19th Century German Immigration to the Texas Hill Country: Laying the Groundwork for a Successful International Novelty Business

The 19th century witnessed a significant influx of immigrants from Germany into the central Texas Hill Country. Initially encouraged by a consortium of German princes and nobility in the 1840s, these immigrants arrived to a country and climate that was very, very different from their own, forcing them to learn anew everything they thought they already knew. In this, the Germans were highly successful due to several key qualities:

• their ability to adapt;
• their willingness to assimilate;
• a strong ethic for hard work; and
• a proclivity for experimentation and ingenuity.

Into this milieu, Carl "Charles" Apelt (my great-grandfather) arrived from Mühlberg, Germany, in 1887 for a visit with relatives. A family tragedy during his trip resulted in his decision to remain in Texas, where he later started and successfully operated an international novelty business, the Apelt Armadillo Company. I believe that the German people and communities of which he was a part provided a vital and solid foundation on which he could build his company. He both benefited from and possessed himself the qualities listed above, all of which proved so important to his (and his critters') success.

Blog Comment

This week I commented on David McKenzie's blog.

Tourism Comes for the Hill Country

Hal K. Rothman's book, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, Kansas. 1998. Pp. xi, 434.), speaks to me on a very direct, personal level. Early on, Rothman writes that "Tourist workers quickly learn that one of the most essential traits of their service is to mirror onto the guest what that visitor wants from them and from their place in a way that affirms the visitor's self-image." (12) The tourist of Rothman's study is not ultimately seeking to learn about the truth and history of a place, but rather to see in that place their version of it as seen in their mind's eye. I know what that's like.

How? Five little words: I grew up in Texas.

Texas is one of those places about which everyone seems to have an opinion. What's more, they think they know what Texas is, what it looks like, feels like, who Texans are. Here's a sampling of the comments I've heard ad nauseum over the years:

• Is it like the TV show Dallas? 
• Do you have a ranch like Southfork?
• I bet you ride your horse to school.
• Do you have a belt buckle with your name on it?
• Where are your boots?
• What do you mean you don't have a cowboy hat?!?
• Do you drive a pickup truck?
• Do you speak Spanish?
• You don't like tomatoes or spicy food? Aren't you from Texas?

The list goes on, but you get the idea. And then there's the other part of it, the assumptions people make about Texans that they're too polite to say: that we're puffed up, loud, prideful, bombastic rednecks who think we're the best at everything and are racist, homophobic jerks. I remember when I moved to Chicago at the age of 22, I gradually realized how non-Texans apparently saw us with something nearing shock. I had no idea. Really. None.

So I grew up just like a lot of other American kids did, but with this little thing in the back of my mind that told me that when I was not in Texas, I needed to fill a certain mould, walk, talk, act a certain way because that's what people expected. (To this day I am regularly asked why I don't have an accent. If you must know, it comes out when I'm tired, angry, tipsy or around my family. Or talking to someone with a southern accent.) And there are times when, often without thinking, I agree to give the person I'm speaking with what they want: yes, I have boots, and yes, I can ride a horse, and yes, my family has a ranch. But in my mind, I'm thinking, I haven't worn those boots in a decade, haven't been on a horse since 2006, certainly never barrel raced, and our ranch looks nothing like Southfork.

Texas, especially Austin, has remade itself to reflect visitors' expectations back at them, just as Santa Fe did in Rothman's account. Being an Austin native, I constantly hear affirmations of how hip and cool my hometown is, yet I find its hipness to be manufactured, created and very self-consciously nurtured. In the 1970s and 1980s, before the rest of the country discovered Austin, it was truly cool, with an authentic vibe that just was without trying. Then it began attracting technology businesses like Dell and Intel, and a grungy little music and film festival called South by Southwest, and an iconic film called Dazed and Confused came out, and the rest of the country started paying attention. And then moving there in droves. And these newly arrived folks loved Austin so much that they started remaking it into the Austin they imagined it to be. (And don't even get me started on San Antonio...Riverwalk, anyone?)

Today, my hometown is in many ways unrecognizable to me. It's a nice place to visit, and there are pockets that remain strangely, wonderfully untouched, but its retail developments and ridiculous sprawl are unfamiliar. It's in the same geographic location where home used to be, but it's not my Austin. I imagine this must be how the longtime Santa Fe residents Rothman discusses felt after watching Edgar Hewett, Mary Austin and their acolytes repackage their town: equal parts bewilderment, nostalgia, and alienation from a town that is, and yet is not, theirs.

Blog Comment

This week I commented on Megan's blog.

Interpreting and Using History

I’ll just right out with it: I loved Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, London. 2013. Pp. xiii, 363). Somewhere in my progression through graduate study, I began to realize that history is not static, not universal, not one correct version of facts in the midst of other wrong versions. It is, rather, a set of histories, interpretations of a time or event with which we each engage through the lens of our varied experiences and viewpoints. Kelman’s profiling of Sand Creek’s journey to memorialization illustrated that in delicious detail.

As I progressed through A Misplaced Massacre, I frequently found that two works repeatedly rose to my consciousness. Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 1995. Pp. x, 310) assesses the ways in which Europeans attempted to understand, mourn and come to terms with their losses in World War I. He examines a broad array of coping mechanisms, including art, architecture, film, literature, body recovery, and spiritualism; he also spent a good deal of time analyzing the meanings and politics of memorial sites. He states that, “war memorials [serve as] foci of the rituals, rhetoric, and ceremonies of bereavement. This aspect of their significance has not attracted particular attention from scholars in this field. Most have been drawn to war memorials as carriers of political ideas…or the multiple justifications of the call to arms.” Quite simply, says Winter, “War memorials were places where people grieved, both individually and collectively.” (78-79)

The opening of a memorial site at Sand Creek holds with Winter’s analysis. It was clearly a place where the Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples could (and do) bury and mourn their slain ancestors, both individually and as nations, with rituals and quiet personal moments. It was also a politically charged site from the moment Chivington’s soldiers finished firing. Not only was it the site of violence, it also held vastly different meanings for different people…

…which caused me to revisit Jerome de Groot’s Consuming History: Historians and heritage in contemporary popular culture (sic) (Routledge: New York. 2009. Pp. xii, 292). I think historians, with their methodologies and standards and quests for unpacking what happened, can forget sometimes that people – all people, not just historians – use history in varied ways. History has meaning; “fact” and “truth” are not synonymous. De Groot opens his book with a challenging question: “Who, then, tells the public what ‘history’ is and what it means? If ‘the past’ is after all an empty signifier, just what are the semiotic processes involved in constructing, perpetuating and consuming purported meaning – what strategies are in place for pouring sense into such representational aporia?” (1) He proceeds to explore the various ways in which we “use” history, the ways in which it has (or finds) meaning to us as humans; he discusses historical films and reality shows, genealogies and Ancestry.com, video games, historical reenactments, museums, documentaries, literature…the list goes on.

I thought about this as I read Kelman’s account of the many missteps and blunders that the National Park Service (NPS) made as it tried to work with Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and local Kiowa County residents to navigate toward opening a federal memorial site. The Indians who worked with NPS on this effort had strong “memories” of the massacre (I say “memories” because none of them were there, yet they cherish these “memories” as though they had been, much as an American of my generation might treasure “memories” of, say, a grandfather’s exploits during World War II; Alison Landsberg would call this “prosthetic memory”) that the NPS failed to understand. Not because the NPS folks were bad people or out to get the Indians, but simply because they were human and viewed the massacre through an entirely different lens, a lens which, I believe, was not less valuable or “right” than the Indians’, only different.

History is messy. As de Groot concludes in Consuming History, “The fact that history pervades contemporary culture demonstrates the keen importance for the scholar in understanding the ways that it is manifested and in which it is conceptualised (sic)…The past is fantasy, lifestyle choice, part of the cultural economy, something which confers cultural capital, something to win or desire, a means of embodying difference and a way of reflecting on contemporary life. It is engaged with on a personal, group and family level; it can be experienced in a range of ways at the same time.” (249) Kelman’s book demonstrates how challenging it can be to marry popular consumption and scholarly exactitude for today’s historian.

Blog Comment

This week I commented on Megan's post, A Very Complex Empire.

Filling the Void (or, Today Carol Goes Off the Reservation)

Several years ago, I helped create and oversee a Federal program that provided funds to organizations that were attempting to eradicate gangs from their communities. I knew nothing about gangs; thus began my education. I remember spending a few days in Chicago, conducting site visits with some grantee organizations to see how their government-funded efforts were progressing. I met with community advocates, some of whom were former gang members who had served considerable prison time for their activities, including murder. They told chilling stories from their gang days, and then shared the reasons why they now worked so selflessly and diligently to help stop gang violence. It was one of those amazing, humbling experiences that dramatically changed my worldview.

During a drive through a rundown, gang-ridden south Chicago neighborhood with an activist pastor who was pointing out various gang boundaries and sites of past violence, I ignorantly asked how it was that gangs had made such a stronghold of the area. I took for granted that everyone knew how awful gangs were, and couldn’t understand how they came to be so powerful.

This patient pastor explained that the area was so blighted that it was ignored by most: there were no businesses, no jobs, little public or other transportation options for the welfare families who lived there. Most of the commercial buildings were abandoned and deteriorating, as were many of the residences, though many of those still housed families struggling to survive. There were no human services organizations, no food pantries, nothing but the few brave churches like his who remained to care for the people there. When you have no transportation, no job options within walking distance, and no ability to travel to where the jobs are elsewhere in the city, what do you do?

It was a hard question, but it revealed the answer to my question: the gangs saw a need, and they filled it. They provided food and other necessaries to those struggling in the neighborhood. They were the human services agency that the local government had failed to make available. As such, gangs won the people’s gratitude, loyalty and affection, enabling them to cultivate and harvest a fertile recruiting ground for new members.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because Pekka Hämäläinen’s fascinating book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press: New Haven and London. 2008. Pp. viii, 500), has brought that afternoon with the pastor to mind. Just as gangs create complex systems of trade and community relationships to further their own interests, so too did the Comanche manipulate Spanish, Mexican and Texan citizens into reliance and even near-subjection to meet the Indians’ material needs and imperial goals.

Popular American history would have us believe that big, bad imperialist Europeans wiped out all Indians, and the Indians were helpless before the onslaught. Hämäläinen proves that, for the Comanche, at least, this is untrue. She restores Comanche agency and, indeed, effectively demonstrates just how capable they were at beating the Europeans at their own game: “By 1810, the real nerve center of the Southwest was not Santa Fe, but the western Comanche rancherías along the upper Arkansas, Red, and Brazos valleys, where peoples from numerous nations congregated to exchange goods, forge and maintain political alliances, and organize large-scale multiethnic military campaigns. New Mexico’s economic and political ties to Comanchería endured, but they had come to reflect its dependence on, not control over, the Comanche nation.” (202) Hämäläinen goes on to show how New Mexicans ultimately rejected their own government’s directives, choosing instead to nurture and maintain their vital trade relationships with the Comanche. (212-213)

It is the New Mexicans’ rejection that triggered my memory of the blighted south-side Chicago slum. A community pursues that which best takes care of the needs of its people. In the 19^th century, the Mexican government failed to strengthen and protect its New Mexican citizens, opening the door for the Comanche to fill the void, just as gangs do in impoverished American neighborhoods today. It is, to me, a striking parallel.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Federal Support of the Transcontinentals

Being still in the midst of Richard White’s Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, I cannot pretend to write effectively yet regarding its overall impact, success or themes. That said, as I progress, I find my thoughts repeatedly turning to another work that seems to offer a fascinating companion viewpoint to that White seems to be putting forth.

Brian Balogh’s book, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America, argues that the laissez-faire style of government we all learned about in high school, that hands-off approach favored by the American government during the Gilded Era, was a myth. The federal government may have governed differently than its more pro-active European counterparts, Balogh says, but that does not mean it governed less. Balogh asserts that, despite embracing an attitude of American exceptionalism founded on strong beliefs of individualism and free market self-reliance, Americans frequently looked to the federal government throughout the 19^th century, and that “the national government proved to be most influential when it was least visible.”¹ Americans expected their national government to play an active role in their communities, in westward expansion, in economic development, and in other areas of American life; they just did not wish to see that activity. Hence Balogh’s theme of a “government out of sight”.

Balogh’s position resonates as one reads White’s Railroaded. The United States government was so deep in bed with the railroad companies that there was hardly room for everyone under the covers. White demonstrates just how crowded that bed was when he unpacks the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which “implicated not only the leadership of the Union Pacific Railroad but also Schuyler Colfax, the vice-president of the United States; James A. Garfield, a congressman who would be a future president of the United States; James G. Blaine, a Speaker of the House who desperately wanted to be president; and a covey of leading senators and representatives who scattered like so many quail for shelter.”² And that was just one railroad.

Not only were a number of elected officials on the railroads’ lucrative dole, but their assumptions about the projected success of the railroads (when they would eventually be built) and their utter lack of understanding of how the railroad companies operated (due to the railroads’ intentional opacity and outright lies regarding their financial activities) led them to enact legislation favorable to the railroads, unfavorable to the federal coffers, and that the railroads would ultimately manipulate to their further advantage using another federal entity: the courts.³

Most Americans, I suspect, were not aware of the intricacies of Congress’s activities with regard to railroad financing or, if they were, probably did not understand them. How could they, when Congress did not? Thus, it seems plausible, even despite contemporary newspaper exposés, that Americans did not recognize just how embroiled in the railroads their government truly was, nor could they understand the enduring and damaging repercussions of that entanglement on the federal treasury. The lack of a sustained and substantial public outcry (at least through the portion of the book that I have completed) would seem to indicate the truth of my suspicion, though perhaps my continued reading will disabuse me of this notion.

Balogh tells us that Americans expected much from their national government, but that they avoided large bureaucratic federal efforts in favor of less visible governing styles, where “the law, the courts, trade policy, fiscal subsidies – supported by indirect taxes – and partnerships with nongovernmental partners” shaped the nation’s economic development.⁴ This appears evident in the narrative White is unfolding: out of sight, out of mind, coupled with an “if you build it, they will come” enthusiasm that appears to have been chimeric. 

Bibliography

Balogh, Brian. A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

---

[1] Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America, 2.

[2] White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, 64.

[3] Ibid., 22–23.

[4] Balogh, 379.

Blog Comment

This week I commented on Diane Haight's blog post.

“We traveled without firearms, to the regret of the boys.” – Margaret Rumsey Wright, reminiscing about her family's 1916 road trip in 1966.

In June of 1916, 37-year old widow Frances Rumsey and her three children – Hammond, age 15, Margaret, age 13, and Francke, age 12 – set off from Seattle for a road trip across the country in their new Model T Ford. Destination: Boston, where the children would be attending school. And oh what a road trip it was!

Margaret, or Margs, as her family called her, was charged with keeping a diary of the trip, a responsibility she adhered to faithfully. The result is a charming, often humorous, sometimes harrowing account of early 20^th century road travel. It is easy to forget when reading Margs’ highly literate tale that it occurred 98 years ago. Her prose and humor feel contemporary, except for the very occasional jarring anomaly. For instance, on June 15^th, the family dines at a Chinese restaurant, where Margs twice refers to the proprietor as a “chink” without a hint of sarcasm.

The family’s trip eastward spans three months and includes several days visiting Yellowstone National Park (where Margs twice comments on their feeding of the bears), only recently opened to vehicles at the time, Niagara Falls, and nearly every auto mechanic’s garage between Washington and Massachusetts. Margs’ reader quickly learns that flat tires and blowouts were daily occurrences, as were other mechanical failures. If there is one constant to Margs’ story, it is the constant coddling and care that their Model T demanded on an hourly basis. This is likely due to two main reasons: 1) the poor conditions of the roads, especially in the western states (once they get to Ohio and Pennsylvania, they seem to have far fewer problems, likely because of the presence of more paved roads), and 2) the apparently delicate nature of the parts and assembly of the Model T. Overall, though, the tires were by far the most vexing issue. After a mosquito-plagued night camping in Yellowstone on July 3^rd, Margs wryly remarks, “A flat tire was the first thing we noticed as we stretched [in the morning] and we were sure the mosquitos [sic] had done it.”

Surviving both a head-on collision with a driver that lost control of his vehicle and a serious wreck that overturns their vehicle (requiring several days of repairs), the Rumseys make it to Lake Forest, just south of the Wisconsin border in northern Illinois. Here they spend nearly two weeks with family, swimming in lakes and visiting Chicago. Margs particularly enjoys visiting Marshall Field’s department store, where Cousin John is President. I was especially gratified when she paused to remark on the store’s employees’ Choral Society, which is occasionally accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a venerable institution that I had the immense joy of working for from 1999-2001.

Continuing their journey east, Margs’ August 25^th entry details their stop at the headquarters of Firestone, where they let that company know just how flimsy they’ve found Firestone tires to be. The company gives them new tires at reduced rates, but I suspect Margs has not high expectations that they will be any better than their predecessors.

On September 2^nd, they finally arrive in Boston.

As I read young Margaret Rumsey's account, I was repeatedly struck by how very different the Rumsey family’s road trip experience was from such trips we embark upon today. Aside from the constant tire and mechanical trouble and poor roads, what stuck out most to me was the interactiveness of the trip. The car would get stuck or have trouble, and other drivers or people in the neighborhood would come help. Farmers would invite the travelers to camp on their property and share their company on the porch. The Rumseys would solicit news about road conditions from other travelers at gas stations and garages. At Yellowstone, they spoke with other park visitors, upon which Margs would comment in her diary. There was only one instance where the Rumseys encountered an inhospitable family, but that was quickly forgotten when another family a little further down the road proved kind and generous. This community approach to travel is alien to us today: we isolate ourselves in our cars, with our cell phones and satellite radios, engaging in minimal verbal interaction with gas station clerks and fast food employees, allowing ourselves to be guided by interstate signage and flashy billboards declaring must-see attractions rather than by knowledgeable locals (who might not give us the time of day if we did ask).

Margs’ diary of this three-month trip feels accessible and familiar, and yet wholly unrecognizable too. This is what makes her account so special and fun.

Wright, Margaret Rumsey. “Margaret Rumsey Wright Diary”. 1916. Letters, Diaries and Documents from the Montana Historical Society. Contributed to the Montana Memory Project by the Montana Historical Society Research Center. http://www.mtmemory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p267301coll2/id/1443/rec/69http://www.mtmemory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p267301coll2/id/1443/rec/69, accessed November 1, 2014.

Blog Comment

This week I commented on Diane's post, "California and Reconstruction".

The Evolution of Race Relations in Antebellum California

D. Michael Bottoms’ book, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850-1890, makes me angry. It is an interesting look at the evolution of race relations in 19^th century California, engagingly written, in which Bottoms delves into social, legal and legislative analysis, demonstrating their importance to the evolution of racial constructs both separate of and in relation to each other. Despite Bottoms’ careful study, though, I'm angry at the injustices that my 21^st century sensibility finds in this otherworld. With both hands quickly held up in supplication, I say that I know I am not to judge people then based on modern values. From the historian’s perspective, I understand that is a no-no. But from the human perspective, the one that feels the slings, humiliations and privations of the persecuted, I assert my right to fume. I shall now descend from my soapbox.

Bottoms is fuming too – it is easily discernible in his tone. That does not detract, however, from the success of his work. Rather, it lends to it a fellow-feeling of compassion with which his reader can identify. We feel the mortification of African Americans whose children the state repeatedly abuses with regard to their education. We are livid at the inhumanity of the treatment of the Chinese. His conclusion that California’s handling of the extensive racial diversity that made it unique in the antebellum era foreshadowed the way that the nation as a whole would handle the same challenges in the late 19^th century and well into the 20^th is well argued and worth considering.

Yet An Aristocracy of Color is not without its problems. Although California was a Mexican state until mid-century, Bottoms gives little more than lip service to the Hispanic population’s shifting position among the various races. His whole focus is almost exclusively on African Americans and the Chinese. Yet despite this laser focus, he periodically fails to provide details that would underscore his points. For example, he mentions the queue, that long pigtail that Chinese men wore, noting that white tormenters were encouraged to shave them off in an act that caused serious distress to their victims. Yet he does not explain why the queues are worn or why their loss is so emotionally destructive.

Similarly, while he notes several times that Chinese emigrants continue arriving in California, he does not pause to explain why they continue coming despite outright American hostility, few legal protections, and the degrading living conditions that await them. Surely those already in California, who clearly traveled back to China periodically and conducted business with their home country, surely they must have written letters home that conveyed the reality of their lives in California? So what was the situation in China that made America attractive despite all that? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Ultimately, however, these are minor dissatisfactions. In toto, Bottoms’s work is a remarkable look into Californians’ increasingly contortive efforts to maintain white supremacy in the face of a rapidly changing nation.

Bottoms, D. Michael, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850-1890, Race and Culture in the American West, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.

Armadillos: An Unusual Mammal Links the Histories of Texas and the German Immigrant Experience

There are several iconic images that people the world over associate with Texas, several of them promoted by the state itself: longhorn cattle, the Lone Star, cowboys, the Alamo, “Don’t Mess with Texas”. Natives, though, know there is a little critter that has become a beloved state totem unlike any other: the humble armadillo.

Texans love these little guys, at least the idea of them. Austin’s annual run, the Capitol 10K, has prominently featured a running armadillo in sneakers in its logo since the 1980s, and you can find armadillos – or “dillies”, as my grandmother used to call them – everywhere if you pay attention, on t-shirts, advertisements, neon signs in bars, you name it. The drunken dilly has always been a favorite of mine.

Charming graphics and tchotchkes aside, Texans most often come into contact with armadillos as roadkill on the highway. Ranchers generally consider them pests: the tunnels armadillos dig can be dangerous for livestock, for whom a broken leg, the result of blindly stepping into a tunnel entrance in the ground, has no remedy.

Armadillos and my family go way back. To the 19^th century, as a matter of fact: the Apelt Armadillo Farm was opened by German immigrant Charles Apelt, my great-grandfather, in 1898 in Comfort, Texas, today about 45 miles northwest of San Antonio. Articles have appeared from time to time in newspapers and magazines, and it is striking how they tend to follow a similar structure: marvel at the novelty and variety of the product, recount the story of how Charles lit on the idea to make baskets out of armadillos, then discuss what makes Texas armadillos unique.

First, the novelty and variety of products offered by the Farm: nose-to-tail baskets lined in satin, plain and beaded armadillo lampshades for floor, desk and bedside lamps, ashtrays, paperweights, and more. Catalogues were available to potential customers that showed all the various ways one might decorate one’s home with dilly products.

Need a lamp? (From the author's personal collection.)

From one of the Apelt Armadillo Farm catalogues. Unfortunately, the catalogues give no indication of their year(s) of publication. (From the author's personal collection.)

My great-grandmother Martha even made the dillies into handbags, items  difficult to find on the antique markets today.

To open the handbag, just flip the head back. (From the author's personal collection.)

Then comes the story of how such distinctive items came to be. The November 14, 1925, issue of the Miami News, featured a story on the Apelt Armadillo Farm. It is worth quoting at some length:

Charles Apelt…one day years ago was going to the house for the midday meal when a strange animal jumped from the tall grass and went hopping away. Picking up a rock, Mr. Apelt threw at [sic] the strange being and hit it on the head, whereupon, it rolled over, dead. He picked it up and examined it, his wonder growing. Never had he seen anything like it, with its long snout and jointed tail and a jointed house on its back.

He had been used to skinning every animal he killed, however, and preserving the hide, so he began to consider way and means to skin this one. But this was different. Finally he decided to take the animal out of the hide instead of taking the hide off the animal. This plan proved successful, but when he tried to nail the shell to the barn to dry he discovered it would not stretch out flat.

About that time his wife called him to lunch and he picked the shell up and carried it to the house, leaving it in the sun while he ate. When he came out the sun had so dried the shell that it began to cup up. “Basket!” instinctively thought Mr. Apelt his [sic] early training [as a basketmaker] prompting the thought, doubtlessly. So he brought the tail around and joined it to the snout and hung it up on the porch to finish drying.

One does not have to look hard to find elements of storytelling here. For example, armadillos are fast runners. That Apelt could have been startled by one as it began running away, then have the wherewithal to bend down, pick up a conveniently located rock and hurl it at the still rapidly moving creature with such precision that it knocks the animal on the head hard enough to kill it instantly seems unlikely. However, it is a story oft repeated, and one suspects that both the Apelt family and the journalists enjoyed the telling of it.

In addition to the armadillo products offered by the Farm, the Apelts also sold live animals to zoos and individuals desiring unique pets; they also sold them to scientists and laboratories wishing to study their odd reproductive qualities (they always give birth to four babies per litter that are either all male or all female) or the disease leprosy, which they can develop similar to humans. In fact, family records include this sheet of paper, the draft of a 1971 letter written by my mother at Kathryn’s request, which was to be typed up and sent to individuals in Geneva, Switzerland, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, that had inquired about armadillo ownership and shipping fees.

Draft of a letter replying to international inquiries about armadillos as pets, written by Kathleen Adams Apelt in 1971. (From the author's personal collection.)

Page 2. (From the author's personal collection.)

Old family photographs show plenty of activity and well maintained buildings at the Farm, as well a family seemingly well-to-do. I know little of those people or the operations in those days, but it appears that novelty items and farming in south-central Texas in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries could provide a comfortable living.

Charles Apelt. Year unknown. (From the Apelt Family's private collection.)

The showroom. (From the Apelt Family private collection.)

(From the Apelt Family private collection.)

This may be the most widely reproduced photograph of the Apelt Armadillo Farm. The author's grandfather, Kurt Charles, is not pictured here because he was not yet born. The two children shown are his older brothers, Armin (left) and Willie (right). (From the author's personal collection.)

I have a confession: I took the armadillos and the Farm for granted all my life. The old photographs show a lovely house with lots of people and buildings surrounding it, but after the Farm was closed in the early 1970s, the property was abandoned for decades. Growing up, I remember driving by it occasionally with my grandmother, Kathryn, or my parents and wondering why we always had to stop on the side of the highway, leave the air conditioned comfort of the car for the awful Texas heat, and go walk through the high grass and weeds, full of grasshoppers and goodness knew what else, to look at an old ruin. I have heard the stories from various members of my family for so long that I cannot keep straight from whom I learned what. Now, as I attempt to view the Farm through an historian’s eyes, I find it challenging to marry family lore with empirical fact. I suppose that makes the exercise all the more valuable, and I embrace the journey. I consider this post my first step along this familiar yet new yellow brick road.

The Apelt Armadillo Farm received some fresh attention in 2010, when Texas recognized its impact on the Comfort community with an historical roadside marker following the Farm’s painstaking restoration by antique enthusiast Harriette Gorman, who now owns and resides on the property. 

In its heyday, the Apelt Armadillo Farm employed local residents, both for armadillo production and for its non-dilly operations as well (it was a fully functional farm and ranch in addition to its novelty products).

The day before the historical marker dedication in 2010, my father, Kurt Apelt, Jr., and I visited Mrs. Gorman to tour the restored property. She loved to talk about the place, and about its history, and I remember she commented on how the Farm helped struggling locals during the Great Depression: the Farm would buy armadillos from the locals, providing needed income during that difficult time. That was new information to me, and it instilled a little nugget of pride that my family had been able and willing to help their community in such a way. I am excited to continue digging into the Farm’s past, a past that represents a small part of the history of the West, of Texas, and of the immigrant experience. It represents my past.

The main house in May, 2010. (From the author's personal collection.)

The restored novelty showroom building in May, 2010. (From the author's personal collection.)

Blog comment

This week I commented on Nick's post, "Now for Something Completely Different".

Love It or Hate It: Reviews of Nature's Metropolis

I received my undergraduate degree in the performing arts. When I decided to pursue a degree in history, I quickly realized I had entered a new and alien world. I had to learn to read historical works critically rather than for pleasure. It was an outright revelation when I grasped that bibliographies could have utility -- an entirely foreign concept!

One of my early lessons was the value not only of reading an historian’s work, but also of reading book reviews to see what other historians had to say about the work. I learn almost as much from the criticism as I do from the author him- or herself, especially when the critiques are not uniform.

Such is the case with William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W. Norton & Company: New York, London. 1991. Pp. xxv, 530). The reviewers vary widely in their estimations of Cronon’s book. Lawrence H. Larsen, of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, reviewing Nature’s Metropolis for The Wisconsin Magazine of History (Vol. 76, No. 1, Autumn, 1992, pp. 54-55), foe example, chastises Cronon rather extensively for “pretentious phrasing” that adds nothing to what is otherwise a “useful monograph.” (55) With that out of his system, he then praises Cronon’s research and innovative use of sources, asserting that the book successfully achieves its author’s intent to explore the relationship between Chicago and the Great West.

Reviewing for The Journal of American History (Vol. 79, No. 2, Sep., 1992, pp. 612-613), Samuel P. Hays of the University of Pittsburgh provides a more careful, nuanced critique. He focuses his attention on the value each chapter brings to the whole, noting his satisfaction with 3-5, his approval of “subordinate but integral” chapters 6-7, and his befuddlement regarding the weakest chapters, 1, 2 and 8: “This mélange of collateral subjects seems to be held together, not by their inherent connection as historical subjects, but by Cronon’s own personal journey through the urbanization of modern American life.” (612) Hays concludes with praise for Cronon’s analysis of urban mercantilism and its shaping of hinterland commercial relationships, despite his “highly selective” approach and some important missing factors (e.g., population shifts between rural and urban communities during this time). (613)

While Larsen and Hays identify some frustrations with Nature’s Metropolis but overall give Cronon props for his contribution to the historical canon, Peter A. Colcanis goes hard for the jugular in his review, “Urbs In Horto”, in Reviews in American History (Vol. 20, No. 1, Mar., 1992, pp. 14-20). Like Hays, Colcanis feels Cronon’s best work is found in the middle chapters (2-7), which he applauds for their “informative discussions”. (15) Having dispensed with the niceties, however, Colcanis then bares his fangs: his issues with the book arise from its “imbalance, and its author’s lack of empathy with man, his cities, and his desire for material gain.” He takes Cronon to task for indulging a self-important, smug tone, calling the book “vainglorious and preening”, “didactic” and “condescending”, and pointing out Cronon’s tendency to focus on himself, as Hays did in his review. (16) He observes that Cronon ignores other prominent Chicago industries that may counter his thesis, industries like textiles, steel, and machine-shop products. (17) Colcanis is clearly offended by Cronon’s starkly environmentalist tone and his lack of feeling for the pioneers and capitalists who felt the need to try to better their circumstances. “In pushing and pushing his green line, the author fundamentally distorts both the nature of capitalist development in the Great West and Chicago’s history.” He dissents from Larsen and Hays in the overall value of Cronon's work, deeming Nature’s Metropolis “disappointing”. (19) Of course, we must be mindful that Colcanis is not only an historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but that he explicitly notes in his byline that he is a card-carrying teamster, an affiliation that offers insight into his priorities.

Such wide differences among scholars gives me pause. Has the author inserted too much of himself into his work? Where is the line between editorial license and self-indulgence? Should we not as historians acknowledge the baggage we bring to a subject? I believe Colcanis is overly harsh in his polemic, yet I also think that Cronon’s narrative does feel as though it is trying too hard to ensure that we indict these 19^th century Americans as evil environmental rapists. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.

West's West

The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains by Elliott West (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque. 1995. Pp. x, 244.) is enormously readable, entertaining and insightful. West approaches the history of the central plains through an inclusive methodology, masterfully incorporating environmental history, the zoological and botanical sciences, and anthropological scholarship into a concise narrative that feels both revolutionary and romantic: West cares deeply about his topic, an affection that shines through his prose, while simultaneously demonstrating that some of the “facts” we take for granted about the history of the west are in reality poorly informed and inaccurate.

Originally a series of lectures at the 1993 Calvin Horn Lectures on Western History and Culture at the University of New Mexico, West’s essays focus on four separate yet related aspects of the plains: Land, Animals, Families and Stories. Leading off with “Land”, West examines how Native Americans and westbound settlers each contributed to the deterioration of the plains ecosystems. Perhaps his strongest essay of the four, this is where West deploys environmental history and an understanding of plants and ecologies most effectively. Clearly having done his homework, he capably and deftly surveys the information before him, drawing convincing linkages and conclusions that appear difficult to dismiss, such as the assertion that Native Americans probably caused more harm to the land they depended on than the emigrants from the east, a sharp divergence from typical blame-the-white-people tropes.

His second essay, “Animals”, follows a similar approach to that employed in “Land”. West shows how the crowding of Native American tribes further and further west resulted in an increased reliance on the bison, the near-extinction of which is another tragedy often laid at the feet of westward bound Euro-Americans, and other fauna. He crunches the numbers, noting that there is no reasonable way that so many millions of bison could have died in so brief a period strictly from Indian and white hunting, offering an alternative scenario that plausibly explains the other forces likely at work. (One bone to pick: for all his thoroughness, West frequently refers to bison as “buffalo”. Diffen offers a side-by-side comparison of bison versus buffalo that is very helpful – for instance, buffalo do not have a hump and are only found in Africa and Asia – and that shows quite incontrovertibly that bison are not buffalo.)

West delves into the importance of families in his third essay, examining the relationships between families, community, society and survival in the west. West considers not only how one’s family influenced and shaped one throughout one’s lifetime, but also how families shaped the communities and towns western emigrants erected. He also considers how the plains and western culture reshaped some ideas of family, demonstrating that influence flows both ways.

West concludes with “Stories”, looking at the varied ways that the west is portrayed in films, literature, and even in our own memories. It is an essay quite different from the previous three, but a necessary one. I believe it is important that historians understand how we as humans, both individually and collectively, use history, how it affects and shapes us, and how our imperfect memories still give history meaning in our lives and culture. Concluding his book with such a discussion, West gives us a number of thought-provoking nuggets to chew on, including our assumptions that the west is devoid of history (never mind the thousands of years of aboriginal culture predating the European invasion) and free from eastern corruption and history (we simply brought that with us).

In all, a deceptively easy to read work with some hard-hitting, new evidence and assertions to offer the historiography of the west.