Popular history has not venerated Eduard Harkort as a hero of either Santa Anna's 1832 uprising in Mexico or the Texas Revolution against the revolutionary-turned-dictator. The journal of Harkort, a middle-class German mining engineer, recorded during his two years of fighting and imprisonment in Mexico, reveals the activities and feelings of a brave and multitalented man who withdrew from nineteenth-century corporate life and ultimately found himself in battle, before a firing squad, and in prison.
First published in Germany in 1858 by Harkort's son-in-law, the journal of Eduard Harkort...

This collection of letters, written by a young German colonist in Dr. John Charles Beales's ill-fated colony "Dolores," provides an almost daily account of the colonists' journey to the Rio Grande from New York City harbor and their labors to establish a settlement there on Las Moras Creek. Ludecus recounts in his letters the colonists' efforts to provide protection from Indian attacks by constructing around the settlement a high, thorny barrier of mesquite branches and cactus cleared from the land they wished to plant. He narrates how the carpenters among the colonists fashioned a cannon of...