Mother of Exiles

Immigration to the West in 1883 transformed the country.

- By Candy Moulton

When 1883 writer Taylor Sheridan put a group of German immigrants on a wagon train heading toward Oregon, he drew from the historical record of immigration to America. During the 1880s around 1.5 million Germans came to the United States and the largest number of them arrived in 1882 when about a quarter of a million left their homeland for a new opportunity.

Oregon saw the arrival of the first Volga Germans in 1881, people who had first settled on the Great Plains in central Kansas. Those German migrants left Kansas and found their way to California where they boarded a steamship to travel from San Francisco to Portland. The following year most of them left the Portland area and traveled to Eastern Washington in search of an area where farmland was more plentiful. Some remained in Oregon, founding the village of Blooming.

Germans traveled overland from Nebraska to the Pendleton, Oregon, area in 1882, and while some remained in the Pendleton area, several families kept traveling west to Portland and a new town they established in Albina. A decade later more Germans migrated from the Midwest and Great Plains settling the town of Canby, Oregon.

Immigration by Eastern Europeans to America was not a new phenomenon. Indeed, Germans had been coming to America since the 1600s, with larger numbers arriving in the 1700s as they settled in Pennsylvania and other eastern areas. While living in Pennsylvania, German craftsmen built the first Conestoga wagons. Although these large wagons were never popular with overland travelers due to their massive size, they did see widespread use hauling freight, particularly along the Santa Fe Trail after its establishment in 1821.