Friedrichsburg: A Novel (Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture)

Friedrich Armand Strubberg (1806 –1889) released 21 books written in German between 1858 and 1873. Of these ten are set in Texas. *** Scholars for a couple of decades have been actively noticing Strubberg as a source for or corroboration of trends and facts about the last days of the Republic of Texas and the first years of Texas as a State of the United States. Additionally, Strubberg wrote historic novels after the romantic manner of Sir Walter Scott's WAVERLEY (1814). Strubberg was also as fascinated by American Indians and had even more personal experience with them than America's own James Fenimore Cooper. *** His 1857 novel was issued in 2012 in an English translation by James C. Kearney, PhD, who also annotated and illustrated what he called FRIEDRICHSBURG: A NOVEL - COLONY OF THE GERMAN FUERSTENVEREIN. Systematic German emigration to the Republic of Texas was set in motion by one German noblewoman and a score or more of high German noblemen -- including kin of Britain's Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. *** Friedrichsburg (now Fredericksburg) was founded in 1846 and its first director was none other than author Strubberg himself. Using another name in the novel, he displays medical skills and shepherds his hundreds of recent arrivals from Germany into agricultural self-sufficiency and towards an 1847 treaty of peace with most Comanche and some other tribes of Texas. This peace held for 20 years. Basically Comanches, Shawnee and others preferred Germans as neighbors to Anglo-Americans. The former lived close together in villages. The latter went as individuals wherever they chose and to hell with Indians. *** Romance is carried by two fictious young Germans. Two Indians, one evil, the other good, are lost in admiration for the young woman Ludwina and the evil one first captures her, then saves her from a huge gray bear. *** Introduction, notes, bibliography and index round out and frame the novel. A good read. -OOO-