Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  This carries an echo of Olmsted’s earlier exhortation: “There’s a great work wants doing in this our generation, Charley, let us off jacket and go about it.” The two friends were older now and in more of a position to put their words into action. Olmsted was urging Brace to continue his good works with the Children’s Aid Society. He himself was traveling through a South sorely in need of reform. In this extraordinary passage, he was also making a bold assertion about the cultural primacy of the antebellum North, a place where it was possible to “get up” parks and dancing schools, a place that drew its vitality from differences, the interplay of the “gentlemanly and rowdy.” Of course, “parks” was a curious—and oddly prescient—choice of examples.

  After traveling less than a month, the Olmsted brothers arrived in New Orleans. The city was the natural jumping-off point for any trip into Texas. In those days, there were two main ways to go. One could board a ship and travel across the Gulf to the Texas coast. Or one could travel by steamer along the Red River into western Louisiana, then cross into Texas by land. The brothers chose the latter.

  At the Louisiana-Texas border, they began to make preparations for a frontier journey. Choosing the right horses was especially important. They were about to set off across a vast prairie, and a horse that grew “jaded”—in the parlance of the day—could leave you stranded miles from help. Fred purchased a roan Creole pony named Nack. John chose a chestnut mare named Fanny.

  The brothers also bought a Sharps rifle, a pair of Colt revolvers, and some sheathed knives. Texas was dangerous. There was an ever-present threat of encountering hostile Indians, horse thieves, all manner of outlaws. Texas also was sparely settled. It might be necessary to hunt for food. Fred and John repaired to the outskirts of the tiny town where they’d purchased their weaponry and unleashed a fusillade. “After a little practice,” Olmsted boasted, “we could very surely chop off a snake’s head from the saddle at a reasonable distance.”

  This made for compelling adventure writing in a Times dispatch. Truth be told, the Olmsted brothers of Hartford would never pass for hardened Texas drovers. (Drovers was the appellation for men who drove cattle; the term cowboy hadn’t even been coined yet.) The brothers bought a pack mule named Mr. Brown. As for packing, they found it quite a challenge to winnow down the accoutrements of civilized life. No way could they part with their gingerbread, and as for getting rid of books—simply out of the question. They improvised, festooning the mule with large wicker hampers, generously stuffed with their possessions.

  In San Augustine, the brothers hired a former Texas Ranger to serve as a guide. The man suggested that they replace the laughable mule hampers with an aparejo. An aparejo is a streamlined Mexican pack, consisting of a straw-filled leather sack with loops of rope hanging off of it. Travelers simply place the sack on a mule’s back, like a saddle, and secure their possessions with the loops of rope. But the Olmsted brothers stubbornly clung to their mule rig. The townsfolk of San Augustine gathered in the street to see off this quirky traveling party. There was much animated discussion about packs. Onlookers speculated that Mr. Brown the mule would simply collapse after a few steps. By the time they were ready to leave, Olmsted had grown unsure himself. “We should have half Texas hooting at our heels,” he observed. “But nothing happened. The mule walked off with as much unconcern as if he had been trained to carry hampers from his birth.”

  Off they went. They attempted to follow an old Spanish trail, still in use and stretching all the way to San Antonio. But this road, as Olmsted noted, could hardly be called a road. About the only clue that they were still on course were occasional parties of pioneers staggering westward. Invariably, their tawdry few possessions were piled in wagons caked in red mud. To lessen the load for tired horses, the able-bodied travelers made their way on foot. Weary slaves lurched along the road. Weary farmers’ wives lurched along beside them. Olmsted had never seen such bedraggled women.

  Sometimes, too, they passed wagons laden with cotton, headed the other direction, back East. This was evidence of pioneers who had made lives for themselves in Texas. They had settled a plot of land and worked it with their slaves. Now, they were conveying their cotton to market.

  The Olmsted party made slow progress. On a good day, they covered twenty miles. At night, they tried to pitch camp near a farmhouse. This was like an insurance policy. First, they tried to shoot deer and rabbits in an effort to have fresh game for supper. But the Olmsteds weren’t the best hunters, and their guide didn’t prove such a crack shot, either. Despite their best efforts, they invariably wound up walking to the farmhouse and purchasing their dinner. They had better luck with dimes than bullets, as Olmsted put it.

  But even the simple act of eating proved challenging. Bands of ravenously hungry wild hogs roamed the prairie. The horses and mule would be tied at the edge of camp, and the hogs, squealing horribly, took to battling them, stealing their fodder. If a person wasn’t on guard, a hog was apt to steal his food, too. One time, a hog dashed into the campfire and snatched a chicken that was cooking on a spit.

  This hog problem was confounding. But then, passing through Centerville, Texas, the Olmsteds met an innkeeper who demanded: What!? You don’t own a dog? Apparently, this was a frontier necessity that had been overlooked. Taking pity, the innkeeper gave them a bull terrier named Judy. “She was made up of muscle, compactly put together behind a pair of frightful jaws,” noted Olmsted. With Judy as a traveling companion, the wild hog problem abated.

  As they continued west, the prairie began to grow more expansive. They encountered fewer and fewer pioneers. The markers of civilization—farmhouses and hand-lettered roadside signs, “corn heare”—appeared at increasingly long intervals.

  A sense of giddiness took over. It was Fred and John, together on the vast prairie. The land crested and dipped, crested and dipped, undulating in all directions like a sea of grass.

  On rainy days, the brothers remained in their tent all day, reading from their cache of books and sketching. On clear nights, they sat around the campfire talking for hours.

  The sky above was boundless. That didn’t surprise Olmsted. Rumors of the big Texas sky had preceded his visit; he’d heard all about it. What was puzzling was that stars seemed closer than he remembered them. It was an odd sensation, but pleasant. The stars just seemed nearer somehow.

  On January 9, 1854, the guide took his leave. He had conducted the brothers safely across the prairie and into the Texas hill country. They were now in the town of Bastrop, one of a group of communities in close proximity. Austin was a day’s ride away, and they were two days from the thriving metropolis of San Antonio.

  Olmsted dropped into a shop in Bastrop. He was surprised to see a copy of a newspaper called the San Antonio Zeitung. He didn’t speak German. But paging through, he was able to glean that it was a vital publication, full of news of local interest. Olmsted inquired about the paper, but the shopkeeper was stumped. The man didn’t have any information about what it was, why it was in his shop, or where it had come from.

  A few days later, the Olmsted brothers camped in a live-oak grove near San Marcos. They planned to set out for San Antonio the next day. They stopped by a farmhouse to purchase some fodder for Mr. Brown and the horses. The farmer told them that on route to San Antonio, they could expect to encounter German settlers. Germans again. What were Germans doing tief im herzen von Texas (deep in the heart of Texas)? The farmer did his best to satisfy Olmsted’s curiosity, but he just didn’t have much information.

  The brothers set out the next morning, and after about an hour in the saddle, they spied a tidy little log cabin with glazed windows. Then another and another. The fields surrounding these cabins were unlike anything they’d seen in their journey so far. To this point, they’d passed fields given almost exclusively to cotton. But now they saw farms growing cotton in rotation with a mix of other crops. The land was neatly tended. Crops had been harvested in such a way that only the barest stubble poked through
the earth. As an experienced farmer, Olmsted recognized this as a telltale sign of rigorous agricultural practices.

  Presently, they passed within shouting distance of some farmers, both men and women tending the fields together.

  “Good morning,” cried the Olmsted brothers.

  “Guten morgen,” boomed the farmers.

  Aha. The picture was starting to grow clearer.

  The Olmsteds forded the Guadalupe River with difficulty, then rode up into the hills. Soon they came to a town. The broad main street was lined with workshops and little stores; most of the signs were in German. The brothers’ practice was to eat a cold pack lunch on horseback without breaking stride. But Olmsted was curious. When he spotted a cottage with a swinging sign that read “Guadalupe Hotel, J. Schmitz,” he had to stop.

  The brothers went inside and asked for lunch. The hostess stared at them uncomprehendingly. She spoke only German. Fortunately, an English-speaking customer stepped in and explained their wishes. The hostess seated the Olmsteds at a long oak table and spread a white cloth before them. A few minutes later, she returned with beef sausage, soup, wheat bread sliced warm from the loaf, and freshly made sweet butter. “I have never in my life, except, perhaps, in awakening from a dream, met with such a sudden and complete transfer of associations,” noted Olmsted.

  It was as if he’d been transplanted to the Rhine Valley, a place he’d visited with John during their walking tour through Europe. There wasn’t a cue to tell him otherwise. The walls were hung with lithographs featuring scenes from the German countryside. All around, men with thick pendant beards and flannel shirts sat smoking pipes and speaking animatedly in German. Welcome to the town of Neu Braunfels, Texas.

  As it turns out, Germans started pouring into the Texas hill country around 1830. Most of them were desperately poor and received aid from companies organized specifically to resettle Germans in America. The companies, in turn, had the backing of various German princes. This was no casual resettlement plan. Rather, it was a political scheme with a twofold purpose: reduce pauperism in Germany by dumping poor people in wide-open Texas and put a check on American expansionist impulses in the bargain.

  In 1844, Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels led an expedition of 150 families to Texas. The group’s destination was a parcel of land purchased sight unseen from a speculator. As the settlers slogged across Texas, it began to dawn on them that their destination was leagues to the west of the existing German belt. They’d been bilked. Upon crossing the Guadalupe River, the weary pioneers decided to proceed no farther. They plunked down and formed a settlement in the hills, naming it Neu Braunfels in honor of their prince and sponsor. By the time the Olmsteds visited, a decade had passed and Neu Braunfels and its environs had grown into a thriving community of 3,000 people, all but about 20 of them Germans.

  The brothers spent a whole afternoon at the inn. They fell into conversation with Germans, many of whom spoke English, and found them open and companionable. Olmsted quickly learned another thing about Germans in Texas. Almost to a one, they were free-soilers. They worked their farms themselves without the use of slave labor.

  The Olmsteds were charmed by Neu Braunfels and decided to remain at the inn for the night. When they went out to check on Fanny and Nack, they saw that the stable attendant—a white man in cap and jacket—was giving the horses’ legs a good rubdown. The animals’ snouts were thrust into racks filled with hay, which they were busily gobbling. The whole time they’d been in Texas, the horses hadn’t eaten hay. This was so different from the treatment that slave attendants had given their horses during stopovers on the journey.

  The brothers repaired to their room and were again pleasantly surprised. The room was clean, had potted plants and a brass study lamp, and best of all—there were two separate beds! The few times the brothers had stopped at inns during this trip, they’d been forced to share a bed. On one memorable night, they found themselves squeezed together in a narrow bed in a one-room cabin that passed for an inn. A sheet hung between their bed and the next, where the proprietor and his wife slept.

  Next morning, as the Olmsteds rode out of Neu Braunfels, they saw more tidy cottages set on well-cultivated land. Now, this tableau was charged with significance.

  Encountering the Germans was a real piece of serendipity for Olmsted. The original purpose of his trip had been to document for the Times the difference between Old South slavery and slavery as it existed on the Texas frontier. But this topic proved less rich than he’d anticipated. Slavery was slavery. A Texas cotton field wasn’t much different from a Louisiana cotton field, and as a consequence, he’d provided scant few details in letters to the Times. Thus far, his dispatches had formed more of a travelogue, albeit an interesting one, full of observations about the Texas prairie.

  Now, Olmsted had a focus for his reporting. He could compare the free-soil Germans with the slaveholders he’d encountered on his earlier journey. On first glance, the contrast appeared stark. Moreover, the Germans might furnish further evidence that his unique theories about slavery held true. Whereas plantations worked by slaves were economic backwaters, farms worked by Germans appeared to be models of efficiency. Whereas plantation owners fancied themselves refined gentleman but lived in cultural poverty, Olmsted suspected that Germans might be quite different. Going forward, this would be his area of inquiry. This would be his journalistic territory in Texas.

  Their next stop was San Antonio, the city where the Zeitung was published. That was the paper that Olmsted had noticed in the shop, the one that first piqued his interest in the Germans. San Antonio was neckand-neck with Galveston for the honor of being the biggest city in Texas. Population circa 1854: about 7,000. It was certainly the most cosmopolitan city, a mélange of nationalities, architectural styles, and religions. “We have no other city, except, perhaps, New Orleans,” noted Olmsted, “that can vie in [terms of its] odd and antiquated foreignness.”

  The brothers visited the Alamo, already a symbol of the independent spirit of Texas. And they dropped by the offices of the Zeitung. Of the fifty-seven papers then published in Texas, it turns out that the Zeitung had the second-largest circulation. The editor was Adolph Douai. Douai, an immensely cultured man, was fluent in several languages, had once served as principal of a school in Germany, and had also done a stint as a tutor in Russia. During the German revolution of 1848, he had become an outspoken critic of the government and was imprisoned repeatedly for his views. Fed up, he fled to Texas.

  Douai was a so-called ’48er. The ’48ers were different from the types of Texas Germans Olmsted had encountered in his limited experience. Whereas many of the Germans in Neu Braunfels, say, had emigrated in search of economic opportunity, this later wave had come to the United States to escape political persecution. As a rule, the ’48ers tended to be highly educated, and many of them had held jobs as teachers, doctors, and lawyers back in Germany. German settlers as a whole were opposed to slavery. But Douai and his fellow ’48ers went a step further, as staunch and vocal abolitionists.

  Douai took the Olmsted brothers to Sisterdale, Texas, a nearby farming community that was home to many ’48ers. Sisterdale was one of five such settlements in the region, the others being Millheim, Latium, Tusculum, and Bettina. Such places were called “Latin settlements” because they were full of impossibly erudite German immigrants, now working as farmers, laborers, and shopkeepers. At Sisterdale, the Olmsteds met Julius Froebel, a mineralogist-turned-farmer, and Ernst Kapp, a geographerturned-farmer. The brothers arranged to spend the night in the log cabin of Edouard Degener. Degener was the son of a wealthy German banker. He had twice been elected to the parliament in Frankfurt. But he’d lost his home, his land—everything—during the 1848 revolution. He’d come to Texas and was now a farmer.

  That night, Degener held an impromptu get-together at his home in honor of the visiting Olmsteds. He had a piano, and one of the guests played passages from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. As the evening grew looser, there was waltzin
g. And after the ladies retired, the men got well lubricated, threw their arms around one another’s shoulders, and belted out “student songs,” as Olmsted termed them. It made him feel very young.

  The next morning, Degener was up bright and early, working the fields. He was joined by his two teenage sons. Riding around Sisterdale, Olmsted saw others from the previous night’s party, now tending cotton or pushing plows. It was hard work, yet it struck Olmsted that the Germans appeared happy. “But how much of their cheerfulness,” asked Olmsted, “may arise from having gained, during this otherwise losing struggle to themselves, the certain consciousness of being courageously loyal to their intellectual determinations—their private convictions of right, justice, and truth.”

  Using San Antonio as a base, the Olmsteds made several other forays. They traveled to the Gulf coast, going as far as Port Lavaca. They also hired another former Texas Ranger as a guide and took a dip down into Mexico that was by turns dangerous and drab. One night, they stayed at an inn, only to wind up sleeping outside in the courtyard with their Colts and knives placed within easy reach. That was the Ranger’s idea. He wanted to stay close to the horses to ward off thieves. They made a few desultory inquiries about joining an immigrant party bound for California, but this came to nothing.

  Mostly, they were drawn to the Germans. The brothers decided that maybe they should sell Tosomock Farm and settle in Texas instead. The dry air of the hill country would be a balm for John’s tuberculosis. The intellectual climate was certainly to their tastes. They could even take part in a political battle then starting to brew. The original treaty that turned Texas from a separate republic into the twenty-eighth state included the following provision: As the state’s population grew, Texas might be split up into as many as five different states. For any new states established, Congress agreed, the all-important slavery question would be determined by popular sovereignty. Of course, the hill country was a stronghold for nonslaveholding Germans. Perhaps the Olmsted brothers could become pioneer residents of the brand-new free state of West Texas. The state, in turn, could act as a bulwark, preventing slavery from spreading through the rest of the southwestern territories. John sent a letter to Staten Island to his wife, Mary, floating the idea. Mary’s response has been lost, but it can probably be paraphrased in four words: Get back here now!