Eduard Harkort

Eduard Harkort (born  July 18, 1797 in Hagen , †  August 11, 1836 in Texas ) was a mining engineer and officer .

Life

Eduard Harkort was born as the seventh of eight children of the Brandenburg iron goods manufacturer and businessman Johann Caspar Harkort IV. At the Harkorten house near Hagen. Among other things, he was the brother of the industrialist and politician Friedrich Harkort , the entrepreneur Johann Caspar Harkort V and the entrepreneur, banker and railway pioneer Gustav Harkort . From 1811 he attended the trade school in Hagen, which he graduated in 1814. He then did a commercial apprenticeship.

After Harkort had secretly married the carpenter's widow Gudula Kornemann, who was 15 years older and whom he left again, in 1822, he studied for two years at the Bergakademie in Freiberg / Saxony, then accepted the position of director of an English mining company in Mexico and emigrated. He did scientific work, performed topographical surveys , lectured on mineralogy , made general staff maps of the Republic of Mexico on behalf of the government, and roamed the country from end to end. He later took part in the Mexican Revolution, but then, after his expulsion from Mexico, in the struggle for the separation of Texas , which at that time still belonged to Mexico. Most recently he was chief of all artillery in the Texan Army and rose to the rank of colonel general . Harkort earned fame for his strategic skills and received 3,300 acres of land from the State of Texas upon completion of the campaign in recognition of his services. He died of a nasty fever in Texas at the age of thirty-nine without seeing his homeland.

His daughter Henriette married the young German publicist, journalist and writer Gustav Kühne , who published Harkort's Mexican diaries in 1858.

Works

• The trial art with the soldering pipe. Freiberg 1827

literature

• Louis E. Brister: In Mexican Prisons: The Journal of Eduard Harkort, 1832-1834. College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 1986, ISBN 0-89096-259-6 .
• Gustav Kühne: From Meyican prisons, fragments from the papers Eduard Harkort left behind. Carl B. Lorck, Leipzig 1858.
• Ellen Söding: The Harkorts. Aschendorff, Münster / Westf. 1957.
• Carmen Gasser: Eduard Harkort between Westphalia and Mexico . In: Fabian Fechner u. a. (Ed.): Colonial pasts of the city of Hagen , Hagen 2019, ISBN 978-3-00-063343-0 , pp. 80–81.