MacGregor, James A History of Alberta p165-166
The second earliest group to turn to Alberta was a small band of Germans who in 1889 had been advised to try their luck on the dry, treeless plains at Dunmore near Medicine Hat and had been given all the land their hearts could desire- miles of it, ready to plough, and free of stick or stump. Like the Mormons, this small group, freighted with so much presage for Alberta's prosperity, were deeply religious but unlike them had no financial backing from their church. They were merely a part of a much larger group which had settled mainly in Saskatchewan and which had come fleeing financial persecution and injustices imposed on them by the government of Austria. Two or three generations earlier the Russian government had induced them to settle in the old Ukrainian province of Galicia, but after they were well established as farmers there and after that province had been taken over by Austria, their new governors made it advisable for them to move on to Canada, where they hoped to be free of persecution.For two years at Dunmore, in a settlement they called Josefsberg after their former village in Galicia, they put in crops and gardens, but each time the drought of the area wilted everything they tried to grow. In the experience they were to be but the fore runners of untold thousands who, coming to the prairies from the more humid climates of eastern America or Europe, were to discover that all their former knowledge of farming in moister lands availed them little.
Nevertheless, in the spring of 1891, once they realized that the dry climate of Medicine Hat had wasted two of their precious years, they had courage enough to move in a body to the lands of greater rainfall around Edmonton. They chose homesteads in the dense virgin or burned over forests in the areas of rich soil at Stony Plain, Horse Hills and east of Fort Saskatchewan. There, thanks to their intense industry, they prospered.
The first of these venturesome colonists were but the forerunners of many more of their compatriots, and within three years several hundred other German settlers came in group to homestead in the general area which had begun to look good to these early pioneers. In all, except for one colony which took up land west of Lacombe, some thirteen groups of Germans, some from Galicia and others, Moravians from Volynia, came to settle within a radius of thirty miles of Edmonton. Setting up areas which they named Hoffnungen (west of Leduc), Rosenthal (near Stony Plain), Josephsburg and Bruderheim, both near Fort Saskatchewan, Bruderfeld immediately south of Edmonton, as well as others at Rabbit Hill and near Wetaskewin, Morinville, Beaver Lake and as far south as Lacombe, these valiant pioneers began hacking their way into the forest. Clearing enough land for a patch of oats, barley or vegetables, cutting slough hay on many of the natural meadows hitherto hidden in the forest, and throwing up a log shack roofed with sods, they settled in to their first experience of a bitter northern Alberta winter. Nearly everything they needed had to be produced from their lands and processed by their own hands.
And as more of their compatriots came following, the surveyors cut-lines into the timber they too laid claim to 160 acres each along the banks of Whitemuc and Blackmud creeks, west of the Peace Hills, or in the lower valley of Bearverlhill Creek. Even the scantier timber near Gull and Sylvan lakes began to fall before their axes, while from lakes, little or large, an astonishing number of waterfowl of an amazing variety added a new and pleasant variation to their diet. Choosing building sites near a creek or on a rise overlooking a lake, these pioneers chopped trails ever farther back from the railway to connect one farmstead with another.
also by J.D. MacGregor Edmonton: A History
In January 1891, however, this office (Dominion government land office) received instructions from Ottawa to reserve one hundred quarter-sections in the Horse Hills for a settlement of Germans who were abandoning their homesteads near Medicine Hat and moving north to start over again. Here indeed was good news, one hundred settlers all at once to take up land fifteen miles north-east.
In May, some fifty-three families arrived. They had come by train as far as the end of steel at Red Deer and continued from there by wagons. Some settled in the Horse Hills, but others went to Stony Plain or the Riviere Qui Barre, or out near Rabbit Hill.
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