Utopia failed to take root on Texas frontier

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by BARTEE HAILE
After three wave-tossed months at sea, a shipload of thirsty Germans streamed ashore at Galveston on July 17, 1847 and went in search of the nearest tavern. The previous year, Prince Carl Solms-Braunfels had made the rounds of the universities in his fatherland to talk restless students into taking the Texas challenge. As a recruiter for the Adelsverein, an association of German aristocrats advocating Lone Star colonization as a way to relieve revolutionary pressures, his mission was to fire the imagination of the younger generation with glowing accounts of the New World paradise.