A letter written on May 2, 1845, two months after the first settlers arrived in New Braunfels, gives us details of those first two months in NB. The letter was written by Lt. Oscar von Claren to his sister in Germany. The end of von Claren’s life overshadows the optimism conveyed by him, as you will see.

When Prince Carl left to go back to Germany, amid festivities and cannon fire at the site of the Sophienburg, he offered to take 69 letters back to Germany. Mail at that time took three months or longer. According to author Everett Fey, writer of “First Founders”, there are 14 letters preserved and transcribed “and it is uncertain whether the rest of the letters were delivered to families. There is a good possibility that these 14 letters were used as advertising by the Adelsverein to promote their immigration project.”

The preserved letters are mostly positive about the project, so what happened to the other letters that were perhaps not so positive? Were only the letters of satisfied customers published?

Letters alleging that the Adelsverein was irresponsible in caring for the immigrants were also published in the newspapers. The Adelsverein fought back with replies by one of their own, Count Carl of Castell. He demanded publication of letters giving the “voice of truth” or the positive view.

One of those 14 letters was Oscar von Claren’s sent to his sister, Augusta, and she, in turn sent it to the Adelsverein. It was, no doubt, of value to them.

Oscar von Claren from Hanover arrived on the ship Apollo and came inland with the first group of emigrants. As a young single man, von Claren was chosen by Prince Carl for the responsible position of being in charge of artillery in Prince Carl’s Militia. He organized them to protect the emigrants, both on the way and in the settlement.

In his letter to his sister, von Claren described his arrival in New Braunfels in April 1845 and then of the celebration that took place in early May when Prince Carl was getting ready to leave for Germany. He said that at the Sophienburg (fortress), festive speeches were made and the cannons fired.

At the time of year of his arrival, it was too late to put in a garden on the lot that had been given to him. He put in a cow pen out of logs where the calves stayed while the cows roamed freely. It was not necessary to feed them. In the evening, the cows would automatically roam back to their calves in the pen. Even people that had no houses had pens with cows. Anyone who had more than 25 cows had to pay a fee to the state of Texas. Von Claren was waiting to get chickens; “four hens for $1.00 and a rooster for a third of a dollar”. “He who has cattle, chickens and a livable house has everything” he told his sister. Milk, eggs and butter were the main diet.

Von Claren was aware of unfamiliar noises, like the cutting of trees, plowing and the building of huts. He arose at five in the morning, lit a fire, dressed, cooked tea, baked bread and ate breakfast. After 11 o’clock in the morning the heat was unbearable so everyone stopped working. At this time he cooked dinner and then at three o’clock went to work again. After working, the evening meal was prepared and took a long time because corn meal bread had to be baked every day. It tasted bad when it was not fresh. It got dark around seven o’clock. Twilight, like in Germany, was not known in Texas and it got much darker. Von Claren told his sister that what he needed more than anything was tools, carpenter tools and tools for gardening. Also he needed seeds, fruit seeds of all kinds, lentils, and grape vines. He wished he had brought more with him. An immigrant only paid for the transportation from Bremen and the Adelsverein provided everything else to the colony.

He told his sister that during the land trip in from the coast, many of his clothes and part of his weapons were damaged due to not having them packed in boxes encased in tin. He now sleeps on animal hides and covers with a woolen cover instead of the linens he is used to.

About 300 Tonkawa Indians visit the settlement daily. They are at peace with the Germans and come into town to trade. Von Claren traded animal skins, hides and leopard fur. He traded gun powder, colorful chinz and calico, red and white beads, but not yellow or green (curious), and all kinds of toys made of tin or German nickel silver. Turtles and snakes demand high prices and he intended to sell them.

Their clothing was very thick and long boots were indispensable, but very expensive. He praised the beauty of the area, pretty forests next to the Guadalupe River, hills and prairies covered with wild flowers. Wood like cypress and cedar trees emit a magnificent odor and remind him of pencils. The beautiful blooms of the cactus would be greatly admired in Germany. At night, the air is filled with lightning bugs.

(Here’s the catch:) One must become accustomed to the great heat and large unpleasant animals that inflict deadly wounds, and the numerous rattlesnakes, some ten feet long and probably 15 years old. There are also a large number of alligators, so bathing in rivers is dangerous. He shot a 14 foot alligator. Tarantulas, large spiders that “runs around with the snakes and scorpions” in the woods, have a disagreeable stinger. Finally there is a caterpillar that crawls over the skin.

In May of 1845, there are 400 people living in the settlement. He would like to have friends and family with him “with whom he could cultivate a companionable relationship”.

By the time his sister received his letter, von Claren had been brutally killed and scalped near Live Oak Springs. He and two companions were returning to NB from Austin and while camping, a band of natives attacked the three. Wessle got away and led the Rangers to the site of the massacre. Von Claren and von Wrede were buried there.

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By Keva Hoffmann Boardman —

I don’t have a green thumb or even a brown one. My thumbs are most definitely black when it comes to growing plants. However, I have somehow managed to sustain the life of a Night Blooming Cereus. This unusual cactus has blessed me by blooming on three separate occasions in the last two months.

As the name suggests, the plant blooms only at night and, incidentally, each bloom only last for several hours. My plant always began opening its buds at 11 p.m., had completely open blooms at 2 a.m. and decidedly closed up and wilted flowers by 7 a.m. I’m exact on the times because I set my alarm to wake me every hour and a half so I could experience “the event”. I even got to see a bat as it flew around waiting for me to leave it to its task of ingesting nectar and doing its pollination thing.

There have been other New Braunfelsers crazy enough or interested enough to have foregone sleep to watch a flower bloom. In the early years of our town, August Forcke, a druggist, prominent citizen and an amateur naturalist, reported the night time blooming of a cactus at his home and that several friends visited throughout the night and early morning to share the event with him. His “Queen of the Night” or Cereus grandiflora or “Dutchman’s Pipe” (the newspaper calls it many names; perhaps he had several kinds?) bloomed in June of 1870, 1871 and 1874. In April of 1878, Mr. Forcke shared that his hundred-year-old aloe had bloomed. Think about it — that means his aloe began life in 1778! Exotic flowers appealed to the naturalist in Mr. Forke as did paleontology. Remember when I told you that a huge prehistoric skull was exhibited on the front porch of his drugstore in the 1870s?

I sensed a pattern in the bloom times of Forcke’s cereus, and with a little googling I learned that the plant likes to bloom in the summertime. Later local newspaper accounts include citizens reporting night blooming cactus bloom events from July through September. These accounts occurred from the 1950s through the 1980s and many of these events were celebrated with “watch parties.” In September 1959, Mrs. Egon Jarisch was featured in an article. She was nurturing two Night Blooming Cereus in the hope that at least one would blossom during the Comal County Fair and she could exhibit it. The article went one to state that she had attempted the same thing the year before but her plant had failed her and decided to bloom the night after the fair closed.

Googling also informed me that blooms can be rare and that one must monitor temperature, moisture and soil conditions closely to encourage flowering. Obviously, I did nothing of the kind. I did, however, do one thing right. It seems the cereus cactus likes to be root-bound. This was a cinch for me — I have an ancient ficus (1980 college days) in its original pot which receives rather intermittent watering. It reminds me by letting its leaves turn yellow and fall off; the dear thing has an uncanny will to live.

The newspaper stories, which feature both male and female gardeners, almost always describe the number of blooms that graced each plant. While all are called Night Blooming Cereus, some are reported as having only one bloom while another might have had 42 flowers! Perhaps these were different species. Mine, as close as my novice self can figure, is an Epiphyllum oxypetalum or a Cereus oxypetalus. Perhaps one of you Master Gardeners can tell me based on the photo. My plant seemed to be timed with the moon, producing three flowers two days after the August “Sturgeon Moon”. Its second bloom of one blossom occurred two weeks later and was followed by another one flower bloom two days after the September “Harvest Moon”. I will have to see if my plant has its own unique pattern over the years. It did survive the 2021 “Snowpocalypse” so perhaps it will survive me.

If I have kept your attention this far, then let me just tell you that as a non-plant person, I am quite enthralled by this little plant. The plant itself is rather gangly and leggy, but the blossom it produces is truly amazing. A tiny pink bud forms on the leaf, growing quickly and swelling in size. The stem takes on a snake-like appearance that makes the bud hang below the plant. Then, one evening you realize there is a loosening of the rosy pink-colored tentacle-like sepals of the bud and you know it is beginning. An intense fragrance is emitted; the scent is strong and sweet like a magnolia but very different. As you watch, you literally can see the broader velvety creamy white petals stretching and opening like a time lapse photo. The bloom opens up wide and is eight to ten inches across. Even more fantastic is the inside of the open blossom. My first thought was, “It looks like a little grotto filled with tiny people under a chandelier,” but it is actually the outer white stigma and the inner cluster of buttery-yellow stamens. It is beautiful, charming, exotic and entrancing. Seriously — it is all these things and it takes place in the moonlight of the wee hours of the morning.

Mr. Forcke, I get it now. I totally understand your, and other New Braunfelsers’, love affair with the Queen of the Night.

Sources: Sophienburg Museum & Archives: Forcke family history, Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung collection, New Braunfels Zeitung Chronicle collection, New Braunfels Herald collection, New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung collection.

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By Keva Hoffmann Boardman –

“Peyote!” in muffled but gleeful voice shouted the Comanche medicine man. Two other Indians sprang from the sedan which had been parked on the shoulder of the road. Carefully the two crawled through the barbed-wire fence and hurried to where their fellow aborigine was standing. Constable Bill Jones, who happened to be behind a cluster of huisache bushes, noticed that the three men quickly filled a sack with a certain specie of cactus.”

So begins a story written by former county clerk and city historian Oscar Haas for the San Antonio Express-News in 1965. There is no reference to time and place but I didn’t care; I was hooked and read through to the end.

Constable Jones watched as the medicine men gathered sticks made a small fire of leaves and sticks near the ground where the peyote cactus had been harvested. Each man placed a hand-woven rug on the ground, threw some peyote on the fire and inhaled the smoke. After a while, they rose, turned around three times and hurried off to their car.

The constable went over to the fire and stirred it. He looked up and saw an old Indian chief motioning to him to follow, and so he did, all the way to a cave by a creek. Constable Jones had known of the cave since childhood and let the old chief lead him down a side passage to a deep chasm. On the opposite side of the chasm was a pile of jewels in heavy gold mountings. Guessing that the treasure was from an old Mexican temple and had been hidden during a war, he looked over at the old chief in time to see the chasm’s edge give way and the old man plummet into its depths.

The following day, Constable Jones returned to the cave with a load of wood planks, long enough to bridge the chasm. Where was that side passage? Day after day he looked for it. Friends and neighbors told him that he had had a peyote- induced vision, but the constable refused to believe that what he had seen had not been real. Poor Constable Jones continued to visit the cave, searching, yearning for the treasure.

The medicine men in the story had come from the reservation in Oklahoma to acquire peyote. Native Americans still travel to buy peyote (Lophophora williamsii) from the “peyote gardens” on the Mustang Plains in south Texas — Starr, Jim Hogg, Webb and Zapata counties. The cactus is utilized by over a quarter of a million Native Americans as ceremonial sacrament in the Native American Church.

Peyote has been used by native tribes in its growing areas in Central America for thousands of years. Current thinking is that the Carrizo Indians of South Texas brought the peyote ceremony to the US and taught it to the Lipan Apaches who in turn shared it with Plains tribes like the Comanche in the 19th century. The increased use of the cactus by more tribes led to the birth of the peyoteros around 1900. These men and women find colonies of the cactus in the brush country and carefully cut the “buttons” or tops off — – preserving the underground root so that it can grow again. The buttons are then carefully dried before they are sold. Before 1900, this cottage industry went on relatively unnoticed as the peyoteros quietly supplied the Native Americans with the cactus.

In 1909, William H. Johnson was appointed chief special officer of the United States Indian Affairs Bureau, His job was to reduce the alcohol problem on the reservations. While investigating in Laredo, Johnson learned of the peyote trade that was centered in the small town of Los Ojuelos (Mirando City). He was not happy, and confiscated 200,000 peyote buttons and burned them. (I can only imagine how that affected the local area…). He continued his crusade eventually making the cultivation, harvesting and shipping of peyote illegal and subject to stiff fines. Reports from the reservations on the disastrous effects of the loss of peyote, both physically and spiritually, on the people led the government to scale back their crack down and allow shipments by special permit to only “wet” counties. The Native American Church was formalized, and recognized in part, so peyote could continue to be used legally as sacrament in certain ceremonies.

During Prohibition, the peyote was looked into as a possible “whiskiless drunk” alternative according to several newspaper accounts. Later in the 60s and 70s, hippies from all over traipsed into the South Texas peyote gardens to try out the cactus. Through the years, Native Americans from many tribes have adopted the traditions of the Native American Church and have continued to go to South Texas for peyote.

Texas is the only state where selling peyote is legal — it is also the only state where the cactus grows. Peyoteros must register with the Drug Enforcement Administration in order to legally sell peyote to members of the Native American Church. They also have to register with the Texas Department of Public Safety. The handful of registered peyoteros keep records on how much is harvested from the wild, who purchases the peyote and how much is sold. They have to renew their license annually.

The peyoteros see themselves a little like pharmacists dispensing a medicinal product to the right person. To buy peyote, church members must prove their ancestry; they have to have their Certificate of Indian Blood, because that shows who they are, who their parents are and their blood quarter. It is necessary to be at least one-fourth American Indian to purchase or possess peyote in the state of Texas.

It is not legal to grow peyote; it must be harvested from naturally occurring patches on private land that is often leased by the peyoteros. Ecologists have noted a drastic decline in the cactus and in new growth due to the use of “root plowing” by ranchers who need grassland for cattle and for the creation of lucrative hunting leases which limit the time peyoteros can search. The increase in the Native American tribes who utilize peyote has upped the demand which makes harvesting smaller buttons necessary and doesn’t allow the cactus to recover. Hopefully, the end result will not be the eradication of the cactus and a change in the habitats of South Texas.

There you have it — one more strange collection of facts to impress your friends with.

Sources: Cactus and Succulent Journal, Vol. 6 (1995); www.texasstandard.org ; www.texasobserver.org ; Haas collection, Sophienburg Museum & Archives; San Antonio Express and The Houston Post, April 28, 1909, May 7 and 9, 1909, May 14, 1913.

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Judging by recent headlines, good, affordable housing in the Austin-San Antonio area is hard to come by, especially in New Braunfels. As is my usual, I was on a mission looking for something else when I ran across this excerpt from the Herald Zeitung. It is a portion of a letter dated January 13, 1850, written by Mrs. Ida Kapp to her sister back in Germany. It’s about their arrival in New Braunfels. Mrs. Kapp, the wife of Dr. Ernst Kapp, and their five children ages 4, 6, 10, 13 and 15, set out on Christmas day by horse drawn wagon and arrived in New Braunfels nine days later. Without benefit of phone or text conversation to Europe, she writes in detail about her family of seeking a good safe place to make a living and raise their children. Just check out the descriptions of housing available to New Braunfels residents in 1850

When we finally came into New Braunfels I felt quite wretched. It was a hot day, the appearance of us after nine days of camping out on the road is hard to describe. The first thing we did was to go to Bracht’s who had offered to find a house for us. Not one was to be found in New Braunfels with more than one room and besides all these had no rainproof roofs.

We were recommended to a residence in Comaltown, a 15-minute drive from New Braunfels, and this we decided to take. We first ate our noon meal at a boarding house and then drove out to what has now been our sanctuary for three weeks.

That was a road to drive on. Six oxen were hitched to the wagon and two times we had to shudder and quake through water, Comal Creek and Comal River, and then on over rocks, sticks and stumps. To travel on the roads here one must acquire nerves of steel.

Here in Comaltown our home consists of four rooms, some think quite out of the ordinary here, only it was occupied before it was finished, as usually is the case here and so was never completed. One room has been whitewashed and you cannot understand what that means here, but the rest stand in their (unplastered) raw brick walls. Only one door has been put in, all the rest are boarded up and three rooms have no ceiling, only the bare roof, and several broken window panes, so on nights when a norther is blowing we have to use a lantern for light (Lighted kerosene oil lamps or candles naturally would be blown out by the wind).

Everybody marvels at our wonderful home, which even has a cooking machine (Kochmachine). The house also has a beautiful porch (Gallerie) and there have not been more than three days on which we had to stay inside the house; the other days it was much pleasanter out on the porch.

So, here we now run our little household, Antonie and I change duties each week, one does the kitchen work, the other takes care of the children and tidies the bedrooms. The boys have to keep their own room in order, chop stove wood, and carry it and water into the house, get provisions from town, tend to the horse and mule we bought here in Comaltown. After that they go exploring and bird hunting and engage in other profitless undertakings.

The water of the Comal River is the most wonderful seen anywhere. Its entire course is but a few miles long but is wider and flows much more water than the Ruhr River at Arnserg. It is a really enchanting, (bezaubernd) stream.

Forests, called bottoms (like pecan bottom), extend along all water courses. Otherwise Texas is not much wooded, which facilitates putting land into cultivation. Up to now I have seen but few varieties of trees, no southern vegetation whatsoever, several species of oaks. The live oak is an evergreen and has a very hard wood so it is not used much. Cactus and yuccas, which we consider deep southern vegetation, grow here in wild profusion. Hedwig today found a beautiful light lavender flower with fragrance so much like a violet.

Maybe it’s just me, but the thought of traveling in a wagon… in December…and wrangling five kids would cause me to stop and think a long while before deciding on this undertaking. The adventure might sound fun for maybe a day before it would get old. And it makes me shudder just to think about what it would be like with only a roof, no ceiling, much less missing window panes. That does not sound like much more than camping in a shelter. Brrr! I’m proud my ancestors and people like the Kapps toughed it out to make a new life for us, but I am not so sure that I would be very good at it. I’m only glad that the housing available today is a tremendous upgrade from 1850.

Sources:

• New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung
• Sophienburg Museum & Archives

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