(SIGNED) The Golden Free Land: The Reminiscences and Letters of Women on an American Frontier

The Golden Free Land: The Reminiscences and Letters of Women on an American Frontier

by Crystal Sasse Ragsdale

Hardcover Cloth 198 pages. Condition Very Good NO Dust Jacket. Stated First Edition 1976. Beautiful green boards and gold embossing shows off this Clean, tight, square copy with no marks, highlights or bookplates. Book Well kept and carefully stored in unread condition with slight shelf wear. Foxing on edges. Please note this volume was printed on yellow colored paper. Not an ex-library, book club or remainder copy.

Dedication by author on splash page following first title page dated May 1991.

A collection of rare personal narratives by ten valiant women who helped conquer a strange and hostile American frontier. Printed in his hometown newspaper in Oldenburg, part of the German Confederation, in 1832, Friedrich Ernst's adulatory letter about moving to Texas was widely read at the time and credited for propelling the German immigration wave to prerevolution Texas, settling the "German Belt" from the Coastal Plain to the Hill Country.

Some ten thousand Germans immigrated to the region from 1840 to 1850, and by 1860 that number had more than doubled.

The Texas climate, Ernst wrote in his letter, resembles that of lower Italy! Wild game are everywhere—deer, bears, turkeys! Vegetables and flowers grow in abundance. Cattle feed freely, leaving you with "hardly three months of real work." The native tribes "are moving about peacefully like Cossacks."

The only downside? Maybe a panther here and there, and a few poisonous snakes—nothing to worry about, though; hunters walk barefoot without a thought. If this sounds more like fiction being told while the family members roll their eyes behind the storyteller, consider the account written years later by Friedrich's second daughter, Caroline Ernst von Hinueber.

Caroline arrived in Texas when she was eleven or twelve years old, among the earliest German children to arrive in Mexican, pro-republic Texas. In her translated recollection, available in Crystal Sasse Ragsdale's book The Golden Free Land, her parents and her four siblings were hardly blooming like roses. Rather, they lived in a doorless, windowless, "miserable little hut, covered with straw and having six sides, which were made out of moss. The roof was by no means water-proof, and we often held an umbrella over our bed when it rained at night, while the cows came and ate the moss."