This wonderful second novel of a trilogy about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country concerns the tragic Civil War years, when an apparent majority turned its back on the old efforts to bring the proud but always-threatened and always-broke Republic of Texas into the Union. Texas was much smaller then but still had fewer slaves than most slave states, and author Celia Hayes contends that it was mainly the John Brown raid on Harper’s Ferry and subsequent rumors of possible slave insurrections that drove Texas into the Confederacy.
With the departure of so many of the state’s finest (including many Germans) to the battlefields of Tennessee and Virginia, the scoundrels took over the home front. Particularly in the hills where so many settlers more often spoke German than English and so were considered foreigners of dubious loyalty. Indeed many of them were Unionists, as a monument to some murdered ones, erected in Comfort in 1866, still attests. Tragedy likewise comes to Hayes’ main characters, the fictitious Becker and Steinmetz families, and we suffer along with them in the fulsome emotion her story has created in us.
This is old-fashioned story-telling at its best, and I was pleased to see many fewer typos and misspellings than in the first book. And I have bought the third one, the Harvest, and look forward to it. The old German towns of the hills, especially Fredericksburg, the principal place of the tale, are now major tourist attractions, something the old German burghers would have been pleased to know. It’s enriching to now have an emotional attachment to such as the old coffee-mill-style Verein’s Kirche (which still stands amidst the daily bustle on Main Street) thanks to Mrs. Hayes good writings.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 