On the Frontier

F ROM THE 1840s on, the United States experienced a renewed wave of Central European immigration. As in earlier years, the catalyst was the Industrial Revolution. Millions of European villagers and townsmen were becoming vocationally redundant. Reacting to the Malthusian crisis, individual German states now cooperated in supporting Auswanderer (emigration) organizations, in providing hostel facilities, even in appropriating money to encourage the departure of paupers. Improvements in transportation also were decisive as larger and faster steamships replaced older sailing vessels. Between 1847 and 1860 alone, 2,314,000 Europeans disembarked at American ports. No fewer than one hundred thousand Jews were among them. Although most were in search of economic opportunity, political factors were not absent. Central and East European Jews played a major role in the chain reaction of liberal and national uprisings of 1848. From Paris to Cracow, Jews were prominent as military leaders, politicians, newspaper editors. Some twenty thousand Jews served in the Hungarian National Army under Louis Kossuth. If few of these activists were among the scores of thousands of Jews who came to the United States after 1848, many were the victims of revolutionary and postrevolutionary antisemitism, and often of anti-Jewish violence. Writing in the liberal Viennese journal Österreichisches Zentral-Organ für Glaubensfreiheit , the Jewish poet Leopold Kompert urged his people to turn away from Europe for good and always:

As in earlier years of Jewish departure, young unmarried men figured significantly in the exodus. But so now, in far greater numbers, did entire families, often extended families, and this time not only from smaller villages and towns but from Frankfurt, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Lemberg. Some were too poor to negotiate the voyage on their own. In 1848, Viennese Jewry organized a Hilfsverein to provide financial aid. Parallel organizations were established in Budapest and Berlin. Most Jews managed the odyssey on their own. They were certain of their ability to find employment in the New World through kinsmen and friends. All seemed possible in bountiful America. Upon his own arrival in the United States, Joseph Brandeis (father of Louis) expressed the prevailing optimism in a letter to his fiancée in Prague:

Even before the new influx of the 1840s and 1850s, Jews were venturing in growing numbers beyond the larger Eastern seaboard cities. The latest immigrants now hastened the trend. By the thousands, they augmented the older German communities of Cincinnati and St. Louis. Some traveled downstream to seek their fortunes in the lower Mississippi valley, settling at the great cotton market of Memphis, the mill towns of Natchez, Vicksburg, and Shreveport, the cottonshipping center of Baton Rouge. Eventually New Orleans supplanted Charleston as the focus of Jewish settlement in the South. Turbulent and cosmopolitan, the mighty Gulf port in those days was the most heterogeneous city in the nation. With Yankees and Creoles eager to recruit white newcomers into their camps, Jews were welcomed at almost every echelon. Some became leaders of New Orleans society, charter members of the exclusive Boston and Pickwick clubs. In other Southern communities, in Atlanta and Talbotton, Georgia; in Columbia, South Carolina; in Selma, Mobile, and Montgomery, Alabama, Jewish storekeepers won casual acceptance early on as part of the social landscape.

Following the Mexican War, too, as the United States struggled to absorb a vast expanse of Western territories, Jewish bachelors accompanied other fortune-seekers in pushing beyond the Mississippi. During the 1850s, a number of them settled in the Kansas Territory. After the Civil War, several won election there as mayors, of Rosedale, Wichita, and Dodge City. Adolph Gluck, a Dodge City councilman, liked the looks of a promising young marksman, Wyatt Earp, and appointed him to enforce the law. Earp in turn liked the looks of a visiting San Francisco Jewish woman, Sarah Marcus, and made her his common-law wife. Upon his death many years later, she had him buried in a Jewish cemetery. The discovery of gold at Pike's Peak in 1858, and the later discovery of silver and lead in the Rockies, transformed Omaha into a prosperous neighboring supply center for the Colorado mining camps. By the outbreak of the Civil War, Omaha housed perhaps two hundred Jews, many of whom developed a particular knack for trading with the surrounding Indian tribes. Julius Meyer was elected an honorary Pawnee chief. Other Jewish frontiersmen occasionally developed less equable relations with the Indians. Sigmund Schlösinger, a penniless young Hungarian, earned his bread as member of a scout company along the Kansas-Colorado frontier. “Scalpt 3 Indians,” he wrote in his diary after one encounter with a band of Sioux. “... Kilt a Coyote and eat him all up.”

Although some Jewish migrants to the Rockies became prospectors, most were merchants. Several opened general stores. Others became saloonkeepers, and one opened Denver's best hotel, the Jefferson House. Fred Salomon, a Polish immigrant, became an early Colorado tycoon. His holdings included a general store, a brewery, a sugar beet company, a real estate trust, Denver's first piped-water company. After serving as president of the Denver Board of Trade and a director of the First National Bank of Denver, Salomon eventually accepted political appointment as treasurer of the Colorado Territory. Benjamin Wisebart was elected to the territorial legislative council and later as mayor of the “little kingdom of Gilpin County.” Julius Londoner was appointed Denver's first postmaster. Other Jews who shared in the early Pike's Peak frenzy ended up as “boomers,” that is, temporary residents who later took their chances farther north, in the upper Rockies. Some became store-owners in Utah, Wyoming, Montana. Among the merchants, peddlers, cashiers, tailors, miners, teamsters, and cooks listed in the 1868 city directory of Helena, Montana, were some fifty Jews. Butte's early Jewish population included a newspaper editor, a kosher butcher, a jailer, and four prostitutes.

Still other Jews moved southwest. Some became pioneer traders among Oklahoma's Creek Indian nation. Julius Haas of Atoka, Ike Levy of Guthrie, the Kaupheimer brothers of Muskogee, Joseph Meyer of Tulsa, Korney Friedman of Wagoner earned tidy profits shipping buffalo hides, wolf pelts, tallow, and feathers to distributors in St. Louis. In Texas, even farther to the southwest, Jews achieved a still earlier presence. Three died at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Six were in General Sam Houston's relief force, including the surgeons Moses Albert Levy and Isaac Lyons. Seven years later, one Henry Castro, a Sephardic veteran of Napoleon's Grande Armée, immigrated to the United States, dubbed himself “le comte de Castro,” and eventually made his way to San Antonio to assume an active role in the new Texas Republic. Castro's bilingualism and self-proclaimed reputation as a financier won him a Texas consul-generalship in Paris. Before departure, he talked President Houston into awarding him a land grant in the frontier country beyond San Antonio. Over the years, with the authority of the government behind him, Castro became the greatest of all Texas colonizers. Ultimately he attracted some five thousand settlers to his colony of “Castroville”—and earned himself a fortune. Other early Jewish Texans succeeded on more conventional terms. Although most were retailers, Ernst Kohlberg came to El Paso after the Civil War, opened the first cigar factory in the Southwest, and became a founder of the El Paso Railway Company and a director of the Rio Grande Valley Bank and Trust Company. For many years, Meyer and Solomon Halff were the region's largest breeders of Hereford (Texas longhorn) cattle.

A number of early Southwest Jews won government contracts as sutlers—provisioners for outlying military forts and Indian reservations. In that capacity, they functioned as makeshift bankers, and often “grubstaked” farmers and miners. In 1858, Henry Lesinsky joined his uncle Julius Freudenthal as a storekeeper and sutler in Las Cruces, New Mexico, providing flour and grain to the army, and running passenger coaches and mail through six hundred miles of Indian country to California. After the Civil War, Lesinsky bought the store, opened another, in Silver City, and invested in a copper mine in Clifton, Arizona. When the mine began producing, Lesinsky was obliged to deliver the metal to Prescott by ox-wagon train. On several occasions, his convoys were attacked by Geronimo's Chiricahua Apaches. Eventually Lesinsky abandoned ox teams, in favor of his own narrowgauge railroad from Clifton to Prescott—the first railroad in Arizona.

Perhaps the best known of Arizona's pioneer merchant families was the Goldwater clan. Its forebear in America was Michael Goldwasser, eldest of twenty-one children born to a Posen innkeeper. Leaving home at the age of fifteen, the youngster worked as a tailor in Paris, a bricklayer in London. In 1851, precociously tall and sporting a bold mustache, he married an English-Jewish woman and anglicized his name to Goldwater. Two years later, he sailed directly to California, via the Nicaraguan isthmus, bringing a younger brother with him. Working as peddlers in California, the young men saved enough in two years to bring over Michael Goldwater's wife and two children. The family then operated a general store-saloon-poolroom on the lower floor of a Sonora brothel. It failed. So did an ensuing succession of peddling ventures in Los Angeles and Santa Fe. Moving on yet again, to La Paz, Arizona, the brothers Goldwater worked as clerks in the tiny adobe store of a friend, Bernard Cohn. Here at last the family's fortunes improved. The Goldwaters earned enough to buy the store outright, and later won contracts as sutlers for several nearby army posts. The work was hazardous, requiring portage across ravines and exposure to Indian attacks, and the brothers were wounded several times. Finally, in 1872, profitably selling off their holdings, they opened a sizable general store in the newly founded village of Phoenix. It evolved into Arizona's largest department store chain. “Big Mike” Goldwater, who produced eight children, became the grandfather of Barry Goldwater, United States senator and presidential candidate.

By mid-century, occasional Jewish immigrants were seeking opportunity as far afield as southern California. Los Angeles then was a ranching community of eight thousand. Its first eight Jewish inhabitants—six merchants and two tailors—lived within a few doors of each other. Their numbers grew only slowly. As late as 1860, of fifteen thousand settlers in Los Angeles County, some one hundred fifty were Jews. They apparently thrived. “The business of the place was very considerable,” wrote Horace Bell, an 1858 visitor, “and most of the merchants were Jews, and all seemed to be doing a paying business.” Religious or social snobberies would have been expensive luxuries in those early decades. Like the Jews of Denver and other Western communities, the early Jewish Angelenos won acceptance in every sector of frontier life. They were senior officers in the Masons, early magistrates and councilmen, even a treasurer of Los Angeles County. Local newspapers respectfully described the establishment of Los Angeles's first synagogue, in 1862. In 1877 a visiting Polish writer, Henry Sienkiewicz, the future author of Quo Vadis? and later a Nobel laureate, sensed California's atmosphere of frontier egalitarianism. Many of the Jewish merchants were Poseners, immigrants from Prussian Poland. Sienkiewicz proudly described them as “our” Jews:

Economic and legal status was one thing. What would Sienkiewicz have made of Jewish political success? Jews who became mayors of Western towns and cities in the latter nineteenth century included Henry Jacobs and H. L. Frank, Butte, Montana; Charles Himrod and Moses Alexander, Boise, Idaho; Solomon Star, Deadwood, Idaho; Samuel Jaffa, Trinadad, Colorado; Abraham Frank, Yuma, Arizona; Emil Ganz, Phoenix, Arizona; Oscar Jewburg, San Bernardino, California; Julius Durkenheimer, Burns, Oregon; Charles M. Strauss, Tucson, Arizona; J. M. Sampliner, Grand Junction, Colorado; Emil Marks, Bisbee, Arizona; Wolfe Londoner, Denver, Colorado; Samuel Friendly, Eugene, Oregon; Nathan Jaffa, Roswell, New Mexico; Bailey Gazert, Seattle, Washington; William Wurzweiler, Pineville, Oregon; Phillip Wasserman, Portland, Oregon; Adolph Sutro, San Francisco, California; Morris Goldwater, Prescott, Arizona; Henry Jaffa, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Adolph Solomon, El Paso, Texas; Ben Steinman, Sacramento, California; Abraham Emanuel, Tombstone, Arizona; Willi Spiegelberg, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Camaraderie of this dimension was not unique to the American West. In the same years, there were Jewish mayors, members of Parliament, and judges in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. It was an egalitarianism characteristic, rather, of frontier society. cu9gpUqU0iY5fiot+gg4kHLp7F3Pzu9vNL4QBu28me3Rl4AGjHO8F+Tc6U2YQBWg