Henderson Daily Dispatch

ONCE UPON MAY 2nd

When George III began casting about for mercenaries with whom to subdue Britain's rebellious colonies in America, he first made overtures to Catharine II of Russia. The autocrat who was born 209 years ago today in Germany and who made herself sole ruler of Russia at 33 by having her husband murdered, didn't like George and she refused to hire out her troops to fight rebels opposing him. George III turned instead to the impoverished princess of the Hessian states.

Nevertheless. Catharine was to play an important part in American history. Liking to consider herself a liberal, she invited Members of the Mennonite sect to leave German states where they were persecuted, and migrate to Russia, to help her build up the sparsely inhabited Crimea, which she had just wrested from Turkey.

She promised them exemption from military service (pacifism being a cardinal tenet of their creed), the right to continue to speak their own language, to educate their children as they pleased, and to have complete religious liberty.

The Mennonites, always expert agriculturists, found and developed in Russia a strain of hard wheat, called "Turkey" wheat that was ideally suited to the climate and soil. They made Crimea a land of plenty.

Under Catharine's successors, the promises made to the Mennonites were gradually abandoned. In the seventies of the last century, no longer able to continue to live in a country that now expected them to bear arms, they migrated to new lands. Hundreds crossed Europe and the Atlantic to settle on the plains of Kansas, which had soil and climate like Crimea. These settlers brought seeds of the hard winter wheat they had found and developed in Russia.

After their first crops. it was evident that it was better adapted to Kansas than any of the spring varieties carried by their neighbors from eastern sections of the U. S. Turkey wheat brought a new era to the western plains, founded a wheat empire that became a magnet for thousands of new settlers.