Chapter 11

We have had the ahead ... now for the behind.

In the beginning there was Russia and Russian Alaska. A Dane, Bering, leading a Russian expedition discovered Alaska in 1741. By 1778, Russian Fur Traders were firmly established and sending out serfs to trap and trade.

In Alaska. a serf could buy his freedom by hard work. Not in Russia ... a serf was bound to the land and what ever Duke, or Baron owned the land.

Nikolai Post, Post is a Russian name, Nikolai was sent to Alaska to trap and work about the trading post on the Russian River.

The Russian is tributary to Skilak Lake on the Kenai Peninsula. Skilak Lake feeds the Kenai River which mouths or feeds fresh water to Cook Inlet ... at ... Kenai, an Alaskan town between Nikiski to the north and Kasilof to the south.

Life is hard. Post wasn’t used to easy. Women were imported. Serf met serf ... the bourgeois trader, assigned serf Anna Kasilof to serf Nikolai Post. (Bourgeois. fr. proprietor of the land. French was the language of the educated.)

“A man needs a wife,” he said. They had children. Some lived, some died ... the Post name survived. Coming forward a hundred years, the United States bought Alaska.

Rather than return to the serfdom of Russia, the Posts fled. All the way to Seattle by canoe. There they headed to Montana. They were in the way when the Hutterites expanded into Golden Valley ... and rather than keep moving in a country that was rapidly running out of moving room, they converted.

Understandably, that sect had come from Russia, the Nogai Steppe, and they and the Post family shared a common language ... however shattered. At any rate they understood each other.

In the due course of time Karen Post was born.

During the war ... second and Korea, the draft age men were sent to Canada while Canadian Hutterites were sent to replace the Americans. The Colonies continued the practice ... cuts down on inbreeding. Hormones are hormones ... sex is sex ... wherever ... Karen was born in mid 1961 ... of uncertain parentage. Conception certainly took place in 1960 ... likely the father was Canadian. She was named Post after her mother.

Karen was raised as all Hutterites are bred and turned a very useful sixteen year old. She could cook, clean, plow, shoe, garden, hammer, sharpen, saw and mend. She was silent and respectful around men. She was shaping up as pretty and there was a bidding war. We all know how that worked out.

After the reciprocating engine school had been established, I was again approached by the Department of Education.