Trachoma, the contagious eye infection, was a serious complication for Germans attempting to immigrate here from Russia. I’ve already talked about the cases of Magdalena Klipfel of Ashley and Benedict Fried of Richardton in the early 1900s. Germans from Russia were not the only ones affected by public fears of trachoma among immigrants.
For instance, there was the case of the Margolis family, Jews from Russia, which is, I’m speaking as a historian, wonderfully complicated. It seems H. Margolis, one of the original Jewish homesteaders at Garske (north of Devils Lake), came into Devils Lake in 1903 and rented a building for a store. He stocked it with dishes and other housewares.
By and by he sent for his mother, who probably was a widow, to bring over his five siblings, one of whom was deaf and dumb, although he made his living capably as a tailor. They came in 1903 by way of Quebec City — where Canadian inspectors stopped them, lifting their eyelids and declaring them infected with trachoma.
The merchant’s mother wrote him saying she and the others had been ordered into a private hospital, which took all her money, about $100, with promise of treatment. Margolis got suspicious when he also received a telegram from Quebec demanding more money. He concluded the affair was a scam, a false referral by officials on the take to make money for a bogus hospital.
Press details came out in confusing fashion over time. Two of the Margolis family turned up in Devils Lake to report they had been released, others were still being held, and no one was being treated for eye disease. H. Margolis wrote his United States senator about the matter.
It seems that US senator Henry Clay Hansbrough had been getting other complaints about the situation in Quebec City. He worked with US immigrant officials to dispatch a medical examiner, who pronounced the remaining Margolises disease-free and sent them to their loved ones in North Dakota.
Meanwhile, one of the other complaints reaching Senator Hansbrough in 1903 also originated from Quebec: that of an unnamed constituent, “a well-known resident of Inkster,” North Dakota. The constituent said a relative of his from Sweden, accompanied by his three sisters, was stuck in Quebec City, put into a hospital, his money taken. Press reports said the hospital eventually released the male relative, and after that the three sisters, but the brother had gone into hiding and was “believed to be wandering some place in Canada.” A reporter concluded this was “a case of graft pure and simple.”
Another circumstance emerged from the discussion of these cases. The Russian government issued two kinds of passports to departing citizens: one for those expected to return, the other for those leaving permanently. The immigrants getting caught up in Quebec or New York, rejected by Canadian or American inspectors, had to leave, but they could not go home!
Discussion of the whole situation was charged, too, with a more general attitude emerging in America in the early 1900s: nativism, suspicion and even hatred of foreigners, many of whom had no such friend as Senator Hansbrough to help them out. One German-Russian woman detained in Baltimore dove out the window of a holding room and was seen no more. Perhaps her descendants are living in McIntosh County today.
