Author Unknown
Understand that as you read this, I’ll most likely have gone to God. I can only tell everything from my point of view. It may be my point of view, but every Fortman adheres to a policy of not lying well, most of them.
Because of World War I and II, we know relatively little about our family prior to my Grandfather. Allied Forces bombing destroyed many records in Germany, most of which were on paper. The fires burned many people’s past.
Vortmann was the original spelling of our family, but it has taken on two new spellings since then. Fortmann was first, and finally to Fortman. The second incarnation of our name was because the government office that first issued my dad his U.S. documents thought that the “V” in German was the English “F” sound. The final spelling of Fortman was because he later dropped the “n” to curb.
German persecution happened during World War II. My father told me that his father was an artisan, a furniture maker, in a small Bavarian village. I thought he said this village was called Depoltz, but I’ve never been able to find that on a map. During the late 1800s, Germany was still a patriarchal society. The eldest born son was allowed to take over the family business, and the younger boys were conscripted into the Prussian Army, often at young ages. My father, as the second eldest son decided that he would go to America. See, The Kaiser was going to invade France, and we, living near her border, had friends and even relatives that were considered French simply due to a dividing line. My Dad didn’t want to fight his own family.
So he took all his possessions, rapped them up in a bandana, and went to the port to join a ship crew bound for America. The only problem with this was that once at sea, the captain and his cronies wanted the men to be indentured servants, going back and forth across the ocean hauling all sorts of expensive merchandise bound for the rich Bostonians and New Yorkers lush mansions.
The boat docked in Cincinnati, and Dad somehow managed to escape at the first opportunity. There was a thriving German community in Ohio then, and Frederich Vortmann soon made a contact with a well-to-do land owner named Schmidt. Schmidt took a shining to Dad, and soon was letting him live in the servant’s quarters. My Father became Herr Schmidt’s gardener and general valet. This was all in the 1880s, and it was there that my dad met a girl at the Protestant church, a Miss Frieda Schroeder. After two years of courting, they were married by Hermann Ohlen.
In the 1990’s land in Oklahoma was still practically free, and Frederich had read about this pristine farm and ranch land in the local German newspaper. He told me that after figuring it all out for over three years, he went to Herr Schmidt with $300. This was almost 80% of the wages he had been paid during that time. He asked his employer and friend for a loan of $700 more dollars so that he, Frederich Fortman, could purchase his own piece of land, to call his own for his family. Mr. Schmidt did better than that. He gave my Dad $1500 and two horses. All he asked was that Dad claim two adjoining pieces of land and hold one for him, Mr. Schmidt.
My dad was one of the many who traveled West into the Oklahoma Territory and was given land by the government. After erecting a crude cabin, and the beginnings of a producing farm and ranch, he called for Frieda to join him, and they began a family.
My name is Henry Frederick Fortman. I was born in 1899 in what was still considered Indian territory back then. I had eight brothers, two older and six younger. I also had two sisters, both younger. I remember working, and I remember learning to read and do math at the school, where mother’s took turns teaching all of the five through twelve year old’s simultaneously. I learned how to till the earth, plant and sow seed, birth and kill cows, fix tractors, listen to the air to know the weathers intentions, and to worship the Lord every Sunday. We had to grow up young back then, and plow the fields and herd the cattle. When the sun came up, my momma would already have bacon and cabbage cooking, with a heavy rye bread and milk from Greta or Olga, or one of the other heifers. We ate, and I can tell you, nine boys or not, there was silence at the table. Now, once I was in the fields, Bill picked on Mark who picked on me, and on down the line of boys. But at the breakfast table, you were asking for a whoopin if you breathed too loud or squirmed too much. Or so it seemed to me at thirteen.
Bill was the oldest, and as such acquired a demeanor of responsibility early on. Mark, however, was the rebel even from the beginning. Funny thing, I idolized him more than Bill until I was in my thirties. Mark was the first one to steal Daddy’s tobacco, and he rolled it behind the barn and smoked it. He passed it to me, and the puff made me cough, and get dizzy, and become sick.
One thing about Mark: he was about as true a cowboy as there ever was. He loved to be out in those pastures with the cows and the air and a hand-rolled cigarette. When I was only fifteen he decided to go to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas with forty head of cattle, and I went with him. We struck a deal to be partners, and that was my first mistake as a businessman. At seventeen, Mark was already a gamblin, drinkin, whorin fool. We had some beautiful Longhorns that our Dad had bred into a choice meat when butchered, and a few goats for milk and cheese. Also some chickens for eggs. We dubbed our new 240 acre spread Double F Ranch, and our brand with two adjoining F’s are still patented. My son renewed it even after my death. Great boy.
We employed the Gomez family down there in the Texas Valley, and they lived on a small cabin sitting on the land. Pancho Villa was menacing the country side then, and that was when they burnt down our house. We got three of those Mexicans, though. They came in the night and tried to steal our cattle, but we got our shotguns and defended ourselves. Beto Gomez and his young son, Enrique, stood at our shoulders. The bandits torched our house, but we were on a wooded hill just past the barn, where we fired on them in defense. I may have shot one of those hombres, I don’t know; but when the third one fell, the other fifteen or so rode off amidst a mess of hollerin and gunshots.
We began to rebuild the old farm house, and that took a while. Mark, however, drank and whored more and more as the ranch’s profits mounted. Our sister, Franka, was visiting us from Kansas with her preacher husband one summer. He was Baptist, but that was OK. One evening at supper, Mark had gotten really tight on some home brew that was potent enough to run a Packard. When Franka made a reference to Marks excessive drinking, he told her to shut up. Then he called her a word I won’t repeat. That’s when I beat the heck out of him. After that, we decided to sell the land, split the livestock, and go our separate ways.
Mark never learned, and later he was caught cheating at cards with the Sheriff in a town near Oklahoma City. He was put in jail, and it took a whole year of letter writing and a few dollars to get him out. As for me, I met my wife in Kansas while visiting my sister. Her name was Diana Billings. She was Dutch-German, and as sweet as could be. After having two girls, I ventured out again and bought a farm in a small community outside of Austin, Texas. The town is Lockhart, and that land has been in our family for 54 years now. My son still resides there with his wife, and maybe a grandchild or two every now and then, when they come home. I had cattle back when I bought the property, but I started to concentrate more on corn and tomatoes, vegetables of all sorts. The market seemed to be slowly shifting away from beef, I noticed, even in the 60s.
My son was born in Lockhart, and unfortunately for him, we were uneducated farmers. He was drafted to go to Viet Nam when he was eighteen. Darn it, that war messed him up. My son’s name is Edwin Keith Fortman. He wasn’t great in school, and he probably had a mild form of what we now know as dyslexia. Ed was good with numbers, though, and he could strip apart a tractor or lawnmower by the time he was in his early teens. He liked to work more than study, and became an auto mechanic’s apprentice when he was fifteen. [He wasn’t interested in farming.] He didn’t want any part of the farm. I guess all sons go against their fathers at some point.
Ed used to send us letters from Viet Nam. He became a man there, but the death and stress caused him to become a hard man and a heavy drinker. After he came back, he lived with Diana and me for a while, but he kept getting into trouble, with his drinking and hotrodding. Luckily he met Jay Van Cleave, the young woman who would become his wife. She settled him down a good bit, got him back into college. They moved to Corpus Christi and they both graduated from Texas A&I. We were very proud, and even more so when they had the first boy that would carry on the Fortman name, Erik Henry Fortman, in 1971.
Ed and Jay moved back to Lockhart with their new son and bought a house in town that my brother, Bill, and I build for $10,000. They had a girl, Keitha Lynn, and another boy, Tyson Lee. Erik’s was middle name comes from my first name. Tyson’s middle name was Ed’s platoon Sergeants name. Erik had a brief battle with the bottle himself, but he has now manages an Austin Tex-Mex restaurant, owns rental property, and is a published writer. Tyson went to a technical school and is now a successful motorcycle mechanic. Neither is married, and it looks like they may not have kids, much less boys to pass on the name. Luckily, the writer remembers the stories that I’ve told him. That’s how he wrote our story.
Published U.S. Legacies July 2003