The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia, 1880-1884, Fred Richard Belk, 1976

s death. Sev- eral reports of this were given to this writer by descendants and friends of this great man. In the writer's possession is a letter from Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Claassen of Whitewater, Kansas, May 7, 1972, that verified these claims about the diary. 29. Klaassen, ‘Memories and Notations,” pp. 39-40; Duerksen and Schmidt, “Passenger Lists,” p. 35; CBB (October 1, 1884), p. 150; Shellenberg, ‘“A Modern Day Moses,” p. 6; John G. Rempel, ‘David Toews,” ME, IV, p. 735; Lorene Dick, ‘‘Story of the Dirks Family,” pp. 7-8. 30. Anna Toews, “Diary”; Interview with John H. Wiebe by writer on May 7, 1972. 31. CBB (March 15, 1885), p. 3. 32. Ibid.; GB (November, 1884), p. 87; Passenger lists; ‘Monies Sent to Johann Bergmann’ (document in MHLA, n.p., n.d.); “Statement Concerning the Twelve Fami- lies in Aulie Ata” (document in MHLA, n.p., n.d.); “Committee Sessions on August 7, 1884”" (document in MHLA, n.p., n.d.); CBB (October 1, 1884), p. 150; CBB (October 1, 1885), p. 5. 33. Herold der Wahreit (October 15, 1885). When the fifteen Aulie Ata families arrived on September 5, 1885, a Baptist missionary to New York, a Reverend Shriek wrote to the Christlicher Bundesbote about them. He told of meeting them at Castle- garden and giving the ‘‘dear children” small New Testaments and Baptist tracts. The mothers, he said, had small babies on their knees and though pale, one could tell their determination for freedom. After encouraging them, Shriek bade them Godspeed. 34. “Meeting of the American Mennonite Aid Committee, June 5, 1886 (document in MHLA, n.p.). 35. Arn, The Herald Church, passim; Smith, Schartner Family History, pp. 96 97; Also see Appendix about charter members of the Herald Church; Fred R. Belk, “The Final Refuge: Kansas and Nebraska Migration of Mennonites from Central Asia after 1884,"’ The Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. XL, No. 3 (Autumn, 1974), p. 392. 36. Siebert Goertz, ‘Mother Goertz’s Diary for 1933’’; Goertz, Family History, p. 55. 37. By 1913, the year Claas Epp died, the number of Russian and non-Asian set- tlers in Turkestan numbered over two million or one fifth of the population. See Lenin's Ideas, pp. 14-15, and Wheeler, Racial Problems, p. 6. An honest appraisal of the colo- nization to Turkestan by Mennonites and other non-Asians, much like the colonization of America which drove the Indians back, shows the nomadic tribes were pushed farther into the desert. In fact, this process began the decline of the Kirghiz and by 1913 their population was down some 10 percent. The best available figures of this negative as- pect of colonization in Turkestan can be seen in Bolshata Sovetskata Entsiklopedia, Vol. XXXII (Moscow, 1936), p. 377. Other scholars point out the large numbers of Germans that colonized Central Asia after the initial Mennonite influx. Max Baum, Jahrbuch der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Historischen Gesellschaft von Illinois, Vol. XXXI (Chicago: University of Chi