Pauline Albertina Bratnober

Pauline Albertina, center, around 1890 with nieces Ethel (left) and Elsie (right) Bratnober, daughters by second marriage of Augustus Charles. From the family album of Harry Bratnober Sr. Click Photo for entire image. Pauline Albertina was the youngest of the five siblings and may also have been the heroine of the early Bratnober family. She was born in Custrine, Prussia on November 11th 1852. Her family made the long journey to America in September of 1854, when Pauline was not quite two years old. Augustus writes about their voyage from Liverpool to New York on the three-masted Isaac Webb this way: "We were all dreadfully seasick and lived in constant fear of storms. Mother had far the hardest lot. She always spoke cheerfully to the children, telling them there was no danger at all and we would soon be on land again. Though I know she was often terribly frightened as well as we all were." Pauline has a young pioneer woman’s brave presence, reminiscent of her mother’s spirit, in the earliest photo that we still have of her (above). Undoubtedly she was doing her share of the family's work by the age of ten or twelve--given their poor circumstances when they first arrived in Wisconsin with forty dollars and a wagon full of trunks. Their situation was so humble, in fact, that in the fall of 1856 her father, August Martin, and her brothers load up their first house onto their wagon in sections and move it to town "with the old horse" from its location outside of Hazel Green. Augustus comments simply that: "It was a small affair... We barely got it set up in time for the first snow...It was a beautiful winter."
Hazel Green, Wisconsin street scene, date unknown. Courtesy of Wisconsin Electronic Reader: http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/WIReader/Galleries/Towns.html	When the Civil War ends the family moves on, in 1865, from Wisconsin to Fort Dodge, Iowa and they begin to realize their first signs of prosperity. Augustus marries Isabelle Shilliam of Hazel Green in this year and brings her to Fort Dodge. Ralph, Augustus and their father set up a harness making shop together and then purchase and work a nearby farm as well. Henry heads west at seventeen, to seek his fortune in Montana. Louise marries James Freeburn and moves to Waverly, Iowa. And here, in Fort Dodge, the sibling’s mother, Maria Eva, dies of a stroke in the fall of 1866, while Pauline is still just fourteen. Now Pauline obviously had to manage the house herself, as a young teenager, with Augustus’s new bride, Isabelle, who was all of nineteen herself.
Augustus and Isabelle move to Waterloo in late 1866 shortly after Maria Eva dies, with their newborn Charley (later known as CP) and then in 1868, Isabelle "Belle" Bratnober, their second child is born in Waterloo. Pauline, Ralph and their father stay in Fort Dodge during this time, where Ralph and August Martin apparently have a very good harness making trade--Pauline likely taking the chore of looking after her father and their small brick house, which Augustus notes in 1901 "still stands in Fort Dodge" long after their father has died. Then in 1870, tragedy visits the Bratnobers again, as Augustus’s own young wife, Isabelle Shilliam, dies of a sudden fever at the age of just twenty-two, leaving Augustus with two small children. Pauline comes right to Waterloo from Fort Dodge to shore things up, once more, for the family and for a terribly distraught Augustus, who later writes: "Pauline was only about sixteen years old and it was expecting a good deal of her to run a household, but she did it well (soon it includes their father as well who moves back to live with them from Fort Dodge) and we were a sad little family all that winter." After such a dark winter, Augustus somehow begins to look ahead again and, as always, to make new plans. In the spring of 1871, a young widower of twenty-eight, he starts making regular trips to Chicago to learn and enter into the cattle trade. Coming back to Waterloo in 1873, someone new has entered the family and especially the life of Pauline Albertina: "On returning from one of these trips I found a stranger at the house and Pauline introduced him to me as Peter McArthur from Manitoba, and he freely told me that he had come to marry Pauline. I had never heard of him before and had no idea that Pauline contemplated marrying as she had said nothing about it, so I was very much surprised but of course had nothing to say."

At twenty-one, Pauline had found the man that she would marry and live with for the rest of her life--Patrick "Peter" McArthur, who had already managed through some challenging moments of his own. Peter and Pauline McArthur were married in 1874 and moved to Manitoba, Canada, where Peter and his brothers had settled after emigrating from Scotland. Several of the Bratnobers soon become regular visitors to the McArthurs. Two of the siblings, Louise and Ralph, eventually go to live in Manitoba as well. Peter McArthur was born on October 14, 1841 in Achneim at Nairnshire, Scotland. After learning the cabinet-making trade he came to Toronto, Canada in 1862 to join his brothers, Alex and Duncan, who had preceded him. Here Peter works as a cabinetmaker. In 1866 and 1867 he spends two years in Cedar Falls, Iowa working at a water-powered wood working plant. By 1869 he is back in Canada again living in Fort Garry (now called Winnipeg) where a disturbance arises between settlers and Canadian officials from Ottawa. Government surveyors had begun dragging chains and driving pegs to mark off land along the Dawson River without any explanation of their purpose to settlers, who depended on access to the river for commerce and transportation.	A youthful Peter McArthur in Canada probably before his marriage to Pauline in 1874. Courtesy of Edna McArthur Medd
A radical group, lead by a man named Riel, seized Fort Garry’s main government munitions and supply building in protest. The government sent in five local men, among them Peter and Alex McArthur, to negotiate with the insurrectionists. But Riel and his men now seized their own neighbors and held them hostage as well. The five hostages, which also included the later celebrated Canadian poet Charles Mair, were held captive for several months until Peter succeeded in gradually loosening the bars of a prison window with a purloined knife and the captives escaped—the whole, larger event going down in Canadian history as the Riel Rebellion. Charles Mair later settled in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
The Marquis, an early steamship built by Peter McArthur’s Northwest Navigation Company. Courtesy of Edna McArthur Medd Peter then works as a bridge carpenter for the Duluth & Minnesota Railway in the 1870’s, perhaps returning to Iowa again through this work to meet Pauline. We do not know. After marrying Pauline in 1874, the McArthurs settle just west of Winnipeg in Westbourne near the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, which were fast becoming highways for colonization in the region. Peter and Reginald Pratt organize the Northwest Navigation Company here and build two large steamboats, the Marquette at Fargo, North Dakota and the Northwest at Moorehead, Minnesota. The determined manner in which Peter builds various large steamers and then daringly navigates waters previously thought impassable for such big ships is, today, Manitoba steamship legend. But his commerce-opening initiatives did not come without costs. He lost a harbored ship to fire in 1893. And then in 1897, having developed a substantial lumber business as well, he lost his entire lumber mill to yet another fire.


	Apparently there was no navigation project too large for Peter to conceive. This news photo shows a nine hundred foot raft which they built to carry 25,000 railroad ties and half a million feet of lumber across Lake Manitoba during the summer of 1891. The article notes that the raft included "a camp for the crew and a stable for the horses."
According to The Winnipeg Free Press of September 17, 1936: "Three years later (after the 1897 fire that destroyed the lumber mill) he re-establishes himself in a lumbering business at Winnipegosis, with a loan from his brother-in-law Henry Bratnober. He carried this business on for nearly 30 years, eventually retiring in 1926." There is a charming story that Yvonne Sheane, great granddaughter of Pauline sent us recently about this transaction. Yvonne’s mother, herself named Pauline McArthur Rowan, asked her to share this story about Pauline with us upon learning of our family history project and the reunion. In the early 1900’s Peter McArthur repays the above-mentioned loan to Henry. To Peter’s surprise, Henry returns the check by mail to Peter and asks him to keep the money. Peter looks at this and once again mails the money back to Henry, insisting that it is his. Henry now takes matters in hand, in consultation with Augustus and the family, and they purchase a beautiful ring with this money for Pauline "with two quarter-carat diamonds flanking a fire opal in a very simple gold setting" to settle the matter once and for all. A family heroine, we may guess, had received her long due reward. Pauline and Peter McArthur perhaps at the turn of the century. Courtesy of Edna McArthur Medd. Pauline, we’ve also learned from a History of Winnipegosis, was especially fond of gardening and music. She played the piano very well, sang solos at church and even gave concerts. According to this history "she was always willing to practice for a concert or help organize a fund raising event. At Knox Church, Winnipeg, at The Landing, and here in Winnipegosis, she was especially involved with the Sunday School." The early McArthur house in Westbourne, Manitoba (left) and their later home in Winnipegosis (right). Courtesy of Edna McArthur Medd. Click images for enlarged view.

Peter and Pauline McArthur had six children—Charles, Eva, Alex, Agnes, Isabelle, and John—and we will try to sketch the children’s lives more briefly in a future addendum to this section. Peter McArthur lived to 1936 and nearly ninety-five years of age at their home in Winnipegosis. Pauline passed away in 1924, shortly after celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Pauline McArthur Rowan, her granddaughter, also shares with us this closing story:

"I remember being very sick with diphtheria and being carried over to
grandmother's (Pauline and Peter’s) house. I would have been about seven
years old. I was very sick and there were imaginative figures standing
around my bed. Grandmother had them put me in bed and nurse me
until I was well again.

Pauline at home in Winnipegosis, c.1920.
Courtesy of Edna McArthur Medd

"When I was ten years old I was over at Grandmother and Grandfather's
house one day after Grandmother had, herself, become ill. Aunt Eva sent
me upstairs for something and Grandmother called to me to come into the
spare room to see her. She talked about how she had looked after me in
that room and now here she was in the same place. She was very sweet and
spoke of our situations being reversed. Her loving personality stays with
me yet. When my mother's turn came to sit with Grandmother at night, mother
said she had been dreading it, but it was a beautiful experience for her,
which she never forgot. She said the angels were right there in the room,
which changed everything."