[The following presupposes that the reader knows that Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels, the original commissioner-general of the Verein zum Schutze Deutscher Einwanderer in Texas (Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas, or Adelsverein), had been replaced by Ottfried Hans Frieherr (Baron) von Meusebach, or "just plain" John O. Meusebach, as he preferred to call himself. Readers who need more background information should refer to the Texas Handbook Online entries for Adelsverein, Indian Point, Indianola and Meusebach, John O.

This narrative picks up in October, 1845.]

However, in October, just as it appeared as if the New Braunfels colony might make it through the coming winter, Meusebach received two successive jolts of bad news. First, instead of the $140,000 line of credit he’d requested, the Verein extended him just $24,000, again to be drawn off a New Orleans bank. Next, the Verein proudly informed their new commissioner general that an additional 4,000 immigrants were, at this very moment, en route to Texas. Meusebach had just enough time to complete his surveys in the Fisher-Miller Grant; based on those surveys and the recommendations of the survey force, he had just enough remaining "bluff" with his creditors to purchase four land parcels from the Republic of Texas barely inside the grant’s southern boundary, along the north bank of the Llano River.

Then the avalanche that had broken loose in Germany rolled across the Atlantic and struck the coast of Texas. The ships began arriving from Germany in earnest, and from this point the precise scale of the tragedy about to occur becomes a matter of opinion and conjecture. Some records of maritime arrivals at Galveston from 1840 to 1860 were lost during the Great Storm (hurricane) of 1900, and the Verein records, as we noted, are full of errors. Not all German emigration to Texas was Verein-sponsored; some more well-fixed Germans financed their own passages to the beckoning paradise, made their own plans, and arrived at the same time as many of the Verein force. Some of these people decided to jump on the Verein bandwagon, without paying, for their transportation and sustenance in Texas. Nor are we certain how many of the arrivals at Galveston were again transshipped to Indian Point; the Verein records may "double-book" some of them (i.e., count them twice.). And, since Indian Point had not yet been incorporated (as Indianola) and, at this time, existed only as a Verein debarkation center, the Republic of Texas kept no records there. The United States, of course, would not have established facilities or staffing for customs review of passenger and cargo manifests within the confines of a separate, sovereign nation. Besides, even had records existed, Indianola’s archives were twice destroyed – first, in 1875, during a hurricane that badly scarred the little port, and again in 1886, during the storm that wiped out the city entirely. In any case, it is generally accepted that, between October, 1845, and April, 1846, between thirty-six and fifty ships from Bremen and Antwerp arrived at Galveston carrying between 5,247 (a commonly-quoted number) to more than 8,000 German men, women, and children.

These new arrivals were, in the main, a pitiful lot. Meusebach, in an uncharacteristic burst of temper, even complained to Verein President Count Carl von Castell that the Verein was sending him Halunken, or "rascals," the dregs of German society, including criminals and the insane. The Verein executives, trying to operate within some semblance of a budget, in fact, were now chartering the maritime dregs for transport, and the ships were universally rat- and lice-infested. The average emigrant could not afford the luxury of the new steamships; trans-Atlantic/trans-Gulf voyages aboard the sailing ships still averaged sixty to ninety days. Some ships reported being "blown all the way to New Orleans" while trying to navigate the Texas coast during wintertime and more than 300 people, most of them children, died of sickness and disease, mostly typhus, before reaching Texas. The bark Karl Wilhelm and two other ships foundered in heavy seas and went down with some of their crews and passengers and all of their precious, expensive supplies. As Ottille Fuchs Goeth notes in her Memoirs of a Pioneer Texas Grandmother, her family had boarded a "crate" called the Gerhard Hermann, on which "The food was wretched, the water barely drinkable, and we were seasick throughout most of the voyage." The Gerhard Hermann reportedly sank just out of harbor on its next voyage to Texas. About 500 of the Verein recruits, already battered by the long Atlantic voyage, stepped onto Texas just long enough to take in the situation and demand immediate return passage to Germany. The remaining thousands began stacking up on the beach at Indian Point, or resigned themselves to huddle in Galveston or walk inland from there. Many of the immigrants had brought with them a lifetime’s accumulation of possessions, including fine furniture, musical instruments, china and flatware, heirlooms, equipment, and work supplies. Few if any of them had brought supplies that might help them exist in rough accommodations. No means of heavy transport – wagons, carts, mules, horses, oxen – was available at either port. The Verein representatives in Galveston rented three large cotton warehouses, and hundreds of people had no choice but to store their possessions and strike off without them. (In 1847, the rented warehouses caught fire and burned to the ground, with almost all of the originally-stored items still inside.) Those among the tidal wave of immigrants able to pay exorbitant prices for the few transport systems available did so and started inland, and many chose to stop and settle in the established German communities between the Brazos and Colorado Rivers. As Ottille Fuchs Goeth continues in her Memoirs of a Pioneer Texas Grandmother, "After we landed, it was found that the reports concerning conditions for the emigrants [sic] sponsored by the Society (i.e., the Verein) were so discouraging that Father decided to drop out of the Society and continue the journey on his own." The Fuchs family settled instead at Cat Spring. The Verein, of course, lost all track of these people, never collected debts from them, and was never able to settle them on the Verein grant and thus profit from them. Henry Francis Fisher corralled a number of the Verein subscribers, which of course had been brought to Texas with Verein funds and transport and, using some of the funds Castell had entrusted to him, graciously ushered them to a second grant he had recently obtained -- north of Austin on the San Gabriel River, near present-day Georgetown. That settlement attempt, however, failed immediately.

At Indian Point, no transport was available at any price, and the only real house in the entire area belonged to Johann Schwartz. Once again, beds, furnishings, giant grandfather clocks, clothing, trunks, armoires, all manner of household goods, were simply dragged up onto the beach and left unprotected in a surreal tableau. The winter of 1845-1846 was especially cold and wet. Norther after norther screamed down upon the unprotected spit of land, and rain-swollen rivers – the Guadalupe, San Antonio, Lavaca, Navidad – poured into the bay and spread across the coastal plain and salt grass, effectively cutting off the immigrants from any settled areas or existing communities. If sanitary conditions had been bad at Indian Point for Prince Karl’s first group of several hundred immigrants, they became unspeakable for the thousands there now. Local residents – Schwartz, White and others from as far away as Victoria – did their best to offer aid. Schwartz, who had started a lumber business, helped erect some modest barracks to house a relative few of the immigrants; Meusebach tried to obtain tents for the remainder. As people began dying, however, and as death came in increasingly large numbers, lumber for caskets could no longer be spared, and the dead were placed in mass graves. Meusebach donated his own wooden chests to serve as the last caskets. The people huddled in rude shacks, in dugout holes, or in the open, wrapped in what cover they could scavenge.

In December 1845, in Washington, D.C., the Congress of the United States of America finally, yet by a narrow margin of votes, approved the annexation of Texas as its 28^th state; in February 1946, Texas President Anson Jones formally transferred government of the state to U.S. President James Polk. The event impacted the Verein project from all sides. The entire venture now came under the purview of a new and better-functioning government and a greatly expanded system of laws including, most importantly, those governing interstate commerce and trade with foreign nations. The Verein hopes for unique trade arrangements with Mexico, and the building of its own maritime commerce structure, were dashed in one fell swoop.

Meusebach, of course, was otherwise occupied and had little opportunity to concern himself with what might have been for the German Nationalists. He went this way and that – Victoria, San Antonio, up the coast, down the coast – trying to find food and, particularly, medicine for his people. He searched and searched but still could find no transport for the people on the beach. He continued to think ahead, though. In late 1845 he decided that, based on the failing health and spirits of his charges, he would need yet a second "staging area," between New Braunfels and the Llano River, to rest his people and allow them to regain strength before the final push to the Fisher-Miller Grant – if he could ever get them moving in the first place. Again he led an expeditionary force into the lands just below the grant, where he found a pretty site between two creeks that issued into the Pedernales River – "in a valley encircled by seven hills." In October, 1845, Meusebach somehow managed to stretch his dwindling credit one more time to purchase a 10,000-acre plot of land on the Pedernales, and in December he detailed 32 hand-picked men, under Lt. Ludwig (Louis) Bene, to blaze a wagon trail from New Braunfels to the new site and to begin breaking ground and building the first log cabins for a settlement that would become Fredericksburg, named after Prince Frederick of Prussia.

By January 1846, between 3,000 and 4,000 people had squeezed onto the little shell island on Matagorda Bay. Indian Point now boasted a population as large as that of any city in Texas and the largest population in the entire western third of Texas. Its needs overwhelmed the support structure of several thousand surrounding square miles. (Even Victoria, about thirty miles to the north, was still recovering from the infamous 1840 "long raid" of Buffalo Hump and his Penateka Comanches, who first put Victoria under siege, burned and looted most of it, and hauled away the city’s entire herd of 2,000 horses, then sacked and burned the little port city of Linville, just up the coast from Indian Point.) The people on the beach at Indian Point despaired and began to curse Meusebach, and Texas and the day they’d first heard the call to Geh mit ins Texas. To date, the Verein had not made good on a single promise.

One new arrival at Galveston was Dr. Ferdinand Roemer, a German geologist who had come to Texas independently, under a grant from the Berlin Academy of Science, to survey the Republic’s natural resources. Roemer, who would tour Texas and produce the first in-depth (and still respected), documented analysis of Texas’ geological makeup, wrote in his journal that the entire Verein scenario reminded him of "an oriental caravan."

In early March, 1846, Meusebach was finally able to contract with two brothers, John F. and David K. Torrey of Harrisburg (now part of Houston), to begin transporting the immigrants from Indian Point to New Braunfels by wagon, a trip of of 165 miles. Flooding along the coast had continued all winter; the wagons soon mired in oceans of mud, and progress was measured in yards. No one could ride in a wagon, since almost everyone was required to help push the wagons along. Many men, women, and children, already sick and worn out from their ordeal, collapsed and died in the struggle, and the mud simply closed over them and buried them where they fell. The wagons ground to a dead halt for many days at one ford of the Guadalupe, the crossing made impossible by yet another rain-swollen flood. Still, the human column somehow inched forward, reaching New Braunfels in late March. After only a brief layover in New Braunfels, sixteen wagons and 120 people, again under the leadership of Louis Bene, left New Braunfels and moved northwest, leaving the frontier behind. On May 8, 1846, Bene’s group reached Fredericksburg. One of the first arrivals at Fredericksburg was a Charles Nimitz, in some ways an unlikely member of the Verein inland colony in that he was a nobleman, a Catholic, and a former sailing master and German riverboat captain. Nimitz would build a fine, grand hotel in Fredericksburg (modeled after the prow and decks of a riverboat) and, eventually, branch out into other Texas cities with his hotels. Charles Nimitz would become best known to future generations as the grandfather of Admiral Chester A. Nimitz, a Fredericksburg native who so brilliantly commanded all U.S. naval forces in the Pacific during World War II.

With the Torrey brothers under contract and the first wagons safely dispatched for Fredericksburg, Meusebach, meanwhile, had taken steps to address another major problem at Indian Point, the shortage of food. In late April, 1846, accompanied by a frontier character known generally among the Germans as "Dr. Schubbert," Meusebach left New Braunfels with a detachment to the east, at high speed, to acquire grain and any other possible foodstuffs from the Verein-owned plantation, Nassau, near Industry. The Verein agent at Nassau warmly informed his esteemed commissioner-general that the plantation could provide him all the cotton he needed, but that the only food available was required for the plantation’s management personnel and slaves. Indeed, a good deal of the land that could have been used to grow vegetables and grain for the Verein immigrants had yet to be put under cultivation. The news drove a spike into Meusebach, and he suffered a momentary slump. He, himself, was sick, with a fever. By now the Verein in Germany had placed spies all about him – Fisher, the agent at Indian Point, and even a special agent, Philip Cappes – and Meusebach knew that each of them were firing off continuous, derogatory broadsides about him and his competence to Castell. The entire Verein structure, at this point, had become wrapped in petty intrigues. Meusebach’s insistence on detailed, correct accounting, and his constant warnings about the utter importance of good credit and available cash in the face of the Verein’s rising debt in this unforgiving place – not to mention his unceasing demands for more money -- had made him persona non grata among many of the Verein members and executives. To Count von Castell’s credit, he balanced Meusebach’s correspondence against the harping letters from the other Texas agents and saw that Meusebach, at least, had a proper grasp of the situation, though even the Count, too, was growing tired of Meusebach’s repeated demands for additional funds. From the standpoint of the executives in Germany, so far this enterprise in Texas had not returned one dime in profit and did, in fact, seem to be sinking into a financial quagmire.

But now Meusebach did what many descendants of the Verein settlers consider, to this day, unconscionable. With people dying hourly at Indian Point, he remained at Nassau – for more than three months. Meusebach, however, took a different view of his responsibilities as commissioner-general. First, he felt that if anything happened to him, the Verein cause in Texas was lost, and that he could serve the poor multitudes on the beach at Indian Point little by dying among them. He also knew that the tide of dislike for him was rising among the settlers – to the point of possible violence against his person. Next, Meusebach had already become hardened to one of the facts of early Texas (and perhaps current-day, as well) life: one could accomplish little or nothing if one had no money. "Names mean nothing to Americans," Meusebach wrote to Castell. "Gold and votes carry importance." Realistically, Meusebach could neither feed the thousands on the beach, nor efficiently move them, without cash. As Meusebach’s granddaughter, Mrs. Irene Marshall King writes, "…nothing transcended the importance of providing for the actual existence of the immigrants. Until they were settled in the Grant, there was no possibility of claiming the land." So, Meusebach set about to regain his health, and he set about to raise money. He wrote the Verein executives repeatedly, he solicited for new creditors, and he tried to get a little bit more out of old creditors. He offered to sell the Nassau Plantation. He got the Verein books in the best possible shape, though he was never able to reconcile all the debts and expenditures Prince Karl had accumulated. He kept in touch with the situations at Indian Point, New Braunfels, and Fredericksburg by messenger. He spent the last eighty dollars in his cash treasury for medicine and had it sent to Indian Point.

Meanwhile, Meusebach had cultivated a relationship with Dr. Schubbert. He knew that Schubbert had been affiliated with Henry Fisher in the attempt to settle Verein-contracted immigrants on Fisher’s San Gabriel River grant, and he was wary, of course, of anyone having past or present associations with Fisher. Still, Meusebach found Dr. Schubbert, a native of Kassel, Germany, learned and erudite, and certainly the man had frontier sense. Schubbert was a crack marksman with a pistol or a rifle. Furthermore, Meusebach reasoned, Schubbert was a doctor, and Meusebach had desperate need of a doctor for his colonists. What Meusebach did not know was that "Schubbert" was an alias. The good "doctor’s" name was really Frederic Armand Strubberg. Strubberg had fled Germany because he had killed a man in a duel; now, he was wanted in New York State for killing another man in an illegal duel. And, it was never really established that the man known as Schubbert had any bona fide credentials as a doctor; later circumstances would cast grave doubts upon his qualifications. Without the benefit of hindsight, though, in June of 1846 Meusebach formally hired Dr. Schubbert as colonial administrator and chief physician for Fredericksburg. (The hiring action infuriated both Jean von Coll and Louis Bene, each of whom had coveted the administrative position.) As a hiring incentive, Meusebach told Schubbert that, should he perform well, he might be given certain "considerations" concerning the Nassau plantation. He then dispatched Schubbert from Nassau to lead 400 additional settlers who had finally arrived at New Braunfels to Fredericksburg. Schubbert reportedly reached Fredericksburg, erected "a wretched inn," then, on his own initiative, and without Meusebach’s approval, took a couple of cannon and a heavily-armed party north – supposedly to begin preparing the four townsites Meusebach had purchased on the north bank of the Llano within the hallowed Fisher-Miller grant.

But just as Schubbert and the first wagons were finally delivering their sick, weary riders to Fredericksburg, Mexican dictator Santa Anna sent army units under Gen. Pedro Ampudia north of the Rio Grande to lay the groundwork for another all-out invasion of Texas. Ampudia’s cavalry quickly encountered elements of the United States Army under General Zachary Taylor – sent to Texas just prior to formal annexation -- near Brownsville, and the Mexican War erupted as Taylor notified Washington that "hostilities may now be considered as commenced." President Polk, of course, a wholly-unapologetic Expansionist and believer in Manifest Destiny, had made it his primary goal and a campaign promise to wrest the entire Southwest – all the territory from Texas to the Pacific coast of California – from Mexico, by hook or crook, and present it, as his legacy, to the United States. Santa Anna’s invasion gave him all the ammunition he needed to implement his plans. Polk made Taylor’s notification official, with a declaration of war, on May 12, 1846. This time, the United States of America had intervened on behalf of its most recent family addition to protect a disputed border (and, as a consequence, occupy Mexican territory) but, in the process, the U.S. Army commandeered just about every wagon, cart, ox, and mule in the state for troop and supply transport. The Torrey Brothers terminated their contract with Meusebach on the spot and followed the Army which, coincidentally, offered them a higher bid for their services. The war soon commanded the focused attention of almost the entire Anglo population of Texas, and it siphoned off just about all of the remaining food and medical supplies the young, poor state could muster. "Bad news comes in threes," as the saying goes; soon after the first wagons arrived in Fredericksburg, Texas’ first governor, J. Pinckney Henderson, sent Meusebach a letter that read in part, "I am led to believe that the Mexican Government will add to its invasion of the soil of Texas an attempt at formenting [sic] the hostility of the Indians on our frontier…I would suggest the prudence of abstaining from a movement in that direction until time shall prove that it can be made without reckless exposure of human life…because circumstances may render it impossible to afford military protection…" Meusebach’s German survivors in Fredericksburg decided that one place to die was as good as, or perhaps better than, another; without much discussion, they stayed right where they were.

The settlers still on the beach, meanwhile, were becoming unwilling, helpless participants in a catastrophe of epic proportions. Typhus and cholera were rampant. The only thing that seemed to be in prevalent supply within the camp was alcohol, whiskey, the one commodity unscrupulous local Texans were able to provide with consistency. The reserved and normally disciplined Germans fell to drinking, fighting, and even killing one another. About 500 desperate, single young men, many of whom had left Germany to escape military conscription, enlisted in the U.S. Army under a German commander, Capt. Augustus Buchel, to serve with Albert Sidney Johnston’s First Texas (Foot) Rifles. War with Mexico was preferable to slow death on the beach. Among those to enlist under Buchel were a young Baron Emil von Kriewitz (KRAY-vuhts), out of Prussia, and another doctor, Wilhelm Keidel, who would serve as a company surgeon. Buchel himself would later serve on Gen. Taylor’s staff at the battle of Buena Vista; more about von Kriewitz, Dr. Keidel, and Buchel later.

The Germans at Indian Point lost hope. Word of Meusebach’s failure to obtain food supplies at the Nassau plantation swept along the beach like a strong wind; hunger, and Meusebach’s continued absence, finally precipitated an immediate and inevitable panic. In family groups, or by ones and twos, the Germans began to leave on foot, without transport, without leadership or direction, to follow the muddy wagon trail up the Guadalupe. The abnormal cold of the past winter was replaced by the heat and humidity of spring and summer. The standing water of the winter gave rise to enormous hatches of flies, mosquitoes, and other biting insects that emerged from the brush. Typhoid fever, yellow fever, encephalitis, and cerebra-spinal meningitis joined the scurvy, typhus, cholera, and dysentery already present to ignite a multi-disease epidemic seldom witnessed before, or since. Both Fehrenbach and Benjamin state that huge flocks of buzzards (vultures) and wolves followed the German column north and marked its progress from above and below. "Texas," Fehrenbach says, "was becoming a German grave." There is no evidence of Indian attack upon the long column; by this time, the Indians knew only too well of the mortality among their own kind that came with exposure to "white" diseases. Though Indians may have hounded the marchers, they probably avoided direct contact. Still, Alwin Soergel, who was on one of the last ships to arrive at Indian Point during this episode of the Verein project, wrote, "In the day was heard the cry of the beasts of prey; in the night, the howl of the wolves and the shrill cry of the Comanches."

Soergel’s reference to "the Comanches" is probably in error; by 1845, the Penateka Comanches would no longer undertake raids that left San Antonio and Jack Hays’ Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers between them and their campsites far to the west. The "shrill cry" was probably that of Lipan Apaches, or Wacos, or perhaps the Tonkawas, who were universally despised by other Indian tribes for their overtly cannibalistic rituals and tendencies. It is known, however, that the Northern Comanches – the Noconis (Wanderers, often spelled Nokonis), the Katsotekas (Buffalo), the Yamperikas (Yap Root Eaters) and the Quahadis (Antelope) -- continued sporadic raids into the lower counties of Central Texas.

People wrote last letters home including prayers that, if they died, someone would at least bury them. Such prayers often went unanswered as the dead from one group would be left for the next, hopefully stronger group to bury. The trail north was well-marked by the decaying carcasses of its travelers.

The line of Karlshafen’s refugees soon stretched all the way from Indian Point to New Braunfels – a widely-spaced column of human suffering over 150 miles long. Alwin Soergel continued in his writings, "Arrived in New Braunfels; conditions became worse. The place was without means of sustenance. The poor peasants tried to forget their misery by dancing and drinking." Both von Coll, Meusebach’s agent in New Braunfels, and Theodore Mueller (or Miller, the brother of Burchard Miller), the new Verein agent at Indian Point, secretly made plans and stashed supplies to flee, should the masses turn on them. Disease took hold even in Fredericksburg, and Soergel reported, "All human ties are broken; it is even stated that men were torn from their wives and buried before they were dead." Entire families died, disappeared, and left no trace of their prior existence. Many people were buried, dead or alive, under quicksand-like mud. Hundreds were buried in single or mass, unmarked graves. Many people simply abandoned the trek, deciding to settle where they fell, exhausted. The small community of Breslau was established at Chocolate Creek. Victoria itself gained a sudden, large German population. What would later become Cuero was first known as just "Deutsche Settlement." New Berlin was established; Seguin, Gonzales, San Marcos, and other small communities on or near the Guadalupe River received sudden and large injections of a German populace. No real accounting was kept of the immigrants who, one day, just refused to walk any further and broke off the journey before they reached New Braunfels or Fredericksburg. Wherever the Germans stopped, however, new epidemics of disease broke out. Both Seguin and Gonzales were ravaged by dysentery and cholera.

At this point even Meusebach decided the Verein executives back in Germany had become entirely deaf to his claims and pleas. Still at the Nassau plantation, and finally in desperation, he further decided that his only alternative was to inform the people of Germany of the plight of their fellow citizens in Texas and hope that a resulting public outcry would move Castell and his council to action. Meusebach’s pride, however, and his sense of duty as commissioner-general, would not allow him to write such a public report himself. So he informed Klaener, his agent in Galveston and apparently his only trusted ally, of his general idea. Klaener grasped Meusebach’s intent immediately and, in no time, letters from Klaener to newspapers in Germany were heading east across the Atlantic, detailing the failing health and terrible circumstances of good German citizens in Texas who had been "abandoned" by their sponsors in The Fatherland. The German newspapers published the letters, along with editorial commentary of outrage, and the resulting outpouring of concern penetrated the walls of even the noblemen of the Verein. Castell immediately solicited for additional subscribers and assured both Meusebach and a militant press that the council was not about to let its colonists suffer. However, he could barely conceal his anger for Meusebach, and a subsequent letter to his commissioner-general frothed with sarcasm as it read, in part, "How nice it would be to hear something pleasant; it is hard to digest only Job’s news."

In July, 1846, Meusebach returned to New Braunfels. In September, as a result of Castell’s fund-raising efforts, Meusebach finally received a deposit of $60,000 from the Verein council. He used a portion of the money to purchase 78 wagons, 24,000 bushels of corn, 1,000 cows and calves, and 1,400 sheep and goats. The Fredericksburg population soon exceeded 500, though a new outbreak of cholera and meningitis killed as many as 200. Meusebach kept the wagons moving, back and forth, and by the end of September he was able to relocate all the immigrants inland except those who chose to remain at Indian Point and begin building what would become, in 1849, the city of Indianola.