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The Kolke farm, a pioneer story of a family that embraced change

From Russia to Halifax and Estevan via Germany. That’s a travel plan that most globetrotters would find daunting today, trying to arrange shuttle flights and accommodations.

From Russia to Halifax and Estevan via Germany.

That’s a travel plan that most globetrotters would find daunting today, trying to arrange shuttle flights and accommodations.

Now try to envision doing it without planes, because in 1902 there were none when Emil Arnold Kolke determined that life was going to be better in Canada than it was in his home province of  Volhynia in Russia, (now Ukraine) which had been settled by German Russians.

So shortly after turning 20, Emil boarded a ship that took him to Hambug in Germany and then traveled onward to Halifax where he boarded a train that took him westward to Cando, North Dakota.

But Emil, and his brother Edward were still restless and seeking something different, so they journeyed to Estevan which had the nearest railway and land office where they filed for homesteads in the Outram district in the North West Territories

Emil selected a home quarter-section 24 in Township 1; Range 11, W2 and settled in for the winter. Emil, Ed and Ed’s wife lived together in a crude sod house they had constructed to get them through that first winter on the prairies. Sod was the favoured building material, especially for barns, said the family’s historian Robert Kolke.

Getting a supply of good water was also a major problem for the early settlers. The hand-dug wells often ran dry, which meant water had to be hauled from Long Creek for the livestock.

Emil married Ottilie Rink in the summer of 1907 with the ceremony held in Alpena, Michigan in the United States. Ottilie and her family were from the same area of Russia as Emil and her parents and siblings had arrived in North America in 1901, by way of Bremen, Germany. Their family records showed they crossed the Atlantic and then sailed through the Caribbean and endured 20 days of seasickness before disembarking in Galveston, Texas before making their way to Oklahoma and then Michigan.

After the wedding, the young couple returned to Estevan and the two-year-old province of Saskatchewan, by train and settled into Emil’s homestead near Outram. Their first two children Olga and Selma were born there in 1908 and 1909.

In 1911 the Kolke’s moved to a farm once owned by Ole Haugo, about one mile from their previous home. Twins Leo and Erna were welcomed into the famil in 1911 and the youngest son, Robert was also born there, in 1914. Bethel Cemetary at Outram sits on land donated by Emil and their eldest daughter Olga Kolke Kuhn was laid to rest there in 1944.

Most of the farming was done with horses. Emil purchased a McCormick binder in 1904 for a little less than $100. When harvest arrived though, the horses were replaced by the large steam or kerosene-driven threshing outfits. These threshing machines made the rounds of the local farms where men pitch-forked the sheaves onto the conveyor belts that led to the separation of grain from straw. During the harvest, burning straw piles could be seen across the landscape at night after a long day of harvesting.

Emil purchased his own steam engine/thresher in 1913 and used it for several years, but due to the shortness of a steady water supply, it was idled after several years of work, and was eventually sold.

Emil and Ottilie’s fortunes kept rising though and by 1917, they purchased their first automobile, a Model T Ford. By 1920 it was time to buy an International tractor and in 1921, an IHC threshing outfit. In 1930, Emile bought a combine, only the second one in the district at the time, and horses still provided the bulk of the energy for the daily farming routines.

Besides grain, the Kolkes kept cattle, hogs, poultry and sheep and naturally coyotes occasionally helped themselves to a stray lamb or two, but the family grew and maintained a large garden and even grew sugar beets and made syrup from those beets to supplement their sugar stores. Ottilie made butter and used the carrot juice to colour it to make it look more appealing as the family, like all others, made do and struggled through the Depression years.

Emil remained active on the farm until he sold it in 1961 and he passed away 12 years later in Estevan at the age of 91. Ottilie died in Nov. of 1978, at 90.

“Their lives encompassed an amazing array of history,” said family historian and son Robert.

“From their Russian homeland, where Alexander III was Czar and all the Russian fields were sown by hand and harvested with scythes and flails, onward to the windswept prairies of southeast Saskatchewan where Queen Victoria ruled the Empire. They lived to see the advancement of the mechanized era and two World Wars,” said Robert who served in the RCAF in the Second World War.

This was a couple who took in stride such things as telephones, automobiles, gas tractors, combines, radios, air travel, television and pictures of men walking on the moon; all in one lifetime.

A life lived in full.