This year, 2022, marks the centenary of the start of the Mennonite migration from Manitoba and Saskatchewan to Mexico, a milestone celebrated by tens of thousands in the Manitoba Colony in Mexico. Commemorations are also planned for next year to mark the centenary of the arrival of the Russlaender Mennonites, who left the Soviet Union to make a new home in Canada. On March 1, 1922, the first train of Old Colony Mennonites left Plum Coulee in Manitoba’s West Reserve bound for Mexico. The people boarding the train that day believed emigration to be the only option to protect their children from the state and its nationalistic education system. Just over a year later, on July 21, 1923, the first Russlaender Mennonites arrived at the train station in Rosthern, Saskatchewan. They viewed Canada as their salvation from revolution, civil war, and communism.¹

Both groups of Mennonites faced serious challenges with the question of land. Those emigrating needed to sell their Canadian land to finance the purchase of land in Mexico. Those arriving in Canada had promised to settle on the land but needed to acquire it to fulfill the promise. The lands still available for homesteading were hardly prime farmlands, and required clearing or living with stones. Effectively that meant land would have to be purchased for Mennonites arriving in Canada. For Manitoba Mennonites who had adapted themselves to the new educational system and were not migrating to Mexico, the purchase of the ordered Old Colony villages and farmlands by the Russlaender made a lot of sense.

For Old Colony Mennonites, converting their land to capital was an immediate and pressing issue. At a meeting of Old Colony members in May 1921, the decision was made to sell their Manitoba lands as a single block. David Harder, a witness to those events, noted in his memoirs that the Manitoba land was to “be sold as a community, so that all would receive the same price per acre.” Dwellings were to be considered part of the land “and no valuation should be made for them.” However, in the case of those who only had a home, but no farmland, the buildings were to be assigned a value. Payment was to be made for those buildings out of the entire pool of funds created by the sale.² In a subsequent document that attempted to frame this understanding in legal terms an exception was made for a mill in the village of Rosengart, which was to be sold separately.³ The plan to liquidate their land not only included selling it as a block, but also envisioned an economic equalization, at least to a limited extent.

Selling their land as a block using this valuation and payment scheme set aside the quality of individual landholdings and the value of buildings for those who owned both. Harry Leonard Sawatzky’s study of the Mexican Mennonite colonies offers one of the few explanations of why Old Colonists chose to sell their land in this way. He suggested that a block sale offered the prospect of providing the necessary down payment for the land purchase in Mexico, it would free up the largest group to emigrate as a body, and it would eliminate speculation in land on the part of those choosing not to emigrate. He also asserted that it would bring outsiders into the reserve, thereby so upsetting “the accustomed way of life of those who remained behind that they would soon be prompted to follow to Mexico and, promising obedience in the future, seek reinstatement in the church.”⁴

Although the idea that Old Colony leaders believed this sales scheme would bring other Mennonites in the reserve to their senses seems somewhat conjectural, the plan to sell the land in a block offered some of the advantages that Sawatzky outlines. It is not entirely clear, however, how Old Colony Mennonites preparing to emigrate arrived at the decision to sell the land as a single block using an agent. It is apparent that by early 1921 Old Colony leaders had concluded that they needed assistance for undertaking this mass migration. The Old Colony Mennonites relied on an old friend, the non-Mennonite lawyer John H. Black from the town of Morden, with whom they had dealt before. By the early 1920s there was considerable social capital invested in the relationship between the conservative Mennonites and the Morden legal firm of McLeod, Black, and MacAulay. The firm had faithfully served the interests of conservative Old Colony Mennonites in their prolonged conflict with the state over the education of their children and was a natural choice to help with the legal challenges that would come with selling their land.

The early discussions with Black about selling the land appear to have envisioned obtaining agreement from individual owners to use the legal firm as the single intermediary agent for the sale of their land. On April 4, 1921, over a month before the formal decision to sell in a block was made, Black had already drawn up a draft sales agreement and indicated to the Mennonite civic leader, Vorsteher Franz Froese, that if approved he would prepare five hundred copies of it for use in selling the land.⁵ By the next meeting five days later between Black, officials of the Old Colony orphan’s institution (the Waisenamt) and John W. Rempel of Blumenort, more thought had been given to the sale. The need for the land to be sold for cash was established, although there was already concern that this might be difficult. It was also noted that potential purchasers would have to purchase the villages, including the livestock and implements. The notes of the meeting suggest a “proposed commission on the sale of farms” of five percent on the first $1,000 and 2½ percent on the remaining value, suggesting transactions would still be individual sales. The exact method of distributing the proceeds of an eventual sale seems to have been discussed but remains unclear in the surviving notes of the meeting. Black simply noted, “as to valuation, probably the Saskatchewan method will be carried out.”⁶ In a follow-up letter to the meeting Black broached the subject of commission more directly. Black suggested 2 percent, which he thought under the circumstances, could be “fairly called a reasonable commission.”⁷ In a personal letter to Rempel where he reported on his work to secure naturalization papers for Rempel’s family, Black commented again on the question of commission. It appears that the discussion of commission had somewhat jeopardized the social capital implicated in the negotiations to that point. Black assured Rempel that he did “not wish to insist on any particular rate of commission that is not satisfactory to your people, for it is more important to me that I should be in agreement with you, than the question of any amount of money involved.”⁸

The method of sale to be used became clearer in subsequent meetings. On April 21, 1921, the Old Colony civic leadership met without Black to formally decide on the terms under which their lawyer would be given exclusive rights to sell the land in a block. The terms agreed to on that date were recommended to the Old Colony membership at a meeting held on May 21, 1921, and it appears that some time thereafter they met with Black to formally draw up an agreement. The agreement set out many of the points that had been negotiated earlier and clearly envisioned a block sale of the land. It was dated the same day as the Reinland meeting where the formal decision to sell the land in a block was made. The contract specified J. H. Black as the agent for the committee charged with selling all the land. It referred to a contract that authorized the agreement with Black, which was to be signed by individual landowners by June 1, 1921. Although the agreement’s expiry date of August 1, 1921, suggests optimism for an early sale, the agreement also anticipated that Black might not be able to sell the land. Accordingly, there were provisions for paying his expenses, agreement that he would exert himself even if he were not the seller, and provisions for other possible agents. According to David Harder, the agreement to sell in a block expired on August 1, along with the exclusive listing given to Black, but was subsequently extended several times.⁹

Peter A. Elias’s memoir noted that the agreements drawn up by Black were “to be handed to the village administrators and everyone intending to emigrate was to sign a release of his land to the barrister.”¹⁰ David Harder’s memoir acknowledged that “certainly some found this a little difficult, to surrender their land, which they considered as of better quality and upon which they had exerted so much effort and work to maintain it in a more profitable condition.”¹¹ Relying on Harder’s memoir, historian Frank Epp suggests that “there was pronounced resistance” to the proposal of the Old Colony leadership to sell the land as a block.¹² Despite this resistance, it is remarkable to note that some of the major players in the emigration were well-to-do farmers. For instance, Klaas Heide, a prominent Old Colony civic leader advocating migration, owned land in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and a “huge barn” that “accommodated 40 or more horses” on his yard in the village of Grünthal, near Gretna.¹³

The decision to sell land in a block was severely tested over the next few years and in the end proved unworkable, at least in Manitoba. Although Harder suggested that Black had a potential buyer in mind when the deal was made, there were no offers in the summer of 1921. The first concrete offer worthy of documentation came from the Similkameen Fruit Company in the fall of 1921. This company offered to buy 100,000 acres for $50 per acre, which was considerably lower than the $75 per acre that had been believed possible. A second offer that year brokered by Hugo Carstens, a Winnipeg land agent and publisher of the German newspaper Der Nordwesten, involved both the Mexican and Canadian lands, but the price had fallen to $35 per acre.¹⁴ By early 1922 Black had realized that he would not be able to sell the land but continued to exert efforts to help his Mennonite clients. He drafted the documents when General H. D. B. Ketchen, a prominent figure in the Winnipeg General Strike a few years earlier, was appointed as agent for a specific sale in early 1922 at $35 per acre.¹⁵ There were other potential buyers with diverse origins and interests. In December the monthly newsletter of the more liberal Mennonites, Der Mitarbeiter, discounted rumors circulating that the land had been sold to Italian and Jewish buyers.¹⁶

The rumors were not without foundation. Between December 1922 and March 1923 there were negotiations with the legal firm of Monteith, Fletcher, and David, which was acting on behalf of the Jewish Colonization Association. By that time the land price had fallen to $27 per acre with only 60,000 acres available for purchase. Later that year negotiations were underway with the Municipal Debenture Corporation of Quebec, which had some Italian connections. In one letter their agent noted that “the Italian government did not have the necessary authority to guarantee the Bonds to be issued by the Municipal Debenture Corporation of Quebec,” presumably to finance a purchase of the Manitoba lands.¹⁷ Mennonite real estate agents also tried to work on a large block sale of the land. On August 21, 1922, J. F. D. Wiebe, a farmer, minister, and real estate agent from Herbert, Saskatchewan, who had been involved with the inspection and purchase of land in Mexico, wired Heide that he had buyers for all the land in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.¹⁸

To relieve their financial stress, by August 1923 a despondent Old Colony leadership tried to reduce the amount of land they had purchased in Mexico. A copy of a letter to their Mexican creditors illustrates how frayed the resolve to complete the migration had become. After outlining the problems with the Mexican and Canadian crops, the writers noted, “A lot of our people down there have lost their courage already and several of them have come back to Canada, as you will probably be aware of yourself, consequently such happenings give such bad reports here that it causes a change of mind among our people and a number of them seem to stand back from their intentions to move to Mexico. . . . There seems to be very little hope to be able to sell our lands here at present, and we therefore can see no way out to meet our payments in the future unless we are able to arrange something to lessen our debts to you in some way or another.”¹⁹ The colloquial English used in the letter seems to indicate that Mennonites, instead of John Black, wrote the letter. It is also not clear if the letter was ever sent, as the signed copy in the file is missing the signature of Klaas Heide, one of the important negotiators of the Mexican land deal.

Declining land prices and the difficulty of finding potential purchasers seem to have prevented any of the block sale offers for the Manitoba land to be realized. In Saskatchewan the initial attempts to sell the land fared even worse. In 1921, the Hague-Osler Old Colonists had an offer for their land at $40 per acre that fell through, and they had to repossess their land. Swift Current Old Colonists had also secured a deal with a syndicate of Florida investors using Swift Current lawyers as agents. When payment was not forthcoming, they ended up owing their lawyers 10,200 acres in commissions. The validity of the mortgage on the acreage to guarantee the fees to their lawyers was contested in court and went through several appeals, but the Privy Council in London ultimately decided in favour of the lawyers.²⁰ The affair cost a lot of money, time, and embarrassment.

The opportunity presented by the Old Colony emigration was not lost on Canadian Mennonites who had adapted themselves to the new educational realities and were looking to assist Mennonites emigrate from war-torn and now communist Ukraine. Labelling themselves as “progressives,” they began to organize to bring over their coreligionists, and sought to find a way to settle them on lands being vacated by those emigrating to Mexico. A meeting of various church groups in Altona in April 1922 agreed to form a corporation of American and Canadian immigration committees that would “have as its task to purchase the Old Colony lands for our Russian brothers.”²¹ The envisioned corporation was the seed for the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization. The delegates at the April meeting discussed how Old Colony land could be purchased. There were two plans that had circulated among immigration leaders. H. H. Ewert, a teacher at the Mennonite Collegiate Institute who later acted as chair at the founding meeting of the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization, advanced a plan whereby a syndicate of Mennonites would raise $150,000, which would be used to buy one village and its lands. The village would be sold to Russlaender immigrants who would mortgage their properties to provide the funds for purchasing a second village. The transactions would be made using the Waisenamt, which also acted as a mutual aid credit agency. The process would be repeated until all the Old Colony lands had been purchased and resold to the Russlaender. The second plan, advanced by David Toews, and the one that the Board would adopt in June 1922, involved creating a corporation that would raise ten million dollars by selling $100 shares to Mennonites across North America. The corporation would purchase Old Colony lands and sell them to the arriving Russlaender.²² Although the envisioned corporation never came to pass, at its June 1922 meeting the Board also authorized an offer to be made to the leaders of the Old Colony in Manitoba’s West Reserve at $25 per acre, Swift Current and Hague-Osler at $20. Half of the purchase price was to be paid in cash and the other half in two to five years.²³ The offer was also not acted upon.

With the arrival of Mennonites from the Soviet Union beginning in 1923, the acquisition of land became an acute problem for the Russlaender migration. The Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization and the affiliated Mennonite Land Settlement Board were torn in their approach to finding land for the arriving Russlaender. A. A. Friesen, the head of the Mennonite Land Settlement Board, confided in W. T. Badger, the manager of the Canada Colonization Association (a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific Railway), that the “members of the Board are more in favor of wild lands whether homestead lands or railway lands.” The preference for the cheaper “wild” land reflected the Board’s concern for the repayment of travel debts. Friesen acknowledged, however, that the immigrants “seem to be decidedly in favor of improved lands” and the Board had “hesitatingly” begun negotiations for the purchase of Old Colony lands.²⁴

In 1922, 1923, and 1924, individual land speculators also made several offers for the land. Some of these prospective buyers had a quick sale to Russian Mennonite immigrants in mind. J. F. D. Wiebe saw the opportunity to buy from Old Colonists and then sell the land to the Russlaender; however, finding financing for such a transaction eluded him. In a 1924 letter to the Old Colony Vorsteher Franz Froese, Wiebe noted that there “was considerable disunity regarding settlement” because the Russlaender were now able to “purchase lands without a down payment with ten years to pay. That makes it difficult for those of us working to have them buy your villages in Manitoba.” He rhetorically asked whether Froese would not sell “the village of Rheinland [sic] if Johann Warkentin in Winkler, others, and I would give our word. If we could get a start in Manitoba, we could make it work. We would see to it that you received payment for everything.”²⁵

Despite the 1921 decision to sell the land in a block, smaller groups of Mennonite farmers began to list their lands separately almost immediately and over time more land was sold on a piecemeal basis. As early as August 1922, a representative of the legal firm Monteith, Fletcher, and David appeared in the West Reserve village of Blumengart, obtaining signatures for the purchase of the village by one of its principals, Ernest Fletcher. In October of the same year Fletcher sold the village and its farmlands to John Hofer, David Hofer, and Jacob Hofer of the Millbank Hutterite Colony.²⁶

Most of the Old Colony land in Manitoba’s West Reserve was sold to individual purchasers over the next ten years with a host of different transactions and arrangements. Detailed research of land titles by Bruce Wiebe indicates that even though many of the villagers of Gnadenthal left for Mexico in 1922, sales of land only began in 1924. Many of those who left in 1922 transferred their properties for one dollar to other villagers who were planning to leave later. Wiebe’s detailed listing of Gnadenthal land transactions suggests that Old Colony properties often went through several hands before Russlaender immigrants acquired title to land in West Reserve villages.²⁷ Other arrangements involved renting to own or financing from relatives. Gerhard and Margaretha Rempel Ens purchased land in Reinland from her second cousin, Abram Rempel, in 1923. The Enses lived with the Rempels until the latter moved to Mexico. The purchase price of $14,000 included 480 acres, the village housebarn, livestock, and equipment. The Enses financed the purchase over ten years at 6 percent interest with the down payment provided by Abram Rempel’s brother Franz from Blumenort.²⁸ Some West Reserve farmers increased their holdings while others purchased Old Colony lands and resold them to Russlaender immigrants. The Morden Times reported that Winkler businessman John Enns and his son purchased 275 acres and buildings from a Letkeman in Schanzenfeld for $22 per acre. Letkeman was moving to Mexico and the newspaper reporter thought the buildings alone could have cost Letkeman $5,000. Two years later the newspaper reported that the Ennses had sold the farm to a Russlaender immigrant named Stobbe for $50 per acre including buildings.²⁹

Notable among individual purchasers in the West Reserve were the Jewish merchants from Plum Coulee and Winkler who had mediated the market for conservative Old Colony Mennonites since the 1890s. Ernest Sirluck’s biography notes that his father’s lifelong dream had been to farm, and when the Mennonites could not sell their land in a block, it created an opportunity for his father to “farm for himself.” The Sirluck and Nitikman families eventually purchased 4,000 acres of land; they farmed some and the rest was rented to others on a crop share basis.³⁰ The Rosner and Brownstone families of Plum Coulee also purchased land south of the village in the 1920s. Saidye Rosner Bronfman notes that her father “acquired several farms from the Mennonites who left Canada for Mexico.”³¹ In some cases the land purchases made by Jewish merchants turned the tables on the traditional relationship between conservative Mennonites and Jewish merchants. The purchases made by Nitikman and Sirluck were financed by the owners who now lived in Mexico. A few years later when the agricultural economy was hit by the Depression, Sirluck was forced to renegotiate the terms of his mortgages with his Old Colony Mennonite financiers. The traditional role of the Jewish merchant as intermediary for the market and “worldly” capital was reversed; Jewish merchants were now indebted to Mennonite farmers.³²

The 1924 purchase of the Hague-Osler lands was the only successful attempt to broker the sale of a large block of land between the two groups of Mennonites. In that year, Der Bote, the new Russlaender immigrant newspaper, reported that lands were available for purchase at $18.50 per acre from a London land agent and financier who had purchased the land from the Old Colony Mennonites. The Russlaender had to pay 10 percent down and, due to the exchange rate between the English pound and the Canadian dollar, they had to pay an additional 10 percent; they were able to borrow an additional $5.00 per acre from the financier to begin farming. The entire debt had to repaid over a period of twenty years with an interest rate of six to seven percent.³³

While Old Colonists were at best ambivalent about selling their land to immigrating Russlaender, those arriving from the Soviet Union preferred to settle in the well-ordered and improved villages of the Old Colonists, which almost felt like home. Old Colonists needed to convert their farm assets into cash to pay for the land in Mexico, to finance their transportation, to build homes, and to plant their first crops. The Russlaender arrived in Canada with nothing, facing huge debts to the railway for their transportation, and needing even more credit to begin anew. Declining land prices worked against a quick sale of all the Old Colony land in a block. While lower prices benefited the arriving Russlaender, the benefit was difficult to realize given their poverty. The needs of the two groups made a simple and quick block sale impossible to achieve. However, despite these problems and roadblocks, some villages, such as Gnadenthal, became Russlaender villages. Many others changed in character with neighbours who had different experiences and outlooks on education, the state, and “the world.”

1. Portions of this article were published previously as “Restoring the Commons: Land Deals and the Migration of Manitoba Mennonites to Mexico in the 1920s,” Journal of Agricultural History 87, no. 4 (2013): 452–72. ↩︎
2. David Harder, “Schools and Community: The Recollections of the Village School Teacher David Harder from Mexico,” trans. Delbert Plett, Preservings, no. 23 (2003): 12. David Harder was a schoolteacher who participated in the migration of the 1920s. His memoirs were published posthumously as Schule und Gemeinschaft: Erinnerungen des Dorfschullehrers David Harder von Mexico (Gretna: Jakob Rempel, 1969). ↩︎
3. “Denkschrift des Vetragens gemacht diesen Einundzwanzigsten Tag im Mai A.D. 1921,” Mennonite Heritage Archives (hereafter MHA), vol. 4297, Mexico Mennonite Files (II), file 4, “Contracts and Correspondence Re: Land Sales, 1921–1924.” Many of the same documents were photographed by Bruce Wiebe in Mexico as part of the Hochfeld Waisenamt Collection. The collection is in MHA, Digital Media vol. 119. ↩︎
4. Harry Leonard Sawatzky, They Sought a Country: Mennonite Colonization in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 47–48. ↩︎
5. John H. Black to Franz F. Froese, April 4, 1921, MHA, vol. 4297, file 4. Old Colony Mennonite leadership was vested in the Vorsteher, who was the leader in civic matters, and the Ältester or bishop, who was the main religious leader. ↩︎
6. “Points Mentioned at Meeting of John W. Rempel and the Waisenamt in Mr. Black’s Office,” Apr. 9, 1921, MHA, vol. 4297, file 4. Johann W. Rempel was a former Vorsteher and, at this time, a retired farmer. He was fluent in English, which may be the reason for his participation. Gerhard E. Rempel, “Vorsteher Gerhard J. Rempel (1893–1988),” Preservings, no. 23 (2003): 79. ↩︎
7. J. H. Black to J. W. Rempel, Apr. 11, 1921, MHA, vol. 4297, file 4. ↩︎
8. J. H. Black to J. W. Rempel, Apr. 19, 1921, MHA, vol. 4297, file 17. ↩︎
9. Harder, “Schools and Community,” 12–13. ↩︎
10. Peter A. Elias, Memoir 2, 64. Peter A. Elias died in 1925 and wrote several versions of his memoirs after his retirement from farming, purportedly one for each of his children. Photocopies of the extant German originals are located in MHA, vol. 1079. Excerpts from the memoir referred to here, Memoir 2, were translated by W. J. Kehler (Altona, MB) and are also in the above location; page references are from this version. For a short biography and description of Elias’s writings, see Adolf Ens, “Peter A. Elias (1843–1925),” Preservings, no. 27 (2007): 79–80. ↩︎
11. Harder, “Schools and Community,” 12. ↩︎
12. Frank H. Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920–1940: A People’s Struggle for Survival (Toronto: Macmillan, 1982), 119. ↩︎
13. Sally Harms, “Klaas Heide (1859–1926), Delegate,” in Old Colony Mennonites in Canada, 1875–2000, 2nd printing, ed. Delbert F. Plett (Winnipeg: D.F. Plett Historical Research Foundation, 2011), 117. ↩︎
14. MHA, vol. 4297, file 4. ↩︎
15. MHA, vol. 4297, file 4. Brigadier General H. D. B. Ketchen was the commanding officer of the Winnipeg military district during the Winnipeg General Strike. He was responsible for organizing the “special police force” to deal with strikers. David Bercuson, “The Winnipeg General Strike,” in On Strike: Six Key Labour Struggles in Canada, 1919 to 1949, ed. Irving Abella (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1974), 22. ↩︎
16. Der Mitarbeiter, Dec. 1922, 95. ↩︎
17. Unsigned to Franz Froese, Jan. 2, 1924, MHA, vol. 4297, file 14. ↩︎
18. J. F. D. Wiebe to Klaas Heide, Aug. 21, 1922, MHA, vol. 4297. For more on J. F. D. Wiebe and his involvement with the land purchase in Mexico, see Sawatzky, They Sought a Country, 36ff. ↩︎
19. F. Froese et al. to Mr. and Mrs. Madero, dated Aug. 24, 1923, at Reinland, MB, MHA, vol. 4297, file 8. ↩︎
20. Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs for 1921 (Toronto: Canadian Annual Review, 1922), 797–98; Manitoba Free Press, Oct. 24, 1924, 1. See also Sawatzky, They Sought a Country, 40–43. ↩︎
21. “Protokoll der am 11 April 1922 zu Altona, Manitoba, abgehaltenen Sitzung von Vertretern verschiedener Mennonite-Gemeinden in Manitoba bezueglich der Einwanderung der russischen Mennoniten nach Canada,” as published in Der Mitarbeiter, Apr. 1922, 27. ↩︎
22. H. H. Ewert, Der Mitarbeiter, July 1922, 47–48. See also Frank H. Epp, Mennonite Exodus: The Rescue and Resettlement of the Russian Mennonites Since the Communist Revolution (Altona: D. W. Friesen, 1962), 115–16. ↩︎
23. “Protokoll der 2. Sitzung der Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization am 2. und 3. Juni 1922 zu Rosthern, Sask.,” from photocopies at MHA. The originals are at Mennonite Archives of Ontario, XV-1.1. Epp, Mennonite Exodus, 186. ↩︎
24. A. A. Friesen to W. T. Badger, Nov. 5, 1923, MHA, vol. 1286, file 722. ↩︎
25. J. F. D. Wiebe to Franz Froese, Aug. 30, 1923, MHA, vol. 4297, file 12. ↩︎
26. Bruce Wiebe, “The Move to Mexico: The Sale of Three West Reserve Villages,” Preservings, no. 30 (2010): 36. ↩︎
27. Wiebe, “The Move to Mexico,” 39–43. See also “Gnadenthal Village Papers,” MHA, vol. 2198, file 8, and Elizabeth Peters, Gnadenthal, 1880–1980 (Winkler: Gnadenthal History Book Committee, 1982), 22. ↩︎
28. Delbert F. Plett, “Gerhard Ens (1867–1949),” in Old Colony Mennonites in Canada, 184–85. ↩︎
29. Morden Times, Mar. 26, 1924, and Mar. 17, 1926. ↩︎
30. Ernest Sirluck, First Generation: An Autobiography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 12. ↩︎
31. Saidye Rosner Bronfman, Recollections of My Life (Montreal: printed by the author, 1986), 28. ↩︎
32. Frank Brown, A History of Winkler (Winkler: printed by the author, 1973), 36. ↩︎
33. “Kurze Nachrichten von Ueberall,” Der Bote, May 14, 1924, and Epp, Mennonite Exodus, 194. ↩︎