Lone Star (58 page)

This was one of the great and unheralded land swindles of the century, because Fisher and Miller not only had no right to sell the land, as the Germans thought, but when the transaction took place, they had already forfeited their empresario contract through failure to implement it in time. The fact that the entire grant lay inside Indian country, was far removed from all Texas civilization, and possessed only thin and stony soils without much rainfall were not understood by the
Adelsverein
until 1847—when 7,000 or more German settlers had already arrived in Texas. The two noble agents who investigated Texas in 1844 naïvely assumed that the geographical characteristics of the state were similar throughout. They never set foot on, or went near, the 3,000,000 acres the
Adelsverein
believed it had acquired.

Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels was thirty-three, handsome, and a first cousin to Queen Victoria. He was also something of a monumental fool, though he undoubtedly meant well. In Texas, he rode up the Colorado bottoms, displaying both aristocratic snobbery toward the rather rough-cut planters and intolerance toward the system of Negro slavery. This, his appearance in full uniform with sword and decorations, and his retinue of
 

servants, valet, architect, cook, secretary, and someone hired as a "professional hunter," strained even the famous Texas hospitality.

Solms-Braunfels realized that the Fisher-Miller lands were too far from the coast to be reached at once by the emigrants who had already set sail behind him. Therefore, he set out to acquire nearer tracts, to be used as staging areas. After some difficulty, twice making deals with men who didn't own what they sold, he did secure some broad lands just above the sharp rise of the Balcones fault. The Prince was delighted with this country, which lay partway on the route to the Fisher-Miller grant. The fraying limestone had spectacular scenic beauty; the creeks and rivers ran clear, their beds green with watercress; the giant cypresses growing incongruously this far west along the waters and the pecan trees sprinkling the valleys made it seem fertile and rich. The Prince ignored miles of unpreempted black, rich soils below the scarp, and chose a site near a waterfall on the Guadalupe. He called this townsite New Braunfels. A large log house was thrown up and named
Die Sophienburg
, in honor of a light o'love.

But now crisis was crowding the Prince of Solms-Braunfels. Several thousand German peasants, recruited mostly from the Hesses, Hannover, Brunswick, and other central German states, were piling up on the docks at Galveston. They were transshipped to the
Adelsverein
base at Indianola, a landing point on the Gulf. These people were arriving with stars in their eyes; Texas was described in German newspapers as the land of milk and honey, full of Biblical promise. In crowded Germany, where farmers were used to working their lives out on fractional plots, the concept of 320 acres was almost too much to bear.
Geh mit ins Texas
(Go with us to Texas) they told each other, and the
Adelsverein
had almost 10,000 recruits.

It was also almost bankrupt. The Fisher-Miller lands could not be exploited, at least for years, and many promises were not to be kept.

The
Einwanderer
or immigrants were left camping on the fever coast, while plans were changed. Miserable, hungry, wan after weeks on shipboard, these stolid families sickened; infants died, and the great exodus quickly turned into a nightmare. Typhus broke out, and Texas was becoming a German grave.

At about this point Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels resigned his commission and went home. He turned over the project of settling these countrymen to his deputy, Otfried Hans, Freiherr von Meusebach. Fortunately, Von Meusebach possessed the most important requisite of the true pioneer: he was adaptable. With great good sense, he began to call himself "John O. Meusebach" among the Texans; he took Texan citizenship, and to the people of Texas he was always known as John Meusebach, a good man to do business with all around.

He tried desperately to get the Germans off the unhealthy coast, but due to war conditions in Texas it was impossible to hire enough freight wagons. The immigrants set out on foot, for a journey of some 300 miles. It was again a time, of unusual storms and rains in east Texas. The ragged stream of humanity had to cross swollen rivers and toil day after day through endless mud. Then, the sun burned out, as they crawled westward. Along this march from Indianola to New Braunfels, many immigrants peeled off; exhausted or sick, they stayed behind and settled where they stopped. But the main body toiled on; soon, the Germans were leaving a trail of dead in their wake. The pitiful letters sent back to Germany reveal that the most fervent wish of many on this trek was that they be buried if they fell. A pillar of circling vultures followed the column for many days.

They came into the New Braunfels region and founded their town in 1845. Here, at least the climate was healthful and the country fair, though the farmers looked with some dismay at the hardscrabble rocks and flinty soils. Prince Solms-Braunfels had chosen lovely country, but not one in which pioneers could easily make a living. But the Germans spread through the valleys, and here and there they discovered sufficient meadow plots and plowable fields.

Meusebach realized that the New Braunfels community could not support all the thousands on the road. He needed more lands further west, toward the grant. He sought out the Penateka Comanches, who owned this country, and began to parley. His great point was that his people were neither Texan nor Mexican, two tribes the Comanches hated. The Penateka councils agreed to share their hunting grounds with
los Alemanes
, whom they recognized as a separate tribe. Meusebach offered the Indians about $3,000 worth of gifts, and in March 1847, a deal was made. Meanwhile, during the parleying, the town of Fredericksburg, some eighty miles northwest of New Braunfels, had already been founded.

This Comanche–German treaty was never broken, but there was bloodshed when the Indians became embittered by other white aggressions in later years. Indians could not easily distinguish one Caucasian from another, and after 1860 much German hair adorned Comanche lodge poles.

The Germans founded a series of communities, in a long, fragmented stream reaching west from New Braunfels. Sisterdale, Boerne, Comfort, and several other small towns were planted through the hills. A handful of Germans even reached the Fisher-Miller lands, in the future Mason County, but the rainfall and the Indian attitude was too uncertain for the main body. During 1844–46 the
Adelsverein
brought 7,380 Germans into Texas, and most of these, and the thousands who followed later, settled along the Balcones Scarp just above San Antonio. Though the Society went bankrupt in 1847, Meusebach stayed in Texas, working for the cause. The Germans underwent terrible hardships, but they were peasant-tough; they had avoided trouble with the Comanches, and they survived.

After 1848, a number of German intellectuals fled to Texas. There was one German utopian colony in the Fisher-Miller grant, called the "Latin Colony" because, although none of these people had ever farmed before, they were well educated. Although all the Germans were confirmed by the state in their lands, this colony went the way of most utopian communities on the frontier.

The Germans farmed intensively, on small plots, and they created a lasting impression of being better agriculturists than Anglos. But their influence on Texas farming has been overestimated. They settled in poor soils, compared to the heartland regions, and they adapted to the Texas frontier, rather than attempting to create a transplanted European way of life.

Along the Pedernales and other central Texas streams, the Germans farmed and ranched next to the Alabamans and Tennesseeans filtering down the same valleys; and the two soon became almost indistinguishable. Although the Germans clung to their language in these hills, they adopted Texas agriculture. They abandoned wheat and rye for corn, and they soon let their stock run wild as the Southerners did, although such a custom was unheard of in Europe. The first German log cabins looked like Anglo cabins, and the small, limestone houses that followed them and soon weathered to a rich beige were Southwestern in style. This architecture, like the Victorian mansions along the San Antonio River the German patricians were soon building to the south, was not German; rather, it followed the dominant style of its place and time. Only the early churches looked European; they were transplanted cultural influences, like the Lutheran and Catholic creeds themselves.

Outside of the German tongue, which remained primary for about one hundred years, the other cultural differences, such as women working peasantlike in the fields, soon passed away. The one big difference between the Anglo and the German farmer was that the latter was less mobile. When the German put down roots, he did not leave. This trait later was praised extensively, but the 19th-century Germans who stubbornly clung to their small rocky farms in the Hill Country fell into a kind of trap. They farmed intensively, in a day when land was open and could be acquired extensively by men of enterprise or vision. Those Germans who left the enclaves and entered the plantation economy did remarkably well, and those, like the Kleberg family, which intermarried with the Kings and eventually came to own the vast King Ranch, showed ability equal or superior to the Anglos at empire-building.

With their dominant peasant ethos, most Germans put enormous labor into their farms, but it took a century for most of them to prosper. They remained an isolated, ingrown community, healthy enough in themselves, stubbornly self-reliant, but adding few influences to the whole state.

The Europeans who struck out for the towns and settlements did vastly better. By 1860, there were more than 5,000 German-born citizens in San Antonio; these outnumbered the native Mexicans. More important, these immigrants, many of whom were middle class in origin, gave south Texas its first large mercantile and financial patriciate. They originated and founded most of the business enterprises in San Antonio, from banks to lumberyards, and with the Alsatian-French refugees from Castroville, soon gave San Antonio, with its Casino Club, a cosmopolitan air utterly unlike Anglo-Texas.

Noticeably, also, the Texas Europeans who settled in the towns quickly lost their foreign languages and cultures; these towns were small, and had no foreign quarters like those found in the North. The San Antonio Germans lost their German language at least two generations before the hill people did, and this same pattern held true with other groups, such as Czechs or Poles.

The heaviest European immigration, proportionally, arrived in these years, but compared to that in other parts of America, it was small. There were some 32,000 Western Europeans in Texas in 1860, but there were more than 400,000 native whites, and the European influences, although apparent and important in certain enclaves, never had any appreciable political or cultural influence on the State.

The advance to the 98th meridian from the old colony of Texas differed in no important way from the march out of Appalachia. The first men up the long rivers, the Brazos and Colorado, were Indian traders, who built blockhouses or forts, usually at forks or fords. A few families, living mainly by hunting, filtered in. Then, the remorseless push of the earth-breaking pioneer ruined both the good hunting and the Indian trade. Between 1836 and 1860 this advance into Indian country was similar to what it had been in the United States. First, Lamar's Texas militia drove the settled Indians out of the lands the whites coveted. Later, after 1845, the U.S. Army took over this function, first herding the remaining Indians further up the rivers, then, finally, unable to restrain the public clamor or protect the now pitiful remnants of the agricultural tribes, the whole conquered Indian population was marched north into Oklahoma.

By the middle decade of the century, Texas had carved a thousand-mile-long frontier into the center of the state. Counties were organized up to, and beyond, the actual settlement frontier. In the far south, Cameron County, with its seat at Brownsville, reached upward from the Rio Grande to Corpus Christi on the Nueces. Like the limits of the old Spanish land grants, legal boundaries proceeded many leagues ahead of the people themselves. Maps of the time could be misleading.

The most important factor in this development was that politically, socially, and economically the American frontier in Texas did not differ radically from the conditions of the 18th century. There were three great classes of people, excluding Indians and slaves: subsistence farmers, cotton planters, and the inhabitants of the towns. The towns were few and far between. The vast landscape was overwhelmingly rural.

The pattern of society was the same: hunter-trader-trapper on the far frontier; hunter-farmer behind him through a large yeoman belt; then the planters, forging their own kind of civilized existence in the rear. The towns, most of which were minor ports or river stations or mere crossroads settlements, supported this settlement when and where they could. Cities were not needed; none arose in the Texas heartland, in the antebellum years.

The vast majority of people lived no better, and most of them lived considerably worse, than the colonial inhabitants of British America. This was not due to any regression, but to the almost fantastic explosion of the settlement frontier. People continually outran their civilization when they passed beyond the reach of roads and rivers, and the countryside did not yet have rails.

Texas conditions were everywhere rougher and more primitive than in other states; many travelers noted this. During the whole antebellum era Texas was still a log cabin frontier. Although in the southwest Mexican inhabitants clung sensibly to adobe, or sun-dried clay bricks, and in the hill country the new German immigrants began building sturdy houses of native beige limestone, the vast majority of Anglo-Texans made dwellings out of hand-cut logs. Even in 1860, when sawmills had become more common in the state, most Texas farmers lived in homemade log cabins. The quality of cut lumber, and the shanties made out of it, tended to be wretched, and no improvement over hand-hewed timbers.