Texas by James A. Michener
So Ernst had started studying roofs, and although there were few in Hardwork of thatch, for this part of Texas did not produce the necessary low shrubs, there were some houses whose owners tried to utilize sod roofing; it was too heavy and too subject to moisture penetration. He saw only one house that had half-moon tiles for its roof, and he was most favorably impressed, but these had been hauled north years ago from Saltillo and could not be duplicated in Hardwork.
Some roofs, like that on the slave hut, were disgraceful and almost a waste of time; the best they did was to keep out the sun during the blazing summers. To rain they were small impediment. So the more he studied, the more satisfied he became that his father was right, and he told his family: ‘I think I could earn a good living from cypress shakes.’ When he explained how simple the required tools were and how easily he could master their use, the Allerkamps agreed that he should make the effort. With saw, froe and mallet to flake off the shingles, he moved about the countryside, searching for cypress trees of proper size and testing junipers also, and as he went he stopped in villages and at crossroads to assure the settlers that he could provide them with the best roofs they had ever known.
The more Ernst worked with his shingles, the more clear it became to his father that what the various German settlements really needed was a sawmill. Always a reflective man, he mused: Civilization in a frontier like this is chronicled twice. The date of the first gristmill, so that the people in the houses can eat. The date of the first sawmill, so that proper houses can be built. But to have a sawmill required the importation of expensive equipment from centers like Cincinnati or New Orleans, and then the diversion of some stream or river to provide the waterpower to turn the great wheels that ran the heavy saws.
The Allerkamps had no money for machinery, but as the months passed they were acquiring a reputation for working hard and honoring their promises, so when in the middle of the first year Ludwig came forward with a proposal, his neighbors listened: ‘Our family has no money, but we do have men who can work. If you others band together, send a deposit to Cincinnati, and buy the saws and wheel, my boys and I will dig the millrace and build the housing.’
It was a deal, and while the heavy equipment made its way slowly down the Mississippi, the Allerkamps dug the footing for the sawmill building, erected the stone walls, and set the pits in which the great saws would move slowly up and down, producing the planks with which this section of Texas would be built. When the housing was finished, they turned to the laborious task of digging the millrace along which the water from the nearby stream would run on its way to turning the big wheel that would move the saws.
It was work of such strenuous effort that once Emil joked: ‘I wish we had those slaves,’ and this callous remark caused his father to assemble his family on Sunday for a sharp lesson in civilization: ‘It’s only natural for someone doing hard work, like digging a millrace, to wish that he could have slaves to do it while he rested. You spoke sense, Emil, when you said that, but we find in history that if a man does the work himself, he gets treble benefits from it. He does it better. He does it quicker. And in doing it, he amasses capital which enables him to finance additional tasks. We learn by doing.’
The Allerkamp women never idled while their men labored; Thekla and Franziska made all the clothes worn by the family, and although they purchased a little cloth, releasing their hoarded money in a most miserly way, for the most part, they spun cotton and wove their own. Depending on the time of year, they always had something to sell to strangers: extra cloth, eggs, deer and bear meat; they also sewed the ubiquitous sunbonnets that became the mark of the Texas woman, and it seemed to Ludwig that half the women in the area wore sunbonnets made by his wife and daughter.
Ernst had been home several weeks following his duty along the Nueces before Franziska found a way to ask about Otto Macnab without using his name or betraying her interest in him: ‘Did you fight alone, Ernst?’
‘No, we fought as a company. Captain Garner.’
‘Did you pair off, each caring for the other?’
Since Ernst had been striving to forget some of the things he had seen, he found this questioning distressful. Reluctantly he replied: ‘If a man fell, we all looked after him.’
‘Did your company do well? I mean, were all the men responsible?’
‘Dirty work, but we were powerful.’
‘Did you have a special companion?’
‘No.’
‘Did the Rangers from Xavier County perform well?’ She used a classical kind of speech, learned from her memorization of Schiller and Goethe, and tried to speak in complete sentences.
‘We did. That short fellow you met, Otto Macnab …’
The magical name had been spoken, and without changing her expression in any way, with her face still turned to the spinning wheel where the cotton transformed itself into thread, she asked: ‘Was he brave?’
‘Well now …’ He was still reluctant to speak.
‘What?’ she asked softly.
‘Brave he was. Blue eyes hard as flint.’
‘He sounds very brave.’
‘He was. But …’
‘What?’
Memory of a confusing incident came flooding back, and now he wanted to speak: ‘We were patrolling north of the Nueces where the Mexican bandits had been raiding, and we came upon a white woman whose husband had been slain. I think she was out of her mind. Anyway, we left one of the men to take her to Victoria while we rode on. At a gallop we overtook three Mexican men. I thought they were farmers, maybe. They didn’t look criminal. But this Otto Macnab rode right up to them and started firing.’
He stopped, and after a while his sister asked very carefully: ‘You mean, the three Mexicans had no guns?’
He shook his head and could say no more, leaving his sister with the lonely problem of sorting out what had happened and what it signified.
When the Hardwork sawmill came into operation, civilization in Xavier County took a giant leap forward, because now the heads of families could drive their oxcarts to the mill, load up with beautifully sawn timbers—two hundred produced in the time it took two men to saw one in a hand pit—and build houses of real substance. Some of the most beautiful farmhouses in this part of Texas were built with that first flood of Hardwork timber. The German carpenters did not like the rather sprawled-out and formless dog-run of the Georgia and Carolina settlers; they preferred the compact, well-designed two-story house, with cedar or cypress shingles, neat board siding, stone fireplace and chimney at each end, and a trim small porch to provide protection against rain and sun.
Earlier settlers who had lived in Texas for some years warned the Germans: ‘Without the dog-run to provide ventilation, you’re going to be very hot in summer,’ but the stubborn Germans replied: ‘We can stand a little heat in exchange for a beautiful house.’ Of course, when the summer of 1844 produced a chain of forty days when the thermometer hovered above the hundred-degree mark, the Germans in their tight, compact houses did suffer, but they made no complaint; they simply lay in bed almost nude, sweated inordinately, and rose in the morning gasping for the fresh air which circulated so easily through the dog-runs. Summer in Texas, they were discovering, could be a blast straight out of hell, untempered by any passage over snowy mountains or cooling oceans. Said one old-timer: ‘Come July, the devil stokes his furnaces real high, opens the draft, sends the flames to Texas so he can set up headquarters here in August and September.’
During this time of intense heat the Germans did have a respite which they enjoyed immensely, for a messenger rode in from the new settlement at a place called Lion Creek with news that there was to be an informal two-day Sängerfest to which all Germans living nearby were invited.
Any German Sängerfest, even a limited one like this, was a glorious affair, with almost every man in the community participating, as soloists if their voices were exceptional, as part of the humming chorus if obviously inadequate, and as an honorable par
Of a hundred typical German men, at least ninety-seven, and perhaps even ninety-nine, would marry German women: ‘It keeps the bloodlines clean. It keeps out the lesser strains.’ It was therefore inevitable that when an industrious, attractive girl like Franziska appeared at a Sängerfest, her dress beautifully embroidered by her own hand, her hair in two neat braids with flowers plaited into the ends, she must attract attention and proposals from the hungry young men. Her father treated each approach with dignity, telling the swain that Franziska was too young to be thinking of such things, but his wife gave the young fellows hope that these conditions might change within the year. Franziska herself said nothing, did nothing. She had not at this time ever been kissed by a man, not even by her father or her brothers, and she felt no desire to be kissed by anyone at the festival.
But if she had never been kissed, and in this respect she resembled many reserved German girls of that time, she did experience a rich emotional life, as revealed in her diary:
I shall hide this book even more carefully after today, because I must confide to it a thrilling event in my life. I do believe I have fallen in love. Since I cannot discuss this with anyone, I cannot be sure, but there is a young man, from Ireland I think, who once stopped by our house and who has all the qualities I would seek in a husband. He is handsome, though smaller than my brothers, and he has the frankest blue eyes. Ernst assures me that he is brave in battle with brigands, and I learned from Herr Metzdorf that he owns a substantial property. When shall I meet him? And what shall I say to him when we do meet? These questions are important, because I do honestly believe that one day I shall marry him, even if he is a Catholic. What an amazing thing to write!
Her behavior was not exceptional in these years, for the diaries of various German girls would reveal instances in which young women attended Sängerfests year after year, always knowing which of the young men there they would ultimately marry, but never would the two young people speak. They would look, and remember, and fifty years later they would confess: ‘I knew I loved him’ or perhaps ‘I loved her from that first moment.’ Germans could bide their time.
The Sängerfest this year provided two grand days of German singing, German poetry and German food, and not even the heavy rains that came at the close of the second day diminished the ardor of these good people who were keeping alive the traditions of the homeland which had treated them so badly but which still commanded their memories. Indeed, the rain became so heavy that most of the visitors from Hardwork had to lay over an extra day, and when they did set forth for home they found that what had been little streams during the trip to Lion Creek were now surging torrents, so they were forced to waste a fourth day till the floods subsided.
As they neared their house in Hardwork, Hugo Metzdorf, his face ashen, came to greet them, and without speaking, thrust into Ludwig’s hand a letter just received from Grenzler. When Ludwig finished reading, he passed it dumbly to his wife, who studied it, then grasped Metzdorf’s hand and uttered a low sigh: ‘Ach, mein Gott!’
The letter said that the secret police had arrested Alois Metzdorf, charged him with treason and thrown him in jail, where he had hanged himself.
Unable to speak to either Metzdorf or his wife, Ludwig walked unsteadily to a rock, sat down and covered his face, overwhelmed by the tragedy. Alois, the dreamer, the one who had really wanted to come to Texas, the man who had given him the certificates. Ludwig had shaken hands with him on the pledge: ‘Alois, I’ll hold the best fields for you … till you come.’ He retched, for a horrible suspicion assailed him: ‘Alois Metzdorf would never commit suicide. Visions of freedom kept that man alive. My God! They hanged him in his cell.’
His hands fell to his lap, and when Thekla whispered: ‘Ludwig, we must go,’ he was unable to move. Stricken by grief over the death of his old friend, he could only sit there and mumble acid verses of Heine. In the depth of his despair, and in his sorrow for the German people, he understood as fully as any man might the meaning of emigration, its terrors, its relief, and the wonder of finding after long struggle a new life in a new land. Had he been invited at that moment to occupy a castle in the Margravate or any other German principality, he would have refused. He was in Texas and he loved every rolling hill, every relentless heat-filled day.
In a rush of enthusiasm like none he had known before, he decided that the Allerkamps must immediately utilize their certificates, and with the aid of a surveyor, stake out their own farm. To their relief, a man said to be an expert in such matters arrived at this crucial time to inform them that he knew a surveyor who would locate land for them if their papers were in order. When the certificates were presented, he said: ‘Everything fine. Your land is on the way.’
When they met the surveyor, a thin small man from Alabama who chewed grass stems, he laid the situation honestly before them: ‘We find the land together. We mark it off together. I build three-foot piles of earth and rock at each corner, and then you stand in the middle and dance up and down, shout to the four winds, and fire a gun two or three times to inform the world that this is now your land. For my fee I get one-third, so since you have certificates for six parcels, I’ll just take these two and you have yourself two thousand acres, more or less.’
It seemed so simple, with the surveyor assuring them there would be no other costs, that the Allerkamps in family session agreed, and Ludwig said when the deal was closed: ‘We’ll have our own land. We’ll work for ourselves.’ They further agreed that they would apply the four certificates they still retained to some choice land in the northern part of Xavier County, not on the Brazos, for that was all taken, but not too far inland. Franziska was quietly excited when she realized that the land her father was speaking of would place her close to where Otto Macnab had his property; they had not yet spoken, but she was decidedly interested in being near him.
Unfortunately, the Alabama surveyor was a scoundrel. Immediately after obtaining possession of the Allerkamp entitlement of a thousand acres, he sold it to another man and was never seen again in that part of Texas. When Ludwig and his son Ernst tried to recover their certificate, the buyer went before Judge Phinizy and proved that he had obtained it not from the Alabama surveyor, because had he received stolen goods he would have to return them, but as a finder’s fee from Allerkamp direct, in which case the land pertaining to the certificate was certainly his.
When Ludwig heard this decision, typical of hundreds then being handed down by the Texas courts against immigrants and Mexicans, he was so outraged that he could not for several days even discuss his indignation with his family, but when his fury subsided he assembled them: ‘There is much wrong with Texas. The way they treat Indians, the way they own slaves, the way they allow a man like that to steal from everyone. But there is also much that is right; our neighbors represent that goodness. They’re still willing to provide us food for the next six months while I study and find our land. I’m going to be a surveyor, and an honest one.’
With that firm decision as a rocklike base, he took out his trigonometry book, associated himself with a man from Mississippi who had mastered Spanish land law, and began the laborious study of varas, cordeles, labors and leagues. ‘A vara;’ he told his family, ‘is exactly thirty-three point thirty-three inches, which means that it’s just short of a yard. Texas system, seventeen hundred and sixty yards to the mile. Spanish system, nineteen hundred and one varas to the mile.’ He purchased a surveyor’s chain of twenty varas and accompanied his
On one prolonged survey he was led to a river far to the west, the Pedernales it was called, the River of Flints, and he vowed that when he had his own credentials as a surveyor, he would return to the Pedernales and stake out his claim on the two thousand acres to which he was entitled, paying himself the surveying fee, and then buy as much more as he could afford. He said nothing of this to the man from Mississippi, lest he spread the news that his German helper had found a paradise among the rolling hills and green forests of the west.
For a long period Captain Garner’s company of Rangers received no call to duty, because with the Cherokee expelled and the Comanche pushed back from Austin, the only recurring trouble spot was along the Nueces River, and this contested region fell strangely inactive.
‘What’s your friend Garza doing down there?’ Garner asked Otto when they met in Campbell.
‘Up to no good, you can be sure of that.’
‘Government wants me to make a scout. But it has funds for only three Rangers.’
‘I’ll go without pay. I go crazy just sitting around.’
‘Would you ride down and see if that Allerkamp fellow cares to come along?’
With an enthusiasm which almost betrayed his real purpose, Otto cried: ‘Hey, I’d like to do that,’ and it was in this way that he saw Franziska for the second time. As before, he remained on his horse, instructing Ernst as to where they would meet, and as he had hoped, the Allerkamp girl stood by the door, watching him intently. She was now a petite, handsome sixteen-year-old young miss whose flaxen hair was wound about her head. Again, neither she nor Otto spoke, but she believed that he was somewhat taller than before and he saw her as infinitely more beautiful.