The 200-year trek that brought German-Russians to Wyoming

Like every good story, this one begins with a young princess and a wealthy duke.

The German princess who would one day become Catherine the Great of Russia was born in Prussia in 1729, about 100 miles from present-day Berlin. At just 15 years old, she was sent hundreds of miles from home to marry a young Russian duke named Peter, whom she had met only once before.

The prospects for a fairy-tale romance were not promising.

Peter was her second cousin, and she had met him only once before when they were 10. She later described him as detestable, immature and unpleasant. She particularly disliked his pale complexion and his fondness for alcohol. Nevertheless, in 1745 the two were married, setting in motion a chain of events that would eventually change the course of history in the Big Horn Basin.

Their marriage was a disaster by any measure, and even the paternity of their one child is debated. What Catherine did well was assimilate into her new country. She quickly learned Russian, converted to the Orthodox faith and became so popular that just six months after Peter became Czar Peter III of Russia in 1762, she helped organize a coup in which Peter was overthrown and imprisoned while she took power to widespread public support.

Peter died mysteriously in prison. The official cause of death was listed as complications from hemorrhoids, but most historians believe he was murdered, likely with Catherine’s approval.

Just months after taking power, she pushed for sweeping changes across the country. In 1763, Catherine the Great issued a manifesto inviting Europeans to settle parts of the vast Russian Empire. Knowing the agricultural skills and work ethic of her fellow Germans, she offered incentives that sounded almost too good to be true: free land, religious freedom, local self-government and exemption from military service.

Thousands of German families accepted the offer.

They loaded their wagons and travelled more than a thousand miles east into the heart of Russia to establish farming communities along the Volga River in southern Russia. Catherine stayed good on her offer, and they received land and built villages, churches and schools. They spoke German, worshiped in German Lutheran churches and preserved their customs. For more than a century they lived as Germans in Russia.

Then the promises began to disappear.

As Russia often seems to do, it became involved in costly wars that strained the empire and exposed its weaknesses.
By the mid-1800s, long after Catherine had died, the Russian government began withdrawing many of the privileges that had attracted German settlers in the first place. Military exemptions were revoked, local self-government was reduced, and pressure increased to adopt the Russian language and culture.

Families who had lived along the Volga River for generations suddenly found themselves questioning their future. At the same time, famine swept across parts of Russia and recurring cholera epidemics claimed millions of lives. The ethnic Germans feared that the unique culture, language and freedoms they had preserved for more than a century were slowly being erased.

For many, the answer was another migration.

Imagine that decision.

Your grandparents and great-grandparents had never lived in Germany. Your family had been in Russia for more than a hundred years. Yet you were still viewed as German. Now you were preparing to leave the only home you had ever known and start over once again.

Thousands did exactly that.

The parallels to the stories told in “Fiddler on the Roof” are striking. Like the Jewish milkman Tevye and his neighbors, many Lutheran Volga Germans found themselves looking westward. Drawn by the promise of land, religious freedom and opportunity, they set their sights on the newly opened expanses of the American West.

They packed their belongings, crossed Europe, boarded ships and sailed to America. Some settled in the Dakotas, Kansas and Nebraska, while many others found work in Colorado’s rapidly expanding sugar beet industry. Companies such as Great Western Sugar actively recruited Volga German families because they possessed exactly the qualities needed on the western frontier: experience in agriculture, a strong work ethic, large family labor forces and a willingness to endure difficult conditions. 

Entire communities sprang up around beet fields and sugar factories in places such as Greeley, Loveland and Fort Collins. The journey from Germany to Russia and eventually to Wyoming did not happen in one leap. For many families, Colorado became the bridge between worlds.

As irrigation projects opened new farmland across the West, the sugar industry expanded with them. Great Western Sugar followed the water north into Wyoming and Montana, building factories in Lovell and Billings. The company needed farmers who understood beets, irrigation and hard work, and many of those farmers were German-Russian families who had first established themselves in Colorado.

For some, Colorado was not the final destination. Drawn by affordable land and new opportunities, they packed up once again and moved into the Big Horn Basin, helping transform a sagebrush frontier into one of Wyoming’s most productive agricultural regions.

Some of the descendants of those original settlers who left Germany for Russia nearly 150 years earlier now headed north into Wyoming. They had crossed an ocean, settled new frontiers and started over more than once before arriving here.

Today they are our neighbors and friends. Some of the names you might recognize in your community may carry pieces of this story: Winterholler, Fink, Wagner, Doerr, Steinmetz, Spomer, Korrell, Schulz and Stumpf.

Like all of us, their history was complicated, woven through generations of ancestors who endured hardship, uncertainty and sacrifice to give their children a chance to live and thrive. In many ways, the story of the Big Horn Basin cannot be told without the story of the sugar beet industry, and the story of the sugar beet industry cannot be told without the German-Russian immigrants who followed opportunity across half the world in search of a place to call home.

Think about that journey.

A German family leaves its homeland in the 1760s, drawn to Russia by a young Czarina hopeful about the future of her adopted country. Their descendants spend generations farming along the Volga River before political changes force them to consider another migration. They cross the Atlantic to America, work the beet fields of Colorado and eventually follow new opportunities into Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin.

History often feels distant until we realize it lives next door. The story of the Big Horn Basin is not just a story of canals, beet fields and sugar factories. It is also a story of families who carried their language, traditions, faith and determination across continents and generations, all in the hope that their children might have a better life.

And because they did, many of us do.