Anton T. Ehrmantraut was my great-grandfather. His life belonged to that age in which empires summoned men with promises, used them, and then, having changed their interests, cast those promises aside. He was born on August 26, 1878, in Landau, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire. Yet neither he nor his people were Russian in origin. They were Germans: Catholic settlers from the southwest, from that borderland world of the Rhineland Palatinate, Baden, and Alsace, where frontiers shifted more readily than memory, and men learned early that a ruler’s map and a family’s identity were not the same thing.
His forebears had not gone east by accident. They had been invited. Russia, having won broad lands in the south, wanted farmers to people them and make them useful. So the Empire offered terms that prudent men could not ignore: land, liberty of worship, the use of their own tongue, local custom, exemption from military service. Under such conditions, German colonists founded villages in what was then called South Russia, though it lies in present-day Ukraine. One of those villages was Landau. There Anton was born, not into the old German homeland, but into a transplanted one: German in speech and faith, Russian in political allegiance only because a distant throne claimed the soil beneath his feet.
But states are constant in nothing except appetite. The very privileges by which these settlers had been enticed were, in time, withdrawn or diminished. By the later nineteenth century the old settlement had begun to fray. Language, schools, local self-government, exemption from conscription—one by one the securities of an earlier age were weakened. What had been offered as a stable order proved to be merely a temporary convenience. Families who had crossed Europe to preserve their faith and way of life now faced the familiar lesson that governments remember promises only so long as it profits them to do so. There were other pressures as well: growing households, finite land, narrowing prospects. But it is usually the breach of trust, more than poverty itself, that teaches men it is time to go.
So Anton, like many of his people, went west. I do not yet know the exact date of his arrival in America, nor the precise port at which he entered, but by 1900 he was in Richardton, in Stark County, North Dakota, where he married Margaretha Sattler. By 1913 his son, my grandfather John Frank Ehrmantraut, was born in Gladstone, also in Stark County. Thus the broad outline is plain even where some particulars remain to be recovered: Anton left the Russian Empire in the last years of the nineteenth century and joined that larger migration by which the Germans from Russia remade a piece of the northern plains in their own image.
North Dakota was no random refuge. It drew such people because it offered what they sought and what they had once been promised elsewhere: land, parish, kinship, continuity. There they could build again among those who spoke as they spoke, worshiped as they worshiped, remembered what they remembered. The move was not simply from one country to another. It was from one fragile settlement to another, from one negotiated belonging to the next. In that sense Anton’s life was neither wholly German nor Russian nor merely American. It was something more characteristic of the modern age: a life shaped by empire, migration, and the stubborn effort of families to remain themselves while the states above them altered names, borders, and terms.
So that is how I understand him. His people came from the southwest German Catholic world. They were planted in Landau, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, because empire required settlers. They left when empire ceased to honor the conditions under which they had come. And Anton, by establishing himself in western North Dakota, carried that line forward into America. It is an old story, and not an uncommon one: men moved by power, tested by distance, betrayed by policy, and preserved only by family memory.
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