AUTHOR’S NOTE: By at least his early 20s, Steve Melchior had begun to fabricate a past that would take him from his native Germany and allow him to better control his path to a future of adventure. That future would one day include life as a successful, respected sourdough on the Kenai Peninsula.
After lying on his naturalization paperwork in Washington in January 1884, 25-year-old Stephan “Steve” Melchior enjoyed his U.S. citizenship for only a few months before returning to Germany.
He didn’t go home for a vacation. He went there to stay. Or so he claimed.
In order to leave Germany in the spring of 1883, Melchior had had to step through a number of bureaucratic hoops. He had submitted an emigration application to the Prussian government and received a discharge approval from the Prussian military. He had waited for official signatures and document transfers. The process took about one month.
And yet, by June or July of 1884, he had left America and was back where he’d begun.
According to Hermann Melchior, when his great-uncle Stephan arrived home, “his face and body (were) tanned by the sun, and his hair (was) said to be light blonde. He (was) not immediately recognized by his sister.”
More paperwork followed. Through the naturalization process, Stephan became, once again, a Prussian citizen.
But by mid-September of the following year (1885), he was ready to leave again. Stephan announced plans to emigrate once more to the United States. His destination this time, he told officials, was Iowa, a state with a considerable German-immigrant population.
Rather than wait for the Prussian paperwork to again run its bureaucratic course, however, Melchior chose to leave without official authorization and without returning his German citizenship papers. Before the end of that month, he was gone, leaving government and military officials stewing.
It appears that he never again returned to Germany.
Katherine’s story
After Steve Melchior died in Seward, Alaska, in March 1933, his lengthy page-one obituary in the Seward Daily Gateway stated that Melchior — as a U.S. immigrant — had settled in Denver, where he had gotten married and then begun moving about the country, plying his mechanical and woodworking skills as his family grew.
While this statement is technically accurate, it is also misleading, starting with the omission that he had just immigrated to America for the second time in two years.
Then there’s his destination: Most people who see the word “Denver” probably picture the big-city capital of Colorado, but that was not where Steve Melchior went. He moved, instead, to the small town of Denver, Iowa. According to Hermann Melchior, Steve started up a sawmill in Denver, and “his industriousness quickly led to success.”
At some point after establishing himself in business, he met and married a widow who had also recently immigrated and found her way to Iowa. Her name was Katharina Šterk, she spoke no English, and much of her adult life to this point had been difficult. Although she didn’t know it at the time, her marriage to Steve Melchior would make her life no easier.
She had been born Katharina Petche in Bistrica, Črnomelj, Slovenia, in the Austrian Empire, on Nov. 17 1856, to parents Johannes and Anna (nee Rom) Petche. In January 1880, when she was 24 years old, she had married Peter Šterk, and in only five years they had produced three daughters: Marie (born 1880), Katarina (1882) and Johana (1885). Katarina lived only two years, Johana only three days.
By late 1885, Katharina was pregnant again. Around this same time or perhaps in early 1886, her husband died in or near Vienna. Many years later, Katharina’s daughter Marie would tell family members: “Shortly after Peter’s sudden death, Katherine (the Americanized version of her name) boarded a ship for America…. She stopped for a time in Council Bluffs, Iowa (eastern terminus of the first transcontinental railroad), where (in June) she gave birth to daughter Marguerite (later Americanized to Margaret).”
Now the single mother of a 6-year-old and an infant, Katharina placed Marie in an orphanage run by Catholic nuns while she cared for the baby and sought employment. At the orphanage, Marie disliked the nuns, who, she said, “were very strict,” and she was “relieved” when her mother collected her again after an absence of several months.
It was almost certainly at some point in 1887 when Katharina wed Stephan Melchior, although the exact date and location their marriage occurred is unknown since a marriage license has yet to be located. Melchior adopted his new wife’s daughters as his own, and over the next five years he and Katherine produced three healthy sons (John, Frank and William). By the end of 1892, the Melchiors were a family of seven.
Around this time, Stephan would claim that he had been employed for many years in the main plant of the Pullman Car Company, under the personal supervision of the company owner, George Pullman. Proof of this employment, if true, has yet to be discovered.
Meanwhile, the Melchiors were on the move.
Their eldest son, John Melchior, was born in Washington in October 1888, as was Frank B. Melchior in July 1890.
Then Stephan emigrated with his family to British Columbia, Canada — his fourth change of citizenship in less than a decade. When the Canadian Census was conducted in June 1891, the Melchiors were residents of the North Arm area of New Westminster, B.C.
However, in December 1891 — while the Melchiors were still Canadian citizens—Stephan was issued a land patent in Mason County, Washington. He initiated a mortgage to pay for the land, which totaled 158 acres.
In October 1892, youngest son William Joseph Melchior was born in Vancouver, B.C.
At this point, if not before, the Melchior family began to fall apart. Some of the timing involved in this disintegration is clear, but other parts are decidedly fuzzy.
According to Susan Nielson, a Pennsylvania-based descendant of Frank Melchior, Stephan “was a hunter who spent much time away … however, when he returned home, he always brought game he had bagged for the family. One summer he traveled to Alaska, which made Katherine very unhappy because she needed him to financially support his family.
“When the Alaskan weather turned cold,” Nielson continued, “he returned to Washington State, moved Katherine and their three sons and her two daughters to Bellingham, Washington, stayed the winter there with his family, and then caught a boat back to Alaska the following spring to search for gold. That was the last time his family ever saw him.”
In February 1893, before the move to Bellingham, the Melchiors had appeared four times in a Vancouver, B.C., newspaper:
Feb. 9: “S. Melchior’s wife came to the police station yesterday with her face all smashed in and laid an information against her husband. This morning, she did not appear [in court], and the case was remanded.”
Feb. 10: “At the police court this morning, when the case of Stephen Melchior, charged with beating his wife, was called, it was found that the woman was present, but the man was not. On the previous day, the man had been present and the woman absent. The magistrate issued a warrant for Melchior’s arrest.”
Feb. 11: “Attempts to find the man Melchior, wanted for attempting to flatten his wife’s face, have so far failed, but the warrant will be kept warm pending his return.”
Feb. 21: One of the Melchior daughters went to the local police station to report that her mother was very ill, her father was gone, and she and her siblings had no food to eat. Stephan Melchior was described as the man “who fled from the city a short time ago to avoid the service of a warrant on the charge of wife-beating.”
A year or so after Stephan Melchior’s final disappearance in Washington, according to Nielson, “a friend who had been working with Steve in Alaska visited Katherine in Bellingham and told her that Steve had died.”
Katherine would not learn the truth about her husband for more than 30 years.
Photo from the May 1950 issue of the Alaska Sportsman Magazine. Steve Melchior stands in his garden, holding produce, along the middle Kenai River, circa 1920s.
This is the most famous photograph of Steve Melchior, as a copy of it resides in the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. The Melchior family owns a very similar photograph, with a note in pencil from Steve Melchior on the back. The note, written for family members back in Germany in the late 1920s when Melchior was suffering from rheumatism, says, “That is the only way I can get out because my legs won’t walk anymore. I don’t like driving a car, and the dogs take me wherever I want to go. The one in the front is called Bill (in German, Wilhelm), and the one on the left is called Waldman. The black one on the right is called Nick or Nikolaus. Three good, loyal workers, my bodyguard.”
