CEDAR COUNTY, NEBRASKA - FAMILY HISTORY FOR RADKE FAMILY
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Family Group Sheet form © 2001 by Sue Gann-Splady
<keystrok@boulder.net> All rights reserved.
This file was contributed for use on the AHGP Cedar County, NE page
by: John [soyshirlee@earthlink.net]
Date contributed: 3/11/2003
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RADKE FAMILY HISTORY
1790 TO 19??
(As told to Joanna Cook during her childhood and in the 1950's and l960's)
The village of Gross Zacharin, where Ottilie Reips and Carl Radke were married
around 1871, is located in northern Germany, halfway between Stettin and Danzig.
It’s part of Poland now. Gross Zacharin is known as Starowice and the nearby
town of Deutsch-Krone where Ottilie and Carl used to walk on market day is now
called Walcz. The nearest large town, then known as Neustettin, is now called
Szczecinek.
Then it was still Prussia, part of that north German province noted for its
potatoes. Junker, the stiffly authoritarian aristocrats who owned all the
land in vast estates where the farmers were only tenants.
Ottilie was the daughter of August Reips, a carpenter, and Henrietta Wagner
Reips. In that tiny village, she was considered a particularly bright and capable
girl, so much so that when she was about 18 she was selected by the villagers, as
the winner of an unusual scholarship. The village’s elderly midwife—of course
there was no doctor there—had recently died, and to replace this necessary
functionary, the villagers had all contributed enough money to pay for training
her replacement. Ottilie was selected and sent to a school of midwifery in Stettin.
When she re¬turned, she had traveled farther than most of the villagers. She was
working as Gross Zacharin’s midwife when she married Carl Radke, who like her father
was a carpenter and a wheelwright. His name matched his occupation. Radtke is German
for wheel (the “t” was dropped) and -ke is the diminutive. The “little wheels” were
working for a big idea, though, ever since they had seen a handbill telling about
free land for anyone in America.
The handbill they saw was printed by the Union Pacific railroad, which distributed
them throughout Europe. When the railroad was built to the west, the company
discovered that the western lands must be settled to make the railroad pay. The
company took the logical step of recruiting hardworking immigrants as settlers.
Thousands of handbills, printed in German, were cir-culated in Germany among workers
and farmers. The promise of free land was overwhelmingly attractive. The Junker
landowners in Prussia would not have sold any of their land even if the tenants had
had the money to buy.
Ottilie and Carl Radke, and her parents August and Henrietta Reips, began saving every
penny to pay for the trip to America. By the spring of 1881, Ottilie and Carl had four
children—Augusta, Karl, Anna, and Louisa aged 9 on down to 2--and they also had enough
money to pay for everyone’s steerage passage. Another of the villagers, a harness-maker,
had left his family behind and gone ahead to the United States, where he was working in
Fremont, Nebraska. His wife and children wanted to join him, although he hadn’t yet saved
enough for their fare. The Radkes had enough to lend this family the necessary money, and
the whole group set out from Gross Zacharin together and embarked for America.
Crossing the Atlantic took six weeks, and it was stormy. Ottilie recalled that men, women
and children were crowded together, with no privacy, in the unpartitioned steerage space.
Quarreling and fights were common—and seasickness, too—and in heavy seas the passengers’
baggage and the cargo would roll with the ship, shifting from side to side, with the
passengers scrambling out of the way as best they could.
Passengers had to bring their own food for the journey. The Radkes were unusual because
they had milk for their children. Ottilie later described it as “cooked” milk that had
been canned, so it could be preserved for long periods. (Her son Franz, questioning her,
could never get any explanation from Ottilie save that she
“Cooked it” and it was somewhat solid. She may have arrived at an early version of powdered
milk, or super-evaporated milk that was semi-solid.) For the entire trip to Nebraska, they
had this “cooked” milk to supplement their other food.
The Radkes landed in New York at Castle Garden, which was the great entry port for
immigrants before Ellis Island was established. They immediately took the train west,
and in June of 1881 arrived at Council Bluffs, Iowa. The harness-maker’s family left
the train station to find a hotel to spend the night, while the Radke family—grandparents,
parents and children—prepared to spend the night on the station platform. By 10 p.m. the
harness-maker's family were back on the station platform, all of them covered with bedbug
bites. The bedbugs had been so active that the family left the hotel even though they had
already paid for their room, Ottilie remembered. One of the wonders of the journey occurred
next morning, when Ottilie took a coffeepot to the little station restaurant to get water.
There for the first time she saw ein schwarzer Mann”—the cook was a black man who kindly
filled the pot with coffee for the family. They crossed the Missouri and in Omaha boarded
the Union Pacific for the ride to Fremont, the end of the line.
They found the harness-maker, and reunited him with his wife and children. He still hadn’t saved
their fare money. Although he never did repay the $300, which the Radkes had advanced them, he
did hire a wagon driver to take the Radke family north to the little town of Fontenelle.
The wagon driver took the road that follows the Elkhorn River and before they’d reached their
destination, the sun set and he told them they’d have to stop for the night along the road.
Around them was only a sea of grass—strange sight for the family from Europe. The river was in
the distance across meadows; near the road was a clump of bushes. The driver unhitched his team,
tied them to the bushes and lay down on the ground to sleep. The Radkes stayed in the wagon,
staring at the strange, empty countryside, when there appeared a sight that frightened them nearly
out of their wits. “We were so scared we couldn’t even speak,” Ottilie recalled. Little lights
began to appear around them—first a few toward the river, then closer, moving back and forth and
increasing until they were surrounded by small, moving lights. They were too frightened to wake
the driver and ask him what the lights were. Finally Grandfather August gasped in a whisper, “It’s
the Devil coming with his lanterns!” and all of them pulled their blankets over their heads and
lay trembling till morning. Daylight came, the countryside looked normal, the driver hitched up
the team and they drove on. It wasn’t until later that they discovered New World has fireflies in
it.
At Fontenelle August Reips and Carl Radke found jobs as hired hands on the farms. The big Missouri
flood of 1881 had reached to the Elkhorn River, too, and the water was just receding in June,
leaving pools of water in the fields. These pools were filled with stranded fish; the big catfish
and other fish that they “caught in the fields” helped feed the family. August Reips went to the
land office and discovered that all the free land near Fontenelle had already been homesteaded; to
the north, in Cedar County, there was still one 160-acre tract left, the last one. Since the harness-
maker hadn’t repaid hi, debt, the family had to stay in Fontenelle long enough to earn the money to
buy a wagon and a team of horses. In 1883 they bought the team and wagon, loaded their goods and
headed north to their free land. With them was a new baby, Henrietta.
They claimed their Cedar County homestead, which nobody else had wanted because it was cut in two by a
deep ravine. August Reips and Carl Radke saw this as an opportunity; they knew what to do with the oak;
ash and red elm that grew in the ravine. They had brought with them from Germany all their woodworking
tools—Chisels, knives, gouges, saws and handmade planes that ranged in size from little finishing planes
to one 4 feet long. First they built a dug-out house, hollowing out a hillside (just about on the site
of the barn when Lee and Marie Porter lived on the farm). This made half the house; a frame of poles,
with more poles laid across the top and leaned against the sides, Indian-style, formed the other half.
Next, the men cut a store of lumber from the ravine, laying up oak, ash, and elm poles to season. With
the lumber and their tools, they soon had a thriving business repairing wagons for the settlers from
miles around. The “bolsters” part of the wagon framework often needed replacing, since this was the
piece likely to break when a wagon jounced over hard-frozen ground or was overloaded. They repaired
wheels too, making new spokes of oak and fitting new tires—metal bands—around them. They fitted the metal
to the wheel, then dried the wooden wheel thoroughly so that it shrank, slipped the metal around it, then
soaked the wood so that it swelled to make the tire fit tightly.
While the lumber was still seasoning, August and Carl got jobs on the farms. August was shocking wheat
one day when he discovered another creature of the New World, a beautiful little animal with shiny black
fur and a white stripe on its back. “Was ist das Tier (what is that animal)?”he asked an immigrant friend.
Said the friend—not quite so green a greenhorn—“Mach schnell! Poch das Tier! (quick grab that animal!)”
August dropped his sheaf of wheat, ran and caught the animal—which was indeed a skunk. He couldn’t run fast
enough to catch his friend, however. Henrietta Reips often told the story to her grandchildren, and said,
“It was days and days till he got that smell off him.
The rest of the Radke children were born in Cedar County—Louis, Margarete, Franz Christopher, and Marie.
The original dug-out house was replaced by one close to the site of the frame farmhouse built in 1902.
The successor to the dug-out started with a frame of oak poles, instead of 2x4’s, and heavy oak lintels.
The men, with the frame in place, hitched their team of oxen (which had replaced the horses) to their
wagon and drove to Bow Creek, to Jones’s Mill. This mill, which ground their wheat into flour, also had a
saw powered by its water wheel. “Do you know what ‘edging’ is?” they asked Jones. “Can we buy some?”
Edging is the term for the round slabs sliced from a tree to square up the trunk and ready it to be sawed
into boards. These slices were 3~4 inches wide, with rough bark on one side, and were thrown in a heap as
waste down a small but steep hill next to the water wheel. Jones took a long look at the two men and their
ox-drawn wagon and said yes, they could have all the edg-ing they could load for $1. The men agreed to the
bargain and led the oxen and wagon, with some difficulty, down the steep bank to start loading edging. They
piled in the edging until the wagon was full and heavy. Jones stood on the bank above them grinning, and as
they loaded he began to laugh harder and harder, until he fell on the ground laughing—because the more they
loaded, he thought, the more they’d have to unload in order to get the wagon back up the hill. But August
Reips understood his oxen. Very slowly and gently he called, “Komm, Bill und Tom, komm" and the oxen strained
and inched the wagon up the hill with its full load of wood. When they got to the top, Jones wouldn’t take
their dollar. “It was worth it just to watch you,” he said.
At home, the edging was nailed to the upright poles. Ottilie found yellow clay and mixed it with water to fill
the chinks, where it hardened like adobe. Cottonwood poles formed a gabled roof and made the attic floor.
Plaster on the inside walls and the clay-chinked edging insulated the house so that it was cool in summer and
easy to heat in winter. (The post-and-edging house stood for many years; it was wrecked by Louis Radke while
Franz was in law school. The “new” house of 1902 burned to the ground around 1960.)
August Reips died in 1887. Not long after that, Carl Radke had a crippling stroke that left him an invalid who
could only sit in a chair and watch his wife and children try to keep the farm going. He died in l897. Ottilie
managed, with a Prussian authoritarianism that kept the family fed and clothed but made her difficult to live
with. The children grew up, married, and left; Augusta went to Washington State; Margarete to Chadron, Nebr.,
where her husband Herman Shipkey was an engineer on the Great Northern line to the Black Hills. Calamity Jane,
in her old age, often used to hitchhike rides on the railroad, and he often. gave her a ride in his engine.
Louis farmed in the neighborhood, then went to Washington; Henrietta, whose husband Harry Mallat was the fattest
man in Cedar County (he had to have a specially-braced and reinforced chair), lived in Harting¬ton and then went
to a South Dakota farm just in time for drought and dust-bowl days.
Of the nine children, Franz was the only one considered small for his age and “too puny to make a farmer.” He
had done well in the one-room country school (the children rode there on horseback) and so it was decided to let
him attend high school in Hartington. Then he worked as a night watchman in a tombstone-maker’s shop to put
himself through Wayne State Normal School, then taught country school and worked as an organizer for the Grange
and the Farmer’s Union to work his way through the University of Nebraska and law school.
Marie Radke and her husband Lee Porter farmed the ho-mestead, and stayed on after Ottilie moved to a house in
Hartington. She was a woman of strong character, Ottilie. In her 60’s she became bald, and wore a wig. In her
70’s, her hair grew in again and she threw the wig away. She was almost 95 when she died, still with a full head
of hair. She outlived many of her children. Carl, Anna and Louisa all had died by 1927; she lived another 20
years after that. The family plot in the little country cemetery near Wynot on a hill, with cedar trees growing
among the tombstones—is where she is buried, with her husband and her parents.
The Radke homestead with its steep hills and deep ravine served the carpenters who settled
it well, but it was never easy to farm. Franz Radke, who had inherited part and bought the rest,
reluctantly decided to sell it shortly before his death in 1966. The property now is owned by
Otis Decker—a resident of Wynot and a friend of Lee and Marie Radke Porter-whose plans to raise
cattle there suit the terrain.
Cedar County is in northeast Nebraska, and its northern border is the Missouri River.
Directly across the river is Yankton, South Dakota. In 1857, the grandparents of Franz’s wife,
Magdelene Craft Radke, came from Germany to settle there. From the Radke homestead, a road to the
riverbank passes a simple monument that marks the spot where the Wiseman Massacre occurred. The
murder of Mrs. Wiseman and her children by Indians was a prime reason for Magdalene’s grandparents’
moving south to the more settled area of Johnson County in southeast Nebraska.
Note;
Joanne Shipkey McGowan gave this to John Beer in 1998 at Manteca, Ca. Joanne is the daughter of
Margareta Radke Shipkey. She and her sister Alma lived in Stockton, Ca. Alma passed away in
November 2000.