Texas

by James A. Michener

  Saturday 10 December. Mother and Father did not think I was listening, but I heard the elders discussing Captain Langbein, whom I like very much. A man who lives in Texas but had business in Germany told them that Captain Langbein has a wife in Texas, as well as the one in Bremen whom I met and liked so much.

  I am worried about this and would like to ask Mother whether it could be true, for if it is, Captain Langbein must be a very bad man, which I find hard to believe.

  Two days later, as they were approaching Cuba, a storm more violent than any they had known in the European seas overtook them from the east, throwing their pitiful craft about as if it were a cork adrift in a whirlpool. Nearly everyone was wretchedly sick and often too weak to stagger from the cabins, but Franziska, one of the few able to stand, volunteered to clean up the smelly messes.

  She had no inclination to feel sorry for herself because Captain Langbein, in obvious distress, called for all men to return to the pumps, and for three perilous days, 21 December through the night of 23 December, she knew that all four of her family’s menfolk were toiling in the bowels of the ship, straining at the powerful German pumps, but almost to no avail, for an incredible amount of water continued to stream in through the many cracks, and toward midnight on the twenty-third, Ludwig staggered topside to speak with his wife: ‘Thekla, if anything happens, look first for Franziska. The boys and I will have done all we could.’

  At about four that morning the frail ship plowed headlong into a huge series of waves which swept a sailor and two passengers overboard. Their screams were heard briefly, then only the howling of the terrible wind. Thekla, in the cabin, was sure the ship must come apart under the dreadful strain, and so did her husband at the pumps. But these towering breakers marked the end of the violence, and by sunrise on 24 December the Caribbean had begun to subside, so that when Christmas Eve approached, a weak sun actually appeared through the clouds.

  Sunday 25 December 1842. We had a quiet Christmas. Father took me down into the ship, and when I saw the holes through which the sea came at us, I wondered why we did not sink. I was not afraid during the storm, because I kept busy helping the women with children, but tonight I am terribly afraid. I know this ship cannot last much longer, and I think Father knows it too. And from the look on Captain Langbein’s face, he knows it better than any of us.

  I no longer care if he has two wives. He was very brave during the storm, always taking the wheel when the waves were worst. When I marry I would want my husband to be much like Captain Langbein, but I would not be happy if he took another wife, too.

  When the limping Sea Nymph, her backbone almost shattered by the storms, staggered into Matagorda Bay, all hands cheered. But the sudden onset of a howling wind from across the bay prevented them from landing that day:

  Monday 2 January 1843. After breakfast this morning we finally landed, and it was lucky that we did, for although we got quite dampened by the heavy spray, no great damage was done. But when almost everyone was ashore, and I was looking inland to see our new home, one of the young men who had been nice to me cried in a loud voice ‘Jesus Christ!’ And all of us turned to look back at the sea, where our Sea Nymph rolled quietly over and sank.

  Captain Langbein swam ashore, and when he joined us he said ‘For the past two weeks I thought we’d probably sink.’ And I asked him what others were afraid to ask. ‘Did you think so during the bad storm?’ And he said ‘I expected to go down any minute, little girl.’

  This afternoon some of the women told Mother ‘The sinking of that ship was God’s curse on the Captain for having two wives,’ and I thought about this for a long time. Suppose the ship had sunk six days ago, with all of us passengers lost. Would that still have been God’s way to punish one immoral Captain? What about us? I think the ship sank because the company took too great a risk in sending out such a rotten crate.

  When the six Allerkamps stood with their luggage on the shore of Matagorda Bay, they had no specific idea of where they would sleep that night, or where they would travel in the days ahead, or where they would locate the land on which they would build their permanent home. If ever the word immigrant meant one who comes into a new country, it applied to the members of this family.

  A man who built handcarts with solid wooden wheels approached Ludwig: ‘You’ll have to have one. Three dollars.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Hugo Metzdorf?’

  ‘All the Germans have. You can trust him. Lives at a place called Hardwork,’ and in the sand the wagonbuilder showed them in general how to find their way first to Victoria, forty miles to the west, and from there to Hardwork, ninety miles to the north.

  ‘Everyone,’ Ludwig cried, assembling his family and pointing to the sand, ‘memorize this map.’ And with no aid but that, the Allerkamps loaded their handcart, tied a rope to the front, put Theo at the handles, and set out, with Ludwig hauling on the rope and leading the way.

  It was simpler than it sounded, because even in the earlier days when Otto Macnab and his father traversed this route, there was a kind of path to Victoria; now it was a dusty road. From there, another rough-and-ready trail led north, so there was little chance of getting lost. But to walk a hundred and thirty miles with a handcart and sleep on the bare ground in January was not easy. However, in due course the pilgrims reached a slight rise, and there they looked down upon a sight that warmed them. It was a replica of a German village, complete with rough stone houses, a central square, and prosperous fields that stretched out to thick woodland.

  ‘It was worth it!’ Ludwig cried as he started down the slope, and Franziska asked: ‘Is this where we’ll take our land?’ and her father said: ‘We’ll find even better.’

  Until they located the land they wanted, they would stop temporarily at Hardwork, but they were surprised to find that earlier German arrivals already owned the locations in town and that in the surrounding countryside, for many miles in every direction, the attractive rolling land was also taken. ‘I thought,’ Theo said, ‘that everything was free.’

  It wasn’t. Hugo Metzdorf, the acknowledged leader of the community, explained that there were millions of acres to which the Allerkamp certificates could be applied, but they were always ‘out there,’ meaning to the west. The newcomers were assured, however, that their papers were authentic: ‘None better than these four sold by Toby and Brother in New Orleans, and of course your two military ones are best of all.’

  Metzdorf, who had done a good deal of land selection, ticked off the situation, indicating each paper as he did, and in the end he whistled: ‘Three thousand acres in all! You must have paid a pretty pfennig for these!’ When Ludwig nodded, Hugo asked: ‘You bring much money with you? No? Well, neither did any of us.’ He flexed his right arm: ‘That’s what does it in Texas.’

  He advised the Allerkamps to spend their first two years in Hardwork: ‘Fine German woman here lost her husband a year ago. She’ll rent you a room. Later on, build yourself a shack, not a house like mine. Then look around you, visit other towns, get yourself a horse and ride west, and wherever you go, study the land.’

  ‘What do we do when we find it?’

  ‘Now you have to have some money, because you must get a surveyor. He lines it out proper and files his papers with the government, and then you get title. But you have to pay the surveyor.’

  ‘If we have no money?’

  ‘Customary rate, he takes one-third of the land.’ When Ludwig whistled, Metzdorf said: ‘I know it sounds high. In your case, a thousand acres, and at eight cents an acre, that’s eighty dollars American, and who in Texas has eighty dollars?’

  The widowed woman was actually eager to have the Allerkamps share her half-empty house and to sell them a small plot of land, and in a shorter time than even Metzdorf, an energetic man, could have anticipated, they were at work building not a shack, as he had prudently advised, but a real house—a kitchen and alcoves for beds—and in doing so, they repeated the heroic steps by which all parts of Texas w
ould be settled: sunrise to sunset, work; Sunday, prayers; clothes and furniture made by hand; fields cleared by chopping and plowed by foot-shovels; food, an endless repetition of corn bread, bacon and coffee. But when a family had two energetic elders and four stalwart young people, the outcome was apt to be startling, and in the case of the Allerkamps, it was doubly so. By the end of the second month they had the corner posts of their home in place and all members of the family were learning English from a book they had purchased in Bremen.

  Much sooner than they expected they were brought into full citizenship, for in early March a man came to their house riding one horse and leading another. He was a smallish fellow, and he brought a surprising invitation: ‘Name’s Otto Macnab, Texas Ranger. Trouble along the Nueces River, and Captain Garner of this county would like to have one of your boys join him in an expedition.’

  ‘Is it that we are obliged to?’ Ludwig asked on behalf of his three sons.

  ‘Not an order, but if you’re going to live in Texas …’

  ‘We have only the guns we need for food. No horse.’

  ‘Captain Garner figured that. He sends this horse. Guns?’ He slapped the space behind his saddle, and the Allerkamps saw three rifles, plus the two pistols protruding from Otto’s belt.

  ‘Can you speak the truth?’ the father asked, and before he could continue, Otto said: ‘No, you don’t have to come, but this is how we protect places like yours.’

  ‘Against maybe who?’

  ‘Mexicans, Indians …’

  As soon as he heard the word Indians, Ernst Allerkamp, the middle boy reared on James Fenimore Cooper, stepped forward: ‘I will go,’ and it was agreed.

  When Otto turned to untie the trailing horse and hand over one of the guns, he became aware of a girl hiding in the shadows, and his eyes wandered from the men and focused on her. She was a small girl, fourteen or fifteen, with flaxen braids and a shyness which manifested itself in the curious way she stood, half withdrawn from the scene, half participating. He could not bring his eyes back to the men and paid little attention to what they were saying about the Indian war; he was riveted by the girl and drank in every aspect of her attractive appearance: her white stockings, her homemade shoes, her dress with that flowery bit about the hem, her belt encompassing her narrow waist, the way her blouse was beginning to protrude, but most of all, her placid face framed by the two braids of golden hair. It was an image, emerging from shadows, that would live with him forever.

  For her part, the girl saw a young man not much older than herself, tow-headed, blue-eyed, clean-faced, pistols in his belt, homespun clothes and very dusty, heavy leather boots square as a box, never a smile, leading a horse by a bridle that hung carelessly from his left arm, a young man who spoke in a low voice and who stared at her as if he had never seen a girl before. From her place in the shadows she could imagine him astride his horse, riding through rolling woodlands that seemed to stretch endlessly west and south. He was capable, of that she felt sure, and she supposed that he could use his pistols and the rifles that projected from his saddlebag. He was the new man, the man of Texas, and she was fascinated by him, but as a well-bred daughter of a conservative German family, she kept to the shadows.

  Neither the young man nor the girl smiled during that first meeting, nor did they speak, nor did they reveal by any gesture other than those endless glances the impression that each had made on the other, but all during his three-month fight in the Nueces Strip the man could think of little else when he rode silently or slept fitfully. And during those same long days the girl saw horsemen galloping across battlefields, or resting beside rivers, or splashing through fords, and invariably this quiet young fellow with the blue eyes and sand-colored hair was in the lead.

  When Ernst Allerkamp returned to Hardwork he found his community in an uproar, because a recent immigrant named Pankratz, from the area near Munich, had arrived in town with his wife and two children, had studied the local economy with more than usual intelligence, and had decided that he could make a real profit on his investment if he bought himself a slave. In a town well to the north he found a strong young black man, and the cost was so minimal that he bought the slave’s wife as well. With them he would grow cotton, for which there was a permanent demand in the markets at New Orleans.

  But when Pankratz brought his two slaves to Hardwork the older residents objected not only strenuously but bitterly, with Hugo Metzdorf and Ludwig Allerkamp stating flatly that slavery was not a condition that the freedom-seeking Germans could tolerate. The Allerkamp boys supported their father, and began circulating among the people in town and those on nearby farms, arguing against the introduction of slavery into the community.

  ‘But it’s legal!’ Pankratz said with stubborn force. ‘It’s one of the reasons why Texians fought against Santa Anna. He threatened to take away their slaves.’

  ‘It may be legal,’ Ludwig conceded, ‘but it is not what Germans who flee tyranny should allow in their new villages.’

  Pankratz, believing himself immune to such pressure, housed his slaves in a rude shack behind his well-built dog-run, and proceeded to use them, fourteen hours a day, in the planting of a cotton crop.

  ‘You cannot keep human beings in such a hovel,’ Hugo Metzdorf protested formally, but Pankratz pointed out that many German settlers, when they first arrived in Texas, had lived in worse.

  ‘Yes,’ Metzdorf granted. ‘We did. But we did it voluntarily and with the knowledge that we would soon have better, if we applied ourselves. You intend to keep your slaves—’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I intend!’

  Pankratz was an able man who believed that southern Germans were better educated and more civilized than men like Metzdorf and the Allerkamps, who had come from, a ridiculous place like Grenzler, and he rejected their censure, insisting that since the Texas constitution protected slavery, he had every right to utilize his two blacks as he saw fit, so long as he did not punish them in uncivilized ways.

  He did, of course, punish them. When they lingered in their work he found it productive to lash them with a leather strap attached to a stout oak handle, not savagely or in any brutish manner, but enough to make them realize that if they abused the freedoms he allowed them, sterner punishment would follow.

  When Ludwig first saw his neighbor lash the woman slave across her back and her thinly clad buttocks, he was outraged and went directly to Metzdorf as head of the community. They discussed the matter, with great fury at first and later with controlled bitterness, and the outcome was that one morning when Pankratz had his two slaves in his far fields cultivating the land prior to planting, Ludwig, aided by his Ranger son Ernst, went quietly to the Pankratz place and dismantled the slave shack, hiding its valuable timbers in half a dozen different spots well removed from the farm.

  When Pankratz was summoned from the fields by his wife, who had watched the destruction from her kitchen, he stormed about the village threatening lawsuits and bodily damage to his enemies, but when he saw that the entire community was opposed to his remaining there with his slaves, he put a loud curse upon the place, sold his land at a loss to Yancey Quimper and moved to Victoria, where several families owned slaves.

  When the ugly affair ended, Ludwig told his children: ‘You do not flee from an evil, and then introduce that same evil in your new home.’

  The Allerkamps were constantly aware that the land they now had was not to be their permanent home; they had those four precious documents which entitled them to free land in Texas and they intended identifying their homestead and moving to it as soon as practical. But now they entered upon the heartbreak of Texas land ownership: the acres were theirs, no doubt about it, but to secure them, one had to locate a surveyor. Also, the land system was Spanish in origin, using strange units of measurement and customs not known in Grenzler, so that no man merely trained in trigonometry could presume to set himself up as a surveyor; he had first to master the tradition of varas, cordeles and leagues. So a man l
ike Allerkamp might have entitlement to three thousand acres, but five or six years could elapse before he located his land or came into possession of it.

  ‘I am consumed with anger over this system,’ Ludwig cried one day, for he saw time wasting, with no permanent house built and his family still not established on their own land. Meanwhile he must earn a living and see to it that his three sons earned theirs. Theo wanted a job that paid a good salary so that he could send money back to Grenzler for the ocean crossing of the young woman he had not been allowed to marry.

  ‘I liked that area on Matagorda Bay, where the Sea Nymph landed us,’ he told the family as they discussed their problems. ‘I asked the men there and they said: “This place has got to become a major seaport. We need young men to help build it.” I’m going to try.’

  The family could not give him money for his venture, but they did share generously their tools and clothing, and there were tears of regret and apprehension as they bade him farewell at the start of his long walk back to that remembered spot in the Matagorda region; soon it would acquire jetties and wharves and storage warehouses and the melodious name of Indianola. Theo Allerkamp would be well regarded by the German ship captains who put in to Indianola, and by the immigrants they deposited there, for he was a man of integrity, and also a man unusually gifted with a high tenor voice, which he would display effectively in the local singing societies. In quicker time than he now expected, he would be able to send for his bride.

  Ernst Allerkamp found his occupation in a curious way. When he helped tear down the Pankratz slave quarters his job was to rip off the shabby roof, and during his trip on the Sea Nymph he had worked the pumps so diligently that he had become distressed by any structure that leaked. ‘What a miserable roof this must have been,’ he told his father, who replied: ‘No house can be better than its roof. Thatch on German farms. Tiles in German towns. In Texas, they seem to use cypress shingles. Properly cut and nailed, they could be-best of all.’