Wildernesses
article by Autumn Toennis
Theresa on board.
When they reached the homestead in the evening, she found that home was a dugout cut into the side of a gumbo hill; a structure composed of fieldstone, cedar branches, and logs that sported a door and a single window. While he went in search of water, she made up the house with what little they brought and waited. Alone for miles, she sat listening to a host of new sounds that could not be seen at night.
The crickets would have been loud, pulsing in the dark. She was a girl who had left behind all of her family at a young age, who became lost in the night sky as she stood at the rail of the ship during the passage. A prairie at dark is a twin to the ocean – its grasses rock and rustle against themselves as far as you can see, and the sky stretches above you like an endless sheet, punctured by the moon.
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“In 1914 an Aunt & Uncle came to visit from Chicago, Ill & asked if they would bring me to Amerika with them, they did. I had told this same Aunt, when I was five the next time she came to see us I would go back with her & so after a farewell party the people & friends had for me, I left my Homeland, to start a new life here.”
– Theresa Steidle Hennewinkel, from “My Life” – her unfinished account
The juxtaposition of where Theresa Steidle’s life would play out and where she hailed from was vastly different. Born in 1898 in a village that fell alongside the Black Forest in Germany, most of her early life was spent working alongside her family in the fields, land that she described as a quilt with squares of green broken up by wildflower meadows, “from our house on the hill the view was spectacular,” she wrote, “I never missed a Sunset, as it sank behind the lofty forest, that surrounded the village & field like a frame.”
Theresa left Germany when she was sixteen. Three days out from New York, the countries floating on either side of their journey sank into World War I, and at night they sailed with the lights of the ship doused to avoid being torpedoed.
She would ultimately make a home with Lawrence, “Larry” – my great-grandfather – on a homestead in Eastern Montana. They met during the crossing; years later he proposed to her on a postcard, and by way of an answer she traveled to Miles City, my hometown, where they wed.
Powderville, the area the homestead sits upon, is forty-some odd miles south of Miles City. The land that stretches across either side of Highway 59 is a tall-grassed prairie, punctuated by deep gumbo ravines and rolling hills covered in sagebrush, but for the most part, the sky is the largest living thing for miles around.
“We loaded our belonging & took off for the homestead, which as the gron [crow] flys was about 10 miles, but to me who was not used to the wide horizon, it seemed endless.”
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By all accounts, Theresa and her husband loved each other deeply. They had six children together, the youngest of which is my grandmother, and though life was difficult in the depression era, they worked hard and loved the same way.
No one in my family is able to speak clearly about what happened next. Whatever it was, it gave Theresa cause to send word for the sheriff, and in 1933, Lawrence was taken to the Montana State Hospital, otherwise known as Warm Springs.
Before her narrative stops, one of the last lines in it stands out to me: “I roamed the hills, rode after the mail & visited with the neighbors, for me it was the last carefree year.”
Theresa did her best to keep the homestead going in Larry’s absence, but the family would ultimately move back to Miles City. She worked odd jobs to take care of the children – my grandmother remembers walking her to the Catholic Church rectory, where she would cook meals for the priests in spite of the arthritis that was beginning to cripple her as she aged. Later, when my grandmother married at sixteen, Theresa would move in with them and stay until the end of her life, dying at the age of seventy-three.
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Theresa in 1916.
Page 1 of Grandma’s journal.
In January of this year, my husband and I moved to New York, to the city. We rented a fifth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn, a few blocks off the edge of the East River. As we positioned my desk against a window with a slice of horizon, I noticed the castle-like building out in the distance of the bay. It took me a moment to realize Ellis Island floated directly across from me, perfectly framed by the spray of bare trees at the edge of the promenade. A door – the one that Theresa had passed through just over a hundred years ago.
A few months later, my mother and grandmother came to visit. We booked our own passage and crowded onto the top deck of a ferry.
Ellis is a ghost island of sorts. Despite the throngs of tourists and kiosks selling Statue of Liberty keychains, it’s impossible to not feel that you are visiting somewhere sacred. We see photos of the main building throughout the years; windows are added, benches disappear – but through everything, the warped stones of the floor we now stand on stay exactly the same.
I feel such a kinship with Theresa, though we never met – we are two women a century apart, frontiers hovering in the forefronts of our minds. Her desire to know what more there was to see, what other wilderness existed, shaped her life – and that same desire shapes mine. I am coming to discover that though New York City is two thousand miles of difference from the Montana prairie, any new land is a wilderness to the person seeing it for the first time. Whether it is from an apartment window, the seat of a wagon, or the rail of a ship.
“The voiage was grand,” she wrote, “I never tired to stand at the ships rails to watch the water & the nights filled with stars.”