Travelogues, Part 2: German Explorations of the New World

Too little is known and understood about the German migrations to the United States and the role German immigrants played in the building of the country. Considering that one out of four Americans is of German descent, making them the second largest ethnic group in the country, our relative ignorance about such a big chunk of our national background is puzzling. 

A large part of it, most likely, has to do with the fierce anti-German sentiment during World War I, when sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage" and frankfurters began to be called "hot dogs." And perhaps I'm a little more attuned to the question because I'm from St. Louis, which is one of the most heavily German cities in the country.

There had, of course, been Germans in the country since its earliest days, but the biggest wave of German immigration came after the failed revolutions of 1848 in Central Europe against Prussian and Austrian absolutism. After the Revolutions had been crushed, thousands of Germans and other central Europeans left Europe and came to the United States, settling in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. They practically built the Midwest. 

It's worth remembering the kind of people these German immigrants were.The Revolutions of 1848 have been called "the revolution of the intellectuals," which is a pretty apt description. The German revolutionaries who fled Europe for America--the Forty-Eighters, as they came to be known--weren't exactly Emma Lazarus's tired, poor, wretched refuse of someone else's teeming shore. They were Germany's middle class: artists, writers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, teachers and university professors. They were highly educated, largely secular, and politically liberal verging on radical. They maintained their German identity, creating immigrant self-help organizations, political parties, literary, musical, and philosophical societies, newspapers and journals, and other organizations, but they thought of the United States as they place where their ideals could be realized. . 

When the Civil War broke out, the Germans--overwhelmingly abolitionist--almost unanimously threw their support behind Lincoln and the Union. In fact, Missouri--a southern state in just about every way except geography--only remained in the Union because a group of German volunteers under the leadership of General Nathaniel Lyon marched through the city and captured the federal arsenal before the Confederates could. Missouri's pro-confederate state government fled Missouri for Arkansas, where they continued to function as a sort of government in exile, but the Germans had done their work--and if the river port of St. Louis and control of the Mississippi had fallen into Sesesh hands, the outcome of the war might have been somewhat different. 

My great hero, Joseph Pulitzer, came to the United States to fight for the Union during the Civil War and did so in a German-speaking regiment, the First New York "Lincoln" Cavalry. The Lincoln Cavalry had been organized by a man named Carl Schurz, who by all accounts was a pretty remarkable guy. Schurz, a bona fide hero of the 1848 Revolution in Germany, had escaped by the skin of his teeth, come to America, and more or less single-handedly created the idea of ethnic politics in the United States by molding the German community into a unified political bloc. He had served as Lincoln's ambassador to Spain, and left that post to serve as a Brigadier General in the Union Army,

After the war, Schurz made his way to St. Louis, the thriving German and central European intellectual and political scene of which city made it the unofficial capital of German America. Schurz would represent Missouri in the Senate, would launch the Liberal Republican Reform movement from St. Louis, and would give Pulitzer his start in journalism by hiring him as a reporter to Der Westliche Post, at that time the most important German-language newspaper in the country. He would conclude his political career as Secretary of State under Rutherford B. Hayes. 

As might be expected, they were substantially more sympathetic to, America's Indians than the hardbitten, barely civilized Scotch-Irish frontiersmen and settlers of the Westward Expansion. As Secretary of State, Schurz distinguished himself by his relatively humane policies toward the Indians. And as trained scientists and artists, many of the Forty-Eighters took greater interest in America's indigenous people than in killing them. 

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After the Mexican War, the United States found itself with an enormous chunk of formerly Mexican territory that most Americans knew precisely zero about. Accordingly, the federal government's Boundary Commission of the Department of the Interior chartered an expedition in 1851 to survey its new territory and determine precisely where the borders between the U.S. and Mexico were. But the expedition was much more than that. It included, in addition to surveyors, geographers, geologists, biologists, botanists, ethnographers, and artists to record what they'd seen in those pre-photography days. 

In other words, it was, like the Lewis and Clark expedition, an Enlightenment-era journey of exploration and discovery. The expedition studied and recorded the plant life, birds and animals, rock formations and paleontology, geography, and people of what was now the American Southwest.

One member of the expedition was a native of Stuttgart named Arthur Carl Victor Schott. Schott, like so many other German immigrants to America at that time, was highly educated--he'd trained as a botanist in Germany--and something of a Renaissance man. He was also an accomplished amateur artist, cartographer, topographical engineer, and geologist. He was interested not only in botany but in the fauna of the region (two lizards of the Southwest are named after him), but also fascinated by the people of that hitherto little-known region. The expedition, by the way, included another German botanist, Georg Engelmann, who made his name in St. Louis and was a member of the same Philosophical Society as the aforementioned Joseph Pulitzer.

Schott wrote about, and drew, representatives of the native Americans who now lived in the United States. His drawings were lithographed by Sarony & Knapp of New York and included in the six-volume Report on the U.S. and Mexican Boundary Survey made under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior, published in 1857--a title which is likely the greatest dichotomy between the most boring title and the most fascinating content in the history of publishing.

Like so many of the other illustrated books of that time, many copies were broken up and the illustrations sold. But I was lucky enough to find two of Schott's plates, tucked away in the dusty corners of an antique shop in Chesterfield, just outside of St. Louis. 

Here's "Diegenos:"

And "Aranenos." 

 Schott's work lacks the technical mastery of other, better-known artists of Native Americans like George Catlin, Karl Bodmer or McKenny and Hall. He was only an amateur artist. But I love them nonetheless, if for no other reason for the human touches he gives to his subjects--the way the Diogeno mother on her burro cradles her child, making it appear as if she's resting her head on her husband's shoulder, the way the Araneno on the left is resting his feet in the waters of the Rio Grande.

I also love the scenery in which he placed his Indians, how he shows the sweep and scope of the landscape of the Southwest, and how his botanical training comes through in the meticulous depiction of the plant life in both pieces. They're wonderful little pieces, and they're fascinating records of a journey of discovery--something of the wonder Schott must have experienced clings to them. 

Arthur Schott wasn't the only German artist to explore the American West. Prussian-born Gustav Sohon was a member of the team that conducted the Pacific Railroad Surveys, a series of five expeditions from the Midwest to the Pacific which sought the best route for a transcontinental railroad. Like the Report on the U.S. and Mexican Boundary Survey, the published reports of these expeditions contain much more than recommendations the route for the easiest construction of a railway. They also contain information on the flora and fauna, geography, geology and paleontology, and people living in that vast stretch of territory, and they contain illustrations by some of the foremost American artists of the time, including Thomas Moran. 

Sohon, like his compatriot Schott, was something of a Renaissance man. A soldier, artist, cartographer and a gifted linguist who easily picked up the languages of the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, he created the first known sketch of the Great Falls of the Missouri River in Montana. His drawings, like those of Schott, were also lithographed by the same firm, Sarony & Knapp of New York. I found my copy in an antique shop in St. Louis.

This particular print evokes more in me than the romance of the American age of exploration and discovery. As I was researching this piece, I cam a cross a phrase that struck me:

"On August 16, 1856, Mr. Denver of the House Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad and Telegraph reported that: "the necessity that exists for constructing lines of railroad and telegraphic communication between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of this continent is no longer a question for argument; it is conceded by every one."

In other words, building a transcontinental railway wasn't a partisan issue--it was a necessity the importance of which no one questioned. It's a striking contrast to today, when the very ideas of science and progress are under attack by the Republican party, and when every issue, no matter its importance, is tainted, stunted, stalemated, and stymied by partisanship.

It's critical not to romanticize the past. After all, at the time Mr. Denver uttered those words on the House floor, the country was looking down the barrel of the biggest and most lethal partisan divide in its history, a conflict between two intractable sides which would not end until a huge swath of the country was a charred and smoking ruin. Still and all, there's something in that statement--the idea that there are some things which are so practical as to end debate altogether--that I find refreshing, and it is that sentiment, perhaps, that made this country so appealing to so many talented, educated Germans fleeing their homeland to gaze in wonder at the marvels of this one. 

Travelogues, Part 1.

The excellent Christopher Lane, one of the proprietors of the Philadelphia Print Shop, makes a very useful distinction on his very helpful blog between "collectors" and "acquirers."

"A collector," he says, "can be distinguished from an acquirer by the approach he or she takes to collecting... The most important collecting criterion is that of a theme or topic for the collection. The theme of a collection is that characteristic which the prints share that turns the assemblage into a single entity, rather than simply a group of prints."

At this point, although it pains me to say it, I'm really more of an acquirer than a collector. The criteria I use to select the prints I buy are so broad that it's difficult to say that I have a collecting focus at all. But if I have one at all, it's the travelogue.

I mentioned in the first post on this blog that I wanted to find images that were evocative or redolent of certain themes: travel, exploration, adventure, discovery. This does limit the scope of what I buy somewhat. Portraits are out, so are botanicals, and so are fashion prints, like those damned ubiquitous "La Mode Illustree" engravings that infest most of the antique shops I frequent like pantry moths. And I could care less about most historical scenes, like battles and stuff like that.

I like, and buy when I see them, images that were created by travelers, by people who went out to see what they could see and then recorded what they saw for thousands of other people to see them as well. The images they created, and the books in which these prints were published, were the National Geographic and the Discovery Channel of their time. In an age when people didn't move around a lot, and when it wasn't uncommon to be born, live, and die within the very limited radius of a couple of miles, books and images like this were their only glimpse of distant places.

One of the most interesting of these books was American Scenery, or Land Lake and River: Illustrations of a Transatlantic Nature, which was published in 1840 in London by the firm of Geo. Virtue & Co. (Virtue, as a short aside, was one heck of a publisher. The firm published tons of books and prints on precisely the topic I like.) Originally published serially (there were 30 issues altogether), the series was eventually collected and published in two volumes, with 119 engravings.

American Scenery was illustrated by William H. Bartlett, whom we've encountered before in a previous post, and written by Nathaniel Parker Willis. A team of engravers created the matrices from Bartlett's sketches and paintings--one of whom was Henry Adlard, about whom I'll say more later.

America in the 1830s and 1840s was still a romantic and largely unknown place, and fascinating to Britons and other Europeans. It was still a frontier country, there was a lot to be explored, and Americans were hard at work building not only a new country but a new culture. It was, in short, a great place for a guy like William Bartlett.

Bartlett didn't live very long--from 1809 to 1854--but he packed a lot of living into his short life. He was a terrific artist and an indefatigable traveler who traveled widely through the Middle East, the Balkans,  and North America (American Scenery was followed up by Canadian Scenery Illustrated), making four visits to North American to show the folks back home what their American cousins were up to, and where they were up to it.

So far, I've been able to find two of the 119 Bartlett engravings from American Scenery. Here's the first one I picked up: "Village of Sing Sing (Hudson River)."

And here's the second one: "View of Baltimore."

Sharp-eyed observers will notice that one's in color, one isn't. This isn't uncommon in the world of antique print-collecting--prints were the adult coloring books of their day, and very often, when the books were broken up so that the prints could be sold separately, the dealers had them colored to enhance their decorative value and salability.

William Bartlett died of fever while returning from the Middle East in 1854. I find him one of the most inspiring and interesting artists in my assemblage of prints--the Artist Intrepid, a guy who set out for distant parts with his brushes in hand, an explorer and recorder of the places he went and the times in which he lived. I'll continue to keep an eye out for his work and snap it up whenever possible, but especially more plates from American Scenery. Only 117 more to go.