Uncertain Harvest Pioneering The Palouse For Five Generations, The Schultheis Family Has Struggled And Survived On The Rich Farmland Of The Palouse

Michael and Theresa Schultheis had just made the 2,000-foot climb up the Lewiston grade when they met a fellow pioneer forced off the virgin Palouse hills by the harsh winter of 1875.

“You better go around and turn back,” they were told.

Settling in a cabin with cracks so big they swallowed silverware, the couple resolved to return to Walla Walla if it snowed that night. Theresa Schultheis prayed it would. It didn’t.

In staying, they were among the first white people to settle some of the last untilled farmland in the continental United States. Breaking open the sod to unearth one of the richest dryland wheat regions in the world, they went on to help build schools, churches, a bank and two German-Catholic communities, Uniontown and Colton.

Out of more than a hundred descendants, a dozen or so are still farming. Others have become nuns, priests, nurses, engineers and community leaders throughout the Northwest. State Appeals Judge John Schultheis is a great-grandson of Michael Schultheis.

As Congress forges legislation that will shape agriculture into the next century, Schultheis family interviews, pioneer accounts and squirreledaway memoirs from the past century offer a clear message:

Palouse farmers for more than 100 years have adapted to the forces that transformed a humble way of life into a high-finance business.

The line from Michael Sr. to Art Schultheis, a 33-year-old great-great-grandson farming north of Colton, is a microcosm of those changes.

In those five generations, the family has faced unpredictable odds and preserved traditions of community, hard work and innovation. When its best efforts weren’t enough, the family has farmed on faith.

Through it all, both the Schultheis family and Palouse farming have endured and even prospered.

While Art is ever-mindful of his farming legacy, the financial rigors of modern farming require him always to keep an eye on his annual balance sheet. “I want to make it to a sixth generation,” he said. “But it’s still a business. I’m not so tied up in tradition and legacy that I’m going to do it ‘til I go broke.”

A fresh start

Michael and Theresa Schultheis were barely hacking out a living in the brush of Stearns County, Minn., when Magloire Blanchet, the bishop of the Washington Territory’s Nisqually Diocese, passed through in 1866 and boasted of better prospects in the Northwest.

Their first two children had died and after 10 years and at least one penniless winter. They were frustrated with the cold climate and mediocre soil.

With a 6-month-old son, a 2-year-old daughter and about 20 other German-Catholic families, they headed west on a five-month wagon train trip and to another decade of hardship.

They settled on the French Prairie south of Portland, but they didn’t have a clear title to their land and someone was nearly always sick with malaria. Their second daughter, born after the trip west, died at 11 months.

The family moved to Walla Walla, but found the good farmland already taken. The local priest said try the Palouse.

Michael ventured north and, by one account, found grain growing as tall as the pony he rode. Between Lewiston and Colfax there wasn’t a fence or a bridge.

And visiting a homesteader who had settled the year before, he saw wild hay and cabbages and rutabagas and potatoes as large as any grown in Walla Walla.

Schultheis arranged to buy a 160-acre homestead from a discouraged bachelor for 28 cents an acre. Afterwards, the man said he would have given it to him for free; he was quitting anyway.

The following year, he and Theresa planted their own garden and rimmed it with a rail fence to keep out the wild horses that roamed the country in bands of 20 and 30.

They planted wheat, flax, oats and barley to sell. With the first train still a decade away, he hauled grain down the brake-burning Lewiston grade to the U.S. Army post at Fort Lapwai, a daylong round trip.

Rising at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, Michael milked as many as 13 cows. Theresa churned 1,000 pounds of butter in a year, selling it to a Lewiston merchant in 30-gallon barrels of brine.

By 1879, Michael’s wheat harvest of 754 bushels was more than twice the county average. He had 347 acres of land, while his Palouse neighbors typically had about 200 acres. He told the U.S. Census Bureau he received $2,000 from the sell of farm products. His assets - farmland, equipment and livestock - totaled $3,550, giving him a return on investment unimaginable by today’s standards.

In the winter, Michael logged in Idaho while his wife and sons tended stock back at the farm. The family also put up travelers, charging nothing at first, then 15 cents a night, often vacating their bed for guests.

Their home became the seed of a community.

Palouse hospitality

In 1877, when the Nez Perce Indians went to battle against the U.S. Army, panicked settlers caucused at the Schultheis place.

When the Benedictine sisters came from Sarnen, Switzerland, to Uniontown in 1884, they spent their first night in Schultheis home.

When Jesuit missionaries passed through, young Michael Schultheis Jr. was sent out on a pony to round up local families for services in the Schultheis home.

Many of those settlers had come to the area at Schultheis behest.

The four Reisenauer brothers, weary of Kansas cyclones, arrived in 1887. The Wiebers came from Minnesota in response to a letter from Schultheis. The Druffels - now the most common name in the Colton-Uniontown phone listings - came after Michael Sr. told one of them about the area’s church and school.

The Schultheises prospered, raising their son and three daughters in good health despite various epidemics of typhoid, diptheria, scarlet fever and small pox. They loathed debt, and as one granddaughter recalled on the centennial of the family’s journey west, “they was awful saving” - her word for tightfisted.

They turned their savings and the Homestead Act - in effect, the earliest federal farm program - into a legacy of land that helped four more generations endure repeated farm crises and an agricultural revolution.

Michael Schultheis Sr. paid cash for a second homestead southeast of Colton in 1879, then started a timber claim, planting trees to improve a site, in 1887. Michael Schultheis Jr. added to the family holdings when he took up his own homestead in 1892.

Heavy rains destroyed the 1893 crop. Michael Sr. was one of the few settlers with grain to plant the following year, having saved seed in small, mice-infested piles that he moved periodically to dry them out.

Other farmers didn’t fare as well. For each settler who came and stayed between 1880 and 1900, census figures show nearly as many other arrivals went broke, died or gave up. This provided a steady supply of land when their neighbors sought to expand.

Michael Sr. bought out some farmers but bailed out others, said Art Schultheis.

“If he had wanted to, he could have had everything in the county,” he said.

As it was, Michael Sr. and Jr. prodded horses and “foot-burner” moldboard plows across more than 1,000 acres by 1895. By 1910, their domain totaled more than 2,000 acres and by 1921, Michael Sr. also owned one-third of the Colton State Bank. Michael Jr. acted as president for decades.

For a man who lived on fish and game and earned 25 cents a day harvesting grain in Minnesota, this was the promised land. After Michael Sr. died blind and helpless on April 21, 1924, one day shy of his 49th anniversary on the Palouse, local flags flew at half mast.

“Such pioneers,” eulogized an editorial in the Colton News Letter, “are the builders of nations.”

Hard times

Michael Sr.’s death echoed the end of an era in more ways than one.

It marked the passing of one of the first and last pioneers. But it also came at the dawn of one of the longest and harshest economic tests faced by the Schultheises and other Palouse farmers.

“Food Will Win The War!” had been the cry, and Palouse farmers had responded with zeal by boosting their production to feed a Europe ravaged by World War I.

But in 1920, wheat prices skidded from $2.50 to 80 cents a bushel. They stayed low for years, through the Great Depression and up to the next World War.

In 1931, Michael Schultheis Jr. explained to Colton State Bank stockholders how prices for nails, flour and shingles had doubled since 1893.

Yet “a bushel of wheat, the farmer’s medium of exchange, brings less now than it ever has in the history of the Palouse Country, except in the fall of 1894 and the early Pioneer days.”

It would become a common refrain: The price of wheat stays low, but farmers’ costs rise. Wheat is sold at wholesale prices, while farmers buy equipment at retail.

The only way to stay afloat or make money was to grow more wheat more cheaply.

To do this, farmers brought the industrial revolution to the countryside. With an arsenal of technology, they shifted from a labor-intensive, subsistence lifestyle to an expensive, chemical- and machinery-driven industry.

The government arrived on the countryside, too, as federal subsidies and marketing programs grew to play a key role in farm economics.

Michael Sr.’s legacy is now a family-run agribusiness. It jockeys federal payments and six-figure budgets, always weighing whether to grow in size, while supporting fewer people and smaller communities.

“Nowadays it’s a capital-intensive business,” said Art Schultheis, who invests his crop in farm futures for an added economic edge. “You don’t just cut your grain and take it to the store and you’re done for the year. There’s a lot more to it than that.”

Finding new markets

Palouse farms linked themselves to the larger world the day a boatload of wheat left for Liverpool, England, in 1868, opening the first of the overseas markets that now make up 90 percent of their customers.

But Palouse farmers were largely self-sufficient well into this century.

Sister Gertrude Marie, one of Michael Jr.’s nine children, recalled in 1992 the winter desserts of canned Italian prunes and apple varieties growing in a well-timed succession: Gravensteins in early summer, yellow transparents, the Strawberry apple as school opened, then Jeffrey’s and the Macintosh. Roman Beauties lasted until March.

Garden vegetables were boiled and canned; hogs were slaughtered for cured hams and smoked sausage. Cream from the family cows was sold to cover the monthly grocery bills. It was constant work requiring many hands, particularly during harvests.

Michael Schultheis Sr. was among the first to invest in machinery as a way of easing the load and increasing production. Around 1902, he bought a header, which stacked wheat in long v-shaped beds for a steam-powered thresher.

Even that operation required about a dozen men and up to 32 horses, not to mention the crew that would rise at 4:30 a.m. to cook.

But the harvest crew shrunk to three when the combine - so named because it combined cutting and threshing - arrived in 1926. Again, a Schultheis was among the first with the new technology.

The machinery was still drawn by horses, but they too began to vanish as tractors were modified for the steep Palouse terrain. In 1937, Jacob Schultheis, Art’s grandfather and one of Michael Jr.’s six sons, bought a red International crawler tractor to pull a combine and cultivate the soil. After World War II, which left fewer men to manage horses and mules, hay-powered farming was obsolete.

Meanwhile, production bolstered by the war effort continued through the Marshall Plan to assist war-torn Europe.

With farm chemicals, particularly ammonia-based fertilizers, cropland where Michael Schultheis Sr. got 17 bushels to the acre now yielded 35 bushels, then 50, then 60.

Harvesting became a one-man job, plus truck drivers, with the advent of the self-propelled combine.

“We never felt that we would be able to cut these hills,” said Carroll Schultheis, Art’s father, who bought a John Deere with his own dad around 1960. “And that thing worked around these hills unbelievably easy.”

In the 1960s, progress came through genetics research as well as engineering.

Researchers at Washington State University developed semi-dwarf wheat varieties, which let farmers boost their nitrogen use without worrying about the fat seed heads toppling the plant.

Carroll Schultheis promised his wife Edna Mae a new kitchen if his harvest hit 70 bushels an acre. In 1966, she got her kitchen.

Then, as it did after World War I, the bubble burst. But instead of falling grain prices, soaring inflation and a collapse in land prices toppled many farmers.

Carroll Schultheis dodged a bullet. With as many as three of his six sons in college in the mid-‘70s, he was unwilling to take on the extra work - and debt - of expansion.

“We were just lucky,” he said. “We didn’t overextend ourselves.”

At the turn of the century, farmers could grow the fuel for their horses and sell eggs and cream for cash.

Now, high debt and operating costs had farmers working with greater sums of money; low prices, particularly as overseas markets dried up in the mid-1980s, had them working with ever-narrower profit margins.

Suddenly, federal farm payments began playing a critical role in filling out a farmer’s year-end returns. Federal price supports, which had rarely exceeded $3 billion since they began in 1934, reached $25 billion nationally in 1986.

For the Schultheises as well as other wheat growers, federal farm payments are now as much a way of life as harvest.

A recent study by Spokane accounting firm LeMaster & Daniels said federal farm payments in 1994 typically accounted for 91 percent of Whitman and Spokane wheat growers’ profits.

Since 1987, the first year Art Schultheis started farming with Carroll, the father-son operation has received an average of nearly $22,000 a year in wheat and barley payments.

Farming on his own, Art last year received $18,525 from the government. It was nearly 10 percent of his gross income, 42 percent of his net.

This year, he computed his budget without farm payments, planning to one day farm without them. That budget allows him a salary of only $24,000 a year.

Carroll is not optimistic.

“There’s no farmer that’s out here that’s less than 80 years old that’s never farmed without a farm program,” he said. “I don’t know if they know how to farm without a farm program.”

The modern farmer

Michael Schultheis Sr. farmed by the seat of the pants.

His great-great-grandson’s very choice of pants - rented, cleaning service coveralls with an “Art” patch above the right pocket - goes through a cost-benefit analysis that rules almost all his decisions.

He rises early, but more out of necessity than tradition. He often doesn’t go out the back door without first pondering a computer that can give the bottom-line return on every field and the dates he sprayed, seeded, swathed, harvested and plowed back to 1985.

He seeds with a 27,000-pound notill drill, a Rube Goldberg monster of tubes, drills, discs and wires that plants and fertilizes with little of the soil disruption that leads to erosion. His 240-horsepower tractor features a radar to tell him how fast he is going and an acoustic sensor - a microphone, really - that trips an alarm when the seeder is empty or broken.

It is a far cry from Michael Schultheis Sr. broadcasting seed by hand.

But while Art is every inch a modern wheat farmer, he and his wife, Sue, 32, hold fast to the traditional values of family, church and community that farming can embrace. Just as they plant and weed their crops from season to season, they nurture the intimate sense of town and home brought by Michael Sr. and Theresa 120 years ago.

It was a culture shock at first for Sue Schultheis, a Snohomish native, who got one of her first lessons in modern farm living when, before her marriage, she said moving to a farm would let her finally get a horse. She quickly learned that Schultheises have four-wheelers and tractors instead.

Eleven years later, she still has no horse. She works eight hours a week off the farm, cleaning a local office evenings and weekends. The money goes toward her golf habit and comforts like a stereo that plays soft country and Mariners games in the kitchen.

It’s a hybrid role of the farm wife.

“She’ll make the lunch if I grease the combine,” is how Art describes it.

Bookkeeping, a traditional wife’s job, went to Art when he computerized. But Sue chases parts, sprays thistles and drives truck during harvest. She spends four to six hours a week tending the lawn, neatness being the price to pay for life along the highway.

Indoors, she decorates the house with her woodworking projects, like a small hanging that spells out F-A-RM, the F being on a rooster, the A on a sheep, and so on.

She edits the church newsletter, belongs to the Altar Society, acts as co-chair of the society’s November craft fair and sits on the St. Galls Parish Council. She and Art are organizing the Steak and Wine Dinner Auction for Guardian Angel of St. Boniface, the church school started with Michael Sr.’s help.

Both her children - Kyle, 8, and Kelsey, 6 - go there, and Sue is home, as she puts it, “when the kids come off the bus, skipping up the driveway.”

“I like walking out and seeing Art,” she said one day in her kitchen, which in the summer overlooks a garden thick with corn and pumpkins. “Or him walking in and saying, ‘I’m going to Moscow for a cup of coffee. Want to come along?’ I like working with him. I like everything. I can’t imagine living any other way.”

A changing world

For his part, Art is conservative politically, progressive in his farm management and traditional in an almost subconscious way.

The family milk cow disappeared in 1980. Art stopped raising hogs around 1989, when the price dropped to 37 cents a pound - a $10 per head loss.

But the family still makes its own sausage every fall, buying hogs from a neighbor, and keeps a small herd of cattle for meat and the kids’ college fund.

Like his ancestors, Art is also deeply involved in his community. He belongs to the Knights of Columbus, attends church even in the heat of harvest, and volunteers for the local fire district. When he helped put out a stubble fire that jumped from Robbie Bauer’s to Harvey Jacobs’, he followed the trail of soot and smoke across land farmed by a fellow greatgreat-grandson of Michael Sr. to land once farmed by one of Michael Sr.’s wagon train companions.

Art worries the local community - particularly its sense of public service and the connections of its people - is changing as out-of-town families are drawn by cheap housing and country living. At a recent Colton High School football game, he quickly noticed the roster was dotted with unrecognizable names.

“I’m not related to everybody anymore,” he said afterwards. “I don’t know everybody in town anymore.”

A more ominous unknown is the effect reduced federal farm subsidies would have on small family farmers like Art.

Farmers making interest and debt payments on top of their other expenses will be hit hardest, particularly as the likely increase in production forces prices down, said Herb Hinman, an agricultural economist at Washington State University.

Art is only carrying what could be considered a modest debt load for a used $140,000 combine. But he only owns 42 of the 1,100 or so acres he farms, paying rent or crop shares to his father, an aunt, cousins as far away as Newport Beach, and the John Hancock Insurance Co.

He and other modern-day sharecroppers will see profits shrink quickly because so much of their gross - typically one-third - goes to pay landlords, said Hinman.

Should Congress drastically cut the subsidy program, said Hinman, “We’re going to have turmoil. You’re going to lose farmers and other farmers are probably going to get bigger.”

Both Art and Sue hope they have fine-tuned their operation enough to weather what comes. What they can’t control they let ride on their faith.

Meanwhile, they cling to farming as a constant for their dearest values: dignity, hard work, honest sweat, family ties, natural beauty, public service and the lessons of birth, growth and maturity.

Farming’s embodiment of those values is described in “The Farmer’s Creed.” Sue found it in a trade magazine and burned it into a piece of oak that hangs in Art’s office.

“I believe in farming,” the creed concludes, “because it makes all this possible.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 15 Photos (9 Color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: SCHULTHEIS FAMILY MILESTONES A look back at the important dates and moments in the history of the Schultheis family:

1861 — Michael Schultheis marries Theresa Koller. They have seven children. Three die in infancy and a girl dies at the age of 14. 1862 — Congress passes the Homestead Act, granting 160 acres free to settlers who live on and improve land continuously for five years. 1867 (June 25) — Michael Schultheis, his wife and two children, including 7-month-old Michael Jr., leave St. Cloud, Minn., on a five-month trip by wagon train for Oregon’s Willamette Valley. 1868 — Michael Schultheis works for the Henry Weinhard brewery. The first ship leaves Portland with a full cargo of Washington wheat and flour, bound for Liverpool, England. 1873 — Michael Schultheis moves to Walla Walla and rents land for two years. 1875 — Schultheis family moves to a homestead halfway between Colton and Uniontown. He is the first German Catholic to settle the Palouse and among the first farmers to plant the upland bunchgrass prairie to grain. 1888 — The region’s first combine cuts a 20-foot swath near Ritzville. It requires five men and 32 horses. 1893 — Crop failure on the Palouse 1894 — Michael Schultheis Jr. and Cecilia Wieber become the first couple to be married in the new Colton church. The church was built after a bitter division with the Uniontown church - a division ultimately resolved by the Vatican. 1917 — Family gets first car, a secondhand Overland. 1918 — Michael Schultheis Jr. makes a $15.75 contribution to send a committee of delegates to Washington, D.C., to fix the wheat price at $2 a bushel under the Food Control Bill of 1917. In the following decades, farmers nationwide seek government controls to ensure they can be paid the value of their crop. 1924 — Michael Schultheis Sr. dies at the age of 84. He is survived by three children, 23 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. 1926 — Schultheises buy first combine. It requires three crew members: a driver, a sack sewer, a mechanic and 18 or more horses. 1933 — The Agricultural Adjustment Act - the first Farm Bill - is passed, creating a system of “benefit payments” from an excise tax on commodities. 1935 — On one day, Victor, George and Isabelle kill, clean and freeze 20 chickens, a family record. That same year, the family gets its first electric home refrigerator. 1938 — A revised Agricultural Adjustment Act established production and marketing limits for growers of wheat, corn, rice, cotton and tobacco. 1940s— Wartime brings high grain prices and a period of plenty that stretches into the early 1950s. 1945 — Ammonia-based fertilizers, once used to harden World War II airstrips, boost yields to 60 bushels an acre. 1960 — Carroll Schultheis, grandson of Michael Schultheis Jr., buys his first self-leveling combine, a 1958 John Deere 95. 1963 — Gaines, a dwarf variety of wheat that does not fall over from fertilizer-fueled growth, goes into commercial production. Over the next decade, it earns Pacific Northwest farmers an additional $770 million. 1967 — Afflicted with dust pneumonia, Carroll Schultheis installs a $1,600 air conditioning unit on his combine 1970s — Farmland prices rise 50 percent as new agricultural technology creates a “keep up with the Joneses” fervor among farmers. Amid, international overproduction, Presidents Nixon and Carter employ grain embargoes, hurting U.S. role as a reliable trading partner. Early 1980s — Commodity prices and farmland values drop. National farm debt rises from $20 billion in late ‘60s to $225 billion in 1985. 1983 — Art Schultheis returns home from community college and spends three years working for his father, Carroll, selling crop in his name and raising hogs on his own in a redesigned hog house. 1985 — Farm Bill requires that farmers have soil conservation programs in place by 1995 if they are to receive federal subsidies. 1987 — Art Schultheis forms a general partnership with his father in which Carroll leases ground and rents machinery through the partnership. 1989 — With pork prices at 37 cents a pound, Art Schultheis loses $10 a head and quits raising hogs. 1993 — Carroll Schultheis “retires,” dissolving partnership. Art farms under a sole proprietorship, farming 16 acres of his land and leasing the rest from his father, an aunt and an insurance company. 1994 — Art buys 26 acres, raising his total to 42 acres. 1995 — Art buys combine for $140,000; named Palouse Conservation District Outstanding Conservation Farmer of the Year. He harvests a bumper crop approaching 100 bushels per acre. With prices high, he does not need subsidies, nor does he qualify.