This is the amazing story of why so many German settlers in the Midwest didn't come from Germany, but from Russia. The author has lived for almost 50 years among the "Russland Deutschen" in South Dakota and had his personal life on several occasions traversed by encounters with them. Learn how they got to Russia in the first place and what happened to them after the Crimean War.
Read about their homesteading in the Dakotas and how some of them later went on to California. Get historical insights into the theories of Frederic Jackson Turner, Luther Burbank and many others. Be a visitor at the great Columbian Exhibition in 1884 in Chicago.
Some of the Germans who had it made as vintners in California went later on to Chile. But also witness the decline of small family farming in South Dakota and with it the magic term "Main Street."
Strong characters started out in 1814 with giant-sized floats of tree trunks down the Danube River almost to the Black Sea in Russia.
Atlantic crossings on newly introduced steamers, travel to the Dakotas during the dirty 30s and experience the homesteading life. An amazing intermixture of the life philosophy of the Country-Author-Doctor who dedicated his entire adult life to these people who became the outer edge of the wave that swept over and formed the America we know today.