Viktor Bracht

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Viktor Friedrich Bracht (born September 16, 1819 in Düsseldorf , Jülich-Kleve-Berg province ; † January 26, 1887 in Rockport , Texas ) was a German-American businessman and author of a font that promoted emigration to Texas.

Life

Bracht was the son of the Düsseldorf lawyer Friedrich Bracht (1781–1855) and his wife Katharina Antoniette Salome von Dorsten (1782–1855), brother of the lawyer Prosper Bracht and the doctor Felix Bracht (1808–1882), uncle of the painter Eugen Bracht and nephew of the vest and arenberg rent master Franz Anton Bracht . He grew up in Düsseldorf- Bilk . After school he received training as a businessman .

As an employee of the Mainz Aristocracy Association , he emigrated to the Republic of Texas in 1845 . He became its citizen on December 15, 1845, a few days before Texas was annexed by US President James K. Polk . When he arrived in Galveston , he moved on to New Braunfels , where he built a house and a grocery store in 1846. On behalf of his employer, the Nobility Association, he toured Texas over the next few years, in particular along the rivers Medina, Colorado , Guadalupe , San Antonio , Pedernales and Llano River , and gathered information that he published in the publication Texas in the year , published in Elberfeld in 1849 1848 depicted. The work, which was first published in English in 1931 and reissued in 1991, is of natural and cultural significance, also because Bracht paid special attention to his explorations of flora and fauna. At that time he described New Braunfels as a settlement with around 150 houses in which 800 Germans, 150 Texas Germans, 50 Americans, 10 Mexicans and some members of a colony owned by Henri Castro (1786-1865) lived.

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Panorama of the city of Neu-Braunfels in Texas, taken from the southwest side in the summer of 1847 , Julius Tempeltey after Conrad Caspar Rordorf , 1851

When he was briefly in Germany again in 1846/47, he met Sybilla Anna Maria Schäfer (1830–1904), who was born in Cologne and whom he married in Indianola (Texas) in 1849 . The couple had seven children reaching adulthood, born between 1852 and 1872. In 1854 or 1855 Bracht moved with his family to San Antonio , where he also ran a grocery store and ran an import business near the Alamo mission station . Around 1860, Bracht joined an English syndicate in New York City as paymaster with the intention of building a railway line in Mexico . When he then lived in Orizaba , thereby evading his family and himself from the immediate effects of the Civil War , he temporarily served as a translator for the Mexican Emperor Maximilian .

With the fall of the Mexican Empire in 1867, Bracht lost the property he had built there and went back to New York, where he entered the service of Charles Morgan's steamship line, who opened a line from Rockport to New Orleans to transport cattle. In 1869 Bracht was accountant for the tobacco trader Thomas Henry Mathis (1834-1899), the founder of Rockport. In 1871 he became customs inspector there, and later for a while customs inspector in Carrizo . Eventually he lived again in Rockport, where he acquired land and became alderman .

font

  • Texas in 1848 . Volume 1 of the series Latest Länderkunde with special reference to German emigration and colonization . Julius Bädeker, Elberfeld and Iserlohn 1849 ( digitized ).

literature

  • Bracht, Viktor Friedrich (1819-1887) . In: Samuel Wood Geiser: A Century of Scientific Exploration in Texas . Volume Ib: 1820-1880 . In: Field & Laboratory , 7 (1939), p. 32 ( PDF ).
  • Charles Frank Schmidt: Viktor Friedrich Bracht, a Texas Pioneer . In: The Southwestern Historical Quarterly . Volume 35, No. 4 (April 1932), pp. 279-289.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich Heinrich Hubert Bracht , biography in the portal findagrave.com
  2. ^ Daniel J. Gelo, Christopher J. Wickham, Heide Castañeda: Comanches and Germans on the Texas Frontier. The Ethnology of Heinrich Berghaus . Texas A&M University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-1-6234-9594-7 , p. 23 ( Google Books )
  3. ^ Viktor Bracht, Charles Frank Schmidt (translator), Theodore G. Gish (preface): Texas in 1848 . German-Texan Heritage Society, Southwest Texas State University, Manchara / Texas 1991 (Original: Naylor Printing Co., San Antonio / Texas 1931)
  4. ^ Edward Werner Heusinger: The Heusinger Family in Texas . Standard printing company, San Antonio / Texas 1945, p. 7 ( digitized version )
personal data
SURNAME Bracht, Viktor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bracht, Viktor Friedrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American businessman and author
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1819
PLACE OF BIRTH Düsseldorf , Jülich-Kleve-Berg province
DATE OF DEATH January 26, 1887
Place of death Rockport , Texas