Eyewitness to History

Remarkable photographs by German immigrant-turnedsoldier Christian Barthelmess offer a window into a soldier’s life in the West.

- STUART ROSEBROOK

Christian Barthelmess was a teenager when he arrived in the United States from Bavaria in 1876. The 1870s was a decade of major immigration to America from Germany and Central Europe, and thousands migrated into the ghettos of the nation’s burgeoning industrial cities, or to the West to homestead and own their own land. Like his peers, Barthelmess first worked as a factory laborer in New York and Ohio. In 1876, he lived in St. Louis, Missouri, enlisted in the U.S. Army’s 6th Cavalry and was sent to Fort Apache, Arizona Territory.