ALSO THANKS TO DEBRA BLAU! According to a 1977 interview with Pauline "Lena" Beer Kircher, other families who went to Yuma with the Fastner and Beer families were: Trunde, Fieber, Krickl, Kunzmann, and Blaubetch.

1893 approx.          Amelia Fastner wrote: "At the age of seven, having scarcely completed the third grade, I had to leave my dear home in Milwaukee and attend a small country school in Colorado, where Father, on account of getting a whole section of land just for living on it for five years, had decided to settle. After a three years' stay in this wild prairie, crops began to fail. At length all the Catholics dispersed so the church was closed. Then my Father said, "Rather than lose our Faith in this wilderness we will give up everything else." NOTE: Sister M. Alodia gave her birth date as December 23, 1887, and that she came with her family to America in May 1888.

Wenzel and Catherine Fastner, their six living children, and Wenzel's parents, Johann Fastner and Magdalena Hany, emigrated from Bukovina to America on June 18, 1887, aboard the vessel "Saale." The Fastner family settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Wenzel worked in a tailor shop. Two more children were born. They joined the Beer family in Yuma, Colorado, for about 3 years, where another child was born.

Then when we got there they had to get horses and they plowed and made sod, and from that sod they built our sod house. But your people (Fastner family) didn't have no sod house because they didn't get that far. And then, we had in McCook, we had that agent and he said, "Now you people will have to buy something when you get out there because there isn't much there." Well, they was all right so they had to buy a stove and they had to buy utensils for cooking, and we had to buy things to cook and to do, and to work with that they bought in Nebraska. McCook, Nebraska. And they had their own, shipped to Yuma. They thought they could buy better, cheaper, in McCook than they could in Yuma. Well they did. They had to pay all that stuff for shipping it. That was a lotta, lotta work.

 

You got to Yuma on the fourth of July. A: Yah, it was just the fourth of July and they were all running around with masks, y'know, here. We never had saw anything like that. So, we were just wild about it, y'know, and they had big doings on the fourth of July and so we had a good time with the rest of 'em. Well, then from there, when they got the sod house built, then we could get in, well, then we moved to, and that, sixty, no, hundred and sixty acres land (160), but there was cactus there. Boy, my, that was full of cactus and rattle snakes. We didn't have any coal or anything like that. We had to burn that manure from the cows, biscuits what the cows...

Q: That's what you burned for fuel?

A: Yah, we had to go out with bags, gunny bags, and pick them. And the cows, and then you'd bring them home and then we'd put 'em on a pile, when you have as many as they could pick. We had to go every day, we had to pick cow manure. Oh, well they had to burn that cow manure and then we had, we didn't have no water. They had to take it and go by anybody that had a windmill here, they had far to go for water. They had those big barrels, y'know, those big barrels.