Threshing time in McIntosh County, 1926, and the thresherman Gottlieb Bendewald was in the field. A young bundle pitcher, a neighbor from just a mile away, sixteen years old — Christian Lux — hailed the thresherman to collect wages for work he had done, and things went badly from there. Witnesses disagreed what was said and done, and the parties disputed vehemently.
This narrative comes to me from Shirley Fischer Arends’s masterly work, The Central Dakota Germans: Their History, Language, and Culture. Arends recounts an interview with a woman in Ashley who told the story of a deathbed confession. It seems one farmer sued another in a dispute about threshing and prevailed. The losing party appealed to the state supreme court but lost there, too. The two parties remained at odds for three years, until the plaintiff party lay dying. In the presence of his pastor and his antagonist, he confessed to having falsified evidence. All was forgiven, and for the first time in three years, the pastor administered holy communion to the old enemies.
Gottlieb Bendewald was one of these parties; the other was not young Christian Lux, but rather his father, Jacob Lux, who died in 1932. With benefit of additional documentation, here is their story. Christian Lux had done some work for Bendewald, at the agreed rate of three dollars a day. When he came to collect, Bendewald said he had worked 1¼ days and gave him a check for four dollars. Young Lux said he had worked 2¾ days and was due eight dollars and a quarter. Between then and the time the check was cashed, someone altered the numerical amount on it to $8.00. The written amount “four dollars” still appeared. The bank cashed the check for eight dollars. When it cleared, Bendewald was incensed.
He talked with the old man, Jacob Lux, to no avail. So he took the matter to the state’s attorney for McIntosh County and asked him to help get his money back. The attorney investigated; told Bendewald that he could not help with a civil action, but that there might be a criminal case; and drew up a complaint against Christian Lux for felony forgery. Bendewald took this to a justice of the peace and swore the complaint. Christian Lux was arrested, charged, and freed on bond.
A jury trial ensued at the great Beaux Arts McIntosh County courthouse, at which most facts were agreed upon, although interpreters were involved. The key point of disagreement was who had altered the check. Bendewald said Christian Lux did it. Lux said Bendewald did it, at his insistence, in the field. The jury believed Lux and found him not guilty. Or possibly, the members simply declined to convict the kid in what appeared to have been a spite case. (It was well known, and shown at trial, there was longstanding bad blood between the two neighbor families.) Lux turned around and filed a $10,000 civil suit against Bendewald for malicious prosecution. The jury awarded him $1,000. Bendewald appealed to the state supreme court, which upheld the judgment. So things stood until that deathbed confession in 1932.
I think I know what happened, based on how family economics worked in those days. Neither Gottlieb Bendewald nor Christian Lux altered the check. Young Lux took the check home to his father, who fixed it and took it to the bank. I will say further, the state’s attorney had no business facilitating charges in the case; the bank had no business cashing the check; and the pastor should have settled the matter long before it got to the deathbed.
Those were human mistakes. In her book, though, Shirley Fischer Arends makes much of the importance of community among the Germans from Russia. It was the old men, Lux and Bendewald, who violated that fundamental value. It was a good thing they both got absolution.
