Trial and Triumph

By Kevin Hoffmann

A young couple, planning to marry, are torn apart when the Sioux uprising erupts and throws their lives into peril and turmoil. The young man, distraught when he believes his betrothed died in the battle of New Ulm, and believing he has nothing to live for, joins the union forces which are drawn into the

• Language: English
• Publisher: LitFire Publishing
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641512404

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Trial and Triumph

Copyright © 2018 by Kevin Hoffmann

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

ISBN: 978-1-64151-240-4

Printed in the United States of America

LitFire LLC

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Trial and Triumph

Kevin Hoffmann

Contents

Preface

I Entrance

II In The Swabian Hall

III A War of Words

IV The Engagement

V Kill, Kill, Kill!

VI The Indian Uprising

VII The Swiftest Horseman is Death

VIII The Panic in New Ulm

IX The Battle Plan

X In the Barricades

XI The Battle Begins

XII A Night Ride

XIII Fort Ridgely

XIV The Slaughter

XV Cross and Cup

XVI Through!

XVII The Exodus from New Ulm

XVIII Elsie

XIX Walter

XX Many Friends

XXI Mara

XXII In Mankato

XXIII Walter and Elsie

XXIV In New Ulm

Preface

The original German language version was written by Frederick Mayer and published in 1914. This English translation was done by myself and finished in 2013. My sincere thanks and appreciation to Pete Lowry for his help in verifying the translation.

When I was a young boy, I loved to visit the library in New Ulm, where I would check out several books a week during the summer and bury myself in reading during the hot summer days. There was more to these visits to the library, however, because in the basement was the Brown County Historical Museum. On every visit, I would spend hours in the museum looking at the exhibits, and digesting all the testimonials that were visible to the patrons. An entire section was dedicated to the Sioux uprising. There were original paintings of the battles, Sioux weapons, settler weapons, arrow heads, countless artifacts, letters, and books. It was in a glass display case that I saw my first copy of the book "New Ulm by Dr. P Mayer. How I longed to be able to get access to it and learn the story that it would tell. But it was locked in a cabinet, and so as a boy I presumed that it was a very important book. It was several years later, when I was helping an elderly widow, Mrs. Hermerding, clean her basement that I came across the second and only other copy of the book I have ever seen. I asked her if I might take it home to read, and she simply stated, Here, I’ll give it to you, keep it, it’s yours. The book was written in German, and to my surprise, had not been translated into English. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. The book is a dramatization, of a love story between two characters, Walter and Elsie, set during the Sioux uprising and Civil War. As such, the Minnesota Historical Society was not interested in expending resources to translate it. It didn’t help that the first words in the book translate to: A historical account." Nevertheless, this information did not deter me. I still wanted to learn the story which this book told, and I have now made that story available to you in English. It has been over one hundred years since Fredrick Mayer published the original work, which is now in the public domain. I have used my own camera to add pictures to the book, rather than trying to use the Minnesota Historical Society pictures Frederick Mayer had included.

I did not attempt to make the story politically correct or ethnically balanced, only to translate it, but I did correct some contradictions Frederick Mayer had made. Note that many of the events described are true historic events into which the author wove the dramatized love story of Walter and Elsie.

C:\Pictures\Kevin pictures\NewUlm\IMG_3969.JPG

This is the entrance to the museum in the basement of the library as it looks today. The museum has been moved to the old Post office on Center Street.

Painting in the New Ulm Middle School Auditorium, by John Socha depicting the planning of New Ulm.

I

Entrance

It was a muggy August day in the year eighteen-hundred and sixty-two. Heavy thunderstorms had rolled across the Minnesota prairie. The heavy rains had caused both the Minnesota and the Cottonwood Rivers to swell and, at their confluence, generated much spray and froth.

The school-children of New Ulm were watching the churning waters. The Indians are holding their war-dance under there!, the twelve year old Maria professed to her younger siblings.

Oh, I’m scared!, they screamed, as a violent gust of wind sprayed water into their faces. With that they hurried home.

New Ulm had only been established seven years earlier. Several enterprising young German men had met in Chicago and decided to establish a model colony, in Minnesota. Their families were mostly from Württemberg and Bayern. Their origins were in the area of the old German Confederation fortress which stood at Ulm on the Danube. They were people who had left their homes and father land in that turbulent year of eighteen-hundred forty-eight but, in spite of that, had not lost their love for their way of life and culture.

German loyalty, German thoroughness and morality, the doctor and spiritual leader of this settlement would proclaim, are the foundation of the city of New Ulm, without the imposition of regulations that had ruined the traditional unifying laws of the parent city, Ulm.

No priests and no attorneys! shouted the young cobbler Lutz, that we will resist!

Countrymen, admonished the doctor you are still young and naïve. You know not the beast within the soul of man. You will soon learn that the state and the church, impose secular order and morality which is as essential for mankind to prosper as is the air which we breathe and the bread that we eat!

The glasses clinked and the founding principles were established.

The southern German settlers followed swiftly one after another and by the time our story unfolds, fifty-thousand people, virtually all of German origin, lived in southern Minnesota on the western frontier of Indian territory.

The immigrants knew nothing of America’s national issues. They came in search of a dream inspired by a wish to wrest a homeland from the wilderness. Other cities and villages grew around New Ulm. Through German industry the land was made arable, roads and bridges were built, and schools and churches erected. The settlement prospered and gained affluence and wealth.

People like the New Ulmers who had been involved in political issues in Germany, could also not remain silent observers of the monumental events, which were then shaking the founding principles of the United States.

The Germans in the northern states were outspoken in the fight against the indignity of the Negro slave trade. Their vote weighed heavily in the election of the great statesman and noble philanthropist Abraham Lincoln. Therefore, when the Civil War broke out, the Germans were incensed. No other ethnic group placed as many soldiers, in proportion to their population, in the field against the south as the German Americans.

Nor did the New Ulmers miss the bloody struggle over freedom and yes, indeed the preservation of the American union. Just as their fathers had fought against the bloody Napoleon, the sons abandoned their workshops and farms, left wife and child behind and went forth, to break the yoke of the Negro slaves. From their ranks the same heroism came forth with which their fathers had acquitted themselves in warfare...

"It is not a war between kings and emperors:

It is a crusade, a holy war!"

II

In The Swabian Hall

An elderly gentleman rode out of the city: it was the doctor with his Nelly, known far and wide as the doctor’s old nag. He studied the cloud bank which slowly rose on the western horizon, then cast his eyes over the prairie. All along the river surged wheat-fields waiting for the harvest. Along the river bank herds of cattle grazed in green fields, and beyond to the north lay the Big Woods.

In spite of the bountiful harvest this is an ominous time. The doctor muttered out loud to himself.

The fields are ripe for the harvest, only the hands to bring it in are missing.

Here Mrs. Pfänder lives, all alone, with her little children. There lives Mrs. Crone, also alone, her men have gone to war. It is up to these mothers and their children to cope with this situation on their own. Furthermore, one cannot trust the Indians. Today half the city is filled with them. How they leer at our women! They act friendly, but the Indian is deceitful as a cat, hungry as a wolf and bloodthirsty as a tiger. If they should strike against us we would be at the mercy of God.

Our women are helpless if the Sioux break loose and attack! The thought of it is ghastly!

The doctor rode on silently in deep thought for a time, then as if under a heavy burden took a deep breath, sat bolt upright and shouted:

God bless our German women, they are heroines!

At this point the road bends around a curve. Slowly the splendor of the prairie