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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806127705 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 10/28/1995 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 466 |
| Sales rank: | 720,896 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.08(d) |
About the Author
Dan Thrapp, who was a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, was a foreign correspondent for the United Press in Argentina, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom and, for a number of years, an editor for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote extensively on the West. He books include Victorio and the Mimbres Apaches, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Donald E. Worcester, (1915-2003) was a native of Tempe, Arizona and Professor of History in Texas Christian University. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a student of Herbert E. Bolton. He wrote extensively on the Spaniards of the New World, as well as Latin American and North American civilization.
Read an Excerpt
Al Sieber
Chief of Scouts
By Dan L. Thrapp
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 1964 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-2770-5
CHAPTER 1
The Immigrant
Spring comes early to the valley of the Kraich River, sometimes even by late February, for the winters are mild and short along this chaste tributary of the Upper Rhine. But the February of 1844 was an exception, a wild and stormy month with snow and winds whipping the undistinguished hamlet of Mingolsheim. It was a fitting time for the arrival of Albert Sieber, whose career was to prove as turbulent as the current weather, although his birth in the month of February came only by grace of leap year; he was born on the twenty-ninth.
Albert's father, Johann Sieber, "citizen, miller and farmer," as the dim old parish records put it (since the "miller" is sometimes omitted, one may conclude that he was more a farmer than anything else), and his mother, Katherina, already had eight children, seven of whom still lived. There was Johann, the third generation to bear that name, born at Rothenburg on February 14, 1823, and, though still single, by this time a young adult with his mind full of strange political notions. And Barbara, first to be born at Mingolsheim, she and her twin sister, who had died at birth, arriving August 25, 1824; and Margarete, also called Gretchen, born October 1, 1829; and Peter, December 9, 1832; and Theresia, sometimes called Theresa, born November 13, 1834. The year 1838 had been full, with the arrival of Rudolph on January 27 and his sister Magdalena, nicknamed Lena, on November 5.
Albert Sieber was born into a land of almost idyllic beauty and gentleness, although vagrant whisps of unrest had already appeared on the political horizon. As yet, however, they had done little to dilute the sturdy Rhineland customs which grew from that region's rich traditions and lent it strength. Such a tradition, for example, was that of fine marksmanship, tested each Whitmonday at the Schiitzenfest, when the villages' expert shots fired at a wooden bird until they had destroyed it, the winner being he who blasted down the final bit of wood. Albert, by the time he left the country, was far too young ever to have taken part in such a contest, but the tradition of the worth of shooting skill must have been imparted to him—and absorbed.
In 1845, the year after Albert was born, his father died. The impact of that tragedy was mitigated, however, by the sturdy qualities of his mother, who must have been a remarkable woman. She saw her large brood through vicissitudes scarcely imaginable to our generation. No doubt she received assistance from relatives and the older children, but the problems she faced must often have seemed virtually insurmountable to her, and yet she triumphed over them all.
Almost everyone in the Rhineland knew people who had emigrated abroad, and many had relatives who had done so; the Siebers probably were no exception. They must have read and reread the occasional letters they received from those who had settled in unpronounceable Pennsylvania, telling of that far-off country, its beauties, its opportunities, its freedom. Why, some letters said, you didn't even have to pay taxes in America!
The urge for freedom, the notion that something better than the paternalistic feudalism of the Rhineland could be forged, was beginning in these years to take hold in Baden, the Palatinate, and other parts of Germany and Austria. Students and intellectuals became restless and talked of liberty; from them the feeling spread to the smallest hamlets. Among those deeply affected was Johann, Albert's oldest brother, who marked his twenty-fifth birthday early in 1848. He joined the burgeoning movement.
Toward the end of February, the French deposed Louis Philippe, proclaiming the Second Republic, and the fiery young men of the Rhine guessed, rightly, that the fever of republicanism would burn eastward. The Marseillaise became the hymn of liberty for much of Europe. There was ferment at Cologne, demonstrations at Coblenz, Dusseldorf, Aachen, and other Rhine towns. In Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, and elsewhere the revolutionary spirit "burst forth like a prairie fire." At Vienna, blood flowed in the streets. Commotions occurred in Prussia. Fighting broke out, the most severe of it occurring in Baden and culminating at Rastatt Fortress, where the Forty-eighters made their last stand and were beaten.
Yet their campaign was not entirely futile. "Years of political reaction and national humiliation followed in which all that the men of 1848 had stood for seemed utterly lost," wrote Carl Schurz, but eventually Bismarck became prime minister and through him there came about German unity and a national parliament. "Thus ... a great and important part of the objects struggled for by the German revolutionists of 1848 was, after all, accomplished—much later, indeed, and less peaceably and less completely than they had wished," but without the "national awakening" of 1848 they might have been impossible of accomplishment at all. Albert Sieber could therefore take pride in the things his brother had fought for and, in the end, helped to win. There is evidence that he did so; many of his friends in later life were made very much aware that he was the brother of a Forty-eighter.
The exiles from Germany—and thousands of hotheaded young student-warriors did become such—filled the refugee centers of Europe. Sooner or later, many came to America, where large numbers of them assumed prominent roles in civil, political, and even military life. Schurz and scores of others, a young composer named Richard Wagner among them, escaped to Switzerland. Still others fled to Paris or Antwerp or London. Johann Sieber found his way to Le Havre. From there, about the middle of 1849, he wrote his mother at Mingolsheim and urged her to bring the family to Le Havre so that all might go to America and create a new and perhaps a better life. She probably had little choice. Johann, the eldest son, was now nominal head of the family, and besides, the prospects of going to the United States must have seemed more alluring than those of remaining in strife-torn Baden.
So this unusual woman made her decision, bundled up the family equipage, sold her home or turned it over to relatives, loaded her brood and their belongings into a conveyance, and drove off. She must have realized, and her older children knew, that it was unlikely any of them would ever again return to this lovely land. What courage it must have required for this resolute mother to exchange the well-worn world she knew for something half-known and half-conceivable! What thoughts must have passed through her mind as she set out to guide her captainless expedition to the other side of the moon!
The Siebers reached Le Havre with no incident worth recording and found that Johann had already booked passage for New York. He had written a brother-in-law to meet them there, so when they embarked, they were spared the nagging worry of how to become introduced to their new homeland.
The covey of Siebers probably saw little of New York, tidy community that it was, and soon no doubt were aboard a train, riding happily through a gritty cloud of cinders and acrid smoke toward Pennsylvania. Railroad fever had struck hard at the eastern United States by this time. Already nine thousand miles of lines had been sent sprawling along every conceivable route and in all directions from the seaboard. Some reached well toward the Middle West, although none had yet linked with the scattered rail patterns in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, or Illinois. Even now the railroad was a fait accompli from New York to Philadelphia and well across Pennsylvania, which had more trackage than any other state. The future was plain to see. No wonder financiers, engineers, and dreamers were gripped by the craze to build a railroad. Any railroad. To anywhere. Albert, in the autumn of his life, would have a minor role in charting the course for one of the last lines to be built, but that was far off, in time and miles, in the still almost unknown Southwest.
The Siebers were carried westward by this reeking marvel to an inland town called Lancaster, in a county of the same name, one of the border counties of southern Pennsylvania. It was a booming community, for those times. The county, which had reported only about 3,500 people in 1729, now had nearly 100,000 people; the town had grown from 15 souls to 12,369 in the same period. It was proud of its charcoal and anthracite furnaces, its glass works and foundries, which broke their backers as often as they enriched them. Lancaster was a suitable place for a family of immigrants to be introduced to America and her strange, bumbling, exuberant ways.
The countryside duplicated the Rhineland about as exactly as could be expected on another continent. The climate was a bit sharper, and perhaps the society more crude, but the Siebers could feel at home among descendants of the honest burghers who had migrated here from the banks of the Neckar and the Rhine. Much of the population was German or of German descent; religious conviction brought most of them. About 1711 the Mennonites from Zürich and Bern had come, then the Ephrata community of German mystics, and the Reformeds and Lutherans and Dunkers, and finally the self-reliant Moravians. The Siebers were Catholic, and they soon found that others of their faith had preceded them. They became part of the parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church, established in 1742, but they arrived just as a petition was being sent to the Bishop, pointing out that there were too many parishioners now for the church and not saying what the Bishop already knew: that most of the petitioners were Germans and there were too many Irish in the parish to suit them. The good Bishop chuckled to himself and readily acceded to their request, appointing the Reverend Bernard Bayer, a Redemptorist, to organize another parish, called St. Joseph's, only a block and a half distant from St. Mary's. Twenty-five families, among them probably some of the Siebers, withdrew from St. Mary's in 1850 to found it. Here and there they appear in the old parish records, or at least some of them do. It may be that the family was forced to split up and that some joined another parish. It appears that Barbara and her husband, Henry Rosenfeld, remained at St. Mary's, for their son, William, born in 1852, was baptized there on July 17, 1853. At any rate, the Siebers settled down for six or seven years—long enough so that Albert could say he was raised in Pennsylvania and some could get the impression that he was born there.
Only John (as Johann henceforth called himself), the revolutionist, figures prominently in St. Joseph's records. Two years after his arrival, he and an Elizabeth Hartmann, also from Germany, were married, a union blessed with many children, none named for Albert, although most of his brothers and sisters were so honored. Maybe there just weren't enough babies to go around.
For any growing boy, Lancaster must have seemed a city of delights. The surrounding countryside was a wonderland of fields and woods and marshes and hills, heavily farmed in places but wild enough in others. The country roads, especially the Philadelphia pike, throbbed with traffic that featured the huge Conestoga wagons (named for Conestoga Creek, which wound through Lancaster) for which the region was famous. Originating among the thrifty German farmers, Conestogas had been built for almost a century and were usually drawn by four, five, or six horses of a distinctive breed that was also called Conestoga. In the fall it was not unusual to see fifty to one hundred such wagons each day, en route to Philadelphia, hauling the fresh produce for which Lancaster was renowned. Although built by a variety of craftsmen, the wagons were nearly uniform: top sheets of white canvas, blue bodies, red wheels and running gear, and black ironwork. Often the teams were of a single hue—all whites, or grays, or blacks, or bays, or even roans or sorrels. It was a matter of pride among good wagonmen to match their teams in color and conformation, and so well trained were the best of them that they could be driven by word of mouth alone, although the single rein pioneered by these Conestoga teamsters was used for emergencies.
Conestoga Creek was humming, too, with arks, flatboats, and rafts bringing coal, lumber, and ore from the Susquehanna River, a major waterway bordering the county, seventeen miles and seventeen chains, by meandering tributary, west of the city. Upstream traffic on the creek was now at a peak, but the stream's days were numbered: sometime during the Civil War the last vessel would traverse it and the picturesque route would fall into disuse.
Lancaster County, low and undulating, was well settled. The Indians had left the area long before, and with them went most of its combative spirit. It had sent a few men to the recent war with Mexico, and these had returned with improbable yarns about that remote country which no white man was apt to see again, but they found few listeners. The buffalo had vanished with the Indian. The beaver was no more, nor the elk. No wolf had been seen in the county since 1834, nor a panther, but small game was common, especially birds, for Lancaster was on a major migratory route. Overpowering by sheer weight of numbers and the mighty spectacle of their migrations were the passenger pigeons. People still talked about the last great flight of these birds the country would ever see. It had occurred in March, 1846, in the southern part of the county. Abraham R. Beck, then twelve, remembered it this way in later years:
It was about 12:30 o'clock of a dull, cloudy day when the cry came, "The pigeons are flying!" I ran out to see a vast flight passing northward. The western edge of the flock was approximately overhead. It extended eastward to the horizon. There were four or five pigeons to the square yard of sky—enough to cast a distinct shadow had there been sunshine. They flew in approximately this formation continuously until about 4:30. A mighty detachment left the main flock to settle for the night in a nearby woodland where the mass of their piling numbers broke branches from the trees. The birds were low enough to be within range of the crude shotguns of the village and a number were shot.
If Albert Sieber was like other boys, he prowled the woods of oaks, shellbark hickories, and hemlocks whenever he could escape household chores, and he must have found it a good life. But like all things, it had to end. Theresia, by now almost twenty-two, had caught the eye of one Henry Oswald, an enterprising young man with a talent for business and a yearning for far places. Henry and Theresia were married, apparently in 1856, for in that year they moved to Minneapolis, and once more Katherina Sieber gathered up her belongings—and Albert. Where this daughter went, she would go. Albert, of course, could scarcely have been reluctant.
It would be another two years before the Pennsylvania Railroad could complete its line to Pittsburgh, but a consolidation of haphazard short lines, known collectively as the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago, provided service of a sort from there to the spongy metropolis at the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Already there was a line from Chicago northwestward to Galena, tapping the rich lead mines and heading out at one of the busiest steamboat ports of the northern river country. From it each year hundreds of emigrants boarded packets which bore "Saint Paul" destination signs and churned up the Father of Waters to the head of navigation at the Falls of St. Anthony. St. Paul had five thousand or more settlers and was growing at the rate of a thousand a year. It had forgotten its days as Pig's Eye, so called for a one-eyed French-Canadian whiskey seller, and had far outstripped Minneapolis, across the river.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Al Sieber by Dan L. Thrapp. Copyright © 1964 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Donald E. Worcester,Preface,
Acknowledgments,
I. The Immigrant,
II. The Way West,
III. The Road to Prescott,
IV. The Williamson Valley,
V. Retaliation,
VI. Massacre!,
VII. The Grand Offensive,
VIII. The Long Scout,
IX. The Marrying Man,
X. The Rocks Melt,
XI. The Scouts Come to Town,
XII. To See the Wizard,
XIII. Victorio,
XIV. The Loco Fight,
XV. The Battle of Big Dry Wash,
XVI. A Man of Note,
XVII. Into Mexico,
XVIII. "If we could only get rid of Geronimo ...",
XIX. Chasing Geronimo,
XX. Keeping the Peace,
XXI. The Tragedy of the Apache Kid,
XXII. The Kid Loses His Band,
XXIII. Fired,
XXIV. Autumn,
XXV. The Last Adventure,
XXVI. Afterward,
Bibliography,
Notes,
Index,
