The Harness Maker's Dream: Nathan Kallison and the Rise of South Texas

Introduction

INTRODUCTION I N THE DARK OF NIGHT, Nathan Kallison embraced his widowed mother and, for the last time, slipped away from their village in Czarist Russia. At the age of seventeen, he was heading out alone-first by foot, then oxcart, and finally on a train over thirteen hundred miles of hostile land-to board a ship in the German port of Bremen. That journey began in 1890. It would take him over an ocean and halfway across another continent to a future he never could have imagined, into a century where ideas and honest labor might grow fortunes and where dreams might become dynasties. He would found his family's own in Texas-almost a country within a country. This is a story of twentieth-century America and the vast state of Texas, and a boy who fled the marauding Cossacks to build a new life there. In 1899, seeking a better future for their family, Nathan Kallison and his young wife Anna then moved from Chicago, their first home in the New World, to San Antonio, just as that Wild West city on the edge of Texas Hill Country was beginning to reinvent itself. Like San Antonio, the home he grew to love, Nathan, too, reinvented himself. The young immigrant became an innovative city retailer and a path-breaking pioneer rancher-the latter a rarity among Jews in America at the time. His small and unlikely empire began with his skill as a harness maker, and then, propelled by his vision and hard work, developed into a dynamic and unusual dual enterprise: Kallison's store-which he built into the largest farm and ranch supply business in the Southwest-and Kallison Ranch, where he demonstrated to a suspicious and tradition-bound countryside the latest scientific methods in modern agriculture. INTRODUCTION I N THE DARK OF NIGHT, Nathan Kallison embraced his widowed mother and, for the last time, slipped away from their village in Czarist Russia. At the age of seventeen, he was heading out alone-first by foot, then oxcart, and finally on a train over thirteen hundred miles of hostile land-to board a ship in the German port of Bremen. That journey began in 1890. It would take him over an ocean and halfway across another continent to a future he never could have imagined, into a century where ideas and honest labor might grow fortunes and where dreams might become dynasties. He would found his family's own in Texas-almost a country within a country. This is a story of twentieth-century America and the vast state of Texas, and a boy who fled the marauding Cossacks to build a new life there. In 1899, seeking a better future for their family, Nathan Kallison and his young wife Anna then moved from Chicago, their first home in the New World, to San Antonio, just as that Wild West city on the edge of Texas Hill Country was beginning to reinvent itself. Like San Antonio, the home he grew to love, Nathan, too, reinvented himself. The young immigrant became an innovative city retailer and a path-breaking pioneer rancher-the latter a rarity among Jews in America at the time. His small and unlikely empire began with his skill as a harness maker, and then, propelled by his vision and hard work, developed into a dynamic and unusual dual enterprise: Kallison's store-which he built into the largest farm and ranch supply business in the Southwest-and Kallison Ranch, where he demonstrated to a suspicious and tradition-bound countryside the latest scientific methods in modern agriculture. THE HARNESS MAKER'S DREAM Nathan Kallison's path in his adopted country was shaped by bitter memories of the Russia he had escaped-a society where landless Jews and peasants were pitted against each other as each group struggled to survive under autocratic landowners and the iron thumb of the czar. In South Texas, this young immigrant saw an opportunity to create a different kind of society-one in which independent farmers and ranchers who had clashed bitterly over land use lived harmoniously with each other, as well as with those in the cities. Nathan believed that he and his neighbors could prosper together as they cooperatively planted their futures on the edge of an already shrinking western frontier-a prospect that offered great opportunities for those who were bold, hardworking, and wise enough to seize them. He saw, too, a progressive government to be embraced, not...