The obituary said he was a sheepman
And he was extraordinarily committed to the flock's welfare. But he also was a World War I veteran with shrapnel scars on his back, who never said three words about the war.
Kind of looks like Ukraine, doesn’t it? But this was World War I and these are American soldiers of the 347th Machine Gun Battalion, viewing or posing by some rubble, probably in Belgium. They’re standing around pretty casual, so this may have been at some point after the armistice was declared on Nov. 11, 1918, ending the Great War, as everybody called it then. The photo is from a battalion history retained by Princeton University.
So this is one of those stories that you find, sometimes, when you’re looking for something else. This one emerged in time for Veterans Day, when we all ought to stop and consider what we’ve asked of those who served.
The sheepman’s name was Henry Krebs and he died about 50 years ago at a care center in Pendleton, in Eastern Oregon. He is not anyone I ever knew of before, but it turns out he was in the same World War I machine gun battalion as our grandfather, Charles Miller. Mr. Krebs was wounded in France or Belgium and was awarded a Purple Heart.
I have no idea if Charles and Henry knew each other, although I like to think they had some passing acquaintance, at least, since they were in the same outfit and from the same part of the state. Mr. Krebs enlisted in Heppner, the Morrow County seat. Grandpa Miller, our mom’s dad, enlisted in Condon, the Gilliam County seat, about 43 miles west. They and many other men, and the campaigns they fought in, are listed in this battalion history:
I didn’t expect to run into Henry Krebs while I was looking for Charlie Miller. I didn’t expect to hear about Cleo Drake from Ione, or to read about Van Norder from Hood River, either.
But here it is Veterans Day and I’m thinking about them and the thousands of other young men from little Pacific Northwest towns who ended up with the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe in 1918.
Who were these guys, swept up and sent so far from home? Sent “Over There,” as George M. Cohan described it in the bouncy song. “Over There,” which so many of their parents had left only a few scant decades before.
Who were these young men, so many of them from Oregon’s rural reaches, who joined the Army, rode a troop train across the country to New Jersey, and from there crossed the dangerous Atlantic, where German U-Boats lurked? I’ll bet many of them hadn’t been out of the state, and even a trip to Portland might have left them bug-eyed.
Who were these Yanks who slogged into the middle of that bloody, senseless fight in Europe? Some of them were like Charles Miller and Henry Krebs.
Here’s what Henry and Charles looked like before they shipped out:
Above: PFC Henry Krebs, Company C, 347th Machine Gun Battalion, 91st Infantry Division. Photo courtesy of his grandson, Skye Krebs.
Above: Wagoner Charles Miller, Headquarters Detachment, 347th Machine Gun Battalion, 91st Infantry Division. Photo is from the Mortenson family collection.
In journalism, it often happened that you went looking for one thing and found another. I jumped down many an unexpected rabbit hole when I wrote for newspapers, and came across some wonderful stories that way. I’ve written about that previously. I call it the first Rule of Journalism, there's always something else.
In this case I was trying to learn about Charles Miller, the grandpa we never met, when I came across Henry Krebs the sheepman, and Skye Krebs, his grandson, who is also a sheepman.
Charles Miller died in 1937 when our mom was only 11, and long before any of us, his seven grandchildren, were born. Mom always said her dad had been gassed during World War I and later developed epileptic-like grand mal seizures — “spells,” she called them — that made it difficult for him to farm successfully or to find other work afterward. I’ve written some about that.
So far, I haven’t found records indicating Charles Miller was gassed, but I do wonder what he did and what he saw. Much of his life after the war was poor, sad and streaked with humiliation. Our mom, Agnes Irene, and her mother, Elizabeth Palmer Miller, hung on by constant work and struggle.
At one point, the breaking point, Charles Miller walked into the bedroom in the middle of the night and leveled a rifle at Lizzie and Agnes, who slept apart from him. No one said a word as Charles stood at the threshold of bloody violence against his wife and daughter. But he turned away in silence, and they left him the next day.
His father, John Miller, was a stern Swedish immigrant and local bigshot who had served a couple terms as mayor of Fossil. He had already called Charlie a disgrace and a failure and kicked him off a farm. He gave Charles, Lizzie and our mom the house in Fossil to live in, that’s true, but he was a harsh man.
I wonder if Charles Miller was broken by war. I think he was, by poison gas or by trauma, but it’s unknowable at this point. He died in 1937 at the VA hospital in Portland. His father, the mayor, died later that same year, and they’re buried in the same plot, along with Charlie’s mom, Josefina, in the Odd Fellows Cemetery on the south edge of Fossil, which is the Wheeler County seat. John and Josefina Miller lie under a massive concrete slab set off by a low wrought iron fence. Charlie has a small headstone, pressed up against the fence, facing outward. Our mom’s mother, Lizzie, is buried alongside many of her extended family relatives at Igo, a dusty little country cemetery off the main highway up out of Condon.
The grave of Charles Miller, next to his parents at the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Fossil, Ore. The headstone includes his military service in the “War to end all wars.”
The Krebs family has its own set of lore, of course
I didn’t know anything more about Henry Krebs except for seeing his name along with our grandfather’s in that history of the 347th Machine Gun Battalion, and that he’d been wounded. I don’t know why his name jumped out at me but it did. Then I found his obituary in the Heppner Gazette-Times newspaper.
And from there I found the Krebs Sheep Company and Skye Krebs, Henry Krebs’s grandson.
Skye said Krebs family members have raised sheep and done other farming for more than 100 years, although there’s been some branching off and parting of the ways, fair to say.
Henry and his brothers were growing alfalfa for livestock feed after the war when one of their customers couldn’t pay but settled up with a flock of sheep. The Krebs family took it from there, and at one time sent flocks by rail to Montana for summer grazing and brought them home by train for winter grazing.
Henry’s obituary said he was single-minded about caring for the sheep, and missed his daughter’s birth, his son’s football games and both their high school graduations because of it. The obituary said even death had to wait until the sheep were cared for. He was fading fast in his last days, the family story goes, but held on because his son was in the process of moving sheep back from Montana and the train was delayed by a blizzard.
When he learned his son and the sheep had gotten back safely, Henry let go and died.
I told Skye, his grandson, that I couldn’t help but ask why Henry chose to focus on the sheep so much, and why he missed so many notable family events. I frankly wondered, and I acknowledged it was pure speculation, whether what Henry saw and did in the war followed him home. I wondered if caring for the sheep was how he found peace after that. My Grandpa Miller seems to have come home damaged, and I wondered whether Henry had gone through something similar.
Skye said he didn’t think that was the case. Anyone who makes a living raising livestock, he said, puts their welfare first. It’s just the way it is, even today.
He was a teenager when his granddad died. He said Henry Krebs never said three words about the war, not even about his shrapnel wounds.
Skye said a relative who’d seen the scars on Henry’s bare back said it looked like the medics had gathered the skin up around the wounds and tied it with string. Pretty rough looking, apparently.
When Henry was wounded, another local guy in the battalion, Cleo Drake, dragged him to an aid station. For years afterward he’d say Henry had been in pretty bad shape, and he was half surprised he made it. Skye Krebs said he used to ride the school bus past Cleo’s gas station in Ione and would see him sitting outside.
Skye said his own father told him he and Henry once stopped in the Elks Club and, after a few shots, old Henry told a few war stories. Skye’s dad didn’t provide details, however.
The 91st Infantry Division, of which the 347th Machine Gun Battalion was part, trained for 10 months at Camp Lewis south of Tacoma, Wash., later called Fort Lewis, and now designated Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
The division crossed the country by train and on July 6, 1918 sailed for England, later crossing the channel into France. The war had been going for four years by then and Americans were deeply torn about getting involved. President Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected in 1916 on the campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war.” But continued German submarine attacks on American shipping turned public opinion.
Young men like Henry Krebs and Charles Miller enlisted. Even little towns like Condon held Liberty Bond drives to raise money for the war.
Liberty Bond parade in Condon, Ore. That’s someone portraying Uncle Sam in the bottom photo. The upper one isn’t clear, but apparently included Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany hung in effigy.
It was September 1918 before the division approached the front in France. It was held in reserve as other American troops attacked a German bulge in the lines called the St. Mihiel salient. Then the division moved to the Meuse River-Argonne Forest sector, joining a massive American and French attack on Sept. 26. The division forced the Germans from two trench lines and penetrated a third, advancing 8 kilometers — about 5 miles — but the action was hot and heavy, and Henry Krebs was wounded Sept. 29.
The carnage over the next month and a half was intense. More than 26,000 Americans were killed, making it one of the bloodiest battles in American history. Finally the weight of fresh troops and supplies cracked the Germans, sent them reeling and led to the armistice declared on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
Charlie Miller was a wagoner, meaning he drove horses or mules that pulled supply wagons. Both sides had trucks, tanks and airplanes, but still used horses and mules as well. Thousands of pack animals died, which must have been an awful sight.
The photo is of British troops moving in 1916, two years before Americans arrived in force.
Charles came home with a German soldier’s diary. Whether he took it from a prisoner or from a dead soldier is unknown. Whether he came home with something else, some wound that couldn’t be seen, is also unknowable.
Well.
War is stupid now, of course, and still cruelest to the most vulnerable people — Ukraine being the latest example. It was no more glorious then, although our history books — the ones I read in school, anyway — put quite the shine on us for coming to Europe’s rescue in World War I.
The whole thing was insane, with millions of soldiers and civilians thrown to damnation by foolish, inter-related royalty — kaisers, archdukes and even a spare king or two. King George V of England, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were first cousins, for God’s sakes.
At one point in the final month of the war, the 91st Division was named part of the “armies in Flanders” and was formally under the control of King Albert of Belgium. A 347th Battalion soldier named Van Norder, who enlisted in Hood River, was awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre for gallantry in action.
But all the war accomplished was to set the stage for fascist Nazis to rise in Germany, and the world was at it again 20 years later. You want some irony? Skye Krebs said one of his uncles was wounded in World War II, in the same region where Henry was hit in the back by shrapnel.
World War I was nuts, kind of like we’re nuts now, but with poison gas, trenches and screaming horses instead of nukes and robot weapons. And with vain royalty then instead of the cynical oligarchs who call the shots now, I guess.
I’m humbled by what we’ve asked our veterans to do, and what we still ask of our men and women in the service. Hopefully they can come home like Henry Krebs, and tend to the flock.
What a read by one of the best reporters I’ve known.
Love it! What a wonderful model of how to research, interview, and write a story that is better than a traditional biography. I do a lot of family history research myself to learn the background, history, movement, and life of my people and have written such pieces, and I know it is not fast nor easy, and takes time to do properly. As a UO journalism school grad and retired journalist and j-teacher myself, I see your "Selective concrete description" and "Picture nouns and action verbs."