A German Mennonite Western

I have long wanted to see a copy of Winganoo, der Osagenhäuptling oder: Das Blockhaus des Mennoniten [Winganoo, the Osage chief or: The Mennonites’ Log Cabin] (Mülheim/Ruhr: J. Bagel, 1883, 64 pp.). I don’t remember how I found out about this title; it may have been while searching on Google for something else. The author listed on the title page is W. Frey. It was part of a series called Kleine Volks-Erzählungen [Little Folk Tales or Little Popular Stories] intended for younger readers. Surprisingly, it was translated into French (no date) and Norwegian (1889).[1] The international library database WorldCat lists a German copy at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, but when I inquired several years ago it was noted as “Kriegsverlust” (war loss). WorldCat also lists a French copy, at the University of Strasbourg. A direct inquiry to the library there in 2023 yielded a digital copy of the French version through a program called books2ebooks.eu.

Title page in French

The plot is fairly convoluted. It is set “about 60 years ago” (thus in the 1820s) on a tributary of the Kansas River in what is now northeast Kansas. A Mennonite family consisting of the patriarch Werder and his two teenage sons and two teenage daughters has a cabin there. They have left Russia because Emperor Alexander has taken away their military exemption. (The chronology and geography are out of place, since the Mennonite emigration from Russia was in the 1870s and didn’t go to northeast Kansas.) It’s interesting that the author chose “Werder” as the family name. It doesn’t occur as a surname among Mennonites but it is the word in German for the different low-lying regions of the Vistula Delta in what is today Poland (Grosse Werder, Kleine Werder, Danziger Werder), from where Mennonites migrated to the Russian Empire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Winganoo, an Osage chief, is out hunting and hears the Werder family singing and comes to investigate. He complains angrily about white intrusions and depredations on Osage land. The Mennonite boys wish to defend their family but Father Werder admonishes them with his teaching of nonviolence and peaceableness. They give Winganoo water and food; Winganoo is mollified and decides the family are his friends, but warns that other “Omahas, Crows, and Osages” are ready to attack.

Father Werder decides he has to inform government officials about Winganoo’s reports and embarks on an 8-day trip (four days each way) to St. Louis. He admonishes his boys to non-aggression.

One day the boys go out fishing and discover a camp of white hunters (bandits) led by a man called Red Will. They have captured Winganoo and are torturing him. Winganoo manages to escape and the boys rescue him and take him back to their cabin. The next morning the bandits surround the cabin. The four youths and Winganoo escape by canoe down the river to Winganoo’s village while the bandits burn the cabin.

Father Werder’s report is dismissed by the governor. While in St. Louis, Werder also visits the lawyer Downright who was supposed to be trying to get in touch with Werder’s brother-in-law Randow, who had always been in trouble at home and had migrated to America about 10 years previously. Downright claimed he had had no success.

Father Werder returns home and finds the burned cabin. He then goes back to the governor, who assigns Red Will to attack the Indians. It turns out the governor and Red Will are conspiring to stir up excuses to further attack the Osages and their friends. Werder protests that he doesn’t want to kill anyone – he just wants his children back and says he will go look for them himself.

While searching, he stumbles across the bandits’ buried treasure, including letters between the lawyer Downright and Randow, showing Werder that Downright was deceiving him. At that point, an Osage man named Black Snake appears. He wants to take the treasure and tells Werder there are four white youths in his village. While they are talking, Red Will and Downright appear and shoot them both. Werder survives and for some reason the bandits let him go to continue his search for his family.

Red Will’s band then captures the two Werder sons, who are out looking for their father. The band then goes to attack Winganoo’s village, but they are ambushed. Red Will is killed and the Werder family is reunited.

Father Werder discovers that Red Will was Randow, his brother-in-law. Leah Werder marries Winganoo and everyone presumably lives happily ever after. All that in 60 pages.

The identity of the author is not entirely clear. The title page attributes it to W. Frey. Advertisements at the time of publication also use the name Frey.[2] WorldCat attributes the German version to a Wilhelm Fricke. A 1924 Norwegian dictionary of pseudonyms also indicates that W. Frey was actually Wilhelm Fricke.[3] More recent bibliographies point to W. Frey.[4] A comprehensive bibliography of German children’s literature lists 288 books by Wilhelm Frey with life dates of 1833-1909.[5] This includes Winganoo. Most of these are similar adventure tales set in time periods from the ancient world to the 19th century, and everywhere around the world – Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia. There is also a listing for Wilhelm Fricke (1839-1908) of 19 titles.[6]

Fricke’s list also includes a few stories in Native American settings, some explicitly derived from James Fenimore Cooper, but many of his titles are collections of shorter stories. Winganoo is not included in Fricke’s list. Many of Fricke’s works listed in WorldCat seem to be Westphalian regional history, not children’s stories.

Austrian biographical dictionaries identify Wilhelm Frey (1833-1909) as a railroad official and also a music critic with several Viennese newspapers.[7] A genealogical web site of the Jewish Museum Hohenems in Austria identifies Frey as Jewish, born in Hohenems, and lists several of his titles that are also found in the Klotz bibliography (but not Winganoo) and several titles for Jewish readers that are not in the Klotz bibliography.[8]

Surprisingly, one of W. Frey’s Western stories has been translated into English, with an introduction by Ray Allen Billington, a well-known mid-20th-century historian of the U.S. West.[9] Billington’s essay, “A Note on German ‘Westerns’,” places Frey in the context of 19th-century German popular writing on the North American West, starting with translations and adaptations of Cooper and on to the famous German western author Karl May. Billington calls Frey “an obscure hack-writer” writing “pfennig-dreadfuls.”[10]

Billington gives life dates for Frey of 1833-1909 and says he was “probably a pseudonym for Wilhelm Fricke,” but unfortunately gives no source for these conclusions. (The dates match the Viennese Jewish Wilhelm Frey, not the Westphalian Wilhelm Fricke.) Billington says, “We know also that he was an impossibly prolific writer of books for boys, all of them almost exactly sixty-four pages long, and nearly all unabashedly blood-curdling narratives couched in a language and style that can most charitably be labeled as unsophisticated.”[11] He counts 167 titles from 1887-1902, depending on the only source he explicitly cites in his essay, Christian G. Kayser, Deutsche Bücher-Lexikon, oder Vollständiges Alphabetisches Verzeichnis der von 1700 bis zu Ende 1910. He also reports, without giving a source, that 40 of the Frey stories were translated into Norwegian, “far surpassing any other popular writer.”[12] Billington suggests that the significance of Frey and other similar authors lies in the fact that they shaped European attitudes and understandings of the North American West in completely misleading and unrealistic ways.

So we’re left without a definitive answer. Did Wilhelm Frey the Jewish railroad official and music critic also write hundreds of children’s adventure stories? Or was “W. Frey” actually Wilhelm Fricke the Westphalian author? Or was W. Frey a completely different person? Or was W. Frey simply a name for a committee of staff writers who churned out stories for the publishers, like the non-existent Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene, the authors of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery series for youthful American readers in the 20th century? In order to produce nearly 300 titles over the course of 20 years or so, the author or committee would have had to produce around 15 titles per year.

The author clearly had some knowledge of Mennonites – nonresistance and the emigration from Russia of the 1870s (although he puts it in the 1820s). He spends no time explaining this context, so he seems to think that his readers would not be surprised or need more detailed explanations.

Two things struck me about the story. There are no other Mennonite families or other white families mentioned; the Werder family lives in isolation. And there is no religious content in the story other than Father Werder’s defense of nonviolence. It is not a particularly pious story.

One final question: why didn’t Mennonites own this book? In all the hundreds or thousands of German children’s books that have come into the Mennonite Library and Archives over the decades, I have never seen this one. Presumably its lack of overt piety might explain this. It has no distinct edifying message; it’s just an adventure story.

Notes

[1]M.W. Feilberg, ed., Norsk Bogfortegnelse 1883-1890 (Kristiania: Norske Boghandlerforenings Forlag, 1892), p. 95; Osagehøvdingen Winganoo eller Mennoniternes Blokhus: En Fortaelling fra Praerien by Frey, 1889, part of series Fortaellinger fra aller Lande #21.

[2]Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel und die mit ihm verwandten Geschäftszweige (Leipzig), no. 10, Jan. 13, 1882, p. 1, lists it as a new publication, by Frey.

[3]Hjalmar Marius Pettersen, Norsk anonym- og pseudonym-lexikon (Kristiania: Steenske Forlag, 1924), p. 405, identifies Frey as Wilhelm Fricke; Norwegian translation by Elling Kristoffersen.

[4]Hilmar Schmuck, Willi Gorzny, Hans Popst, and Rainer Schöller, eds. Gesamtverzeichnis des deutschsprachigen Schrifttums (GV) 1700-1910, vol. 152 (München: K.G. Saur, 1986), 161, 163. Lists it as #785 and #1793 of the series Kleine Volks-Erzählungen.

[5]Aiga Klotz, Kinder- und Jugendliteratur in Deutschland 1840-1950: Gesamtverzeichnis der Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache, Bd. 1 (Heidelberg: J.B. Metzler, 1990), 491-501.

[6]Klotz, 503.

[7]Leo Santifaller and Eva Marnach-Obermayer, Österreichisches biographisches Lexikon, Bd. 1 (Graz: H. Böhlaus Nachf., 1957), 360. Felix Czeike, Historisches Lexikon Wien, Bd. 2 (Vienna: Kremayr and Scheriau, 1993), 400.

[8]https://www.hohenemsgenealogie.at/gen/getperson.php?personID=I0450&tree=Hohenems (accessed Nov. 15, 2023).

[9]W. Frey, The Apaches of the Rio Grande: A Story of Indian Life, trans. Brita F. Mack, intro. Ray Allen Billington (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Corral of the Westerners, 1978). The publisher was a local chapter of the Westerners International (https://www.westerners-international.org/index.shtml, accessed Dec. 2, 2023), an organization of enthusiasts, including academics, about the history of the U.S. West.

[10]Frey/Billington, 5.

[11]Frey/Billington, 19.

[12]Frey/Billington, 21.