Undaunted: A Norwegian Woman in Frontier Texas

Chapter 6

C h a p t e r 6 In Defense of Texas Just days after Otto’s birth, Elise was abruptly recast in her role as a writer. Her friend Andreas Gjestvang in Hamar had forwarded scurrilous newspaper articles attacking Texas. Although he expected a reply, Gjestvang hardly guessed that the articles would revive Elise’s taste for robust journalism. When the slanderous items reached her, she burst back into the world of writing and never left it again. A “Captain J. Tolmer” was the purported author of the offending articles. According to Tolmer’s story, he was a French military officer who was writing a newspaper series about his travels through the United States. On the western leg of his journey he claimed he had detoured into Texas and gone on from there to St. Louis. He pulled off this trip of more than six hundred miles in only one day, obviously an impossible feat at the time.1 He said he had written his Texas account in St. Louis and sent it from there to France. It was published in Le Journal des Debats (Journal of debates) in Paris, then translated into Norwegian and forwarded to Hamars Budstikken , the newspaper in Gjestvang’s county. In  Avenarius and Mendelssohn of Leipzig, Germany, published the letters in French with the title Scènes de l’Amerique du Nord (Scenes of North America). Elise immediately doubted the authenticity of Tolmer’s account: “It is hard for me to think . . . that people would accept this product . . . at face value; it strikes me as nothing but a poorly written adventure story. I wonder if the people in Norway were not simply confused if they took Tolmer’s account as anything but a piece of fiction. It is impossible for me to believe that Tolmer would have the audacity to offer as truth such a mass of gross . . . lies to so highly cultured a nation as the French.” She was right. The Scènes de l’Amerique du Nord description of Texas comes across as pure fiction, the granddaddy of Wild West frontier adventures written long before ten-cent cowboy pulp novels began to flood the market. The author even felt he had to deny that he was violating the French maxim A beau mentir, qui vient de loin—“He tells fine lies, who comes from afar.”2 The modern historian Philip Jordan, writing in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, has shown that the letters were a fraud, a total fabrication. There was no Captain J. Tolmer in the French army or navy, and the real writer may never have been in the United States, much less Texas. According to Jordan, the make-believe account was cobbled together from bits of Americana narratives written by famous English and French travelers. My own speculation on the basis of Jordan’s analysis is that the writer was probably a professional novelist, perhaps even Alexander Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, who was linked to the Journal des Debats. Dumas, or an imitator of his florid style, had put together a potboiler tale contrived to sell to an unsuspecting public.3 Translated from the original French, Tolmer’s story starts this way: “I crossed Texas and, wonder of wonders, I’m still alive. But not because of the inhabitants.” He then describes them. “The word inhabitants hardly fits so bizarre a population, mixed, nomadic, heterogeneous, fantastic, composed of fugitives, savages, Americans, Spaniards, Portuguese, metiz (mestizos ), French, Germans, and even of Indians and Negroes who often have had petty run-ins with the law.” From here the story goes on to present Texans as braggart villains who address one another as “judge” and “general,” however lowly their occupation. A gang of these sleazy people in Galveston—presumably heirs to the pirate Jean Lafitte, who once ran the town—tries to seize Tolmer. “Judge” Peters, a famous bandit, leads the desperadoes on a chase to capture him, but Tolmer escapes to Nacogdoches with the help of aristocratic Spanish hacienda owners. His getaway is made by an incredible overnight journey— Galveston is an island on the Gulf of Mexico shore more than two hundred miles south of Nacogdoches. To this the bogus Captain Tolmer added other insulting and mendacious observations: “The United States flings out to its frontiers a refuse boiling with crime.” About Nacogdoches specifically, he said: “The annexation of Texas to the United States had not brought the slightest happiness to its former (Mexican) population, once so...