The Great Drought
Dry spells were not uncommon in the Molochna River Basin, and the rainless autumn of 1832 aroused little concern. By the following March, though, Johann Cornies wrote to his friend Daniel Schlatter: ‘Not even the oldest people here can remember such weather.
The ground is like a dry rock, without any moisture.’11 By midJune Orthodox and Nogai villages were reporting deaths from starvation.12 Mennonites and Germans fared better, but their livestock faced the same fate as that of all settlers - Molochna pasture lands were barren, and only a few days of heavy rain in early July permitted livestock to survive that summer.13 The July rains were too little and too late for grain crops, and Menno- nites established a community fund to buy grain and fodder, sending representatives to surrounding districts to purchase whatever provisions they could find.14 Both Mennonites and Germans sold off a quarter of their horses at minimal prices, keeping only those they absolutely needed for field work in the coming year.16 During the winter of 1833-4 those who could afford to moved their livestock to regions less severely affected, paying as much as five rubles per sheep to rent pasture; poorer settlers could only wait and watch as their livestock died. ByJanuary the only fodder available to most Molochna settlers was a local weed called kurrei, which sometimes caused fatal diarrhoea in sheep.16 By February even the kurrei was gone, and settlers fed their livestock thatch from the roofs of their homes.17 Some desperate Nogai, facing starvation, raided Mennonite and German cattle herds, and colonists began posting guards in response.18 Disease swept through weakened livestock and thousands of head, already weakened by hunger, died.19 Only the state’s emergency efforts at famine relief prevented similar massive fatalities in the human population before rain and warm weather finally returned in April 1834.2°
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