Peter Iverson

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Peter Iverson | Discoverers, Pioneers, and Settlers: Toward a More Inclusive History of the North American West | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.1 | The History Cooperative

Discoverers, Pioneers, and Settlers: Toward a More Inclusive History of the North American West

IN THE AMERICAN WEST of the twenty-first century most people live in town. Our region is increasingly urban, if not urbane. Agriculture may have been centrally important to the establishment and early growth of Phoenix, but today as you drive down Central Avenue you do not automatically begin to ponder an agricultural heritage. In 1982, when the WHA last met in the Phoenix area, local arrangements chair Bob Trennert hauled you out to Rawhide, a Wild West sort of town then situated in the wilds of north Scottsdale. Today it is surrounded by tile roofs and its owners have opted for relocation. Rawhide will now be situated on land within the Gila River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.	1
In these transitional times, it is all the more important to realize that if you go back far enough in all of our families, you will find people who worked on the land. My maternal great grandfather, Peter Koppes, is a case in point. Five years before the start of the American Civil War, at the age of twenty, he completed the long journey to Wisconsin from his native Luxembourg. After several years in Sheboygan County, Peter Koppes moved on to another area that had attracted many people from Luxembourg: Marshall County, Kansas. In this small enclave, about 35 miles south of Beatrice, Nebraska, he found good farm land and weather that made life interesting. I think he would have agreed with the conclusions reached in the 1920s by a correspondent for the Kansas City Star: "God just dropped Kansas out here on the plains and the next morning it organized a constitutional convention.... Even historians don't understand Kansas," he added, "I wonder sometimes if anybody except God understands Kansas and sometimes I think Kansas even has Him fooled."¹	2
Confronting the Kansas climate, the locals insisted, made you a better person. It fostered maturity and strengthened your character. Back in Sheboygan County, Susan Schmidler, the daughter of Luxembourger immigrants, hoped such declarations had some validity. She decided Koppes and Kansas were worth a try. Her parents remained in the Sheboygan area and continued to experience what another family member termed "the trying lives of the Wisconsin pioneer." Susan and Peter Koppes, however, lived for several decades on their homestead along Horseshoe Creek in Marshall County, where over the decades they confronted grasshoppers, drought, fire, and other agrarian delights.	3
Their first home measured all of 14 feet by 16 feet. It had a shingled roof and two windows, but it resembled a mansion about as much as an Isuzu looks like a Ferrari. Peter and Susan Koppes appreciated the need to devote more financial and emotional attention to the barn, the pig pen, the hen house, the orchard, and the farm itself. Eventually they moved to town to spend what an unblinking local history referred to as "their declining years." There came a point when relatives concluded Peter Koppes had to be separated from all those things on his land that would "tempt him to toil."²	4
In 1900, one of their daughters, Veronica ("Fronie") married Paul Schmitt, the son of John and Catherine Schmitt. My grandparents remained unreconstructed Kansans, even though life took them to Michigan, New Mexico, Arizona, and finally, California. A county history testified to what it termed "their faith and fidelity to the one and only beloved Kansas." My grandparents always believed in the redemptive power of getting up early, drinking strong coffee, and saying the rosary. Their residence in Whittier allowed them to vote against Richard Nixon in 1946, 1948, 1950, 1952, 1956, 1960, 1962, 1968, and 1972.	. . .

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