Augustus Charles “Gus” Bratnober

A.C. Bratnober, 1903, in New York just before departing by boat for his only visit back to Europe. Courtesy of Edna McArthur Medd. Augustus Bratnober was the family scribe. Educated in Old German by his grandfather until the age of eleven in semi-feudal Prussia, he apparently had an irrepressible desire to chronicle the world around him in writing that could not be deterred by work, war, imprisonment, tragedy, or even the infirmities of old age. Born on November 25, 1842 in Custrine, Prussia, he was the eldest of the five siblings and we still have his wonderful autobiography, referenced for its common soldier’s authentic account of the Civil War by historians today, a dozen or so long letters to his sister Pauline, and a whole series of articles that were published in the Iowa State Reporter about his visit to Europe in 1903. Life was harsh and lean for the Bratnobers in Prussia, according to his brief but vivid account of the family’s early years in Europe. The opportunity for change sprang from his parents’ decision to come to America in 1854, despite all the risks associated with this undertaking, just as Gus was about to turn twelve. There were plenty of hardships to deal with as they started life again in Hazel Green, Wisconsin. But surely the worst, for hundreds of thousands of families like the Bratnobers, came with the outbreak of the Civil War. The Battlefield at Chickamauga Creek, near Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, where the Wisconsin Tenth Infantry fought in September of 1863. Personal Use Permission from: www.Corbis.com After just seven years in the United States, Augustus was eager to enlist in the Union Army at eighteen and to head off to battle with the Tenth Wisconsin Infantry Regiment on August 18, 1861. “My greatest fear was that the thing would be over before I could get there… We were a jolly crowd then and expected to do things up in a hurry when we got to the front; none of us ever dreamed of the hardships before us.” Wisconsin had only been a state for about fourteen years and had a population of less than 700,000. They would send 91,200 young men like Gus into the war, comprising thirteen percent of their entire population. More than 11,000 would perish and the majority of survivors would return home partially disabled by wounds or disease.
Augustus was mustered out in November of 1864, weighing one hundred and thirteen pounds and immensely grateful just to be alive. During the three years and three months that he served he had marched hundreds of miles, seen comrades die of disease and infection more often than gunfire, been promoted from Private to Sergeant, fought in one of the war’s great battles at Chickamauga Creek in Georgia, been captured and left to die in a Confederate Prison in Virginia for nearly eight months and—finally—he had lost his treasured pocket diary that he’d kept daily all through the war just one month before he was discharged. But like most men who survived “The Late, Great Unpleasantness” Gus was immensely proud to have served and he went regularly to regimental reunions for the rest of his life.	Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia – the Confederate’s tobacco-warehouse prison where Augustus was imprisoned. Click here to enlarge
His detailed description of his personal war experience is a remarkable document. A military accounting of the Tenth Regiment’s saga can also be found on the Internet at: http://www.secondwi.com/wisconsinregiments/10th.htm After the war Gus says that he wanted to be a lawyer, but lacking the education to pursue this (he had learned his basic English from the sailors coming over on the boat) he starts out, after the Civil War, to pursue a different destiny. One gets the sense that he was almost impulsive in his eagerness both to work and to explore the new frontier—finding his pleasure in the never-ending adventure of trying new things and exploring new places. In his first year home from the war, before marrying, he explores all over central Iowa, working at a variety of jobs all along the way, he nearly joins up with an enthusiastic but rowdy bunch of Gold Rush enthusiasts heading for Nevada, and then he lands in Fort Dodge almost by accident to find a man with a harness shop for sale at a bargain price. Now he has his start. Gus makes a deal for the shop and he marries Isabelle Shilliam of Hazel Green, his sweetheart from even before the war, on November 20^th, 1865, bringing her and then the entire family to the small town of 1,500 in Iowa. Here Augustus makes harnesses, buys and works farms, cuts and hauls lumber, delivers groceries in the countryside from a peddler’s wagon and finally, declares himself sick of the grasshoppers that keep plaguing the crops in Fort Dodge and moves to Waterloo to open a butcher shop in town. Two children were born to Augustus and Isabelle during these tumultuous, youthful years: Charles Philip Bratnober (1866), later known as “CP”, and Isabelle Bratnober (1869), who they called “Belle”. Augustus and his sister Louise Freeburn at the Freeburn Farm in Waverly Iowa in the 1870s. Courtesy of Edna McArthur Medd. Ready now to make a steady go of it in Waterloo (“Butchering was hard work in those days, we opened up at about four o’clock in the morning in summer and never got home before eleven at night.”), Gus builds a two story, wood-frame shop at 218 E. Fourth Street in Waterloo in the spring of 1870, with living quarters upstairs. A young man of twenty-seven with so many experiences already under his belt, he is unexpectedly met at this unlikely juncture with the worst tragedy of his life. His beloved Isabelle develops a sudden, terrible fever in the fall of 1870 that ends her short life of twenty-two years in just a few days. “(Isabelle) was delirious almost from the start…She regained consciousness and asked for the children. I brought them in at once and she wept over them, bid them goodby and told me that she should be happy…She never spoke nor made signs of intelligence to any of us (again) and died at 1:00 o’clock in the morning of October 22, 1870…I hope I may never see a sadder day…I could not think, I could not sleep, I never entered those rooms again.” Saved once already from wanderlust, a terribly distraught Augustus now sells his thriving butcher shop and several farm properties and goes back out into a variety of pursuits in search of a new direction for his life. His sister, Louise Freeburn, eventually raises the two children in Waverly, Iowa after immediate help from his youngest sister, Pauline. Augustus works mainly at farming and cattle trading for several years—moving cattle back and forth to Chicago, even detouring once to explore the Dakotas. Then, in November of 1873, a cattle herding friend leaving Chicago suggests to Augustus that he ought to come along and see Texas. Gus is off again, based only on this brief suggestion—exploring Texas all the way down to Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christie and then into northern Mexico, almost deciding to buy land and settle in Texas. Their journey reads like it could be the last cowboy story from the Old West—as they ride the vast plains on horseback, camp out and shoot rabbit for dinner, and pay settlers a dollar to sleep in their barns when it rains.

Ida McWain Bratnober, second wife of Augustus around 1885. From the family album of Harry Bratnober Sr.

But in March of 1874 he returns home to Waterloo again. Here he marries Ida McWain on December 9, 1875, taking CP and Belle (now nine and seven years old) back home with him again. Ida had been born in Ontario, Canada in 1853 to Scottish parents and then moved with her mother to Waterloo in 1870. Gus and Ida would have three more children of their own—Ethel (1877), who later marries George Bradley; John Elwood Bratnober (1879), who later marries Jessie Kelly and runs the family’s sawmill operations near Seattle; and Elsie (1880), who later marries Frank Kelly and types the entire, hand-written Augustus autobiography for the family in about 1930. Thus Augustus had five children in all by two marriages. Gus and Ida purchase and live on the Deacon Farm north of Waterloo until about 1880, when they buy a home on Independence Street in Waterloo and move back to town.

In 1880 Henry Bratnober comes back to visit the family from Montana and Augustus comments: “I had not seen (my brother) in fourteen years.” Henry certainly had much to tell. He would soon become a principal partner and superintendent of a large mining operation in Montana, which would make Henry a very wealthy man in the 1890s – a fortune that he would apparently spend too fast and then lose almost entirely by 1907.

Augustus continues cattle trading during the 1880s—and keeps right on rigorously farming and even butchering again as well. By the late 1880’s Henry is making investments with Augustus and now Augustus begins to expand his projects, joined by his sons in one of these ventures. CP goes to Montana in 1886, at about the age of twenty, and works for his Uncle Henry at the Drum Lummon Mine. Then in 1888, CP comes back and establishes the Bratnober & Ricker Lumber Company with yards in Waterloo and Dunkerton, Iowa and capitalization from Augustus. How the Bratnobers decided to focus on the lumber business at this time we do not know. Soon CP marries May Lichty of Waterloo and establishes the Bratnober-

One of the Bratnober-Waite locomotives
near Clear Lake, Washington around 1900.
Photo by Darius Kinsey, courtesy of John Labbe.
Click to enlarge

Waite Lumber Company in Minneapolis in 1895 with partner and friend Harry Waite. In 1899, at twenty years of age, CP’s step-brother, John Elwood Bratnober who is younger than CP by thirteen years, goes out to Seattle and the Bratnober sons begin buying timberland and establishing the first of several large-scale sawmill operations at Clear Lake and Monohon, Washington, with business operations run from Minneapolis by CP and Harry Waite.

Three Generations

Augustus with son CP and grandson Harry Sr. around 1910.
From the family album of Harry Bratnober Sr.

Gus and Ida in about 1905.
Courtesy of Edna McArthur Medd.
Click to enlarge

Gus obviously takes great pride in following his sons growing lumber business as the new century dawns. In 1900 he hosts the double wedding of his daughters, Ethel and Elsie (who are pictured with their Aunt Pauline at the top of the Pauline page) in Waterloo. He travels to Europe in 1903 to visit “the old country” for the first and only time since he had left as a boy. Then, in 1905, even the irrepressible Augustus observes: “I began to notice that I was getting older this year.” Now in semi-retirement, Gus and Ida travel from Waterloo two or three times per year to visit children, family, and friends in Canada and the West. In 1908 his first daughter Belle, a fine opera singer who did not have children, dies suddenly and unexpectedly of illness in Europe just short of her fortieth birthday. Augustus lays Belle to rest alongside her young mother in Hazel Green, Wisconsin. He mentions purchasing a new, matching gravestone for his first wife on the occasion of this funeral, and both of the “Isabelle” markers are still visible and in fine condition today.

Gravestones of the two Isabelles in Hazel Green, Wisconsin, 2000.
Courtesy of Jana O’Keefe Swanson.

Gus and Ida move permanently to Los Angeles in about 1910, buying a small house at 401 South Boylston Street. Augustus writes regularly to his sister Pauline, in Canada, to tell her the latest news of his backyard gardening exploits, his children’s comings and goings, and his concerns about the terrible overcrowding of Los Angeles in 1912! Thank goodness he could not see what was to come. Never able to just sit around the house, he instead mentions things like: “I took eight lessons in drawing from a Frenchman named De Bamel (this year) and also started to learn to read French, have kept at both more or less ever since.” Ever curious and observant of life and events around him, and ever grateful for family and friends, Augustus passed away in Los Angeles, California on July 11^th, 1918, where he is laid to rest at Inglewood Park Cemetery.

The longhand of Augustus from a 1915 letter from Los Angeles to his sister, Pauline, in Canada.
Courtesy of Edna McArthur Medd.

Contents of above letter:

“My Garden is the best I ever had and we are having
oceans of flowers. Fruits of all kinds are plentiful and
cheap. Our farmers and Gardeners are not well satisfied with
prices, but we can’t have large crops and high prices very
often. I hope this finds you all well and enjoying life.
I know of no use for life if one has to always feel miserable.
The town is full of people – You won’t know this town
when you see it again. But everyone is complaining. At
Waterloo times are very slow and it seems as if everything
is on the Bum everyplace I hear of. But it will change
and it is always darkest just before the dawn –

         write soon
                      affectionately
                               Your Bro

Regards to all the family.”

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