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ALICE WEBER
GREEN BAY
?V/6e       lre 4       94r ,II:       e4
H  ER BOHEMIAN peasant mother could not read or
U      write, could not even distinguish her name from
other words, but Aliska will never forget how she would
stand in a sea of grain, entranced by the billowing wind-
swept expanses of the new land, America. Here the
mother had found freedom and a new hope. As a girl
of twelve she had walked twelve miles to the border in
order to hire out to the Germans. As a child, she had
quit school after only two days, because the schoolmas-
ter had made her kneel for half a day in a hoop of dried
peas as punishment for some infraction of the rules.
  The voyage to the New World in a sailing vessel had
lasted for three months, for the ship had been caught
in the Sargasso Sea. But the dream of what lay ahead
sustained the small party of emigrants through hunger
and thirst. The fourteen-year-old girl landed with the
party in Wisconsin at Manitowoc and then proceeded
on to Oconto County, where a Bohemian settlement
helped with the problem of homesteading near the small
village of Spruce. At seventeen years of age the girl
married a Bohemian farmer, but after her fourth child
was born her husband died. Her second husband,
Joseph Shipla, was a stonecutter who in following his
trade was constantly away from home. Five children
were born to the second union, and to the second oldest
child, a girl, the father gave the name of his favorite
book, Aliska.
  Of the nine children all were girls except the oldest,
who left the farm at seventeen years of age, and the
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