This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/ZVC.2ACE/4125.1.1.2 Message Board Post: Jo....in that time frame, I imagine it would have been word of mouth and newspapers....immigrants east of the Mississippi probably didn't have much problem, the Indians having been pretty much subdued/died out by then. Maybe still a problem in Western NY/Canada, but the French and Indian war was long over by then. Out west (I live in New Mexico), the Indian Wars went on into the late 1800s. The German author, Karl May, started publishing his books about Old Shatterhand, et al, in the late 1800's, so anyone going out West could learn something from them. As you may know, today's Germans have a fascination with the "Wild West", complete with theme parks and carnival costumes.

From: the online booklet http://mki.wisc.edu/hgia/ a partial quote from the booklet: http://mki.wisc.edu/HGIA/Settling.htm >David Zeisberger (1721-1808), a native of German-speaking Moravia, spent >his life as a missionary of the Moravian (Herrnhuter) Church, working >mainly in Pennsylvania and Ohio with various Indian groups. His extensive >writings on Native cultures and languages, several of which he spoke >fluently, remain invaluable sources of information for scholars today. The >reproduction on this page shows Zeisberger, as portrayed in 1862 by the >Alsatian-American immigrant artist, Christian Schussele (1824-1879). Image courtesy of the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA, <www.moravianarchives.org>. In part because of contacts between German-speaking immigrants and Native Americans, Germans back home developed a fascination with Indians that has continued unabated to the present. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, hundreds of fictionalized treatments of American Indians appeared in Germany, the best known of which are the novels of Karl May (1842-1912), whose only visit to America-in 1908-came after he had completed most of his works. Today, there are an estimated 200 "Indian clubs" in Germany whose members don feathers and war paint and "recreate" traditional Native ceremonies. An important corrective to these activities is the Native American Association of Germany, e.V., founded in Kaiserslautern in 1994 by Lindbergh Namingha, a former U.S. serviceman and member of the Hopi Tribe. Back in the U.S., the novelist Louise Erdrich (b. 1954), whose mother is Ojibwa Indian and father German-American, has thematized German-Indian cultural contact to great acclaim. < My materna (non-German) grandfather seems to have traded things with the Native Americans in western Nebraska in the 1920's and 1930's and my mother and her sister had a tepee they used to play in that he had been given in exchange for something that I do not know what. I enjoyed the other letters to Jo. Amy Uehara ----- Original Message ----- From: <cwitze@comcast.net> To: <NIEDERSACHSEN-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Monday, August 21, 2006 5:48 AM Subject: Re: pre immigration germany... knowledge of native american Indians > This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. > > > http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/ZVC.2ACE/4125.1.1.2 > > Message Board Post: > > Jo....in that time frame, I imagine it would have been word of mouth and > newspapers....immigrants east of the Mississippi probably didn't have much > problem, the Indians having been pretty much subdued/died out by then. > Maybe still a problem in Western NY/Canada, but the French and Indian war > was long over by then. Out west (I live in New Mexico), the Indian Wars > went on into the late 1800s. The German author, Karl May, started > publishing his books about Old Shatterhand, et al, in the late 1800's, so > anyone going out West could learn something from them. As you may know, > today's Germans have a fascination with the "Wild West", complete with > theme parks and carnival costumes. >