Okay, show of hands. How many of you knew that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (better known as the Mormons) played a prominent role in the settlement of the Texas Hill Country?

Don’t feel bad; I had no idea, either, until I was assigned to write the entries on Gillespie County for the New Handbook of Texas almost thirty years ago. In fact, for more than a decade in the middle of the nineteenth century, a breakaway group of Mormons founded and then abandoned an astonishing number of settlements in Central Texas.

The Mormons are now well established in Utah, but that wasn’t always the case; their early history was, to put it mildly, peripatetic. Joseph Smith founded the movement in New York State in the 1820s, but he and his followers attracted violent opposition almost immediately. They moved to Ohio in 1831, intending eventually to settle in Independence, Missouri, but after bloody clashes with locals in both states, they moved again, to Illinois, where they founded the town of Nauvoo in 1840. A year later, Smith and the Nauvoo city council angered non-Mormons by destroying a printing press that had been used to print an exposé critical of Smith and the practice of polygamy; Smith was imprisoned in Carthage, Illinois, and died in a riot when a mob stormed the jailhouse.

Before his death, having concluded that Illinois was no more hospitable to the embryonic faith than New York, Ohio, or Missouri, Smith sent an envoy to negotiate with Sam Houston for the establishment of a Mormon settlement in the Republic of Texas. Lyman Wight, one of Smith’s favorites—he was ordained the first high priest of the church in 1831—had received Smith’s permission to lead a group to Texas, but Smith’s successor Brigham Young decided that Utah would be a more propitious site. While most of the Mormons followed Young to the Great Salt Lake Valley, about 150 to 200 dissenters (accounts vary) followed the renegade Wight, who felt compelled to honor Smith’s wishes, to Texas.

Wight seems to have had an incorrigible case of happy feet, even by Mormon standards, and a profound stubborn streak—hence the colorful nickname, “the Wild Ram of the Mountains,” bestowed on him by the New York Sun. (That’s John James Audubon’s ca. 1845 lithograph of Rocky Mountain sheep at the top of the page, by the way.) Wight was born in upstate New York in 1796 and subsequently lived in Canada, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin; he also refused to acknowledge Young as Smith’s legitimate successor.

Wight and his followers spent the winter of 1845–46 at an abandoned fort near Preston, in Grayson County, and arrived in Austin in June 1846. They settled in what is now Webberville, where they met the pioneer blacksmith and memoirist Noah Smithwick, in September 1846, and built a gristmill on the Colorado River which was destroyed by a flood.

By this time the Mormons must have been wondering if they would ever find a place to call home. In 1847, Wight asked John O. Meusebach for permission to found a colony on the Pedernales River; no doubt he hoped that the Germans, with their tradition of religious tolerance, would look more kindly on Mormon polygamy than had their Anglo neighbors. (Apparently the Germans considered the Mormons “lawless of religious practices,” but pragmatically figured the newcomers could teach them American agricultural and milling techniques.)

Wight and his followers founded the settlement of Zodiac, four miles southeast of Fredericksburg, in 1847. There they built a sawmill (the first in Gillespie County), a gristmill, a store, a school, and the first Mormon temple west of the Mississippi River; they became the principal suppliers of seed, flour, and lumber to their German fellow settlers, and also helped build Fort Martin Scott, established in 1848 on what was then the western frontier of settlement in Texas.

Wight himself refused several invitations from Young to come to Utah and was excommunicated by the Mormon church in 1849. In 1850 he lost the election for chief justice of Gillespie County to the German immigrant Johann Klingelhoefer, but was awarded the office after pointing out that Klingelhoefer was not an American citizen. By the following summer, however, Wight could apparently no longer be bothered to show up for court, so the county commissioners declared the office vacant and awarded it to Klingelhoefer, who had since become a citizen. (One historian has suggested that Wight was addicted to alcohol and opium, which may have contributed to his erratic behavior.)

Perhaps Wight had already sensed another move in the offing. In September 1851, after more devastating floods, he and his followers left Zodiac and moved to Burnet County, where they established a colony called Mormon Mill on Hamilton Creek—those Mormons were serious millers, weren’t they?—but in December 1853 Wight and his followers sold the property to their old friend Smithwick and moved on to Bandera, where they built a furniture factory. In the fall of 1856, however, they moved again, this time to a site on the Medina River below Bandera which came to be known as Mountain Valley or Mormon Camp. (The site is now covered by Medina Lake.)

If folks thought that Wight would settle down at last, they were sadly mistaken. In 1858, he had a premonition of the Civil War and decided to lead his followers—one can only imagine what they thought when he told them to pack up yet again—back to Missouri.

Apparently this was one move too many even for the indefatigable Wild Ram of the Mountains; he died on the second day of the journey, when the group was about eight miles from San Antonio, and was buried in his ceremonial temple robes in the Mormon cemetery at Zodiac, which no longer exists.

And what of his followers? Some remained in Texas, while others moved on to Iowa, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), or Utah. As of 2012, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints claimed 315,895 members in Texas, or about 5 percent of the national total of 6,321,416. Only four states—Utah (of course), California, Idaho, and Arizona—had more. I wonder how many of today’s Mormon Texans are descendants of Wight’s followers, followers who were secretly relieved not to have to uproot themselves yet again at the whim of the Wild Ram of the Mountains?

What we’re reading
Heather: Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Martin: Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

Let’s face it: we are not culturally conditioned to look kindly upon constraints. Every day bombards us with messages urging us to maximize our enjoyments, super-size our servings, and prolong our erections. Limitations, we’re told, are for losers.

I, on the other hand, believe firmly that sometimes, under certain circumstances, constraints can actually foster, rather than curtail, creativity; ingenuity can flourish in unexpected ways, in all sorts of compromised settings. I absorbed this lesson during my time as a “county writer” for the Texas State Historical Association’s New Handbook of Texas, beginning in the mid-1980s, during which I suspect I learned at least as much about the craft of writing as I did as an undergraduate English major or in grad school.

As a county writer, my job entailed researching and writing all the entries associated with a given county for a massive revision of the original Handbook of Texas, a historical encyclopedia/biographical dictionary originally published in two volumes in 1952 under the aegis of Walter Prescott Webb, with a supplemental third volume appearing in 1976. The greatly expanded New Handbook, published in six volumes in 1996, required a veritable army of contributors—more than 3,000 in all—some volunteers and some, like me, paid staff, to crank out the roughly 24,000 entries. (Since going online in 1999, the Handbook has grown to more than 25,000 entries.)

On the face of it, few jobs could have less to do with creative writing. Yet trying to shape an occasionally jumbled pile of historical data, hearsay, and legend into a coherent, even compelling, and above all brief (sometimes just two or three sentences) narrative was an irresistible and, I believe, inherently creative challenge, even if I didn’t always succeed; many of the entries I had to write, such as those on small watercourses or hills or towns that had dried up and blown away, were simply too short and/or uninteresting. Here, for example, in its entirety, is my entry on a stream called Town Creek:

Town Creek rises a mile north of Fredericksburg in central Gillespie County (at 30°19′ N, 98°52′ W). Intermittent in its upper reaches, the stream follows a southerly course for 3½ miles to its mouth on Barons Creek in Fredericksburg (at 30°16′ N, 98°52′ W). Rising in the hills of the Edwards Plateau, Town Creek crosses flat to rolling terrain surfaced by shallow loamy and clayey soils; vegetation consists primarily of open stands of live oak, Ashe juniper, and mesquite, and grasses.

Doesn’t exactly set the heart racing, does it? Yet every so often I would find some nugget of information that could add a little color to a highly compressed and otherwise drab recitation of facts, and I took an inordinate pride in trying to craft the most apparently unpromising entry into something that would reward the careful reader with a graceful turn of phrase or an unexpectedly poignant or amusing incident. Here are just a few, drawn from various biographical entries I wrote: After the jazz pianist Peck Kelley quit the music business due to deteriorating eyesight, “he reportedly spent hours practicing at home on a stringless, silent piano so as not to disturb his neighbors.” German immigrant Johann Klingelhoefer “was elected chief justice of Gillespie County in 1850 but had to give up the office when his opponent, Mormon leader Lyman Wight, pointed out that Klingelhoefer was not yet an American citizen.” The West Texas rancher and congressman Claude Hudspeth, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, once referred to the president of our neighbor to the south as “that spineless cactus of Mexico.”

If I had to pick one favorite among the hundreds of entries I wrote, though, it might be the one on actor Tom Mix. Mix probably didn’t belong in the Handbook of Texas at all; despite his claims to have been born on a ranch on the Rio Grande and to have served as a Texas Ranger and with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the battle of San Juan Hill, he was in fact an army deserter from Pennsylvania. He was the most celebrated Western silent-movie star in early Hollywood, but he was virtually forgotten with the advent of talkies. After almost a thousand words, my entry on him ends as follows:

Mix died on October 12, 1940, when his Cord automobile overturned on a highway near Florence, Arizona; he was driving to California to discuss a return to the movies. His principal baggage reportedly consisted of three snow-white Stetson hats.

I couldn’t say with certainty that the story of the white Stetsons was true, but it was simply too good to pass up, and it provided a perfect way to punctuate the downward trajectory of Mix’s life. In this entry, and in many others, I was merely following the advice of the newspaper editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”), though I tried always to leave myself a little wiggle room—hence the use of “reportedly” in the excerpt above. (I was also a big fan of “apparently,” “presumably,” “allegedly,” and similar conditional constructions.)

This is all a pretty high-falutin’ way of talking about what was on some level hackwork, but I think that even the humblest piece of writing can benefit from, and manifest, a careful devotion to craft. As George Orwell, a particular literary hero for the simplicity and clarity of his writing, once said, “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.” (That would have made a pretty good motto for us county writers, right down to the emphasis on the surface of the earth; we probably had to write more entries on physical features—creeks and mountains and such—than any other type.)

We’re never more creative or more fully human than when we acknowledge and work within our limitations, be they imposed externally or internally. Our aspirations can be infinite, but actual achievement usually requires a pragmatic acceptance of the finite. And, of course, a judicious use of conditionals.

What we’re reading
Heather: Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Martin: Vincent Virga, Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations

For all of my whingeing about the difficulties of adjusting to life in Texas, even after thirty years here, I know I’ve had it pretty easy, especially compared to the nineteenth-century settlers who endured almost unimaginable hardships while trying to claw a tenuous living out of the deceptively thin Hill Country topsoil. For one thing, I speak the same language (more or less) as the natives. For another thing, those natives aren’t actively trying to kill me—well, with the exception of the occasional jackass in a pickup speeding down MoPac. Finally, and arguably most important of all, I live here after the invention of air conditioning.

Many of those Hill Country settlers were German immigrants, and they and their descendants have played a prominent role in the region’s history over the last century and a half. I learned something about them when I started working at the Texas State Historical Association back in the mid-1980s, as my initial assignment was writing entries on Gillespie County for the Handbook of Texas.

I knew little to nothing of Texas history at the time, but I had always enjoyed our occasional day trips to the charming little town of Fredericksburg—people actually spoke German in the shops and restaurants!—and leaped at the opportunity to learn more about it. Perhaps inevitably, the more I learned, the more fascinated I became.

Here’s the one-paragraph version: In the mid-1840s, the Adelsverein, an organization founded by a group of German nobles to promote colonization in Texas, shipped over more than 7,000 settlers, most of them peasants. The first Europeans in what is now Gillespie County arrived in 1846, when a group of 120 German settlers led by John O. Meusebach established Fredericksburg on Barons Creek and Town Creek, near the Pedernales River. The little community thrived and became the county seat when the legislature created Gillespie County in 1848. Two years later, the population of the town had grown to almost a thousand; in that same year, three-quarters of the 1,235 whites in Gillespie County were of foreign extraction, almost all of them German.

Though little remembered today, surely one of the most remarkable was Christian Althaus, one of the first doctors in Fredericksburg. (The first was Wilhelm Keidel.) While I myself didn’t write the Handbook entry on Althaus—that honor fell to the Barbara Donalson Althaus, who obviously had a more personal connection with her subject—I’m cribbing from it shamelessly in this post.

Johann Christian Althaus was born in Erndtebrück, Westphalia, and served as a medic in the Prussian army before emigrating to Texas. He sailed from Antwerp, Belgium, on the York, arriving in Indianola in 1846 and making his way to Fredericksburg by the time town lots were distributed the following year. Also in 1847, he married a fellow immigrant, Anna Maria Elisabetha (Elizabeth) Behrens; they eventually had seven children. Initially, doctoring seems to have been at best a part-time occupation for Althaus; he also worked as a saddle-maker and as an Indian agent at Fort Martin Scott, two miles east of town, though in the 1850 census he was listed as a carpenter.

Althaus seems, like many of his fellow German settlers, to have cultivated a friendly relationship with the local Indians. He was one of the signers of the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty, which virtually eliminated fears of Indian attacks, and he eventually learned several Indian dialects. He treated Indians as well as whites in his medical practice, following the advice of an Indian friend who advised him to “be friendly and never pull a gun.” (This still strikes me as good advice in most circumstances.)

After ten years in Fredericksburg, Althaus determined to try his hand at ranching. He and the family moved to Cave Creek, several miles northeast of town, where he built a two-room stone house on top of a spring in which he kept his medicines cool. (The house, still standing in modified form on Koennecke-Eckhardt Road, off Ranch Road 1631, is now part of the Historic American Buildings Survey of the Library of Congress.) Althaus, like many of his fellow Germans, opposed the “peculiar institution” of slavery and secession—an unpopular stance with many of their fellow Texans, and contributed to the legendary insularity of the Hill Country Germans—but helped organize the home guard and served as a county commissioner during the Civil War.

And all this time he was practicing medicine, too, as Barbara Donalson Althaus wrote in her Handbook entry:

He served as a community doctor until the 1880s, and his practice of medicine was carried on under many difficulties. Medical instruments were scarce; before Althaus amputated a crushed arm, he had to have the operating instrument (now at Pioneer Museum, Fredericksburg) made by a local blacksmith. He used locally grown herbs, roots, and bark to make his own medicines. When the government sent him to Bandera to treat diphtheria patients, he used medicine he made from honey, almond juice, and the bark of the blackjack tree. Thirty-four out of thirty-five people survived. Elizabeth Althaus not only raised seven children but also ran a makeshift hospital, orphanage, and shelter for wayfarers in their home. In addition she tended the farm during her husband’s trips, which sometimes lasted for weeks.

Althaus farmed and ranched and operated a dairy on the Cave Creek property until the 1880s, when he moved a few miles east. In 1883 he was among the founders of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Cave Creek, which calls itself “the oldest rural church in Gillespie County,” and volunteered to help haul the lumber used to build the church from Austin, seventy-five miles away. (At this time he was in his sixties, remember.) He died in 1915, at the age of ninety-four, and was buried beside the church he helped establish.

All in all, a life worthy of remembrance and even celebration, I’m sure you’ll agree. And a life that puts my own in useful perspective. The high in Austin today will be in the mid-90s, but I’m typing this while sitting in a comfortable chair in our well-cooled house; when I sweat, it’s usually because I choose to, either by walking Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound up and down the surrounding hills in the morning, or by going to a nearby gym. The food we eat is plentiful and healthful, almost exclusively grown by local farmers; Heather is fixing a breakfast of home-made polenta (made with cornmeal from Boggy Creek Farm) topped by a poached egg from our happy Madroño Ranch hens. I’m getting over a summer cold, after several days of pounding decongestants and expectorants.

Do I wish I were living in nineteenth-century Texas? No and hell no. But I do wish that I had had the opportunity to meet people like Christian (and Elizabeth) Althaus in person. I know I could learn much from their courage and perseverance and goodness.

What we’re reading
Heather: Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds
Martin: Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (still!)

Last Monday was Memorial Day, which Heather and I acknowledged by visiting the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg on our way out for a quick visit to Madroño Ranch.

If you haven’t been there yet, I can tell you that the museum is an amazing place, crammed full of artifacts and information; we had no idea! (Those of you wondering why a museum commemorating the Pacific war is in landlocked Fredericksburg should know that it is the home town of Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet during World War II.) We were wandering through, overwhelmed by the number and detail of the exhibits, when we came upon a photograph (above) of Heather’s grandmother, Oveta Culp Hobby, who was the head of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II.

Mamaw, as she was known in the family, was a formidable woman. Born in Killeen in 1905, she was a proto-feminist (though I suspect she would be horrified to be described as such), both genteel and steely. Family legend holds that she displayed a strong sense of integrity, not to say stubbornness, at an early age. Her son (and Heather’s uncle), former lieutenant governor Bill Hobby, wrote of her in the Handbook of Texas:

She was only five or six when a temperance campaign swept Killeen, and at Sunday school all the small children were invited to sign the pledge and receive a Woman’s Christian Temperance Union white ribbon to wear. Oveta thought it over and refused. She had no particular desire to drink liquor, she granted, but she might wish to when she grew up and thought it best not to give her word unless she was sure she was prepared to keep it.

She inherited a firm belief in the importance of public service from her father, a state legislator, and evinced an early interest in the law. She attended both Baylor Female College (now the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor) and the South Texas College of Law, though she graduated from neither. At the tender age of twenty, she became the parliamentarian of the Texas House of Representatives, beginning a long career of public service, though her lone stab at electoral politics was a failure, as Uncle Bill notes:

At twenty-five she was persuaded to run for the state legislature from Houston, but was beaten by a candidate who whispered darkly that she was “a parliamentarian and a Unitarian.”

In 1931 she became the second wife of former Texas governor William P. Hobby, the president of the Houston Post and a good friend of her father’s; she was twenty-six and he was fifty-three. For the next decade, her life revolved around the newspaper business (she was successively the book editor, assistant editor, and executive vice president of the Post during the 1930s), community affairs (she was president of the League of Women Voters of Texas and served on the boards of various civic organizations), and her two children.

In 1942, she was appointed the first head of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), which later became the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). She became the first woman accorded the rank of colonel in the United States Army and worked tirelessly, in the face of deeply entrenched skepticism and prejudice, to establish the WAC as a legitimate branch of the service. (In 1945, in recognition of her efforts, she became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Service Medal.) Uncle Bill again:

The job she undertook was hard, often exasperating, frequently amusing, and sometimes heartbreaking. The new director had to travel constantly, speaking to large groups of men and women on the radical subject of enlisting volunteer women into the army. She traveled with an electric fan and iron, so that at each overnight stop she could wash, dry, and iron her khaki uniform—the only WAAC uniform in existence at the time.

After the war, she was active in the Democrats for Eisenhower movement, and in 1953 Ike appointed her the first secretary of the brand-new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services); she thus became only the second female Cabinet member in United States history. She resigned in 1955 to spend more time with her ailing husband (he died in 1964), and spent the next four decades overseeing the family communications business, which grew to include radio and television stations, and solidifying her standing as the first lady of Houston society. She died in 1995.

My own memories of her begin in the summer of 1981, when Heather and I, having just graduated from Williams College, embarked on an epic cross-country drive from Massachusetts to California and back to San Antonio.

En route to the West Coast, we passed through New Orleans, where we spent several days, and Houston, where we arranged to visit Mamaw. (Heather had made it clear that Mamaw was most definitely not the sort of grandmother one dropped in on unannounced for milk and cookies, so we called her secretary and made an appointment.)

On the night before our departure from the Crescent City, someone broke into our car and made off with all our worldly possessions (admittedly a modest pile), including Heather’s Williams College diploma and (this really hurt) our cooler full of beer. We were left, quite literally, with the clothes on our backs—in my case, a pair of cut-off jeans and a T-shirt bearing, in large letters across the chest, the slogan of the oyster bar in Boston’s Faneuil Hall (“EAT IT RAW”). We waited several hours, in vain, for the New Orleans police to show up before Heather announced that we had to leave; we simply could not afford to be late for our appointment with Mamaw.

We fairly flew over I-10 to Houston, pulling up at Mamaw’s house just in time. We were shown into a beautifully appointed sitting room and offered tea. The tea arrived, served in lovely bone china; I accepted a cup, and balanced it on my knee while we awaited Mamaw’s entrance.

Just before she entered the room, I looked down at the delicate cup and saucer resting on my bare, hairy knee, and suddenly realized that this meeting was not going to go well.

Sure enough, the temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees when Mamaw entered and caught her first glimpse of me in my cut-offs and vulgar T-shirt, with my bushy beard and gold earring. What had I been thinking? Granted, we’d been in a hurry to reach Houston, but why hadn’t we stopped for even five minutes at a Dollar General Store and at least bought me a plain white T-shirt?

I escaped that awkward meeting alive, somehow, but for the next few years, whenever Mamaw called Heather and I happened to pick up the phone, I could feel the chill coming over the long-distance lines and through the receiver. “Hello?” I would say. (This was long before caller ID, of course.) “Is Heather there,” came the icy response—never “Hello, Martin,” or “How are you?”

Finally, after we married, Mamaw began, very gradually, to warm up to me. She became much friendlier on the phone, even asking me questions about myself and my work before asking to speak to Heather. We took our kids to visit her in Houston, having first threatened them with torture and dismemberment if they misbehaved; she seemed to enjoy them, though she never got used to the idea that she had a great-grandson named Tito. (“And how is little, er, Toto?” she would ask.)

She was also a little dubious about my ethnicity. The story goes that when one of Heather’s cousins announced that she was marrying a young man of Greek descent, Mamaw sniffed, “Well, we already have a Kohout in the family. I suppose we might as well have a Papadopoulos.”

I had of course always admired and respected her, and toward the end of her life I grew to love her as well. She was ferociously intelligent, determined, and opinionated, and yet she was also gracious and charming, and extremely funny—all qualities, by the way, she passed on to her daughter and granddaughters (and, so far as we can tell, to her great-granddaughters as well). I was fortunate indeed to know her, despite the somewhat, er, awkward beginning of our relationship.

Mamaw, I salute you. I hope that, wherever you are, you can see that I’ve cut my hair, trimmed the beard, and given up the earring. And that EAT IT RAW T-shirt disappeared years ago.

What we’re reading
Heather: W. S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems
Martin: Jerome Charyn, The Seventh Babe

This week, for spring break, we flew to Colorado to ski and to visit Heather’s sister Isa and brother John and their families. As I sat on the plane, gazing out the window at the green and brown patchwork unfurling far below us, I was reminded of one of my favorite Hill Country legends, this one involving the mysterious Jacob Brodbeck.

A German-born schoolteacher who arrived in Texas in 1847, Brodbeck became the second teacher at Fredericksburg’s Vereins Kirche, married one of his former students, and eventually fathered twelve children. But he is best remembered for his claim to be the first human to fly successfully in a heavier-than-air machine almost forty years before Orville and Wilbur Wright’s famous flight at Kitty Hawk, a claim that has never been proved—or, for that matter, disproved.

Brodbeck was an inveterate tinkerer; while living in Germany he had attempted to build a self-winding clock, and in 1869 he supposedly built an ice-making machine, no mean feat in those days before the Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to the Hill Country. Apparently he worked on his “air-ship” for some twenty years.

In 1858 Brodbeck and his wife left Fredericksburg and moved to Luckenbach, where he became the second teacher at the three-year-old Luckenbach School. Five years later they moved to San Antonio, where he became a school inspector. Brodbeck built a working scale model of his craft, powered by coiled springs, which caused a minor sensation when he showed it at county fairs and other gatherings. He succeeded in convincing several investors, including the distinguished Dr. Ferdinand Herff of San Antonio, to bankroll the construction of a full-size version, promising to repay them within six months, after selling the patent rights to his creation.

At length, he completed that full-size version and prepared for his inaugural attempt. And this is where things get really fuzzy. One account says Brodbeck’s first flight took place in San Antonio’s San Pedro Park, and in fact a bust of him was later placed there; another says the flight took place in 1868. But the most commonly accepted version of events is that on September 20, 1865, in a field about three miles east of Luckenbach, Brodbeck and his craft travelled some 100 feet at a height of about twelve feet, but the springs unwound completely before he could rewind them and craft and pilot crashed to the ground. While Brodbeck escaped serious injury, his air-ship was destroyed.

For some reason, his backers (who had presumably given up on getting their money back) refused to fund the construction of a replacement, so Brodbeck took his show on the road, travelling the country in an attempt to raise the necessary scratch. (No word on what his wife thought of this—or, indeed, of the whole air-ship scheme.) His papers and plans were stolen in Michigan, though, or perhaps in Washington DC—again, accounts vary—and a discouraged Brodbeck returned to Texas and, apparently, gave up his dream of powered flight. He lived out his remaining years on a farm near Luckenbach and died in 1910, a little more than six years after the Wright brothers’ sensational flight at Kitty Hawk. I wonder how he greeted the news of their achievement.

I am myself becoming a bit of a nervous flyer—basically, I agree with George Winters, who said, “If God had really intended men to fly, he’d make it easier to get to the airport”—and I’ve never been bitten by the aviation bug. But a fairly substantial literature celebrates the glory and beauty of flight, and those who fly—Icarus, Lindbergh, Earhart, Saint-Exupéry, the astronauts—retain a lofty (haha!) position in our collective imagination. Perhaps flight is simply the most obvious metaphor for transcendence, a persistent human craving.

In the absence of his own words, I wonder why Brodbeck became so obsessed with the idea of flight. Perhaps, after being the second teacher in both Fredericksburg and Luckenbach, he was simply determined to be first in something. Perhaps after spending all those years dealing with classrooms full of blockheaded students, not to mention a dozen children at home, he found the mere idea of any solitary activity irresistible, especially one that promised literally to lift him above the mundane concerns of everyday life. Did he ever actually make it off the ground? Beats me. If he didn’t, though, he was neither the first nor the last dreamer to blur the line between aspiration and reality.

I also wonder what his neighbors thought of him. Did they view him, with stereotypical hard-headed German practicality, as a crackpot? Or did they secretly wish that they too could experience, however briefly, the sensation of breaking free from gravity and getting a view of the earth that, at least in theory, approximated that of God? Will we ever know what really happened in that dusty field outside Luckenbach? I doubt it, and honestly I think I’d rather not know. Anyway, does it really matter? History is, after all, not so much carved in stone as written on the wind. What were once facts are discovered to be interpretations, and the impossible to be the probable (and vice versa). We would do well to remember the words of Bertrand Russell: “those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt.” Aren’t we all, in the end, called upon to live with ambiguity?

What we’re reading
Heather: Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke: Poems
Martin: Wallace Stegner, Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: Wallace Stegner’s American West