There may be life off the ranch, but any Fremont County farmer or rancher will tell you – The #aglife is “the good life!” #Aglife is a County 10 series, brought to you by Wyoming Community Bank, that pulls the curtain back on farm and ranch life in Fremont County.
Written by Randy Tucker
“Our nation was slowly recovering from the depression of the thirties, drought, dust bowl, ’hoppers and dollar a day wages, if you were lucky enough to have a job. It was the drought that drove many people in search of new homes where they could survive,” pioneer Pavillion area farmer Erhard Schamber said in a recorded 1994 interview with Ned Case.
Erhard knew hardship, but he knew triumph as well.
The son of a Russian immigrant, Erhard came from a family of ten children. His father Pete was also the oldest of ten children and was the only family member born in Russia. Pete’s parents, Rudolph and Dorothea Knittle Schamber, immigrated to Butte, Nebraska, when Pete was only two years old.
Pete married Magdalena “Lena” Weichkum in 1905.
Erhard was their second son, after his brother Ted. Erhard was born on April 23, 1910, in Carlock, South Dakota. Life wasn’t easy for youngsters on farms in the early 20th century.
“When I was a kid, about four years old. I fell off a buggy and had this buggy run over me and pushed my ear off. It was barely hanging on. There was no cars, the closest doctors, 30 miles with horse and buggy and no roads,” Erhard said. “My mother picked me up, put me in the buggy. Took me home and washed it off with carbolic acid. They wrapped it up as close as they could. They left a little place for my eyes to look out. After four days, they unwrapped it. And dad said, “Well, it’s knitting pretty nice, but it’s a little bit lower.” And he said, “You might have to go to the doctor and take it somewhere and bring it down. I raised it a little bit. And I remember I bawled. I said, I want it right where it’s at. So, they left it. But it’s a little bit lower than the other ear.”
He spent much of his youth in South Dakota, but his parents moved to Henry, Nebraska, a small town just east of Torrington, Wyoming in 1925.
His mother Lena passed away on July 24, 1927, and Pete remarried three years later to Mary Elizabeth Mabel Reiber Lissman Kessler and adopted her two children.
It was in Henry that he met Mary Gradwahl. She was three years older than Erhard. Mary was born in Lincoln, Nebraska on February 21, 1907.
On January 20, 1928, the couple were married in Lyman, Nebraska, and began farming.
On July 2, 1929, their first child, Dorothy, arrived. Eighteen months later, Laurine Ruth was born.
It was a tough era to be a farmer, an even tougher area to try to grow anything in the 1930s. The Dust Bowl was in full swing and huge clouds of dust covered everything in sight. A prolonged drought left crops withering in the field and the economic collapse of the Great Depression had western Nebraska farmers destitute, on the edge of starvation.
But there was hope a few hundred miles to the west. Erhard was a very intelligent man who read every newspaper he could get his hands on and listened faithfully to radio news programs from the farm in Henry.
News arrived of an irrigation project just completed in central Wyoming that was seeking homesteaders.
“The Midvale area gave new hope to many. They came from many areas because of the ample irrigation water. We came as others looking for a promising future. We came from a farm on the Wyoming-Nebraska state line. Our first look at the Midvale project was July 23, 1935. H. D. Comstock, district superintendent, took us for our first tour. Prairie dogs saluted us everywhere as if to say, “Welcome, stranger,” Erhard said in his 1994 interview.
Erhard and Mary loaded up their limited possessions and drove to a 160-acre allotment about two miles south of Pavillion.
“In the spring of 1936 we cleared the sagebrush from a 160-acre tract with a steel-wheeled tractor. This was mighty rough when you ran into a prairie dog hole. Tar-paper shacks and adobe huts were a common sight,” Erhard said. “The old settlers will never forget getting up in the morning to 20° to 30° below and finding the water bucket full of ice. We had no electricity or TV in those days, but we had plenty of alkali water to drink until we could afford a deep well.”
On October 8, 1936, their third daughter, Jeanette Alta, was born in Riverton.
The greatest tragedy in Erhard and Mary’s lives came three months later.
“One day in January, that weather, it was about 30, 40 below for quite a spell, and that old shack opened the door, the steam would come out, and the cold would go in. One day about noon, my wife said, “Our little baby don’t look right, something is wrong with her.”
I said, “Yeah, I see it.”
So, we took her to the doctor, we took her down to a doctor in Riverton. He looked at her, and he gave her some pills. He said, “You go home and give her these pills, dissolve them in water.”
She was about three months old then. And she’ll be all right. We took, went home, and gave her those pills. But that night, it was time to go to bed in that old shack. I said to my wife, we can’t put her in her little bed tonight, she’ll be too cold, let’s lay her between us. I remember Mary said, “Well, you sure won’t lay on her?” And I said, don’t you worry about that.
I kept her in my arms, and about two o’clock that night, I had to hold her loose feet, you know how you do little kids. I put my hand up on her little breast, and I listened, and she wasn’t breathing, and her heart wasn’t beating. I said to Mary, you better light the lamp.
I said, I’m afraid our little baby’s dead. She lit the lamp. Sure enough, she was dead.
So of course, the next morning, we come down, we come down to Percy, not Percy, Percy’s uncle had the mortuary.
We went down to get a little coffin, and he said, you’re going to have to get a death certificate. You go to the doctor, get a death certificate.
We went down to the same doctor. We went in, we said, doctor, we’ve got to get a death certificate. The little girl that you looked at last night, she died.
I said, she died in my arms last night. He said, what did she have? I said, well, doc, that’s what you come in here yesterday, you looked at her. You’re the one that should know what she had.
He says, “Well, I guess we’ll just say she had pneumonia.” That really hurt us.”
They buried their baby at Mountain View Cemetery in Riverton. She died January 10, 1937.
They had one more child, a son, Kenneth Wayne, on February 26, 1939. They soon noticed that Kenneth wasn’t moving like an infant. He didn’t roll over, couldn’t sit up and his muscle tone wasn’t developing.
Kenneth was diagnosed with cerebral palsy.
“He was the happiest little boy,” Erhard said. “I carried him everywhere. Sat him up on the seat of the tractor with me. He loved life.”
Kenneth passed away on December 11, 1951.
Despite the heartbreak of losing two children, Erhard and Mary made a success of their original 160-acre allotment and expanded it substantially. Erhard became regarded as the best farmer in the Midvale Irrigation District. He knew what too little or too much water could do to the newly opened sagebrush and was consulted often by other farmers.
“After several years’ irrigation, seepage problems developed. Many farms were abandoned; some families had to move out. I recall we were considered “poor lazy irrigators” by those who didn’t understand irrigation or farming. That’s baloney or bull, call it what you will,” Erhard said. “We realized it was drain our land or move. On September 4, 1956, by a vote of 55 yes, 7 no, the water users instructed the Commissioners, Richard Pattison, Bill Davison and E. R. Schamber, to start negotiations for a $250,000 drainage program. So, with the assistance of manager Carl Powers, Gerry Spence, attorney for the district, and our congressional delegation and the Bureau of Reclamation, we soon had a drainage program rolling.”
There are still areas of heavy alkali deposits on low-lying wet areas around Pavillion, but the drainage program solved most of the issues, creating one of the most fertile regions of Wyoming in the process.
Erhard and Mary were active members of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and were among the original members who built Mt. Hope Lutheran Church at Kinnear.
There were German and Russian families who were members of the Missouri Synod across the irrigation district. In the late 1930s, they decided to build a church at Kinnear. They poured a foundation and built a basement, then called Rev. Leo Fenske as their first pastor.
Fenske was a bachelor. The basement of the church wasn’t heated and had no electricity, but there was a hand-pumped well. The winter temperature plummeted to 30 below zero.
“Mary said to me one evening, “It sure is cold. I wonder how our new pastor is doing,” Erhard said. “I thought about it and told Mary I’ll go check. I drove the truck to the church basement and found him wearing everything he owned, covered in blankets and still shivering. I told him to come home with me. He could stay with us until it warmed up and we finished building the church and parsonage. “
Dorothy and Ruth both graduated from Morton High School.
Potatoes were a popular early crop around Pavillion, and Erhard experimented with sugar beets and carrots as well.
He carried the memory of one potato harvest and his interaction with the Chicago and North Western Railroad in Riverton for the remainder of his life.
He moved to Riverton after retirement and had a framed statement from a potato buyer in Chicago on his living room wall. It should have been a check, but it wasn’t. After taking his entire crop to the railhead in Riverton and having it shipped back to Illinois, he owed the company $11.53.
“You don’t make that up on volume,” Erhard joked.
Despite setbacks like this, Erhard Schamber earned as solid a reputation as any man could achieve and was financially successful well beyond his early expectations. He became a director of the National Bank of Riverton for 29 years.
Mary and Erhard’s farm on the west side of the Kinnear–Pavillion Highway was a showcase, always well kept, free of weeds, with brightly painted white buildings and red roofs.
Three generations of youngsters who grew up nearby worked for Erhard and Mary.
“One of my first jobs as a 15-year-old was working for Erhard. I cultivated corn with a little Allis Chalmers tractor, stacked small bales by hand, and irrigated for the well-respected farmer. He was one of the original settlers in the area, moving here soon after the Midvale Irrigation District went into operation,” Randy Tucker said. “He raised a lot of sheep and I stuffed wool sacks when the shearing crews came through. Erhard also warned me to stay out of the hog pen. He kept hogs around to deal with dead sheep and lambs. It’s illegal now, but he would toss the carcasses into the pen and they’d disappear.
“Hogs will eat anything,” he said. “Including you. They’ve got a taste for meat now.”
“I wasn’t ever tempted to jump in with the dozen or so Duroc hogs looking up at me from the wooden boundary fence.”
Farmers can be competitive. They’ll look at a neighbor’s crop, compare it to their own and either feel a private sense of pride, or take note and make adjustments. There is more rainfall on average in western Nebraska than in Fremont County. Erhard made those adjustments on his own. The techniques that worked around Henry weren’t often successful on his operation near Pavillion.
Speaking of how growing grain as a teenager in Nebraska compared to his current operation, Erhard said, “We wouldn’t irrigate our barley or oats until it was all headed. We’d give one irrigation to save our seeding. Our sugar beets, we’d plant them, and we’d thin them, and after Fourth of July, we’d irrigate them. Here we planted them, and we irrigated them. And we irrigated some of the tracts within the sugar beets. In short, we had to get just about twice as much as they did in Nebraska to grow a crop. It’s extra work. And because of our lack of rainfall, we had to irrigate our crops up. The first irrigation, it goes right through. But there’s no other way to grow the crop. And it’s still that way today, but we’ve improved a lot.”
Production increased dramatically during Erhard and Mary’s lifetime. As a kid on his dad’s Nebraska farm, a good year brought 20 bushels of oats per acre. By the 1960s, they were producing 100 bushels. Sugar beets were similar. When he started in the 1930s, the average beet harvest was 12 to 14 tons. It grew to 21 tons over time.
“We improved and the corn, we grew as good a corn here as they do anywhere,” Erhard said. “And we have a shorter season.”
One year Mary began to have a steady pain in her side. Medical care meant a trip to Riverton.
“I went in one day. I told the intern I had a problem with my side. The intern sent me home and he said, put some ice packs on. If it gets to the point you can’t stand it, well, you better come in. So about two o’clock that night, I just couldn’t stand it anymore,” Mary said.
They didn’t have a phone, but there was one inside the Kinnear Store. Erhard and Mary drove the six miles to Kinnear and woke up Oscar Lund, the store owner.
Erhard called the hospital emergency room, “She’s sick, and I’m bringing her in,” he said.
Erhard drove to the hospital and Mary was taken immediately into surgery.
A nurse approached Erhard and said, “Mr. Schamber, do you want to watch this operation?”
“I said, well, can I? And they said, you sure can. You’ll have to stand back and put your mask on. So, I watched. They put a mask on me, and they took this big tumor out. It was about the size of an animal heart,” Erhard recalled.
They continued farming for a few more years, but in April 1974, they moved to Riverton.
They sold the farm to a cattle rancher who tried to raise sheep. It didn’t work out for them.
“He was a cattle man. And it wasn’t up to me to tell him what to do. So, he sold the feeders off and went to cattle,” Erhard said. “But you don’t tell people what to do. Give them advice and let them take it. I think we should mention that people lived in boxcars and tents and dugouts and adobe houses, tar paper shacks, with no water. But they had water that was alkaline, most of it, until they got enough money to deal with it.”
When the Schambers arrived at their farm, motorized transportation consisted of Model Ts, a few Model A Fords and farm trucks. Many locals still drove horse and wagon.
The work, especially for farm wives, was backbreaking.
“Can you imagine carrying water in for doing the washing, heating on the stove, and pouring it in the washer?” Erhard said. “Scrub boards and wash tubs were common for a lot of people those days. There was no electricity. Those old girls, it took strong women. Those old, rugged girls, grandmas and mothers and our wives had some rough going there. They milked the cows, milked the cows by hand, and gathered the eggs.”
Like many farmers, Erhard and Mary traded milk and eggs for produce at the Basketeria in Pavillion and later in Riverton.
Electricity came to the farm in 1940 and life got a little easier.
“Mary said, now we can get a refrigerator,” Erhard said. “We still didn’t have a lot of money at those times.”
Mary, Dorothy and Ruth hired out to thin beets for neighboring farmers until they had enough money for a down payment on a refrigerator.
“Boy, that was something. We’d make ice cream,” Erhard said.
The refrigerator was a welcome innovation but it took time to adjust to electric lights.
“You know how people used to do it after night. If they wanted a light, they’d take a match,” Erhard said. “We were sitting in the house one night and my dad said he’d go out somewhere in the next room and get something. And, of course, the lights were already there, but he forgot. He said, well, where’s the matches so I can see what I’m doing? Yeah, it was hard to get away from the matches.”
With electricity they could dig deeper wells and pump the water into the house.
Erhard was a fisherman, a fisherman who rarely went fishing because of his constant workload.
Ocean Lake was just a few miles away and in the 1950s and early 60s was considered one of the best Wyoming lakes for crappie and walleye.
“I put a big piece of sucker meat on the hook, threw it out, and waited,” Erhard said. “One time I went out there and I caught four walleyes. I measured when I got them home and laid them on a yardstick. They were from 36 to 38 inches long. Big walleyes.”
They had a happy, social life in town for almost two decades. Friends and neighbors described Erhard and Mary as eternal teenagers.
Erhard began writing letters to the editor at the Riverton Ranger with such frequency he rivaled columnists of the era. Many readers looked forward to his comments, always signed as E.R. Schamber.
Mary passed on May 4, 1993. She was 86 years old.
Erhard lived on his own for the next four years, frequently going to dinner at the homes of old friends and the dozens of farmers he’d helped get loans for as a director at the bank.
Erhard passed on March 4, 1997. He was also 86.
They were a couple who braved the worst that the 20th century could throw at them, surviving family tragedy while forging a life on the cold, unforgiving sagebrush they converted into pristine farmland.
Neighbors who knew them well still talk of Mary and Erhard.
“We had a red truck that was purchased at the Erhard Schamber farm sale (my brother Richard Stearns) named that truck “Mary” after Erhard’s wife.” Nancy Stearns – Wyoming Breezes