He was a failure, wasn't he?

By Richard Stein

One reads so many stories of homesteaders who came to Alberta with nothing but who, through hard work, successfully developed their homesteads into productive farms, bought additional land and modern machinery, built large barns and houses, and retired to town, leaving a prosperous farm to their children. Then there is my great grandfather...

At the urging of his sister and his wife's sister who were already settled with their families near Leduc, Alberta, Adolf Rachui decided to grasp the opportunity to obtain free land in Canada. As a German living in Russia, he was the victim of increasingly discriminatory laws that prevented him from purchasing land, even though he was born there and was a Russian citizen. He was trying desperately to support a growing family through poorly paid laboring jobs. Furthermore, his eldest son was approaching the age where he would be subject to the military draft. Russia had not been kind in other ways as Adolf's first wife died of blood poisoning and he lost three infant sons.

So on June 1, 1909, Adolf Rachui with his second wife and four surviving children arrived in Leduc by train. They lived with his sister's family for a few months while Adolf earned a few dollars with his carpentry skills. Then they rented a farm with a tiny two-room house. Adolf filed on a homestead near Warburg, but abandoned it after eight months because "the land is of no value for agricultural purposes being nearly all swamp and brush." He filed on another homestead in the same area and "cut a road to the place." Then tragedy struck when his wife died in childbirth and he abandoned this homestead stating "my wife died and my finances will not permit me at present to comply with my homestead duties."

After a difficult year trying to raise small children, Adolf again married, this time to a widow with a young son. The family eked out a living on a sequence of rented unproductive farms in the Millet area, never acquiring enough money for a down payment on a farm of their own. The older children left home to work or to marry. Finally, Adolf learned of an abandoned homestead near Buck Lake. He filed on the land and, after working for several summers clearing some of the heavy timber for grain growing and building a house and barn, he moved his family and belongings by horse and wagon through bush and swamp to finally settle on their own place. It was 1925, sixteen long years after the Rachui family stepped onto the train station platform in Leduc in eager anticipation of receiving free land.

It would be nice to say that it was smooth sailing from this time on. Adolf and his family struggled to clear the land for crops and livestock. They lived on home-grown vegetables, wild berries, rabbits, partridges, fish from Buck Lake, and the odd deer or moose that they were able to shoot. Precious cash was earned from the sale of a little grain or a pig or calf. At times there was nothing to eat in the house. Land clearing went very slowly, but Adolf eventually fulfilled the homestead requirements and obtained clear title to his land in 1936. By this time their children had all left home and Adolf and his wife were left to live out their lives in poverty on their partially cleared homestead. But their lives were over; Adolf died in 1939 at the age of 69 while on his way to a neighbor to borrow a cup of sugar, and his wife died three years later.

By any standard measure, Adolf Rachui's life in Alberta was a failure. He did not establish a prosperous farm; he did not adequately provide the necessities of life for his family; his children received little education; he never had a house with more than two rooms; he had almost no impact on his community; his meager farm buildings disappeared soon after his death; his family Bible and his few documents were lost in a house fire. Adolf failed even to maintain his surname as the ending "i" was inadvertently read as "l" soon after he came to Canada and he was known as "Rachul" for the rest of his life.

All that can be said of him is that he gave to Alberta his ten children. He was a failure, wasn't he?