Preservings 11 (1997) - Plett Foundation

1941. Jakob Braun III and Maria Klassen Braun, his
second wife.
Jakob Braun IV and Cornelia Funk, wedding photo,
1941.
at their advanced age, undertook another emigration
in the evening of their lives, an emigration
that took them into a foreign climate as well as a
different continent.
The picture of Jacob II shows him with the
bundles of possessions at Carey, a man of stature,
in many ways a man of profound influence and
conviction, willing to abandon a life’s work for a
faith, language, culture and religious freedom.
Several years in the tropics, where he lived in the
Chaco village of Reinland helping his daughter
and son-in-law establish themselves in a new
homestead, did nothing to mellow him. An eyewitness
described the moment he decided that
some sacrifices are not worth making, for after
sitting for days painstakingly separating the cotton
from its seed, he threw down the last handful
and said, “I’d rather plow 10 acres of wheat land
by hand than do this!”
And true to form, he initiated the necessary
maneuvers to return to Canada, taking his entire
family with him again, to re-establish themselves
in the scrub bush south of Grunthal, taking land
that had remained in virgin bush because it was
inferior crop land. Here the sons started over
Preservings
again, demoralized somewhat and even broken.
Jacob II, however, continued on as talkative
and self-confident as ever. His wife died a year
after their return, leaving Jacob to move from son
to son. He became the self-appointed agent for
the sons, doing their buying as well as that of
their neighbours so that the farmers would not
need to leave their work. Grandchildren remember
that he never wrote anything down for these
trips to town, and yet he remembered to buy every
single thing, a prodigious memory still envied
today. He regaled the grandchildren with stories
of Russia, of the blue water of the sea of Azov,
which he mentioned often to the end of his life.
When he was well into his eighties, he would go
visiting on foot, often trudging 8 miles to visit his
nephew who was by this time also retired.
An interesting aside to this man’s life story is
that shortly after he married Maria Funk (walking
to Winnipeg from Grunthal to court her), he
developed an abdominal condition that required
him to be completely vegetarian, so that throughout
a long life spent in various difficult circumstances,
his food had to be cooked separately. Yet
this did not prevent him from taking snuff, a habit
he made into an artform which most people who
knew him associate with him to this day. In the
end, Jacob II died of heart failure at the age of 88
years of age in 1941, and was buried in the
Grunthal cemetery. His adult life spanned the
economic rise and fall of the family fortunes, the
latter accelerated by the liquidation of assets necessary
for emigration to Paraguay, the cost of the
migration and the dissipation of those assets in
the Chaco tent village.
Jacob Braun III.
Jacob III, born 1887, was the oldest surviving
son of Jacob II. He grew up in Gnadenfeld on the
home farm, married into the prominent Falk family
of Bergfeld and settled in to a prosperous
Mennonite village existence, with a farm clear of
debt, a partnership in a steam threshing outfit and
a young lad, Jacob IV, on the way to take over the
homestead whenever Jacob wished to retire.
The events of 1924, however, changed all that
as Jacob III, encouraged by Katherina his wife,
reluctantly sold his farm and possessions to follow
his father to Paraguay. There, in a tent and
lean-to, the family stagnated for a few months
waiting for the trackless Chaco to be surveyed.
Meanwhile, Jacob was responsible for running
the steam engine that supplied the camp with
water, working occasionally in the Quebracho
mills, until less than three months later, Katherina,
his wife died suddenly, leaving Jacob III with six
young children. The heat and the insects and the
delay combined with the tragedy to intensify
Jacob’s opinion that the emigration was a mistake,
at least for him, and he marked time until
his father made up his mind to return to Canada.
With characteristic enterprise, he together with
his brother-in-law set up a small supply store along
the narrow-gauge railway into the Chaco, and survived
that way until 1929, when the whole family
returned to Canada. (See article by Ernest
Braun, “My Grandmother’s Song” in Preservings,
No 10, Dec. 1996, Part One, pages 43-46.)
However, for him it was too late, for his health
was broken, and although he was known as
“Groote” Bruhn before, he never fully recovered
62
Jakob Braun IV and Cornelia Funk Braun, 1954.
his health or his demeanour, dying in 1950 of cancer
at the age of 63. An interesting footnote to
this life story is that in the 21 years after returning
to Canada and settling on undeveloped land,
Jacob III never once mentioned the prosperous
circumstances he had left, symbolized by his
father’s housebarn still standing just a few miles
away. In fact, the younger children never knew it
was there until a chance reference in 1990 brought
it to their attention.
Jacob Braun IV.
Jacob IV was an 11 year-old boy when the
prosperous farm in Bergfeld was sold and the trek
to South America was begun. He enjoyed the sojourn
in Puerto Casado, later regaling his wife
with stories of his escapades, out-running the train
on foot, walking on homemade stilts, and nearly
drowning in the river at Casado.However, the
return of the family to Canada coincided with the
stock market crash of 1929, and Jacob entered
his teen years just as the Great Depression of the
thirties settled in for the decade. Jacob spent that
decade cutting firewood to keep the larger family
alive, walking from farmer to farmer hoping to
work enough for a meal or even lodging. Despite
this and despite his reputation as a noted backwoods
wrestler, Jacob IV is remembered as smiling
and as a ready conversationalist, specializing
in flippant comebacks and an optimistic outlook,
always giving the other the benefit of the doubt.
Even today his nephews remember him as someone
who could outwork anybody and enjoy it.
As things began looking up near the end of
the thirties, Jacob’s inherited entrepreneurial spirit
manifested itself in the purchase of a
steel-wheeled tractor and a breaking plow, which
he and his brother Peter used to break much of
the scrub land in the area as livestock culture began
to give way to grain production in the late
1930s and early 1940s.
After marrying Cornelia Funk, his second
cousin, he managed the home farm in Weidenfeld
for a while and then pioneered himself on scrub
land in the school district of Bergfeld now called