Ghost Town on the Gulf

Once there was a town on the Texas Gulf Coast, which during its hey-day— which lasted barely a half-century from start to finish—rivaled Galveston, a hundred and fifty miles east. It started as a stretch of beach along Matagorda Bay called Indian Point, and selected for no other reason than it was not Galveston by a German nobleman with plans to settle a large colony of German immigrants. Prince Karl Solms-Braunfels was a leading light of what was called the Mainzer Adelsverein; a company of well-meaning nobles whose ambitions exceeded their business sense at least three to one. They had secured— or thought they had secured — a large tract of land between the Llano and Colorado rivers approximately a hundred miles west of Austin, but the truth of it was, all they had secured was the right to induce people to come and settle on it. So many settlers farming so many acres, and the backers of the Adelsverein would profit through being entitled to so many acres for themselves.

That this tract of land was unfit for traditional farming, and moreover was the stomping grounds of the Comanche and Apache tribes, peoples not generally noted in the 19th century for devotion to multi-cultural tolerance and desire to live in peace with their neighbors seems to have been overlooked in all the excitement. These factors seem to have struck Prince Karl as a mere bagatelle, an afterthought, a petty little detail that other people would take care of. The Adelsverein would earn a tidy profit by inducing people to settle on such lands as they held a license for, so no fair for other entrepreneurs to poach their immigrants, as they passed through the fleshpots of Galveston. With a fair bit of the old Teutonic spirit of organization, Prince Karl decided that the Adelsverein settlers, who had signed contracts, and sailed on Adelsverein chartered-ships would not be contaminated by crass mercantile interests or distractions. Best to come straight off the trans-Atlantic transport, through a port of his own choosing, comfortably close to the most direct route north, and the way-station he had himself established to feed settlers into the Adelsverein land grant… and so it was, that his choice fell on Indian Point, soon to be christened “Karlshaven”.

Three years later, it was called Indianola, the major deep-water port and entry-point for thousands of European immigrants to Texas, as well as a couple of shipments of camels (that is another story entirely). Indianola was also the major port for supplying… among other concerns, the US Army in the West. A great road, called the Cart Road ran towards San Antonio, and south of the contentious border, to Chihuahua, Mexico supplying the interior mercantile needs of two nations . By the mid 1850s, the town relocated to a location slightly lower in elevation, but one which would let it take advantage of deeper water and a navigation route which would favor major maritime traffic. The Morgan Lines established regular service to Indianola, which boasted two long wharves, with the Morgan ticket-office at the very end of one of them. It was called the “Queen City of the West”, shipping— among other things— rice to Europe. In the cattle glut after the Civil War, mercantile interests also experimented with shipping refrigerated beef and canned oysters. For a few decades, Indianola gave Galveston and New Orleans a run for the money. It changed hands a couple times during the Civil War, when life turned out to be a lot more interesting than most inhabitants of Texas had bargained for. Upon the end of that unpleasantness, Indianola looked fair to taking a rightful place in the list of great ports of the world.

But in September of 1875,  a great hurricane slammed Indianola, and it’s low-laying situation left it vulnerable to storm surge. All the water piled up in the bayous in back of the town, and when the  first edge of the storm passed over, it all rushed forth, carrying a large portion of the lower town into Matagorda Bay. Still, there were enough left standing on higher ground, and it was a fine deep-water port and a good strategic location; not something to be casually abandoned. The city stalwarts rebuilt in the spirit of optimism. Eleven years later, Indianola was slammed again, by another massive hurricane. To add to the horror of the second storm strike,  at the very height of the hurricane, an upset oil lamp set fire to the structure it was in and a number of people taking shelter in that building were horribly burned to death. Several nearby structures also burned. The rebuilt town was obliterated; the remnants of those long docks built for the Morgan Lines are still lying at the bottom of the bay. The city fathers sadly accepted the inevitable. There is still a bit of Indianola left; a few summer homes on very tall stilts, but mostly monuments and relics, bottles and doll heads, doorknobs and Minie balls, sad tattered reminders of what was once the Queen City of the West. Galveston inherited that place, with energy and enthusiasm,  but only for a couple of decades, until that city itself took the full force of another hurricane, after the turn of the new century.

Indianola features rather prominently the “Adelsverein Trilogy” – since the Steinmetz and Richter families are among those left to fend for themselves on the bare shell-sand shore in Book One.  In Book Two, it is the city where Hansi Richter and his sister-in-law, Magda Vogel Becker come to purchase goods for the general store that they have opened, following the end of the Civil War.  In the final volume, it is the prosperous city from which they depart on a visit to Germany -  thirty years after arriving as nearly penniless immigrants.

One amusing thing I discovered, in doing research on life and times in 19th century Texas – by the 1850s, Indianola had a huge ice-house, to store ice shipped from New England in specially-built ships… and it was possible to enjoy iced drinks and ice-cream, well before the Civil War. Imagine that – out on the frontier, people ate salt-pork and beans, cooked over a wood fire while dodging Indian arrows… and three hundred miles away, you could sit in an ice-cream parlor, and sip cold lemonade.

Kitchen Matters – Shoo Fly Pie

I made this dessert – which in the Pennsylvania Dutch country (which isn’t Dutch but actually a corruption of Deutch – or German) can be eaten at breakfast – for my English-Greek neighbors, when I was stationed in Greece in the early 1980′s. They were mystified on several levels, as it is not really a pie, although it is baked in a pastry crust, and can be baked until it is sort of a cake, or left with a soggy center like a pudding. It also does not contain flies. They were also baffled about who or what, exactly, were the Amish, although that was explained very neatly by release of the movie Witness at about that time.

Shoo-Fly Pie

1  8-inch unbaked pie crust, chilled or pre-made or from scratch.

Combine: 1 1/2 cup flour, with 1/2 brown sugar, a pinch of salt, 1/4 teasp ginger, 1/4 teasp nutmeg, and 1/4 cup soft butter. Rub together with your hands until it resembles soft crumbs.

Combine in another bowl: 1/2 teasp baking soda, 1/2 cup molassas, 1/2 boiling water. (the mixture will foam up, slightly) Add to it 2/3rds of the crumb mixture and pour into the pie shell. Top with remaining crumb mixture.

Bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes, or less if you like it sort of pudding-soggy in the middle.

The Little House Books

A couple of weeks ago, when putting together a short story for an anthology of western stories, I was reminded yet again again of my own grade-school devotion to Laura Ingalls Wilders’ Little House books. My heroine in the short story is a thirteen year old girl, in the Texas Hill country during the Civil War, taking the first few steps toward being a responsible adult, in caring for her younger sister and friends, and bearing a warning to other households in the tiny settlement where she lives about the depredations of the ‘hanging band’, a pro-Confederate lynch mob. Much of the background activities in the story – cutting wood, making soap over an open fire – are all drawn from my memories of reading the Little House books. I have all of them, of course, from the hard-bound uniform editions that were published in the 1960ies, with Garth Williams’ illustrations. All of mine are sadly battered, and minus the dust jackets, but with flyleaf inscriptions in Mom’s handwriting; a present to me on my 8th birthday, a Christmas present in 1964, or 1965. Over five or six years, I acquired them one and two at a time, and read them avidly, often in one sitting. “Little Town on the Prairie” was the first, and is the most completely tattered. I think I got “The Long Winter” and “These Happy Golden Years” next, at one fell swoop for my birthday, and then Mom and Dad filled out the collection with “Farmer Boy” and the others.

Mom had also been a fan. The books were originally published when she was in grade school, and her class had written a group fan letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was still then living, and she had sent them a very cordial reply, befitting a very proper Victorian school teacher. Later on, Mom tried emulating Ma, in being always calm and serene no matter what the situation, with mixed success as that degree of passive Victorian “Angel in the House” serenity was very much against her nature to begin with.

I read them out of sequence, as I received them as presents, and afterwards over and over and over again. I still hold the books (but not the TV series, which was marred by the constraints imposed by a weekly need for drama and irredeemable presentism) in considerable affection. Llooking back now,  though, one does wonder a little bit about Pa. Even allowing for Mrs. Wilder’s nostalgic affections, how on earth could a man make a bust of farming in Minnesota, for pete’s sake? And rushing out to stake a claim in a territory not yet open for settlement, and which turned out not to be, after all? It is not even certain that the books were entirely of her own writing, either. The Little House books are so different, much more immediate in the telling, and deft in the descriptions and characterization than those writings known absolutely to be by Mrs. Wilder. That was plain to me as soon as I had a chance to compare and contrast— say, by high school. As soon as the theory was raised by her biographer, I thought it quite likely that Rose Wilder Lane, a professional writer of long experience, had polished, added to and edited her mother’s memoir.

The books spoke to us, to Mom and I both. After all, when they were first published, the details of lives on the frontier in the 1870ies were in the living memory of grandparents, and even parents; Granny Jessie had been raised on a farm, where horses provided the main power, when pigs were slaughtered in the fall, for meat to last the winter, and it was expected that a housewife would make her own clothes and her own jam, and for the family to make their own music and entertainment of an evening. Wood burning stoves, kerosene lanterns and outhouses were, and are still a part of life in many parts of the country. My own Dad fixed things, and built things, just like Pa. Mom read to us, and made our clothes, and we sang long folksongs together— just like the Ingals family did.

And even though they had lived in what was always seen as the Old West (and everything I ever knew about blizzards and the dangerous attraction of pump handles in mid winter, I learned from the books) this was an Old West that was not the wild and wooly frontier of so much popular culture: although there were brief encounters with elements that are supposed to be typical (cattle drives, Indians, lawlessness and violence) most of the narrative is concerned with the prosaic business of making a life for a family, in the face of dangers more natural than man-made; blizzards, prairie fires, tornadoes, drought and plagues of grasshoppers, malaria and scarlet fever. Oh, and the problem of being snubbed at school by the girls with nicer clothes, and trying to keep a surprise Christmas present a secret, in a small house.

The Little House books still speak to us, because in that American way, they are profoundly optimistic. The common message running through all the books is that of being able to cope with whatever was set in your way, no matter how large or small: You yourself, your family, with your friends, and the community could do what needed to be done to resolve the problem, no matter if it was a bad-tempered teacher picking on your little sister, or the entire town snowed in and near starvation. There was a solution, sometimes a hard, and risky solution, requiring courage and daring— but there was a solution, and it could be accomplished. This is a very empowering message, which I think explains the enduring appeal.

The Anti-Lily Bart – Lizzie Johnson Williams

I have always had the sneaking feeling that circumstances peculiar to the Western frontier significantly enabled the successful American struggle for female suffrage. The strangling hand of Victorian standards for feminine conduct and propriety, which firmly insisted that “ladies were not supposed to be interested in such vulgar doings as business and politics” was just not able to reach as far or grip so firmly. There was simply no earthly way for a woman traveling in a wagon along the Platte River, pushing a hand-cart to Salt Lake City, living in a California gold-rush tent city, or a log house on the Texas frontier to achieve the same degree of sheltered helplessness thought appropriate by the standard-bearers of High Victorian culture. It was impossible to be exclusively the angel of the home and hearth, when the hearth was a campfire on the prairie and anything from a stampeding buffalo herd, a plague of locusts or a Comanche war party could wander in at any time.

Life on the frontier was too close to a struggle for bare survival at the best of times. No place there for passengers, no room for the passive and trimly corseted lady to sit with her hands folded and abide by the standards of Boston and Eaton Place. The frontier was a hard place, the work unrelenting, but I have often wondered if some women might have found this liberation from the stifling expectations of the era quite exhilarating. I have also wondered if the men of the West – who had quite enough on their plates already, in just surviving -  didn’t find it a little bit of a relief, to deal with a woman who was strong and competent and could hold up her end, rather a bundle of simpering, fluttering helplessness in crinoline. Curiously, the very first American female law officer was a westerner. The first few licensed female doctors gravitated to the frontier west, where the relative rarity of medical talent made for a less picky clientele and the first state to grant women the right to vote was Wyoming… in 1869.  When it came right down to it, the struggle for women to gain the right to vote did not meet the fierce resistance in America as it did in Britain. Perhaps the concept did not rattle the masculine cage in Cheyenne quite as violently as it did in Westminster, or arouse a backlash anywhere near as vicious;  curious, since the American west is supposed to be the high holy of aggressive masculinity.

But someone like Lizzie Johnson could have had the life and career that she did, nowhere else. She was born in Missouri in 1840, and came to Texas with her parents six years later. Her father, Thomas Jefferson Johnson was a schoolteacher and devout Presbyterian, who brought his growing family to Texas. Eventually he set up a boarding school in Hayes County, south of Austin and some distance from San Marcos, which drew pupils from the area – and astonishingly, a fair number from other Southern states. Lizzie’s father, known as the Professor had originally intended it to be a boys school but so many girls applied that it morphed into a coeducational secondary school. The school prospered, and Lizzie (along with her brothers and sisters) taught classes – including bookkeeping. Lizzie turned out to be particularly gifted at mathematics.

This talent would have an unexpected bearing on her later career, which began to blossom in the decade following the Civil War. She taught school in a couple of small towns near Austin before opening her own primary school there in 1873; in a two story house on property she had purchased in her own name. She did more than teach school, though: complaining of boredom with the same old teaching routine and social affairs in letters to her brother, she had begun to write popular fiction under various pen names for the weekly Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper… and she also did bookkeeping. Her brother John had kept the books for the Day brothers, who had extensive ranching interests in Hays County, and were old neighbors of the Johnson family. There were seven Day brothers; inevitably they were known as the “Weeks”. John never entirely recovered from battlefield injuries incurred during his service as a soldier, and when he died, Lizzie took over in his stead. Her father had kept a small herd of cattle to supplement his income from the school, and Lizzie was now in possession of an income of her own, which she could invest in whatever she chose.

And she chose to invest in real estate, and in cattle, about which she became startlingly knowledgeable, for a maiden lady schoolteacher. By the time she opened her own school; she had registered her own brand, owned land and cattle, and was sending substantial herds north to the Kansas railheads. Her life seems astonishingly modern, the farthest thing imaginable from the repressed and constrained fictional women in contemporary novels by serious writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton. She worked at what pleased and rewarded her, and no one – not her father or other male relative had anything to say about her household, her income, and her considerable business interests. Well, her surviving brothers – all younger – might have had a lot to say, but apparently little enthusiasm for attempting any means of control over a formidable woman like Lizzie.

I think of her as the anti-Lily Bart. Another astonishingly modern touch – she married well beyond the age that a woman was expected to have committed in matrimony, and it was not for lack of serious suitors. For Lizzie was – to judge from contemporary formal daguerreotype portraits of her, in which the length of film exposure made any facial expression except the kind you could hold for some length of time out of the question – a rather attractive woman. Victorian standards of beauty differed considerably from the modern one, admittedly; they favored round-faced blondes, and Lizzie was dark-haired and looked rather like a 19th century Demi Moore. She was no frump, either, but dressed elegantly and in the latest fashion. She was courted assiduously over several years by one of the Day brothers and a number of other prosperous men, every one of whom knew her as a woman of property… and moreover, exactly how she came by it. Brains, beauty and business sense apparently had considerable allure.

At the age of 39, this frontier Kate married her Petruchio. He was a handsome and raffish widower with several children, named Hezekiah Williams. Although a retired Baptist preacher, and a moderately unsuccessful rancher, he was also a bit of a gambler and drinker. Sensibly, Lizzie married him with the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement in place. She would control her own property acquired before the marriage, as well as anything she acquired in her own name after it.

It seems that Lizzie Johnson Williams chose as well in her marriage as she did everything else, for they maintained a devoted and happily competitive relationship, both in business and in their personal life for thirty-five years. They went up the cattle trail to the northern railheads three times, Lizzie and Hezekiah each with a separate herd; it is thought that Lizzie was the only woman rancher who trailed cattle that she herself owned wholly, in the post-war cattle boom. When she died in 1924, ten years after Hezekiah, her neighbors were astonished to find out that she owned property worth a quarter of a million dollars. She had lived in a modest, not to mention miserly style since the death of her husband.   She did not marry into money, or inherit through her family; every dollar of her estate she had earned herself, by teaching, writing and bookkeeping, and parlaying those earnings into land and cattle investments, using her own best judgement. A thuroughly modern woman, a hundred years before such women were more the norm.