1847: A Chronicle of Genius, Generosity & Savagery

By Turtle Bunbury

Capture the spirit of an industrial, social and cultural revolution through this invigorating collection of historical portraits from the dawn of the industrialised world!Though it feels like an era marooned almost irretrievably in the distant past, the 1840s &ndash a decade of blistering social and cultural change – is only two lifetimes removed from the present day. There are, in other words, people alive today who knew and associated with people for whom the Gold Rush and the Great Famine were living memories.Having grown up in an Irish country house built that year, 1847 has long proven the source of inspiration and fascination for historian Turtle Bunbury. And in a bid to once more grasp the spirit of the age, he has over the years assembled an archive of the most remarkable stories from those twelve momentous months.Bristling with all manner of human life and endeavour, from American pioneers and German entrepreneurs to circus charlatans and down-and-out songwriters, 1847 is a collection of his most remarkable discoveries to date and a stirring portrait of a chaotic world surging towards the modern. By turns poignant, outlandish, curious and provocative, this is history at its most invigorating – as panorama, as epic.Praise for The Glorious Madness:'An absolutely brilliant book.'Patrick Geoghegan, Associate Professor in History at Trinity College, Dublin'Turtle Bunbury's open-handed, clear-sighted and finely written book comes fresh and, I might almost say, redeemed out of the moil and storm of controversy that surrounded the topic of the war, in a thousand different guises in the decades since its end. Turtle holds out his hand in the present, seeking the lost hands of the past, in darkness, in darkness, but also suddenly in the clear light of kindness – in the upshot acknowledging their imperilled existence with a brilliant flourish, a veritable banner, of wonderful stories.'Sebastian Barry, author of The Secret Scripture'Turtle continues the wonderful listening and yarn-spinning he has honed in the Vanishing Ireland series, applying it to veterans of the First World War. The stories he recreates are poignant, whimsical and bleakly funny, bringing back into the light the lives of people who found themselves on the wrong side of history after the struggle for Irish independence. This is my kind of micro-history.'John Grenham, The Irish TimesPraise for Vanishing Ireland:'A perfect symbiosis between text and images – both similarity affectionate, respectful, humorous, slightly melancholic but never sentimental or nostalgic. This is invaluable social history.'Cara Magazine'This is a beautiful and remarkably simple book that will melt the hardest of hearts. Bunbury has a light writing style that lets his interviewees, elderly folk from around the country, tell their stories without interference. It's neither patronising nor overly romantic about the past; just narrating moving tales – The portraits by Fennell are striking, warm and dignified, with a feeling of being invited into people's lives.'The Sunday Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Sep 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9780717168439

Turtle Bunbury

Turtle Bunbury is a bestselling author, historian and television presenter. He has established himself as one of the most prolific and energetic history writers in Ireland, publishing eleven books to date, including the bestselling Vanishing Ireland series. Having grown up surrounded by old portraits and dusty books at Lisnavagh House, County Carlow, Turtle studied history at Trinity College Dublin before moving to Hong Kong where he became a travel writer. Returning to Ireland some years later, he was determined to bring Irish history to life for all those who felt the past was just a dull chronicle of dates, dates, dates. His quest has led him to a succession of fascinating book titles, including the highly acclaimed Vanishing Ireland series, as well as to the History Festival of Ireland, which he co-founded. Turtle is a well-known name on Irish television and radio, and a contributor to magazines such as The World of Interiors, Playboy and National Geographic Traveller. He is co-presenter of RTÉ’s ‘Genealogy Roadshow’, voice of Newstalk’s ‘Hidden Ireland’ series and the founder of Wistorical, an innovative concept for promoting Irish history globally through social media. Turtle lives on the family estate in County Carlow with his wife Ally and their two daughters, Jemima Meike and Bay Hermione.

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January

NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1847

A sprightly youth, on New Year’s Day,

O’er the Eastern hills came bounding;

His step was light, and his heart was gay,

But Death was his track surrounding.

—William Heaton, ‘The Flowers of Calder Dale’

May the New Year grant much joy to the man for whom I would like to sacrifice my life, may our hearts be ever new in the holy bliss of the purest love.

—Lola Montez, Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria

New Year’s Day was a bright and beautiful one. The executive mansion was crowded with a populous procession for several hours. The absence of the Major-General of the army and his staff, told an eloquent story, as did the absence of many officers of the army and navy. They were in the South fighting the Mexicans.

—Mrs E.F. Ellet, Court Circles of the Republic, Washington DC

Dark clouds, portending famine and anarchy, lower thickly around us, so that it would require almost miraculous intervention to ward off the threatened storm … We can only hope for the best, and trust that as the year is ushered in with sadness and sorrow, it may close with mirth and rejoicing, so that, when the season again returns, we may be enabled, under brighter auspices, to wish our readers a Happy New Year.

—Tyrone Constitution, Omagh, Ireland

For the last week we have travelled over a barren and desolate looking country. There is hardly a blade of grass to be seen.

—George Taggart, Mormon Battalion, Yuma County, Arizona

We pray the God of mercy to deliver us from our present calamity, if it be his Holy will.

—Patrick Breen (Donner-Reed Party), Sierra Nevada, California

Early, early, blithe New Year,

Bid the blessed Spring appear.

Tell her to look kind and mild

On the mother and her child,

Who, in hunger, cold and stark,

Wait her coming in the dark,

Counting hours as ages, while

Plenty is forbid to smile.

—Anonymous, Belfast News Letter, Ireland

THE COMANCHE WARRIORS & THE FREE-THINKING GERMANS

Fredericksburg, Texas, United States

Monday 4 January 1847

Being lynched by a mob was not the ideal way to end a year, but that is how 1846 damn nearly finished for Baron Ottfried Hans von Meusebach. He knew who the perpetrators were. As the man entrusted with the administration of a new German colony in such a wild country as Texas, it was probably to be expected. The friction between the settlers had been as scorching as the summer sun for many long weeks, and it was hard not to feel deeply claustrophobic living in an isolated community surrounded by hostile Comanche Indians. As the full moon lit up the night sky on New Year’s Day, the six-foot-two strawberry-blond aristocrat looked west once again towards the treeless prairie he had been sent to manage. And as he did so, he deduced that the only sensible way to get out of this mess was to head into those perilous badlands and go talk with the Comanche.

Meusebach had ceased calling himself a baron the moment he arrived in the thorn-scrub of the fledgling state of Texas. Old World titles cut little sway out here on the edge of civilisation, and he found it simpler to be plain old John O. Meusebach. It was not intended as a disguise: far too many members of the German community already knew who he was. Indeed, plenty of his fellow-settlers hailed from the Duchy of Nassau, that heavily forested region of west Germany where he had spent his formative years. The Meusebach home back in Dillenburg was famed throughout the duchy as a musical stronghold. Meusebach’s father, a solicitor by day, was a renowned poet who collected folk music and literature, while his mother was something of a virtuoso on the piano. The entire clan frequently recited poetry and sang ballads and hymns for visiting neighbours.

Growing up in such an inspired, liberal and intellectual environment, Meusebach had always sought a distant utopia. He had developed his dream while studying natural science at the University of Halle, although, perhaps aware of the relatively limited career prospects for botanists, he also picked up a law degree. By 1838 he was working as an assistant judge in Berlin as well as a government assessor in Potsdam.

North America had long fascinated Meusebach, but his imagination was truly piqued when he read Texas: The Rise, Progress, and Prospects of the Republic of Texas (1841), a best-selling account by the Dublin-born author William Kennedy, which told of a land of rivers and caves that was reputed to be home to innumerable secret silver mines and perhaps even the fabled El Dorado gold. At this time, Meusebach also became wholly aware of the Adelsverein, otherwise known as the Verein zum Schutz deutscher Einwanderer in Texas (‘Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas’). This innovative society was formed in 1842 by 25 German nobles who met at Biebrich Palace, the Duke of Nassau’s castle on the Rhine, with a view to sponsoring a German colony in Texas. That same year, the new (and short-lived) Republic of Texas had completed a major colonisation arrangement with two German settlers, Henry Francis Fisher and Burchard Miller, entitling them to a little less than four million acres of coyotespeckled savannah and dun-hued prairie between the Llano and Colorado Rivers. In 1844 the unscrupulous Fisher and Miller sold their land grant for a handsome profit to the Adelsverein, and by December 1844 the first batch of German settlers had arrived in Texas. These constituted a curious mix of impoverished workers and liberal, well-to-do middle-classers on the run from the increasingly tough social, political and economic climate back home.

Towards the end of 1844 Meusebach wrote to Count Carl of Castell-Castell, vice-president and business director of the Adelsverein, expressing his immense interest in Texas and declaring his appetite for geology, botany and horticulture. The count was so impressed that he offered him the recently vacated post of commissary-general for the German colonists. It was in that very capacity that Meusebach boated into Galveston, Texas, on 1 May 1845, and, having now dropped his hereditary title, he made his way overland to the outskirts of the Fisher-Miller grant. All too soon he realised the extent to which Fisher and Miller had hoodwinked the Adelsverein: the lands they had sold were deep in Comancheria, the traditional hunting grounds of the Penateka.

The Penateka, or Honey-Eaters, were the largest and among the fiercest of the Comanche Indian bands that roamed the Great Plains.¹ In the eighteenth century they drove the Lipan Apache into Mexico and then pulled the plug on the Spanish Empire’s devastating northern advance by creating a no-man’s-land between the semi-arid western borders of the United States and the Mexican province of Texas. This was Comancheria, an informal empire that, at its peak in the early nineteenth century, covered nearly a quarter of a million miles, including vast sections of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma.²

The key to the success of the Comanche was their brilliant intuitive understanding of horsemanship. Their mastery of the beast was such that George Catlin, a supreme chronicler of the West, hailed them as ‘the most extraordinary horsemen that I have seen yet in all my travels.’³ By the age of five most Comanche boys could ride mustangs like centaurs; by their teenage years they could shoot arrows with deadly precision, lasso a wild horse or scoop another man up onto their horse, all while thundering at a full gallop. Everything was conducted on horseback: hunting buffalo, rustling tame horses, capturing wild ones and, perhaps most memorably, carrying out raids and ambushes. Their blood-curdling war whoops still echo into the present day: they were as terrifying and cruel a foe as the white men had ever encountered. To be captured alive in a time of war would almost certainly mean a gruesome death. Victims were frequently tortured, scalped, mutilated, roasted alive and beheaded, in no particular order.

Nonetheless, the westward advance of the white man in the nineteenth century was something they could not halt. It began when the buffalo, upon which the Penateka depended for food and hides, began disappearing from the southern plains, killed or driven away by European bullets.⁴ Trade between the Comanche and the white man became ever more commonplace, and the results were by no means all bad for the Comanche: lovely and cooling cotton clothes to wear in the sweltering summers, colourful umbrellas to fend off the rains during the wet springs, metal kettles and saucepans for cooking and boiling. Many Comanche were canny enough to learn Spanish, but there was suspicion too, born of the smallpox and syphilis epidemics that hit the Penateka hard in 1817.

By the 1830s the band had reached its peak influence, numbering perhaps 8,000 men, women and children. However, a fresh outbreak of smallpox in 1839 decimated the Penateka. The white man’s treachery was utterly exposed that same year when 35 Comanche, including 12 war chiefs and several women and children, were murdered during a peace conference in San Antonio.

The Penateka had no overall chieftain as such, but after the San Antonio massacre leadership fell to the handsome Buffalo Hump, a Spanish-speaker and a seasoned veteran who had been dealing with white men, both traders and fighters, for two decades. Buffalo Hump was the name given to him by the white men, who were unwilling to accept the more accurate and startling translation of his Comanche name, ‘Erection that won’t go down’. He was a charismatic leader but a relatively unimaginative one, and his response to what happened at San Antonio was to lead a force of maybe 400 warriors on an anarchic rampage of the new European settlements across Texas, including the port of Linnville, massacring, looting and burning as they went.

They didn’t have it all their way, though. A new and more formidable enemy stepped into the picture: the heavy-drinking, sharp-shooting Texas Rangers. Creative, bold and unpredictable, these full-bearded Western warriors changed the game entirely by spurring their horses into action and charging at the Comanche. Buffalo Hump was compelled to negotiate. In 1844 he and the diminutive Old Owl (Mopechucope) were among the Comanche chiefs who concluded a treaty with the Texans at Tehuacana Creek, but it collapsed when the Texan senate refused to recognise the proposed boundary between Texas and Comancheria.

The situation remained extremely volatile when John O. Meusebach arrived in the early summer of 1845 to take up office as commissary-general. His first residence was in the settlement of New Braunfels on the Guadalupe River, on the edge of the Fisher-Miller land grant. The new German colony was already in financial chaos, but he was quick to start putting things back on track.

He almost immediately began scouting the region for a site on which to build a second settlement. By August he had pinpointed a spot on the Río Pedernales, some 60 miles north-west of New Braunfels, which he named Fredericksburg (nicknamed ‘Fritztown’), after Prince Friedrich of Prussia, a first cousin of King Friedrich Wilhelm III and one of the more cultured members of the Adelsverein. The town’s first public building was the Vereins Kirche, or People’s Church, which opened as a multi-purpose school, town hall, fort and non-denominational church in 1847. It was designed by the colony’s director, Dr Friedrich A. Schubbert, a mysterious German who claimed to be of royal descent. A wagon track was also built to connect Fredericksburg to Austin, 70 miles west.⁵

The first wagon-load of 120 settlers arrived at Fredericksburg on 8 May 1846, but any serenity Meusebach might have derived from their arrival was dispelled shortly afterwards by the receipt of a letter from Count Carl, casually advising him that a further 4,303 German emigrants were en route to the colony. Meusebach tried to explain that there was no money for looking after the newcomers. When his aristocratic patrons consistently failed to heed his words, he arranged for the publication of an article that revealed the plight of the German emigrants. The Adelsverein were embarrassed into action and extended £60,000 in credit. However, they also sent Philip Cappes, a trusted ally, who was instructed to keep a close eye on Meusebach and report back to them accordingly.

Tensions began to boil during the latter weeks of 1846, culminating in a nasty incident on New Year’s Eve, when a mob closely connected to the dastardly Henry Francis Fisher turned on Meusebach and nearly hanged him on the doorstep of his own house. Meusebach had by now discovered that Cappes was a spy, but the final straw came shortly after New Year’s Day, when Dr Schubbert led a group of armed colonists out from Fredericksburg on an unauthorised mission to explore the wilderness north of the Llano River. Schubbert’s party were deep into the uncharted Comanche territory when Shawnee scouts reported that between 40,000 and 60,000 Indians, probably Comanche, were camped along the Llano, at which point Schubbert sagely retreated to Fredericksburg.⁶

Meusebach was livid when he learnt of Schubbert’s excursion. However, he was also inspired. The prevailing wisdom among European settlers was that the Comanche would have to be conquered ‘by force or by treaty’. Meusebach had made his inclination clear early on when he established friendly relations with the local Waco Indians, who, in a nod to his impressive mop of red-blond hair, called him Ma-be-quo-si-to-mu, or ‘Chief with the burning hair of the head’. At break of dawn on 22 January he despatched a party of 40 men and three covered wagons from Fredericksburg to make peace with the Comanche. He joined them a few days later, having just submitted his resignation as commissary-general to the Adelsverein, proposing that it take effect from 20 July.

Meusebach’s guide was Lorenzo de Rozas, a Mexican who had been kidnapped by the Comanche as a child and consequently spoke their language and knew the territory. The expedition suffered a series of setbacks early on. One wounded man was sent home when his rifle unexpectedly exploded during a buffalo hunt. More alarmingly, a campfire took on a life of its own and seared across the prairie for 36 hours before the Germans brought it under control. So it was no great surprise when, 17 days into their journey, a Shawnee hunting party they met close to the sandstone bluffs of the Llano informed Meusebach that his group had been under constant surveillance by the Penateka Comanche practically since they had set off.

The Germans then crossed the river, and the following day they met a party of Penateka advancing under a white flag near present-day Mason, Texas.⁷ Meusebach was invited to visit the nearby Penateka camp on the San Sabá River, where between two and six thousand Comanche were waiting to greet them. (The river had seen its share of violence over the decades: in 1758 the Penateka had destroyed a Spanish mission established along its banks, and a US militia force had also been badly mauled during an ambush in 1839.) An anonymous German who accompanied Meusebach left a brief account of the epic, adrenaline-inducing moment when they walked unarmed into the Comanche camp two days later.

On February 7th we finally approached their wigwams on the San Saba River and here we were given a ceremonious reception. From the distance we saw a large number of Indians in their colorful array coming down the hill in formation. As we came nearer they entered the valley, all mounted, and formed a long front. In the center was the flag; on the right wing were the warriors, divided in sections and each section had a chief, the left wing was formed by the women and children, also mounted. The entire spectacle presented a rich and colorful picture because the garb of the Comanche on festive occasions is indeed beautiful and in good taste. The neck and ears are decorated with pearls and shells and the arms with heavy brass rings. The long hair of the men is braided into long plaits, which, when interlaced with buffalo hair, reaches from head to foot and is decorated with many silver ornaments.

As we approached the formation of the Comanche, it was requested of Mr. Meusebach that only he and a few companions come nearer, and that was arranged. When our four or five men were within 100 paces, Lorenzo [de Rozas] told us that if we fired our guns [into the air] as an indication of our confidence, that it would make a very favorable impression. This we did and the Comanche responded in a like manner. We were greeted with elaborate handshakes and then led into their village.⁸

Meusebach and his colleagues then walked through the camp at San Sabá, past the staring women and children, the campfires, the tipis, the piles of buffalo hides, the pack mules, the corralled horses, the prowling, suspicious Comanche dogs. At length he was introduced to Ketumsee, the Penateka headman, and Meusebach quickly reassured him that he came in peace as a neighbour. Echoing the nickname bestowed on him by the Waco Indians, Meusebach was swiftly named ‘El Sol Colorado’, or the Red Sun – no small honour, given that the sun represented the Great Spirit, the Penateka’s premier deity. Ketumsee offered to summon a peace council but advised that it might be a couple of weeks before the senior Comanche leaders arrived. The Germans were invited to pitch their tents near the Comanche camp during the long wait.

When James Pinckney Henderson, the Governor of Texas, learnt that Meusebach’s party had set off to negotiate with the Comanche, he instructed Robert Neighbors, his exceptionally talented Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to track them down as quickly as possible in order to help the process along and avert a massacre. The Virginia-born Neighbors was unique among the European and American frontiersmen then living in Texas in having mastered the Comanche language and culture, and he was a frequent visitor to their camps. By early February he had set off with a second party, including Dr Ferdinand von Roemer, a geologist from Hanover, who recalled that they

arose at sunup, and after a short delay, caused by the preparation of our breakfast consisting of coffee, fried bacon and bread, our little company was on its way. Jim Shaw, a six-foot tall, strong Delaware chief, led the way on a beautiful American horse … Then followed Mr Neighbors and I, with a young American whom Mr Neighbors had engaged for the duration of the expedition, and a common Shawnee Indian. Each of the two latter drove two pack mules which belonged to Mr Neighbors and Jim Shaw.⁹

On 10 February they caught up with Meusebach’s group, which, noted Dr Roemer, comprised ‘a number of unaffected Germans with genuine peasant features’, ‘a group of Mexican muleteers’ and three ‘American surveyors’.

As the main Penateka chiefs were still making their way to San Sabá, Meusebach, Dr Roemer and 13 others took the opportunity to zip out to an old Spanish fort upriver, on the back of long-standing whispers that there were silver mines in the vicinity. If they did find any trace of silver, this would have made it the ideal base for a new settlement. However, while Roemer would unearth plenty of petrified animals and plants to bring home, the silver rumours proved unfounded. As Meusebach dryly remarked, ‘I do not really count the silver mines until we have them.’

It was not until the last days of February that Buffalo Hump arrived at the camp, alongside Old Owl and the war chief Santa Anna, another battle-hardened Penateka headman who had ridden alongside Buffalo Hump during the failed campaign to drive the Texans into the Gulf of Mexico seven years earlier. To Roemer, the three chiefs were very ‘dignified and grave’. Old Owl was ‘a small old man who, in his dirty cotton jacket, looked undistinguished and only his diplomatic crafty face marked him.’ Santa Anna was ‘a powerfully built man with a benevolent and lively countenance.’ As for Buffalo Hump, the scourge of the Texans for so many years, he was

the genuine, unadulterated picture of a North American Indian. Unlike the majority of his tribe, he scorned all European dress. The upper part of his body was naked. A buffalo hide was wound around his hips. Yellow copper rings decorated his arms and a string of beads hung from his neck. With his long, straight black hair hanging down, he sat there with the earnest (to the European almost apathetic) expression of countenance of the North American savage.¹⁰

The fact that the Penateka were prepared to talk with Meusebach was not so unusual. The Comanche actually had a long history of making treaties, particularly if the upshot was a boost to their commercial profits. It was certainly no coincidence that their Shoshone dialect was the language of trade on the southern plains.

The peace council formally commenced at midday on 1 March, when the three chiefs and 17 other solemn, silent headmen sat upon buffalo skins spread out in a wide circle around a campfire. Beside them ran the waters of Sloan Springs, a tributary of the San Sabá River, and the air must have been perfumed with the scent of wildflowers blooming in the cool spring rains. That evening another full moon filled the night sky – a cotton-ball moon, or tahpooku mua, as the Comanche called it.

Meusebach, who had manners enough to treat each man as his equal, delivered a lengthy address, translated by the Delaware chief Jim Shaw. He explained that he came ‘from far away, from across the great waters’, and that he and his fellow-Germans had ‘joined the Americans, they are our brothers, and we all live now under the same great father, the President.’ He told them that his ‘industrious and thrifty’ countrymen had already built the settlements at New Braunfels and Fredericksburg, and that they hoped to build further settlements along the Llano. He continued:

We do not fear war, but we prefer peace, and if you are willing to wander with our people on the white path of peace, it will gladden the hearts of our wives and warriors, and we then wish that you should abandon the red warpath and tread on the path that is white and visit our people, our cities, villages and wigwams. When we are friends, we shall always share our meals with you, whenever you come to us.

He requested permission for his community to travel without fear through the region of the Fisher-Miller land grant. He asked that the Penateka alert them whenever ‘bad men and redfaces of other tribes’ should be spotted in the land. In return, he offered the Penateka the same protection from the Germans. He told of his plans to send surveyors with compasses to appraise the surrounding countryside and, appreciating the Penateka’s discomfort at the extent of the Fisher-Miller land grant, he promised that his men only wished to cultivate a relatively small amount of land to grow corn. He addressed their fears for the future of their beloved bison by saying the Germans had little interest in buffalo.

[You] live by hunting, striking your tents, made of buffalo skins, today in one place, tomorrow in another. When the buffalo has gone northward, and the fleet deer deep into the forest, when you cannot kill any more game with bow and arrow, when the grass is wizen, when your horses have lost flesh and the north wind confines you in your wigwams, then come to my people and exchange what you have for the necessities of life.

There were rewards on offer too. If the headmen accepted Meusebach’s terms he was willing

to give you and your squaws many presents, or equal them with the white pieces of metal, that we call dollars, and give you as many as one thousand and more of them.

He also spoke of a future in which the two groups might feasibly intermingle as one.

When my people have lived with you for some time and when we know each other better, then it may happen that some wish to marry. Soon our warriors will learn your language. If they then wish to wed a girl of your tribe, I do not see any obstacle, and our people will be so much better friends.

When they met the following day it was Old Owl who spoke, saying that the Penateka were prepared to abandon the war path and to honour the terms of the proposed treaty, but that they needed to clear it with other distant Comanche headmen before they approved Meusebach’s plan to build more ‘wigwams’ along the Llano River. All the same, concluded Old Owl, ‘my intention is to walk the path of peace under all circumstances on this side of the Brazos River.’ Meusebach’s reply was equally promising: ‘I do not disdain my red brethren because their skin is darker, and I do not think more of the white people because their complexion is lighter.’¹¹ He assured the headmen that he had not ‘spoken with a divided tongue’ and proposed that they meet again ‘when the disk of the moon has rounded twice’.¹² At the end of the council they lit a pipe of peace on the embers of the campfire they had sat around, and each man puffed for a while.¹³

The day after the council concluded, the Germans began the trip back to Fredericksburg, about which the anonymous German wrote:

Scarcely had we completed a day’s journey when a company of Comanche under Santana [Santa Anna] with their families joined us quite unceremoniously and informed us that they wished to accompany us all the way to Fredericksburg. Their company proved to be of some advantage to us, since they shot several wild horses. The meat was very appetizing.

Their return journey also took them to the Enchanted Rock, an enormous pink granite outcrop that was known to groan and creak at night. It was held sacred by Comanche, Apache and Tonkawa alike. Not surprisingly, rumours abounded that it too marked the site of ancient mines of gold and silver.

When they finally got back to Fredericksburg

it appeared to us even more cheerful because it happened to be Sunday and the settlers, arrayed in their colorful dress from the various districts of Germany, greeted us. They, too, rejoiced when they saw us return at the head of and in peaceful association with a troop of Comanche Indians.

One person not rejoicing was Dr Schubbert, who had launched a coup d’état to depose Meusebach as commissary-general in his absence. The plot failed when 95 colonists signed a petition urging Meusebach to stay on.¹⁴

The peace council led to a treaty, eventually signed at the Marktplatz in Fredericksburg on 9 May. Among the 14 signatories were Meusebach, Old Owl, Santa Anna, Buffalo Hump, Robert Neighbors, Jim Shaw and, surprisingly, Dr Schubbert.¹⁵ Officially recognised by the US government, the treaty was to prove to be one of wretchedly few cases in American history where immigrants and indigenous people agreed to share the land and protect one another from other warring parties. It was also that exceptionally rare thing, an unbroken peace treaty with a native tribe. As Jack Hays, a widely respected Texas Ranger, later told Meusebach, he was ‘never molested nor lost any animals during his travel within the limits of our colony, but as soon as he passed the line he had losses.’¹⁶

The Penateka’s inky X-mark signatures were barely dry on the treaty when the Germans began to build perhaps the most remarkable of the seven Adelsverein-sponsored settlements in Texas, namely the utopian commune of Bettina, which began to spring up in May 1847 35 miles north of New Braunfels, along the banks of the crystal-clear Llano River. The leading light of this project was the surgeon Dr Ferdinand Herff, a cousin of Meusebach’s. Herff was a joint founder of the Vierziger (‘Men of the Forties’), or Darmstadt Society of Forty, a fraternity of free-thinking intellectuals from the German universities of Giessen and Heidelberg and the Gewerbeschule (industrial school) of Darmstadt.

Greatly influenced by the utopian philosophers Étienne Cabet and Charles Fourier, the society had originally planned to set up a socialist commune in Wisconsin, until the Adelsverein offered them $12,000 in American gold, as well as livestock, equipment and provisions, if they agreed to bring 200 German families to Texas instead. The first and greatest batch of Vierziger immigrants arrived at Galveston on the St Pauli on 4 July 1847, after a voyage of much beer-swilling and musical merriment. Among them were two musicians, an engineer, a theologian, an agriculturalist, two architects, seven lawyers, four foresters and a lieutenant of artillery.¹⁷ One of the musicians was Heinrich Backofen, the son of a prominent maker of clarinets, flutes, oboes and basset horns from Darmstadt. He arrived in Texas with a ‘chest of instruments’ that would provide his young comrades with much entertainment. From Galveston they made their way overland to New Braunfels. It was a ‘comparitively uneventful’ trip, as seventeen-year-old Louis Reinhardt, one of the newcomers, recalled:

We had supplies of every kind imaginable; for instance, complete machinery for a mill, a number of barrels of whiskey, and a great many dogs of whom Morro was the largest, being three feet high. We came prepared to conquer the world … We camped on the prairie and sang, drank and enjoyed ourselves the whole way as only the German student knows how to do. We lived like the gods on Olympus.¹⁸

The Germans began work on their commune shortly after they arrived on site in early September 1847. At its heart was a thatched common house, described by Reinhardt as ‘a huge structure of forks and cross beams which we covered in reed-grass’. By Christmas 1847 they were also able to celebrate within an adjacent adobe house covered in 10,000 shingles carved from a single pecan tree. They named the new settlement ‘Bettina’, after Bettina von Arnim, a radical German writer, singer and pioneering feminist who was a close friend of the Meusebach family.

On the strength of Meusebach’s treaty with the Comanche, the commune at Bettina enjoyed perfectly cordial relations with the tribes that lived around them. Reinhardt was entertained by the Penateka’s linguistic ambitions:

They even tried to learn German from us in spite of the great difficulty they found in pronouncing some of the words. The word Pferd they could not say at all; Ross was easier; but best of all they liked Gaul, which seemed to afford them great amusement.¹⁹

Trust was further enhanced when Dr Herff performed a successful cataract operation on a chief, although there was a degree of awkward bewilderment when the chief presented the community with a Hispanic slave cook by way of thanks.

Daily life focused on music and song, but, as Reinhardt wrote, the happy commune ‘went to pieces like a bubble’ amid recurrent rows that some Vierziger members were pushing all the hard work onto others. Backofen, one of the richest members, was also fed up with being the butt of the commune’s jokes because, as he put it, he liked to ‘keep my belongings tidy’, suggesting that everyone else was somewhat messy.²⁰

Without any sensible leadership structure, the commune soon fell apart, and its members had scattered by the summer of 1848. No trace of the Bettina settlement can be found today, but several of its members went on to greater glory in the annals of the American West. Dr Herff became the first surgeon to use anaesthesia in Texas, and his colleague Jacob Kuechler pioneered the science of dendrochronology, by which natural events are dated by comparing successive annual growth rings of trees.²¹ Another former member was Gustav Schleicher, an engineer, who did much to promote the railways and who became a congressman. Backofen returned to Darmstadt to take over the family business and became the city’s finest woodwind-maker, earning particularly high praise for his basset horns.

Irrespective of Bettina’s collapse and the Adelsverein’s plunge into provisional bankruptcy, Meusebach continued to work as commissary-general until 20 July 1847, as promised. His last act was to dismiss Dr Schubbert from his position as director of Fredericksburg and to appoint Jean Jacques von Coll – another veteran of the Comanche Peace Council – in his place. However, Schubbert refused to comply before Meusebach’s term ended and he continued to cause such a headache that Hermann Spiess, the new commissary-general, nearly killed him in a duel that October. Schubbert, who was later revealed to be an impostor named Friedrich Strubberg, went on to run a medical practice in Arkansas before returning to Hesse, where he became an author.

As for Meusebach, he also returned to Germany, where his father had passed away in 1847. He is assumed to have called upon the family of his fiancée, Elizabeth von Hardenberg, who had died of typhoid fever in his absence. While in Germany, he broke his links with the Adelsverein, but he returned to America after he was elected a Texas senator in 1851. The following year the 40-year-old Senator Meusebach married 17-year-old Countess Agnes, the Austrian-born daughter of his friend Count Ernst of Coreth. Eleven children followed, although five did not survive to adulthood.

In 1869 a tornado ripped Meusebach’s house in New Braunfels apart, and a heavy beam smashed down on his leg. His limp was not improved when he was shot in the leg during a local vendetta between cattle rustlers in 1875. By that time he had settled on a 700-acre farm in Loyal Valley, 21 miles north of Fredericksburg, where he planted an orchard and a rose garden, and where he could enjoy a well-deserved bath in a Roman-style tub he constructed out of limestone and cement. When the house burnt down, in 1886, he built it up again. He died aged 85 on 27 May 1897, 50 years after he struck his extraordinary deal with the Comanche.

. . . . .

During the summer of 1847 Robert Neighbors, the Indian agent who met Meusebach at San Sabá, was caught up in the tale of Cynthia Ann Parker. She was a girl of about ten when she was seized by a Comanche band during a murderous raid on her family ranch a decade earlier. She had been presumed dead until Major Leonard H. Williams, another Indian agent, espied her while negotiating with the Comanche in 1846. Williams’s attempts to purchase her freedom had been firmly rejected by her warrior husband, Peta Nocona.

Shortly after he signed the treaty with the Penateka, Neighbors tracked Cynthia to a camp in Oklahoma, but he was to have no more success than Williams. On 18 November he wrote to the Commissioner for Indian Affairs, saying that he had

used all means in my power during the last summer to induce those Indians to bring her in by offering large rewards but I am assured by the friendly Comanche chiefs that I would have to use force to induce the party that has her to give her up.²²

It transpired that Cynthia now identified herself as a Comanche and had no desire to return to her people. Moreover, by the autumn of 1847 she may well have been carrying a child by Peta Nocona, a boy who would grow up to become Quanah Parker, the formidable leader of the Quahadi, another Comanche band.

As for Neighbors, he was destined to be murdered in 1859 by a Texan who disagreed with his partiality for the Comanche ways.

. . . .

The Penateka war chief Santa Anna ended 1847 by becoming the first member of his band to visit Washington, an experience that convinced him of the futility of resisting the United States. His submission appalled many of his fellow-Comanche, who already abhorred the Penateka for having negotiated and traded with the white men.

A tragic finale awaited Santa Anna when a dual epidemic of cholera and smallpox swept into Texas in late December 1849, carried west by the grubby, unwashed ‘Forty-niners’ of the Gold Rush, who cut a line through the north of Comancheria en route to the Californian goldfields. The cholera epidemic is thought to have wiped out half the Penateka, including Santa Anna, Old Owl and many other headmen, as well as half the Kiowa and huge numbers of Cheyenne. As the starving Irish people were discovering thousands of miles away, cholera is a hideous way to die: violent diarrhoea, muscle cramps, extreme dehydration, chronic vomiting, raging thirst, shrivelled skin and an irregular heartbeat.

Buffalo Hump was among the survivors, and he took up the reins of leadership; but his tactic was to turn south and launch a bloody raid on the luckless Mexicans who lived beyond the Río Grande. As the Penateka fractured, with many warriors joining other Comanche bands, Buffalo Hump led a dwindling number of followers living miserably between a small reservation on the Brazos River and a camp in the Wichita Mountains, where they were attacked by US troops, who killed a further 80 members. They finally fetched up on another reservation in Oklahoma, where the world-weary Buffalo Hump died in 1870.

The German colonists fared considerably better, and today there are more than three million Texans who consider themselves at least part-German.

February

THE OPIUM KING & THE APOSTLE OF TEMPERANCE

Look out across the sea that guards thy emerald shore

A ship of war is bound for thee, but with no warlike stores

She goes not forth to deal out death but bears new life to thee.

—Samuel Lover, ‘The War Ship of Peace’

Holy Cross Cathedral, Boston, United States

Sunday 7 February 1847

At first there was a terrible silence as the impact of the bishop’s words registered. Then came the weeping and the growing chant of prayer.¹ It was just over two weeks since John Fitzpatrick, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Boston, heard the shocking news: the Hibernia, a packet ship from Liverpool, had steamed into Boston with grim tales of a devastating famine that had engulfed all of Ireland and had already killed entire communities. The British government had quite clearly lost control.

John Fitzpatrick, the Roman Catholic bishop of Boston, now counselled his congregation that it is

vain and idle at a time like this, to discuss the causes to which such calamities may be traced. It is vain and idle to discuss of the duties of Parliament and of landlords, and debate whether it is the will or the power that is wanting in them to afford relief. In the meantime, men that are our brethren walk the streets like spectres, crawl over the ground like worms, and die because they have no food … Let us arise and we shall not be alone; for throughout this vast country all those who love the faith, and all those who love that country of which the cruel sufferings may be ascribed to her inviolable attachment to the faith, and all those whose hearts are warmed by the fire of divine charity, will be at our side; all will act in unison with us.²

The tremendous outpouring of emotion in Boston was not surprising, given that the city’s Irish-born population already numbered 30,000 at the start of 1847. Many were new arrivals, piled up in disease-riddled ‘rookeries’ along the Boston waterfront, where, between 1841 and 1845, 61 per cent of children under five died, generally of smallpox, tuberculosis and cholera. As the Boston writer Lemuel Shattuck observed, the children of some Irish neighbourhoods ‘seem literally born to die’.³

Perhaps anxious to halt the further exodus of Irish people to Boston, the city bosses were to invest considerable expense and time in their efforts to relieve the distress in Ireland. It was not enough, but what was achieved must nonetheless stand as a fine testament to the might of compassion, and it did much to strengthen the bond between Boston and Ireland that continues to the present day. Bishop Fitzpatrick is to be credited with seizing the initiative, launching the Relief Association for Ireland shortly after his powerful sermon at the Holy Cross Cathedral. With funds coming in from both Protestant and Catholic donors throughout New England, the association sent a preliminary $20,000 to the Archbishop of Armagh at the end of February, with a recommendation that the four Catholic archbishops in Ireland distribute the money as they saw fit, but, commendably, ‘without distinction of creed’.⁴ By the close of June the association had sent a further $130,000 across the Atlantic.⁵

However, the most remarkable donation from Boston was to come by way of Ben Forbes, a merchant who made his fortune selling opium to the Chinese and whose subsequent