At the bottom of the memorial cairn in the Alt-Bergfeld Cemetery southwest of Grunthal, Manitoba, we see a single word: Hirte (herdsman).¹ As there is no name, it is likely impossible to establish with certainty who it was. According to local lore, the teenaged son of the herdsman was struck by lightning in 1907 while herding the cows on the village communal pasture.² As a general rule, at that time East Reserve Mennonites did not use concrete or stone headstones, with the result that names resided only in the memories of the villagers. When most of the villagers left Canada for Paraguay in 1926, that memory left with them and the name of the herdsman was lost. By the time the memorial cairn was erected around 1980 nobody could identify the man. He may well have been one of the early non-Mennonite herdsmen employed after many new immigrants arrived from central and eastern Europe beginning in the mid-1890s. As early as 1901, the herdsman for Alt-Bergfeld was listed in the federal census as Kost (Constantine) Kosowan. By 1906 the herdsman was Pytro Dzaman (misspelled as Gorman), but he and his family moved to the Stuartburn area where they are listed in the 1911 census, so the tragic death remains a mystery. Little has been written about the intersection of these two immigrant communities, the earlier Mennonite immigrants employing a more recent set of immigrants who spoke the same language, German, and often came from central and eastern European territories such as Volhynia, Bukovina, Galicia, and Prussia.

Some background might be helpful to understand the circumstances of this employment. In 1873 Mennonite delegates from Russia negotiated the right to live in a closed block settlement and they accepted land east of the Red River, known as the East Reserve (now the Rural Municipality of Hanover). Block settlement, however, still meant that each family would be forced to live on its own homestead, and would therefore be separated from everyone else. To change this, an exception to the Dominion Lands Act called the “hamlet privilege” was negotiated in 1876, allowing Mennonites to settle in villages and perform their mandatory improvements to the village instead of to their own homestead. These exceptions, however, were time-limited. In fact, within a few years there were requests to permit non-Mennonites to apply for homesteads within the reserve. In 1889 the hamlet privilege was cancelled for the East Reserve, although existing villages were grandfathered in.

These closed villages became the hallmark of Mennonite settlement on the prairies. However, within the villages, it was not long before non-Mennonite immigrants began to appear in municipal assessment records. The earliest non-Mennonite names appeared in the Niverville area, where a station of the Pembina Branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway attracted merchants who also invested in land. By 1890 German Lutheran families had settled in Friedensfeld southeast of Steinbach, and within a decade at least ten different homesteads were registered in that area.

The census records for 1891 show domestic help and farm labourers with non-Mennonite names as living on the East Reserve. Slightly later, in 1896, the Hanover assessment roll lists Gottlieb Fuchs as a “labourer” in Schoensee. This term was likely code for the role of the village herdsman, who had a dedicated hut at the southeast corner of the village. Fuchs was assessed only on “Personal Property,” meaning that he did not have his own land. This seems to have been the beginning of a pattern of employing recent eastern European immigrants as village “servants,” “farm labourers” and “domestics,” as the various federal census records indicate. Later entries narrow down the description of some of the farm labourers to “cowman” or “herdsman.” It is clear that these closed villages now included immigrants with German and Slavic names. A case in point is Alt-Bergfeld. By 1901, Constantine and Barbara Kosowan were residents of the village. They are identified in the census as Greek Catholic, and of Austrian nationality, but as having “Ruthenian” (Ukrainian) as their native language.

Alt-Bergfeld was founded about four kilometres from Grunthal at the southwestern edge of the East Reserve in 1877. It was one of the last villages to be established in the first round of Mennonite settlement. The shallow soil, scrub bush cover, stony ground, and poor drainage made grain production difficult, but with its abundance of trees, high water table, and grassland it was well suited for a subsistence farmer. Although grain farming was out of the question, gardening and cattle raising or dairying worked well, so well that Alt-Bergfeld became a sizable and prosperous village. It was one of few villages with farmyards on both sides of the street, which was lined with rows of maple trees planted in the old tradition already known in Prussia.

Each day for about half the year the village herdsman blew his horn and gathered the cows together in the morning to drive them to the communal pasture over a mile away. In the evening he returned, blowing his horn to alert the owners to claim their cows along the village street. By the turn of the century, Mennonites living in Alt-Bergfeld hired new immigrants from eastern Europe for the job. These immigrants had arrived much like Mennonites, seeking new opportunities and new hope. On the East Reserve they often served as hired hands and maids seasonally, and occasionally year-round. Although it is common knowledge that these new immigrants sometimes lived and worked on the East Reserve even before the turn of the twentieth century, little has been written about them.

My awareness of this was given immediacy on April 21, 2017, when a phone call from Edmonton raised an unusual question. The caller, Erna Chase, said that she had been in Steinbach six months earlier on a quest for a burial site, and had been told that I might be able to find it. After some preliminary questions, it turned out that the lost burial site was that of her maternal grandmother, whose name was Maria. When I asked about the surname, there was some hesitation. The surname was part of the problem, since there were many different spellings, but the name used today was Schanowske. I was slightly taken aback since I was expecting a Mennonite name, but I was intrigued nevertheless. I asked for the first name of the husband. It was Martin. I was in the middle of a meeting just then, so I asked for an email address and said I would get back to her when I had done a bit of research.

Even as I walked back to the meeting, as unlikely as it seemed at the moment, something clicked in the back of my mind. I knew that name! Maybe with a slightly different spelling and pronunciation, but close enough to bear some investigation. Later that day I followed my instincts, retrieved the Martin Schaknowski reference that I knew about, and double-checked online with the 1911 federal census. Although the spelling was quite different, phonetically the name was identical. That record confirmed that his wife’s name was Maria, but I also wrote down the children’s names, and emailed Erna Chase with the question: is this the family you mean? She promptly confirmed that it was the right family. This exchange began a connection that has continued to this day.

Although I could not help with her immediate question regarding her grandmother’s burial site, I asked whether she knew that her grandfather had served as a herdsman in the old Mennonite village of Alt-Bergfeld. She had never heard anything like that! I sent her the 1911 census where her family and my grandmother are on successive pages, and then shared that her grandfather and my great-grandfather had known each other very well. That was a surprise to her. I explained that my great-grandparents lived in that village in 1911, and the herdsman would have taken their cows to the communal pasture. That means for several summers twice a day these two men would have met at the gate to the village street, in the morning to hand off the cows, and in the evening to retrieve them again. It is also highly probable that my grandmother would have known the herdsman’s oldest daughter, Rosa, who is Erna Chase’s mother. Rosa was eight years younger than my grandmother, and lived only six hundred metres away. My own father also lived in that village a few years later, but by that time the Schanowske family had already moved on. The language of the Schanowske family was German but their domestic language was that of the Prussian lowlands, which shares roots with Mennonite Low German, so the Schanowske family would have spoken much the same dialect as their Mennonite neighbours.

It is a bizarre coincidence that I would have a piece of this puzzle of her ancestry. I added a further wrinkle to the story by telling her that I also had a colour picture of her grandparents’ house. With the permission of Dr. John Warkentin I sent her the picture that he had taken of the old log house during his research in the late 1950s. Even more coincidental is the fact that as he was trudging up and down the village taking pictures, as he did several times, I was sitting at my desk in the Woolwich School (No. 1968), about a mile away. The house itself, a cozy cottage built of squared logs carefully dovetailed, was later moved closer to the village street, and in the early 1950s was occupied by a Danish dairyman who did the milking for rancher George Robertson. In 1937 Robertson had purchased the land from William McCullough, a speculator who bought it from the village in 1923.

The herdsman story took an unexpected turn a few months later, when by another strange coincidence a friend gave me a box of cards and memorabilia that somebody had dropped off at his place. Among the cards were three sample handwriting booklets from the Alt-Bergfeld private school from 1908, 1913, and 1916 collected by teacher Peter K. Klassen. These Probeschriften were copy booklets of exemplary handwriting hand-bound with heavy thread designed to showcase the excellent work of schoolchildren learning to write (in German). In 1908 and in 1913 the handwriting was in the old Kurrent or Kurrentschrift Gothic script, which few people under the age of eighty can read today. However, in 1916 the lettering was Latin. One could speculate on what role the outbreak of the First World War might have had on that change. More pertinent to this story is that I opened the 1913 booklet first, and because of the uneven binding it fell open to a passage signed by “Kaarl [sic] Schekonowsky.” This turns out to be the oldest son of the Schanowske family, later known to Erna Chase as Uncle Charlie.

It struck me, for the first time, that the children of the non-Mennonite herdsman would have been attending the Mennonite private school. The passage that Karl had been given to copy examined the history of the very area from which Karl’s family had emigrated just seven years earlier. The text, however, was remarkably Mennonite. It described King Frederick I’s use of his Prussian troops as mercenaries in Europe during the first decade of the 1700s as “shameful.” The text also mentioned the last outbreak of the Black Plague in northern Europe in 1708–11, when one-third of the population of East Prussia died. It seems that the teacher tailored the text deliberately to the students in his class.

As more detail surfaced about the Schanowske family, the story began to take shape: this German-speaking Lutheran family immigrated to Canada from Volhynia in 1906, on two different ships. Martyn Tchechanovsky (b. 1873 in the village of Skotniki, in the Dolnośląskie province of present-day Poland), and his wife Marianna Schanowske (nee Neugebauer, b. 1874, married in the village of Mokvyn,³ in present-day Ukraine) appear in existing local records in 1908 when the birth of daughter Olga was registered in “Steinbeck.” The sizable German Lutheran settlement in nearby Friedensfeld may have attracted the new immigrants to settle in the area.

By 1910 the family had obtained employment in Alt-Bergfeld, where Martin was employed as a “cowman.” There, according to the 1911 census, he worked seventy-two hours a week for about $10, but had Sunday off, when the villagers took turns herding the cattle. Maria and the oldest daughter Rosa (mother to Erna Chase) likely stayed at home to take care of the younger children Olga and Heinrich (both born in Manitoba). They probably tended a huge garden and perhaps some hens or pigs. Karl and Friedrich (both born in “Russia,” according to the census) attended the Mennonite private school in the village, and likely helped their father with the cows during the summer. Since Alt-Bergfeld was a large and prosperous village, with about fifteen households in 1911, the herd of milk cows could easily have numbered seventy-five or more. The communal pasture was over a mile away, and as there were no fences, keeping a herd of cows from damaging crops or straying was a full-time job. This was especially the case for Martin, who had less than full use of his right hand due to arthritis.

References to Niverville in the various family records suggest that for several years the family left Alt-Bergfeld over winter and obtained work in the Lutheran community just east of Niverville. Here Rosa met her future husband, Adolf Wolske, whom she married in 1915. In 1916 the newlyweds moved to Saskatchewan, where surprisingly the census records find Martin and his entire family listed as well, probably there on a visit. By 1918 the Hanover assessment roll shows that Martin and Maria were back in Manitoba, living in the Schoensee area two miles north of present-day Grunthal, where Martin again probably served as “cowman.” This left Rosa Wolske separated from her family for a decade. As daughter Erna Chase puts it, “My mother often sang the ‘Red River Valley’ song. When she was only seventeen years old, she left that valley with her husband for a homestead in Saskatchewan. I learned all the words as a child but I really didn’t realize the significance of that song for her. Surely her heart ached with loneliness for her parents and siblings. Grandmother Maria is resting peacefully in that beautiful Red River Valley. If we can locate her gravesite I want to tell her that her strength has come down to all her descendants.”

By 1920–21 the family had acquired its own land in Rosengard, living in the village. There the younger children likely attended the Mennonite private school taught by Philip Kehler until the new government District School No. 2162 opened in fall of 1927. Four Schanowske children were listed as attending the new government-run Rosengard district school under teacher Peter Rempel in the fall of 1927. Since this was their first exposure to an English school, all four of them, aged nine to thirteen, were in Grade 1. Their attendance was somewhat sporadic, for their mother Maria was deathly ill at the time, and that fall she was taken to the Winnipeg General Hospital. Maria Schanowske passed away in early December 1927 at the age of fifty-three, after being ill for some years. Bardal Funeral Parlour of Winnipeg then sent the deceased to Carey (the closest station to Rosengard) by train. Here the casket was picked up and taken for burial, but no record of her burial site has been located. She had lived in Canada just twenty-one years. Left to mourn her passing was her husband of thirty-three years, Martin, her married daughter Rosa in Saskatchewan, and ten unmarried children, the youngest just seven years old.

Martin Schanowske then sold their things in Rosengard at auction in early January 1928 and moved the family to the growing railway town of Galilee, Saskatchewan, to homestead near Rosa and Adolf Wolske. Adolf died suddenly later that same year, leaving Rosa a widow at age thirty-one with three young children and a fourth on the way. In 1936 she married Herman Schumacher and had more children, among them Erna Schumacher Chase. Their daughters were themselves occasionally recruited to be “herd girls” on the plentiful pastureland and hills grazed by beef cattle. Rosa continued to live in the Galilee district of Saskatchewan to the end of her life. Today Galilee, much like Alt-Bergfeld, is almost completely erased from the landscape, and often referred to as one of the ghost towns of Saskatchewan. Only the old Sugar Loaf School and an abandoned garage remain, on Highway 36 south of Moose Jaw.

From the family’s last contact with the East Reserve, fast-forward ninety years to when the herdsman’s granddaughter Erna learned about a chapter of her grandfather’s life that she had never known. In the fall of 2019, Erna Chase, her sister, and a nephew arrived at our house in Tourond, and I took them back to the places where their grandparents had lived: Alt-Bergfeld, Schoensee, Rosengard, and the Niverville site of the original Lutheran church on Provincial Road 311, in the first two cases showing them the sites where the houses of the herdsman had been. For Erna Chase the visit to Alt-Bergfeld was emotional. As she remembers, “I too had the chore as a ‘cowherd’ to bring the milk cows from the pasture on our farm. As we stood in Alt-Bergfeld on a sunny day last September, I think that I heard him blow his herdsman’s horn.”

What happened to the herdsman’s family over those ninety years? Eleven children had been born to Martin and Maria, three of them in Europe (Frederick was a babe in arms during the voyage over), and eight here in Manitoba. After the move to Saskatchewan in 1928, the sons ended up homesteading and farming in the Galilee area, and later farther north. One son moved to Flin Flon to work in the mines after the Depression made farming difficult in southern Saskatchewan. Three of the sons were called to serve in the Canadian military during the Second World War. Four of the five daughters married locally, and stayed in the area until retirement, when one moved to Calgary. One daughter left home to enter the workforce in the 1930s, but no further information regarding her whereabouts is known to the family. Rosa, the oldest daughter, lived on a homestead in the Galilee district of Saskatchewan (36-10-27-2W) until her passing in 1971. One daughter lived to be over one hundred years of age. The last member of the original Schanowske family died in Moose Jaw in 2015, 109 years after arriving in Canada.

For a family whose name has close to twenty different spellings, this has been a journey. To Mennonites, they are nameless no more. They were, and continue to be, our neighbours.⁴

1. Bergfeld was established on the Mennonite East Reserve in 1877. The next generation established Neu-Bergfeld farther southeast, and the original village became Alt-Bergfeld. ↩︎
2. Grunthal History (Steinbach: Grunthal History Book Committee, 1974), 47. ↩︎
3. In the record, the village is listed as Mockvien. ↩︎
4. Special thanks to Blake Hamm of Selkirk, Manitoba, for assistance with copy-editing. ↩︎