John Hoffman was an able farmer in the German colony at Courland, in western Russia, between what is now Latvia and Lithuania. The great success of the educated, skilled German contract farmers afforded their Russian landlords a greater lifestyle than that of those landowners who relied upon penniless illiterate Russian peasants to till their soil. Resentment towards the German colonies increased over time, as the colonies themselves increased in number, and came to dominate the Russian landscape from the Baltic Sea to Odessa in the south.

In 1861, a son was born to the Hoffman’s, and they called him Gottleib, meaning “God’s life”.

During the next several years, even as competition for the overpopulated farmlands of Europe became unbearable for the rural working poor, the Prussian warlord, Bismarck, succeeded in conquering all of the central European germanic states, uniting them into his own expanding principality. Finally, in 1870, when Gottleib was nine years old, Bismarck proclaimed the new nation state of Germany, fatherland of the German peoples. The effect of this proclamation in Russia was to make the germans there very unwelcome indeed. German nationalism was seen to have taken root in expansionist militarism, like that of Napoleon, and therefore equally threatening to Russia.

By 1890, the twenty-nine year old Gottleib Hoffman was already a skilled farmer, ready to take on his own operation and make a success of it. But he had no land. The talk among the german colonists was of the free land available to settlers in the new lands of the Northwest Territories in western Canada. If they could make it to western Canada, they would be given 160 acres of farmland, said to be excellent, free and clear. Free land, to farm if they could, and the promise to live free as citizens of Canada and as subjects of the British Empire, which meant they could look forward to a life of lawful prosperity under the protection of the world’s greatest power.

After taking stock of his place in the land he knew as home, Gottleib Hoffman made a fateful decision. Unwilling to risk his future to the hostile political climate of Russia, and unable to afford farmland elsewhere in Europe, the strong young farmer from Russia, and his twenty-six year old wife, Pauline, booked passage, most probably at the port of Gdansk, for North America.

They shipped out for Quebec, and entered Canada there as landed immigrants in the spring of 1890, speaking neither english nor french. Joining up with other Germans heading west on the new railway, they entered a multicultured column of settlers passing north of the Great Lakes, and on into Canada’s gateway to the west, the new settlement at Winnipeg, where twenty years before had stood the small Red River village of Louis Riel's youth.

Gottleib Hoffman spent a year working in Winnipeg, scouting out the west as best he could, and gathered from reports he heard that the most agreeable farmland was that north of Palliser’s Triangle, where the prairie soil was best, the climate wet enough, and the slough fed wood lots so important to the farmer were not too far away. The next year, Pauline and he travelled five hundred mile to the northwest, into the heartland of Canada’s western prairie, into the land of the Cree.

There, some hundred miles east of the South Saskatchewan River settlement of Batoche, near Yorkton, they staked claim to their 160 acre quarter section of free land, with the aid of a government surveyor, whom Gottleib paid in cash for the lawful survey and the binding legal documentation. This he would need to register his legal claim at the land titles office, when next he had the opportunity.

They unpacked the plough. The livestock he had brought as breeding stock was put into the harness, to pull the great steel blade. So it was, that in the fall of 1892, Gottleib Hoffman of Russia ploughed his first few acres of deep tough primeval prairie sod on the treeless, windswept grassland of central North America, in the territory of the Cree indians, as Pauline watched. Pauline was ready to cut the sod into the bricks with which she would build her own home, a one room sod box, an earthen cave, dirt floored and sod shingled over wood roof poles cut at the river, miles away. In this rude, leaking cave she would spent the next half dozen years of her life, alone when Gottleib left to work jobs for cash in the wintertime.

Poor and overworked, virtually destitute in Russia, their first five children had died. The next nine, all born in North America, survived. The eldest of these was Hugo, a baby boy, born in the family homestead, legal description Township 28, Range 4, North 2nd Meridian, Section SouthEast 1/4 of 10, Number 168, on the western prairie in the Northwest Territories of the Dominion of Canada in the year 1892.

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