closest thing the Palouse Country ever had to Little Big Man‟s Jack Crabb. Nearly a century old when I was a boy, Phillip had been raised on the Kansas frontier and after coming to Rebel Flat in the early 1880s unwittingly fell in as a young teen with the area‟s Wild Bunch. He was soon embroiled in an operation that rustled Indian ponies along the Snake River. According to Grandpa, not one to fabricate tales, Phillip barely escaped their buckshot and arrows. But the boy was arrested with several gang members by a Lewiston marshal who surmised Phillip‟s circumstances and allowed him to return home on the pledge to keep better company. He took his vow seriously and settled down to ranch and farm, became a stalwart member of the local Congregational Church, and never lost a steeled resolve to abide by the law and confront anyone who might not.

Phillip packed a six-shooter in those days, and rendered helpless brutish gunfighters at least three times—on the road to Mockonema, along the frontier streets of Colfax, and with the vigilante posse that helped bring the notorious outlaw “Big Bill” Masterson to justice in 1892. Every time I saw Phillip outside, the old fellow wore his signature circle-brimmed tan cowboy hat. Just about the time I worked up enough nerve to personally inquire about his legendary exploits, Phillip passed away. I was fifteen and mourned the loss of this uncommonly gentle spirit whose life loomed so large among those of my

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generation. I made my own vow to resist timidity and make forthright and timely inquiry into matters I considered of some significance. (Years later I learned that Pullman teacher and historian Gordon Lindeen had tape-recorded a 1958 interview with Phillip Ochs. I tracked down Mr. Lindeen when a student at WSU in the early 1970s and he found the long-lost tapes which he allowed me to duplicate.)

Each year on the farm, our parents, Donovan and Mary Scheuerman, made caring for the large garden behind our house a family affair. We grew dozens of cabbages for late summer slicing bees using the razor-sharp Hoofel and a fifteen gallon crock to make sauerkraut, cucumbers for dill pickles, and parsnips and carrots for Sunday pot roast feasts. Recurrent attempts to grow melons met with only marginal success for some reason. Butternut and Indian squash added colorful orange, green, and yellow splashes to the area and we kept neighbors and relatives supplied with all the zucchini they could ever desire with the fruit of just two plants. We picked red raspberries and strawberries for preserves and fresh eating from blossoming bushes that attracted hordes of viceroy butterflies, and carefully tended patches of perennial rhubarb although I wished the adjacent asparagus would somehow perish forever. Dad was extremely particular about the amount and method of watering each vegetable. Carrots had to be sprayed with a mist while the cucumbers were slowly drip irrigated with small canals resembling an exhaust manifold that reached the entire spread. Grandpa taught us that Good Friday was always the day to plant spuds and so we did. Usually we set out a row of freshly cut Netta Gem and Red Pontiac seed potatoes at least a hundred yards long into a plow furrow that Dad filled with the old Caterpillar D-6's next rumbling pass pulling two sections of moldboard plows. These would eventually be dug on a long afternoon of toil in late September when the vines had fully shriveled and dirt clods were perfect for throwing at an older brother.

We kept a small alfalfa pasture behind the garden near the house for the livestock which included cattle, sheep, and a few pigs. I always marveled how ewes so skittish they blanched at our glance would sit as if in addled bliss while complete strangers stripped and bloodied them each March when shearing their fleeces. A small orchard planted by my great-grandparents lay beyond our alfalfa where we gathered green Transparents, Golden Delicious, and other apples each fall as well as apricots and Bartlett pears. Wood pruned from the trees each spring was stored to use for smoking up to a thousand pounds of pork sausage, Wurst, which we stuffed each December. An overgrown pie cherry tree provided camouflage for the skeleton of an ancient McCormick reaper that we pretended was a Sherman tank when we crawled down into its lever-laden interior while two severely weathered header-box wagons with their characteristic Picasso-like asymmetrical frames rested nearby. We had an old Hutchison harvest photograph in the house mounted on heavy gray cardboard showing Grandpa Scheuerman standing on a derrick table next to one of the oddly shaped wagons. He used the most peculiar vocabulary when describing harvesting operations like those depicted in the scene. As if speaking in tongues, he told about hoedowns, sack jigs, roustabouts, band cutters, bindle stiffs, and water bucks whose roles I sought to understand.

Our nearest neighbors, the Jimmy and Maxine Smick family, ran a larger cattle herd in alternating years on one of their fields bordering our place. I was never more impressed with countryside friendliness than the day after a rare nighttime southwester fiercely blew across the Palouse. The wind picked up a heavy overturned sheet metal watering trough, at least ten feet in diameter, and blasted it directly across the field where the Smick cattle were pastured. The calamitous roar of bovine Armageddon apparently

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resounded across the hills because the following morning most members of the trough-shocked herd were wandering aimlessly along the road for a mile between our place and the Palouse River. Broken wire was everywhere in sight but Jimmy just laughed at the thought of what must have happened. We all set about to mend fences and round up those animals that survived judgment and were approved for return to the Smicks' heavenly acres.

Jimmy Smick also taught the junior high Sunday School class at Trinity Lutheran where most of our relatives attended although, like most towns in the Palouse Country, other denominations were represented. Endicott also had the oldest German Congregational Church in the region, a gleaming white testimony to pioneer faith; a beautiful Seventh-Day Adventist Church of brick and stone, and a memory of Methodists meeting somewhere. Jimmy had a son, Monty, my age with whom I often engaged in debates that I generally wound up losing though I do still contend that the Yanks played better ball than Milwaukee in the „60s. His father had a penchant for bringing contemporary issues to the forefront from verses studied in the Old and New Testaments. He spoke about stewardship in terms of more than the collection plate, but about caring for the land with which God had blessed us. Jim interpreted the reference in Genesis 1 about mankind having "dominion over all the earth" to mean we were stewards of the land, and that soil conservation was a moral issue. At that age I was more interested in how Mantle, Ford, and Maris were playing but the thought that the direction in which I drove the tractor might be considered sinful practice bothered me a bit.

Jimmy also spoke about the evils of atheistic communism and how many of our German relatives who had not left Russia for America were now suffering for their faith in faraway Siberia. Tens of thousands had been expelled from their homes along the Volga at the beginning of World War II and disappeared into oblivion. I had heard bits and pieces of our people's saga and of missing relatives during somber conversations between Grandpa Scheuerman and his older brother who bore a given name unique in my limited experience—Yost. I deduced a connection with timeworn letters addressed to the family years bearing postmarks and blue and green stamps dated from the turn of the century with what I determined to be typeface in Russian and Spanish as well as English. I once happened upon a cache of them in an attic steamer trunk. The letters had traveled to the Palouse from Rio de Janeiro, someplace in Canada named Bashaw, and Russia. The Cyrillic was wholly unintelligible to me as were the letters' contents. While the style of the script varied with the author, all were in an archaic German dialect just as incomprehensible to my parents except for an occasional family name. I clearly remember when I first asked my grandfather about who had written the letters. His cheerful visage grew wistful but he proceeded forthrightly to tell me that their origin was rooted in our people's response generations earlier to a royal promise.

A woman he identified as "die Kaiserin Katarina" had invited our German ancestors to leave their strife-ridden central European homeland in the 1760s and undertake a perilous year-long journey to the wilds of Russia's lower Volga frontier. In return they would be given free land and exemption from taxes and military service "forever." En route to the steppes they arrived at the port near St. Petersburg where, according to family tradition, the mysterious woman of regal bearing sought their company to hear her native language spoken. She encouraged them in their quest and a year later those who survived the trek founded a village they named Yagodnaya Polyana, or "Berry Meadow." Some weeks later I mentioned Grandpa's fanciful story to the oldest person in our family, his eldest sister whom we

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affectionately called Diela Vess, Russian-born and nearing the century mark. "Yes, it happened as your grandfather says," she replied in heavily accented English. "And sometimes I think this is why my name is Katherine," she smiled.

A brief investigation into the date and place revealed that the only "Katarina" who could have extended such a welcome was the tsarina of Russia herself, Catherine the Great, also a native of Germany. I learned in later years that she did frequent the docks at Oranienbaum west of St. Petersburg to greet the weary Hessian arrivals at the very time others from that principality were being sent as mercenaries to fight with the British against American independence. In middle age I retraced the route on which our ancestors ventured from Germany to Russia and visited Catherine‟s country palace at Oranienbaum. I retrieved a small broken piece of red granite from the stone walkway leading from the waterfront to the small but ornate royal residence. Several days later and over a thousand miles to the south, I found myself in the village of Berry Meadow where a distant relative presented me with a hand-forged sickle as an additional souvenir of my trip back in time.

To young Americanized ears like mine, the nicknames borne by many elders in our area sounded peculiar, but were so accepted by young and old alike that even closest relatives sometimes did not know the given names of their aunts and uncles, let alone others of more distant kinship, until their funerals. "Hey Mary," I remember my dad announcing to Mom one morning while he read an obituary in the Colfax Gazette. “Knooga's name was really „Henry.‟” The word meant “boney‟ in Hessian dialect, fitting for his slim build and enormous hands. The subset of first and last names just in our small town was so limited that we had several Henry Kromms, Mary Repps, Adam Morasches, and many others of shared designation. The solution to distinguishing individuals in conversation came to the Palouse from the Old Country where identical formal names abounded in the village. A system of practical if bizarre nicknaming as practical had emerged in the Old Country and endured with those who came to Endicott, St. John, Colfax, Farmington, and elsewhere in the Palouse and Ritzville-Odessa areas.

First, depending on which half of Berry Meadow the ancestral house was located, one could either be Kalmooka, derived from the villagers‟ name for the Buddhist Kalmyk tribe, the southsiders; or Totten, from their word for Mongol Tartars, or those living in the north half of town. I think Grandpa said we were Kalmooka so I assumed for a while we had been Lutheran Buddhists. Of course there were many such Scheuermans on the Volga and in the Palouse so each family clan, though descended from a single couple in the l760s, had a second appellation—in our case the Watchka, Yusta, or Kosak Scheuermans. Nobody even in our grandparents' time knew for certain the origin of these antiquated referents but they served the purpose well and their sound gave clues to some enigmatic former incident of comedy, lineament, or family tendency. We were Kalmooka Yustas, not one of those “Cossacks.”

Finally, virtually everyone had a personal moniker that could have arisen from a variety of circumstances and characteristics. In Endicott, Colfax, or St. John where many of our older relatives lived, streetside summons were rendered without diffidence to persons called Schwartza (Black) Pete and Rud (Red) Marie, Huhnkil Hannas (Chicken John) and Krommageeglel (Crooked Rooster). There was Katya Yhugher (George's Katie, one of two hex casters in town whose houses we scrupulously avoided) and Kedda (Katherine, from a nervous Russian boyfriend who once stuttered in her presence), Arbuza (Watermelon) Adam and Moslanga (Sunflower) Alex, and in our family, Badelya (Small Bottle) and Rahmbadya (Cream Chin). My grandfather was distinguished simply by others invoking his father's 293

German name, thus Karl Johann Scheuerman was more fully known to Palouse Country German Russians as that Kalmooka Yusta Heinrich Karl. The method sounded so reasonable, yet along with Hexeri curses and incantations, incredibly anachronistic in our 1960s realm of rock music and war protests.

Grandpa also informed me that our junior choir director at church, Clara Litzenberger, had special knowledge of our heritage. She was in her sixties at the time and still had the mettle and patience to meet every Wednesday afternoon during the school year with a passel of young people who struggled to remain silent between tunes in spite of our church‟s awe-inspiring vaulted interior. Trinity Lutheran‟s main sanctuary is remarkable and features an Old World color scheme worthy of Catherine's Winter Palace— immense turquoise arches with lavender and Prussian blue trim embellished with lustrous gilded filigree stenciling. Wheat sheaves emerge in deep relief on wooden panels beneath a west wall of windows; biblical images and verses are carved in massive lintels along the parish house. Virtually all furnishings including the pews, high altar, and molded exterior of one of the region's largest pipe organs were built of solid birch and alder smoothly lacquered to a gleaming sheen. But the church building, Grandpa emphasized to me, was not built as any testament to the pioneers' prosperity here in the new Canaan. Rather, everything in the grandiose design from the plaster shields of the Twelve Apostles to the massive wooden cross seemingly suspended in air before a massive purple dossal curtain that stretched to the ceiling was to focus parishioners' attention upon divine majesty. "That is why," he recalled in German, "we chose the first words of Psalm 115, for the verse of dedication: "Not unto us, 0 Lord, Not unto us; but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truth's sake.'"

I knew "Clara Litz" to be a relative by some distant connection yet close enough to occasionally join the extended family dinners held every Sunday after church at my grandfather's home in Endicott. With families of five grown sons and daughters spread across the Palouse Country from Lacrosse to Sunset, Grandpa supervised feasts that routinely drew no fewer than two dozen not including frequent guests. Almost invariably the fare included roast beef, mashed potatoes with gravy and sauerkraut, and a mixture of cooked carrots, onions, and parsnips. This was always followed by fruit pies unless someone's birthday, confirmation, wedding, or basketball championship also warranted cake. The identical meal was served in the same way at many homes in town that very hour with the only appreciable difference being the aperitif. Some old timers preferred a cruel concoction of fortified port and Jack Daniels to tamer Riesling. Once after dinner when Clara was present, I sacrificed listening to older cousins debate the upcoming week's sporting prospects and asked what she knew about our ancestral past. She had read all about Queen Catherine II and added that our people had been used as a buffer against the Mongol tribes who recurrently threatened the peace on Russia's southern border. With images of Genghis Khan now entering the picture, more exotic of past family adventures on both of the globe filled my boyhood brain.

In middle age, Grandpa Scheuerman had served as board chair of School District No. 95. The school was located on a neighbor's farm until consolidation with the school in town put the building up for sale. He acquired the substantial structure and somehow relocated it to our place where it entered into a new era of service as a shop and chicken house. One of my least pleasant chores on the farm was to clean the eggs we gathered from the birds enrolled in what we always called "the schoolhouse" and be sure they were fed with grain stored in what had been the building's kitchen. My father's sister, Aunt Evelyn Reich, once pointed to a half-dozen tin cups suspended on a post in the schoolhouse. "We all took

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turns washing those for Miss Vera Longwell," she said, who had arrived from Kansas in 1920 to teach my aunts, uncles, and others in the vicinity who were then of school age.

Reminiscing today at three-quarter century's distance, Aunt Evelyn noted methods that shaped their lessons: pairings in which older pupils often assisted the younger, studying the classics and original historical documents, and periodic public presentations of written, dramatic, and musical works. Tales of Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest occasioned trips to an anonymous grove of willow and hawthorn down the road where botany easily became a topic of inquiry. Saturday Evening Post reviews of the Boston Symphony's 1920 premiere of "The Pleasure Dome of Kublai Khan" led naturally to stories of Marco Polo, the poetry of Coleridge ("In Xanadu did Kublai Khan .... "), and news of Babe Ruth 's trade that year from Boston to the Yankees for $125,000. That remarkable sum, in turn, offered grist for a lesson in mathematics. Decades before terms like interdisciplinary studies, high expectations, and cross-age grouping entered the pedagogical lexicon of best practices, Miss Longwell and teachers like her in other country schools offered enriching educational experiences. A faded family photograph shows Miss Longwell surrounded by a sea of faces, children and parents at a schoolhouse gathering in late spring of 1920 for a festive afternoon of picnicking, declamations, and group performance.

By the time I had grown to the age of the older children in the picture, I was aware that former residents of our immediate vicinity, friends of my father, were making their mark in the world. Union Flat's General John Kinney had been the only Marine officer in World War II to successfully escape from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp—a feat he attributed in part to a history and geography lesson he had remembered from school in Endicott about the US-Canadian border battle slogan "Fifty-four, Forty or Fight." Carl Litzenberger, one-time barnstormer with Amelia Earhart whose pilot's license bore Oroville Wright's signature, served as the Army Air Corps' Chief Pilot Trainer in Georgia during World War II. Dr. Margaret Henry, daughter of the town's physician and sister to three other doctors, was the nation's first AOA board-certified woman ophthalmologist, while Rev. Dr. Carl Mau was serving in Geneva, Switzerland as head of the world's largest Protestant body, the Lutheran World Federation. Communities throughout the Palouse can provide similar rosters of such notable sons and daughters who remained home or ventured beyond to attain national and international distinction.

Our mother's brother, Uncle Willis Johns, who had spent so much of his youth in the Waverly- Fairfield area, directed the most comprehensive multi-state mapping project of the Northern Rockies ever undertaken by the US Geological Survey. Despite his aversion to appearances at any formal event in favor of weeks in the wild, our lanky 6' 6" uncle was honored for his efforts with induction into the Explorers Club where he shared the rarified air of fellowship with such luminaries as Sir Edmund Hillary and Neil Armstrong. The family had to find out about it from the newspapers and when I inquired about the benefits of membership, he deadpanned, "I can always get a free steak dinner when I'm in New York," the organization's international headquarters.

But our uncle was far more interested in showing us how the Palouse Hills were formed, where the Nez Perces and Palouses fought at the Battle of the Big Hole, the route of Lewis and Clark over the Lolo Trail, and the saber-toothed tiger skull he found carefully placed upon a rock shelf deep inside an obscure mountain cave. While his colleagues retired to lives of comfort and golf, Willis flew off to Israel to observe first-hand excavations at Jerusalem and Tell Lachish. Something of a religious skeptic, he was nevertheless impressed with the recent discovery of the Tell Amarna tablets at Ebla which confirmed the 295

existence of the Hittite Empire, hitherto mentioned in ancient manuscripts only in the Old Testament book of Judges. This news justified a trip to Turkey where our uncle investigated the new discoveries there with a team of university archaeologists. From the shape of the Palouse Hills to pottery shards in Jerusalem, Willis's curiosity knew few bounds.

Rural Schooling and Community Continuity

Interests nurtured in area youth by innate curiosity and encouraged by family members were extended by remarkable faculties of Palouse area schoolteachers. In our case, Mrs. (Mildred) Repp had fascinating bulletin boards in her fourth grade classroom featuring the major Indian cultures throughout North America. The words "Nez Perce" and "Spokane" were the only names on the map close to where we lived but she said Indians had once hunted and dug roots along Rebel Creek Flat. She read to us fantastic legends of the Northwest's First Nations featuring Blue Jay, Abalone Man, and other Animal People. During our sixth grade year Mr. (Jim) Leonard, a native of Palouse, read classical literature to us and when we first heard about Ulysses and Penelope I wondered what the journey across the Atlantic must have been like for my Grandmother Scheuerman, whom I only knew briefly before her death in 1961. She had come from Berry Meadow in 1898 as a small child with her parents aboard the SS Hungarie but something tragic and mysterious had happened to her mother. Throughout Grandma's lifetime she sought without success to learn if her mother had been buried at sea or somewhere near New York City where they had landed.

Grade school principal and eighth grade teacher Mr. Yenny, born and raised in Kooskia, was the most formidable figure we ever encountered at school. To us he was a man without a first name—like Moses or Shakespeare, whom we held in highest regard. We struggled to correctly diagram sentences and artistically render penmanship push-pulls. The room was as much museum as desk space with rocks and mineral displays from the Hoodoos and the most intriguing exhibit of conifers from the eastern Palouse forests. Each specimen was precisely cut to the same dimensions with the bark remaining on the sides (he was also the junior high shop teacher), and stood about two feet high with a forty-five degree slice on the top revealing the ring structure and an inner chamber behind plastic showcasing seedlings, cones, and needles. A man of substantial girth who seemed to look forever sixty, Mr. Yenny was a strict disciplinarian who brooked no misbehavior, untucked shirts, or hats worn inside. He was also a giant in any crisis. When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and I was in seventh grade, Mr. Yenny convened the entire student body in the multipurpose room and said with calm resolution, "Our president has fallen earlier this day. His death touches us all but America remains strong." I seem to recall that we were dismissed from school early and I joined my cousins in front of the television set at Grandpa Scheuerman's to watch the historic events of that tragic November day unfold. There was sadness among us but no panic; mostly because Mr. Yenny had said everything was under control.

In high school, Mr. (Ray) Smith took us on outings in physical science class to archaeological digs on the Snake and Palouse rivers. These excavations were supervised by Dr. Roald Fryxell of WSU, co-discoverer of Marmes Man in 1965 with Dr. Richard Daughtery, and Dr. Roderick Sprague from the University of Idaho whose crew found an original Lewis and Clark Peace Medallion while relocating Indian burials at the ancient village of Palus to higher ground to salvage them from flooding. He also drove us across the basin to study the peculiar terrain of the Channeled Scablands and see the fossilized mold of the Blue Lake Rhino. 296

Our high school FFA advisor, Mr. (Dan) Birdsell, a native of the St. John area, introduced us to soil chemistry, crop and livestock judging—impossible for me to master, public speaking, and parliamentary procedure. He taught to the incessant background strains of Eddy Arnold's "Cattle Call" and other country music he considered hit music. Mr. Birdsell also served as our junior varsity basketball coach and once enabled us to salvage some dignity by keeping his alma mater from scoring 100 on us. (They managed 98.) Author-educator Garrett Keizer writes about the FFA in Nowhere Else But Here, his eloquent memoir about a scholarly city kid who reluctantly takes a job at a rural New England high school. Much to his wonder, FFA came to impress him as the single-most important influence for shaping democratic values in young people and instilling an appreciation for Western civilization. The organization's memorized meeting ritual is steeped in references to Demeter, virtue, and ideals taken from the classical world to be put into contemporary practice. Mr. Birdsell imparted these understandings through example, humor, and endless hours of volunteered time helping students like me before and after school.

The spirit of unfettered young adult inquiry in any era arrived in the person of Mrs. (Louise) Braun on the first day of our senior year in the fall of 1968. She came clad in black leotards and matching leather jacket, and we soon found her to be as demanding as she was iconoclastic and brilliant. At first glance that opening week, nothing traditional appeared on the horizon for our classroom experience except the plaster bas-relief of a Revolutionary War scene mounted high on the wall behind the teacher's desk. Under Mrs. Braun‟s tutelage, we delved deeply into English literature but were not assigned the customary required outside reading lists for writing and reporting. The fresh air of academic freedom rushed between her third-story room and the library across the hall. We could choose Ray Bradbury or Zane Grey, Successful Farming Magazine or The Brothers Karamazov. The important message was to read, and we grew to love her and the tales she brought about growing up in tiny Viola in the eastern Palouse.

Virtually everyone from our classes went on to some form of higher education, usually at Washington State University in Pullman, Eastern Washington University at Cheney, Moscow's University of Idaho, or to community college in Spokane or Walla Walla. "To strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield." Tennyson's words of dynamic challenge from “Ulysses” served as the motto for my brother's graduation, and I recalled Grandpa reciting those very lines to me long before that class ever entered high school. Most of us moved on feeling that our paths would likely lead beyond the Palouse but that those who chose to return to the farm or a community business or set up house would also find success. Of the sixty graduates from my brother‟s Class of 1967, mine two years later, and my future wife‟s in '72, one- third of us eventually returned to live in places from Spokane to Lewiston.

Palouse Country community ceremonials fostered dependability and continuity. Under the abiding ministry of Trinity's Pastor Fred Schnaible, for example, my wife and I were baptized as infants, confirmed in adolescence, and married as young adults. Dr. John Hardy delivered both us and our first- born daughter, Mary Katherine, two decades later. Timeless Mr. Yenny, who had welcomed us to kindergarten and taught us in eighth grade, never missed a high school graduation. Local bank president Cliff Workman, who had helped many of us open our first bank accounts as children, presented scholarships when we received our diplomas. Most of these individuals and others like them retired in the community to join the ranks of elders who continued for years to volunteer in a variety of ways to benefit area youth. Throughout this period of our upbringing in the Palouse, most of my generation experienced

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what we considered a sort of rural dullness. Holocaust survivor Ellie Wiesel terms such circumstances a "blessed ordinariness" that should never be taken for granted. Rather, it instills a sense of solidarity and personal responsibility to family, community, and society at large.

Glimpsing the Palouse Primeval

A few weeks after my high school graduation, Grandpa Scheuerman expressed an interest in visiting relatives who lived in Brewster, Washington. Since we were caught up with summer fieldwork, I offered to drive him over for the weekend and I noticed on the map that our destination was only a few miles from the Colville Indian Reservation. I remembered Grandpa's tales about his parents bartering garden produce for Indian salmon at the immigrant Palouse Colony and had long wondered about the experiences of the region's First Peoples. Not far from our farm was the bridge over the Palouse River near the place known to old timers as "Kamiakin's Crossing" and a stream near the foot of Rock Lake still bore the name "Kamiacun Creek" on area maps. Somewhere I had read that Kamiak Butte had the same Native American namesake. Reflecting on this unusual word and Grandpa's boyhood memories of area Indians, I ventured to request a minor detour while on our way to Brewster. Highway 155 ran about fifteen miles north from Grand Coulee to the Colville Tribal Agency Headquarters in Nespelem and with Grandpa's permission, we were soon headed toward the reservation. My meager investigative credentials consisted of curiosity about a name attached to several Palouse Country landmarks.

I approached the public affairs office simply to ask if anyone bearing the name Kamiakin might live in the vicinity and be willing to speak with me about the family‟s Palouse Indian history. I read some initial skepticism in the eyes of the woman who fielded my query, Annie George—herself the daughter of Chief Cleveland Kamiakin I would learn later, but she smiled and said a family elder, Arthur Tomeo Kamiakin, lived nearby and might be inclined to speak with me. I carefully wrote down directions to his home, thanked Mrs. George for her trust, and drove with Grandpa past a cemetery in which a massive white stone rose several feet above the others. I turned and parked our blue Ford Fairlane on a grassy trail next to the graveyard and we walked the short distance to the white obelisk that I recognized from a high school history text as Chief Joseph‟s headstone. A bust of the famed leader was carved into one side of the memorial, and a few feet away we saw stones bearing the names of Tesh Palouse Kamiakin and other members of that distinguished family. On almost every grave was a collection of reliquaries significant to donors who had come to pay tribute to loved ones—feather clusters, silver coins, dried flowers, and small brass bells that sang eerily in the wind.

Grandpa called my attention to a polished red granite marker on the other side of Joseph‟s grave. The engraved words “Tom Poween 1852-1940” appeared above a scene depicting an Indian fisher on a riverbank with the words, “Born at Almota on the Snake River.” We seemed to be in the midst of the Palouses‟ final resting place, here in the sage and dust. We returned to the car and continued on our journey back in time down the gravel road to the dirt lane that our map indicated would lead near the road beyond town to the Arthur Tomeo residence. Abandoned cares lay randomly near the road beyond town like carcasses White buffalo hunters once left to rot by the thousands on the Great Plains. Soon a while mobile home appeared ahead as had been indicated and I parked near the front door. After knocking several times, a kindly fellow appearing to be about my grandfather‟s age with long gray-black braids opened the door. He quickly stepped outside and pulled the door shut behind him as if to prevent anyone inside from seeing him converse with me. 298

I introduced myself and Grandpa, identifying us as natives of the Palouse Country. Arthur Tomeo's eyes immediately brightened and he almost shouted, "Have you ever heard of place called Rock Lake?" "Yes," I replied, "we have been there many times." "Well that's my home country!" he said pridefully. "My father and uncles, Tomeo, Skolumkee, and Tesh Palouse; they were all raised there with my grandfather. He was Chief Kamiakin. Not far from the lake is Steptoe Butte—our "power mountain!" My mother's people were the Poweens from Almota and Penawawa." The word "Palouse Country" seemed to release a torrent of memory from the old man. While we both remained on the stoop I clumsily jotted down as best I could his many recollections of trips back to his grandfather's and great- grandfather's burial sites in the Palouse, information on family connections, and the story of how Kamiakin's wives brought their families to the reservation. Through the eyes of Arthur Tomeo Kamiakin and other friendships introduced through his acquaintance, like Emily Peone and Mary Jim, I came to glimpse the Palouse primeval—a vast labyrinth of whorls and swirls as if a deific signature thumbprint.

Palouse Country pioneer doctor and poet John W. Lockhart expressed in the florid verse of "The Palouse and Progress" (1906) the tenor of the region's halcyon days as if poised for a period of unprecedented change:

On Steptoe‟s famous heights old Progress stood, And viewed, with practiced eye, the broad domain With the range of vision. The great Palouse, With her rugged hills and hoary mountains, With their mighty forests and liquid hands, Of azure hue, winding their tortuous And devious ways among the bunchgrass Hills, to the great ocean of the West, To swell her fair bosom, that she may bear A nation‟s commerce, and proclaim her worth Among the crowns of ancient heritage. To eastward the high rolling prairies, Buttressed with the everlasting dolomite, Upheaved and seamed and creviced by the strong, Covered layer upon layer, fathoms deep, With the disintegration and decay Of ages, awaiting the grand processional Of inventive genius to fructify The fertile soil, and there produced in rich And rare abundance, rivaling in grand Profusion the luxuriant storehouse Of Egypt, harvests of cereal food To feed the great Eternal purpose. Height upon height they rise, in undulations, Vast as the troubled sea when wind and storm Hold high carnival and would feign uproll The angry waves to lash their fury out In that bright firmament of peace....

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