Croatia to America: Nick Peris

by Sam Begg - from family stories and research

Nick Peris had joined the early rush from Croatia to America.   His travels had brought him to Cleveland after the American Civil War.   A thriving industry had grown up, boosted by armament contracts during the War.  The foundries of Cleveland created a demand for labor that could not be filled by the U.S. population  Nick found that his opportunities were limited because he didn't speak English, but he felt that, with time, he would progress both in his English and his status.

He lived in a dirty boarding house in Cleveland.  The community was predominantly immigrant and eastern European.  The similarities in the Slavic languages enabled him to fit into the polyglot society.

Life was simple; he worked twelve hours a day for seven days a week.   His pay was enough to afford him a room, meals and money for drink.  Nick was a small man so he kept his place in the rough and tumble world that surrounded the mills in Cleveland. 

Brawling was an integral part of the drinking life that consumed the few free hours of each week.  He learned that it was best to have a large friend who had a reputation for holding his own, or more, in the fights, or opportunities for fights, that prevailed in the clubs and bars.

The harshness of life in the streets was paradise compared to conditions in the mill.   Life was cheap and there were always newcomers ready to take any job available.   Serious injuries and death were normal occurrences and thought of as a part of the business.  For the owners it was a time of great opportunity, and the illiterate immigrants provided the cheap labor that allowed the industrialists to concentrate on building the structures that would carry the U.S. into the 20th century.

Nick despaired in the life.  There was little time for living; the constraint droning of the mill, the never ending billows of smoke made the environment bleak.  He remembered the green hills of Croatia, where he romped as a boy.   The fields where the yearly cycle of crops provided a world that was changing, yet unchanging.  Those warm days had been replaced by a world of darkness that once endured when living in the shadow of the mill.  It was the fall of 1872 and Nick had little savings and little prospects for improvement in his life.  He stopped drinking; he spent as little money as he had to. Nick had decided that the golden land was not golden for him.  He would work until he had enough money for passage home, plus a little extra to restart life in Sosisec, Croatia.

Nick's homecoming, in the summer of 1873, was not as the prodigal. He felt a sense of failure.  America was a dream, he had lived there and the dream had not come true.  Nick soon lost his feelings of failure.  The clean air and the land with clean running streams seemed golden to him.  He would live out his life there, watching others make the trip he made.  His children would be the future fodder of industry in the U.S.   He would wish them well and wonder how they could survive in that dark alien land.   He would receive letters and a part of him would wonder "what if?"  What if he had held out for one more year?  What if he had moved to another city or state?   Nick's adventure was only the prelude of the life to be lived out by my family.

Nick married in 1874 and in 1876 had a daughter, Mary Peris.  Three additional children were to follow and luckily, in that time and place, all would reach adulthood.