Moses C. Trautwein. In the year 1841 the German ancestor of Moses C. Trautwein came from Bremen, Germany, and settled near Cincinnati, Ohio. There he took up farm lands, made a home for himself and his family in a new country, and he died there in advanced life. He was Benheart Trautwein, father of C. B. Trautwein and the grandsire of the subject.

C. B. Trautwein was born in Bremen, Germany, on Fehruary 17, 1832, and he came to America with his parents in 1841. They were seven weeks and three days on a sailing vessel making the trip. They lived on their farm near Cincinnati and there the boy, C. B., was reared. When he was twenty-one years old he went to Pike County, Illinois, and engaged in the blacksmith trade. He married there, and later settled on a farm, becoming a prominent farmer and stockman of that district. He is now living near El Dare, in Pike County. He was married on October 1, 1854, to Miss Lucinda Meyer, who was born in Orange, Indiana, in 1834. She died in El Dare in 1891. They were the parents of eight children. Louisa J. married John Driver, and lives in Colorado; Martha E. died in infancy; Austin B. died in Thomas, Oklahoma, and is there buried; he was fifty-four years old when he died, and had been a farmer; William H. died in childhood; Charles Wesley died in Kinderbrook, Illinois, aged forty-one years; he was a physician and surgeon; Marvin B. died in Fresno, California, at the age of forty; he was a teacher in the schools of that state; Frederick A. is at home in El Dare, Illinois, and lives with his father; Harry was killed in a runaway accident at El Dare, Illinois, in July, 1914; Moses C. is the youngest of the family.

Moses C. Trautwein attended the public schools at El Dare, in which town he was born on October 14, 1876. When he had finished his high school training he entered Barnes Business College at Quincy, Illinois, specializing in telegraphy, and in 1899, when he had finished his training, he secured a position as telegraph operator for the Burlington Railroad. He next worked on a farm in Pike County, Illinois, until March, 1907, when he came to Custer County, Oklahoma, and bought a farm of 160 acres about four miles west of the town of Thomas. He successfully worked this farm until 1912, and in January of that year he came to Thomas and bought the Tribune with all its equipment. Since then he has been editor and publisher of that paper, which was established here in 1902 by Messrs. Bronson and Nichols. The paper has always been independent in its politics and has a wide circulation in Custer and surrounding counties, with a creditable foreign list as well. The plant and offices are on South Main Street, and the equipment of the plant is of the best, and along strictly modern lines.

Mr. Trautwein has served locally on the school board, and he is a member of the Chamber of Commerce of Thomas, which is a thriving organization with fifty-three live members to its credit. He was secretary and treasurer of the Farmers Institute and of the Farmers County Fair, and is an enthusiast in farming matters in the county. He is a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church and his fraternal affiliations are with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Modern Woodmen of America, with which latter society he has been prominently identified for the past seventeen years. He is also a member of the A. H. T. A.

In 1899 Mr. Trautwein was married in El Dare, Illinois, to Miss Myrtle Fenton, daughter of John Fenton, a Pike County farmer. Three children have been born to the Trautweins: Russell was born April 6, 1902, and is now in the high school at Thomas. Alma was born on January 31, 1907, and Adeline was born on September 23, 1909.

The family enjoys the confidence and friendship of an ever widening circle of the representative people of Thomas and of Custer County, and they have a leading part in the social activities of their community.