DeWitt County is about 90 miles east of San Antonio, in a part of the state that is soaked in Texas history. There are plenty of families there today related to colonists who settled when the region was a part of Mexico.
The county is in the midst of its 175th anniversary, and as luck would have it, a resident recently uncovered a previously unknown history of the area – just in time to celebrate the county’s history.
There was only one problem. It was written in German.
The author, C.H. Waltersdorf, immigrated to DeWitt county as a child. To unlock the manuscript’s secrets, the DeWitt County Historical Commission turned to Professor James Kearney, a historian and professor of German at the University of Texas at Austin. The finished product was recently unveiled to the public.
Kearney spoke to the Texas Standard about translating the text. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Well, what do we know about the person who wrote this book?
James Kearney: The author, [Carl Herman] Woltersdorf, nothing was known about him. And so that was part of the excavation into this project that I did. It was a kind of an archeology on a lot of fronts.
But he was a German immigrant who came to Texas in the early 1880s. His family had already come before him – his father and mother left him behind as a five-year-old. And eventually he started his own German newspaper.
But in 1898, he wrote a long supplement, “A History of DeWitt County” in German. And so this is what I translated.
How did this first come up on your radar?
Well, it didn’t, actually. I was approached by, of all people, a former cheerleader from here at the University of Texas – a delightful lady named Mary Gayle.
DeWitt County was celebrating its 175th anniversary, and she is involved in the historical commission. And they had discovered this manuscript, the only known one to exist. And they decided they would like to translate it for their celebration.
You use the term “discovered.” How was it discovered? Do you know that story?
Yes, I do. Beverly Bruns is a, I think she’s president of the DeWitt County Historical Society, and she has her roots in the German community.
You know, these people have trunks and old collections of papers and letters and she was rooting through these and she found what was published as a supplement to a newspaper, a German-language newspaper. There were over a hundred German language newspapers in Texas at one time.
She found it and she recognized “DeWitt County” in the title. So they contacted me and as I read it, I realized this is actually quite an important manuscript on a lot of scores.
Can you just tell us what the history covers generally?
He starts from the very beginning about DeWitt County and Green DeWitt, one of the original colonies in the Mexican period. But he just covers that very perfunctorily.
His story really begins in depth with about 1845. And the reason is that’s when vast numbers of German immigrants began coming in and landing at Indianola. DeWitt County is strategically positioned halfway between the coast, Indianola and San Antonio. And that was where all the supplies came in for so-called West Texas, including these Germans who eventually became the majority population in DeWitt County.
So his focus is telling the story of DeWitt County from the German immigrants point of view. And that’s something that’s never been done before. And so it becomes a story of acculturation – of adaptation to a society and mores and things that didn’t exist in Germany, you see, and a class of people that didn’t exist.
Waltersdorf refers to “rowdies” or cowboys, and he says this is a type of person that we’ve never encountered before. As I read it, I realized this is actually quite an important manuscript on a lot scores. And we can go into that.
It has an interest beyond DeWitt County, too. DeWitt County, for most people, or historians, if you mentioned DeWitt County, one thing immediately comes to mind – namely the Sutton-Taylor feud, which is the largest, bloodiest feud in American history. It played out in DeWitt County.
And there have been many books written about the Sutton-Taylor feud – many articles, a lot of ink. But none of the accounts, not a single one, mention the fact that there was a large and growing immigrant community in the county that was not directly involved in the feud.
John Wesley Hardin. Public domain photo
They’re like bystanders. They’re sitting in the bleachers watching these various Anglo factions slaughter each other. So he does use a sense of humor often, and he tells funny anecdotes. His book is a wonderful collection of anecdotes, some of which are based on first-hand experience and some he heard.
As a newspaper man, you know everything that’s going on and everybody. For instance, he tells the story of the famous gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, who was involved in the feud, and how he liked actually to hang out with the Germans in Yorktown and drink beer and go to their dances. And he was a very gentlemanly, nice guy who always paid his bills.
And so you think, wow, this is one of the most notorious killers in American history who had a whole other side.
The German that this book was written in, how does it compare to contemporary German?
It’s very easy German. Woltersdorf, although he was a newspaper editor, does not write in academic German. I found it delightful to translate and very easy.
You see, the question is not knowing what the German says. The question is finding the appropriate English equivalent of it. He laced his narrative with a lot of German sayings that any German would recognize.
I don’t know if I can think of a precise example off the top of my head, there are many, but trying to find an equivalent English expression that has the same pithiness and so forth and so on… It’s a challenge. And when you feel like you’ve got something right, it’s a reward, a sense of accomplishment.
But there’s also syntactical… You know, German has a very strange word order, and it has the capacity to make, for technical reasons, it has a capacity to make very long sentences, which English cannot do. And so, that is something you struggle with – how to break up these very long sentences, and yet preserve a certain tone and pace throughout. It’s a challenge.
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Is there a passage, a scene from the translation that really, really sticks with you?
I found this story about Frau Sieder, very compelling on a lot of different levels.
It tells the stories of common people and the people who, collectively, their energies and their efforts built the community in the county of DeWitt, but they’re sort of who are left out of standard histories.
And, for instance, he tells a story about a German lady by the name of Frau Sieder, who served all the wagoneers and teamsters who were driving wagons from Indianola to San Antonio and back. And you’re talking about hundreds of wagons, a tremendous trade, before Indianola was off the map by hurricane.
She would serve 100 people at a time, but she ran it with an iron fist. She would tolerate no cussing or loud behavior, and everybody had to sit and eat and then plop down a quarter.
I should mention a couple of things. There’s some interesting omissions in Waltersdorf that are quite interesting. For instance, DeWitt County was 20% Black, and there’s never a mention of a Black person ever in the book, and that’s a regrettable omission. Not a mention.
But normally these little history books like this also tend to go into the churches, and the development of the churches as an important social institution. There’s not one mention ever of the religion or churches in his history of DeWitt County, which is all the more interesting because briefly, he got himself ordained as a German Methodist preacher and he was active for 10 years in Texas and had congregations.
He had one here in Llano County at Art, the beautiful German Methodist church. He was a preacher there. But all of a sudden, for reasons which are unclear, he gave it up and his history has not one mention of religion.
