Pilgrimage of Joy . . .

MOTHER AND HER DANISH KIN
by W. Carl Ketcherside

My mother’s grandfather was Lars Hansen. He was born of peasant stock in Denmark on February 28, 1829, the year that Hans Christian Andersen gained recognition for his first stage play after he had come to Copenhagen from a boyhood of poverty and persecution at Odense. We never knew the original family names of the women our ancestor married in Denmark. Our only existing records show that the first was Mary and she bore him four children — Lars Peter, Christina, John and Nelson. The first became my own maternal grandfather and after he began to grow up, his father became known as “Old Lars” to distinguish him from his son.

After the death of Mary, “Old Lars” married a woman whose name was Karen, and who was eleven years younger than himself. They had a little girl and boy, and it was while the latter was still quite young the lure of the New World became too great for them to resist. The stories of emigrants who found breathing space and livingroom among the hills and on the wide expanses of prairie and plain sounded a clarion call in a world which had been bled white by the Napoleonic Wars. The Hansens saved what they could and sold what they had and purchased steerage tickets for the family.

My grandfather often told me of the hardships encountered on the sixweeks trip. All food had to be brought along and in their case it consisted mostly of hard-tack rye bread and cheese. The latter became so moldy it had to be scraped before it could be eaten. All became ill and were so sick and nauseated they could hardly minister to one another for weakness. The little boy died and had to be buried at sea. The emaciated little body was sewn up in sailcloth by a sail-mender. At dusk the little knot of emigrants ascended to the deck where the master of the ship read the Lutheran burial service, at the close of which the weighted body was gently eased overboard and sank from sight in the rolling waves.

On the long journey the Hansens became friends of another emigrating family bearing the name of Mabuce, and learning that they were coming to a place called Missouri, they resolved to stick with them. They eventually settled near Bessville, halfway between Marble Hill and Marquand, a land of rolling hills and spring-fed streams. Three more children, all girls, were borne by Karen, who died on November 14, 1877, still only thirty-seven years of age. “Old Lars” lived on for eleven more years, before he passed away on his fifty-ninth birthday. He was regarded as an aged patriarch in those days when the life-span was much shorter than it is now.

Young Lars Peter had gone to school in Denmark and in the new world became fascinated with the knowledge conveyed in the village school. He readily learned English but never lapsed in his usage of the tongue he first knew. All of his life he subscribed for newspapers published in Denmark and though they arrived months after they were printed he devoured their contents greedily. He became an adept penman and his letters were models of Spencerian neatness.

When he married Sophia Christensen he found himself with a companion of “the old school.” She thought it was a sin to teach children to speak English. She wanted life to be exactly as it was in the towns and villages of Germany and Denmark. To be a Dane in those days, was to be a Lutheran, and as the Hansen children were born and grew old enough they were sent to the parochial school where all recitations were in German and the catechism was the most important class of all. On Sunday the ritual was conducted in German by stern pastors who tolerated no questioning of their authority. The colony in which my mother grew up was a little island in an alien sea of humanity. It was a culture transplanted and imposed upon another culture.

At the age of twelve Anna and her sisters were in the field following the plow in the spring, and in the harvest season they were shocking wheat. In the fall and winter the girls hired out in the homes of the wealthy where they were sometimes treated as drudges, arising before daybreak and working until long after darkness fell. The pay was two dollars per week and board. The two dollar wage was dutifully turned over to the parents at the end of every seven days.

One of the older girls, Hulda, met and married a man who worked in the mines and they established a modest home in a “company house” in Cantwell. It was while Anna was visiting for a few days in the home of this sister that William Ketcherside first saw her, a lovely, rosy-cheeked German Fraulein who spoke a delightful dialect which she never completely lost during her lifetime. He courted her with the same zest with which he went at everything else and she agreed to marry him only upon condition that he get the full consent of her father.

That was not easy. A good deal of correspondence must have ensued for the general attitude of people in the German colony was simply stated, “I’d rather follow a girl of mine to her grave than to see her married to a man who is not a Lutheran.” The idea of allowing Anna to marry a young agnostic must have ensued a great deal of furore, but finally the parents had to give in. Many years later I read the final letter of consent written by my grandfather to the man who was destined to beget me and give me life. It was couched in formal verbiage and was dignified, and almost stately.

It required that the young man who wanted to marry Anna respect her Lutheran faith and never ask her to forsake it or exchange it for something else. It bound him by a solemn covenant to have all the children resulting from the union properly christened by an ordained Lutheran minister, duly instructed in the catechism and confirmed in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church “as God has instructed in his holy word.”

It was probably no great issue with the ardent swain. He knew very little about God, less about the Bible and nothing at all about the Missouri Synod Church. Eighteen months after the wedding when I was born, he made no objection” to my being christened. Later my mother told me about it. One of my aunts made my long white christening dress and my mother carried me in her arms almost three miles on a hot day to the Lutheran Church in Flat River where I was christened by the Reverend Mr. Petersen. The christening certificate is now quite yellow with age. More than fifty years later I went to visit a Lutheran clergyman in a little Arkansas village only to find out that he was the assistant who helped out in the service. It probably took two of them to hold me still and keep me quiet.

I was born in our humble home. There was no hospital anywhere near the area and even if there had been no woman would have gone to it to deliver a child. Many years after the event my grandmother told me about my arrival. When my mother began to feel the pains signifying that her time had come, my father went to get my grandmother who had herself delivered several hundred babies in cabins in the woods. Every woman felt safe if “Aunt Viney” was present during the ordeal. An uncle was dispatched to get Dr. McClellan who was delayed somewhat because his horse had unhooked the stable door and headed for the pasture. Fortunately, with my usual good spirit of cooperation I postponed the happening until the principals were present and we got the signal, “All systems go!”

My mother had prepared a homemade cradle out of an E. I. Dupont de Nemours powder box which my father had carried home from the mine, and she told me later that I was the loveliest child she had ever seen. She also told the other five the same thing in turn. Nine months after I was born she learned she was again pregnant, and when her second son was born she named him Larsen Rudolph in true Danish fashion as she had named me William Carl in honor of my father and the crown prince of Germany.

Ours must have been a typical home in a mining community. My parents loved each other although I have a faint recollection of my mother weeping as she rocked one of us, because of some misunderstanding which had caused my father to “fly off the handle” and use profanity. Sometimes she shed tears because of her yearning for a sight of the faces of those whom she loved in the community where she was reared, and especially because she was homesick for her father and mother. I wonder now if she missed regular attendance at the Lutheran Church, and if there was a pang in her generous heart because she saw us growing up with no catechetical instruction.

Christmastime must have been especially depressing to her. It was a great season in the German community. For days before there was baking and preparation of all kinds. The house was filled with the pungent odor of spices. There was always a huge tree cut down in the forest and hauled home to be erected in a comer of the living-room close to the fire place. It was strung with popcorn and cranberries for there were no commercial hangings. Christmas brought good feelings and mellowness, helped no little by frequently imbibing homemade wine and brandy brought up from the cellar.

Compared to all of this Christmas in a mining village was a drab affair. The decorations consisted of drawings by the children on ruled tablet paper. There was hardly room for a tree but we managed a little one. It was not easy for our parents to select something for us because the company store did not feature a variety. Each child received an orange and a peppermint candy cane. To make it really Christmas there was a little book or a ten cent toy, a jumping-jack or a set of blocks.

The thing that really topped it off was the box that came from down on the farm of our grandfather. It always contained a dressed goose. No one in the German community ate turkey for Christmas. There was smoked sausage, stuffed and prepared by grandfather himself, for he was a sausage maker of wide reputation. When the box was delivered from the railway station we could hardly wait to open it and see the things which had been selected from the farm and included. Our mother laughed and cried in turn as she took the things out and laid them on the oilcloth-covered table.

Perhaps I recall her times of melancholy more than her moments of joy. There must not have been too much time to devote to the luxury of feeling sorry for herself. There was washing to do on Monday while she bent over the grooved board in the big tub, a board well-rubbed with pungent homemade soap. There was ironing to do on Tuesday with the flatirons heating on the cookstove out in the smokehouse. There was always sewing and mending.

The garden had to be tended and fruit and vegetables had to be canned in Mason jars, or sometimes dried in the sun. 1 can recall mother’s frequent repetition of the old homely proverb, “Man works from sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done.” Yet she always found time to show her love for us and when we were hurt we could go to her with full confidence that she would stop whatever she was doing and gather us into her arms.