»Wo liegt das Glück?«  Jantzen 101 ­Fontane mixed actual and fictional elements, but certainly his American setting is not the only place he did so. All Fontane´s efforts to research America as part of a larger German cultural sphere did not, of course, guarantee that his depiction is without error. Some incongruous elements remain, so that the critics of his Ameri­ca are not entirely wrong. The failings, however, are in the particulars, not the main themes. For example, although he looked at a few maps for details, like a lot of other Germans he did not quite seem to understand the true dimensions of the American West. His use of Denver, for example, is wrong on every count. The maid Maruschka ostensibly travelled the 600 miles »alle Jahre zweimal zur Beichte nach Denver.« 44 There were Catholic mis­sionaries in Oklahoma and Spanish missions in Texas or the Benedictine monastery in Atchison, Kansas, that would have all been closer. Just across the border in Kansas there were also Catholic immigrants with their own priests. At Christmas Fontane has Kaulsbar running to Denver to get everything»was zu Geschenken und Bewirthung noch fehlte.« 45 On the frontier, it would have been much more likely that such items would be or­dered and shipped to the Darlington station or that the many visitors from Halstead would have been asked to bring them along. The distance from Darlington to Denver is about the same as from Berlin to Paris and not many farmers would travel that far to do their shopping. His obsession with Denver from a setting in Oklahoma would indeed make no sense to any American. Apparently, he just liked to mention Denver occasionally since that seemed to belong in a novel about the American West and he had read Lindau´s depiction of the frontier town. 46 Unfortunately, he struggled with its spelling, for in the manuscript he typically wrote»Denwer.« Per­haps Emilie had asked him about that one time while writing out the clean copy or simply could not read it, because at one point it is written out clear­ly and incorrectly in Latin letters next to the also incorrect Sütterlin ones. 47 [see image 2] Zieglschmid lists several other errors or fictional elements. 48 We can see in any case that for Fontane Prussian Mennonites in Indian Territory were simply part of German-speaking America. This setting is the standard by which his novel should be judged. Readers who know about Mennonites find the novel credible because the details about the Mennonite congregation and the mission work among Indians make sense. 49 For a reader in Newton or Halstead, Kansas, where Mennonites are still an important part of the townscapes, it is much easier to see how Fontane got important elements of America right. The fact that the novel has never been translated into English highlights the way that it belongs to the greater German cultural sphere that existed in the late nineteenth cen­tury. In North Newton Bethel College still exists, the successor school to the Mennonite school in nearby Halstead where Fontane had Ruth and Shortarm, one of the Indian boys, attend. 50 The Mennonite Library and