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Carl de Haas and Winke für Auswanderer
Carl de Haas, great- and great-great-grandfather to the McMillans of White Bear Lake, arrived on the Wisconsin frontier in 1847. Winke für Auswanderer, his booklet of advice for people considering emigration, was widely available in Germany and went through at least two printings and an expanded second edition.
In May 1847, following what he called his “student years” at the university in Bonn (he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1844), Carl de Haas emigrated to the Wisconsin frontier north of Fond du Lac. A year earlier, he had joined a group considering emigration to Texas but abandoned those plans because of an inhospitable climate and the political and social uncertainties of the War with Mexico.
Aggressive sales agents for ship operators, innkeepers, even for the slow horse-drawn canal boats of the American interior were common in Germany then. Reliable information about emigration and life in the New World, however, was difficult to find. Carl planned to fix that. For his own emigration, he relied on published letters from Johann Mentis and others, written from their homesteads in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
He made the trip from his family home in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal), traveling 20 miles west to Düsseldorf, up the Rhein by steamer to Rotterdam, by ship from Rotterdam to Cherbourg, and then by steamship to New York, a 16-day voyage. His traveling companions included a brother Richard, a nephew Eduard, and six others, including two children. They carried their belongings in 14 chests, large and small.
Carl kept careful notes and within a few months of the group’s arrival in Wisconsin had produced Winke für Auswanderer, a densely written 92-page booklet stuffed with advice on exchange rates, what to pack, how to farm, what to avoid, how to select a team of oxen, evaluating prices of goods and services, arranging transportation from New York to Wisconsin, avoiding agents, and much more. A photocopy of the original German booklet, together with an English translation, is part of the online collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The Frau Erica site includes a version of the Winke für Auswanderer translation organized in nine chapters, clickable at left.
The de Haas family in the New World
Seven and a half million German immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1870, settling predominantly in the upper midwestern states. (The U.S. census for 1840 counted slightly more than 17 million residents.) In 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Germans remained the largest self-identified U.S. immigrant group, with 43 million descendants.
By the time they settled on the 40-acre farm Carl had bought in Calumet, Wisconsin, the de Haas emigrants had found much that was familiar. The German language could be heard on the streets of cities and towns. Commerce could be conducted in several currencies — Prussian Thaler, Silbergroschen, schillings — and many stores and hotels supported transactions in foreign currencies by posting signs with rates of exchange. Much of the advice in Winke für Auswanderer involves equipment and purchases for farming and the current prices paid for livestock or bushels of grain. Most of Carl’s German readers were farm families drawn to the New World by fertile soil, affordable land, and far better prospects.
Farming, however, apparently lost its appeal for Carl, and he soon left the agricultural life. In 1848, a year after Carl had bought the original farm, the de Haas group bought rights to a 160-acre parcel on a small lake about four miles east of the farm. There they tried to establish a brewery — Carl’s nephew Eduard had trained as a brewer in Germany — but the brewery does not appear to have lasted. Richard bought the land in July 1850, sold it to Eduard in January 1851, and then returned to Germany. Eduard sold the land that March. Carl himself was already living in the village of Calumet where he was running an inn and writing about emigration for German newspapers in Milwaukee.
Already in Germany, Carl had an interest in writing. He had written articles for newspapers, produced some poetry, and one of his dramas had been staged in Elberfeld. Writing seemed a way forward. His Winke für Auswanderer, published in 1847, was doing well and was widely read in Germany. German-language publishing was thriving in the Midwest, particularly in Chicago and Milwaukee. Die Abendschule, Germania and many other newspapers and magazines had found a ready and dedicated audience. (Frau Erica herself was an Abendschule columnist.)
In 1850, Carl moved east to Buffalo, where he began a 25-year career as a writer and newspaper editor. He married Catherine Burg. Their first four children — Frederick, Carl, Edward, and Emma — were born in Buffalo. The family then moved to Detroit, where Richard (1863) and Bertha (1866) were born. Carl and his family returned to Fond du Lac in 1871, where Carl founded a successful German newspaper, the Norwestlicher Courier.
Frederick, Carl and Catherine’s first child (born 28 August 1851), spent his adult life in St. Paul, Minnesota. He and his wife Johanna Hauser had six children — Paul, Virginia, Louis, Elsa, Louise, and Leona. Elsa, born 30 November 1886, married Malcolm McMillan. They had two sons: Malcolm Jr. and Richard.
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