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Kissing Sitting Bull: A Prussian Pioneer on America's Last Frontier
| Article
# : |
19199 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
2,625 Words |
| Author
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Sharon Hudgins
Sharon Hudgins is an author and journalist who lived for
fifteen years in Germany. Her ancestors emigrated from Prussia
to the United States in the 1860s. |
When four-year-old Elizabeth Halweg left her Prussian homeland in 1867, on a boat bound for America, no one could have predicted that only a few years later she would become a friend of both the great Sioux Indian chief, Sitting Bull, and Theodore Roosevelt, future president of the United States.
Elizabeth was one of five children born to Mathilada Malek Halweg and her husband Wilhelm, a baker in the Prussian town of Flatow, in northwestern Poland. When the Halwegs lived in Flatow, in the mid-nineteenth century, the territory of Poland was partitioned among Prussia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Flatow was situated near the shifting border between Prussia and Russia, in an area disputed by both countries. So it is not surprising that Wilhelm and Mathilda Halweg chose to leave this contested land and sail for America, in search of a better and more stable life for themselves and their children.
The Halweg family settled in New York City, where they remained until the mid-1870s. Dissatisfied with city life, they--like thousands of other immigrants--decided to move westward, into the more open spaces of the vast American interior. The Halwegs bought land in Iowa and started a second new life, this time as farmers.
It was here that Elizabeth Halweg met her future husband, the man who would take her even father into the American West. George Dell was a descendant of English Quakers who had originally settled in Pennsylvania. Nineteen years older then Elizabeth, he had served in a military hospital unit during the Civil War, then returned to his chosen occupation as an Iowan farmer.
George and Elizabeth married in 1883, one month after her twentieth birthday. Three days later, they left on a train for the Dakota Territory, one of the last frontiers of settlement in the West. George purchased land for a cattle ranch one hundred miles north of the Dakota Black Hills, on the northern Great Plains--huge expanse of dry, desolate grasslands, almost barren of trees, that one visitor described as "a good place to make money, but a poor place for a civilized being."
This was also Indian territory. Much of the land on the Great Plains had been taken from the Indians by a series of government treaties confining them to several reservations. In 1877--after gold had been discovered in the Black Hills and General Custer's army had been defeated by Cheyenne and Sioux warriors--the United States government appropriated even more Indian land, forcing
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