We all know something of cities that thrived once and then for one reason or another ceased to exist—preclassical cities we read about in myth and epic; Homer’s Troy or St. Paul’s Ephesus. So used are we to thinking of these extinct places as ancient and, therefore, remote, that it is hard to conceive, as Macaulay once did, of the cities we know and live in being ruins, or worse, grassy mounds in empty fields.
There can be little doubting that most of us tend to take our world for granted. This tendency was certainly evident in the lives of men and women of Indianola, Texas, in the middle 19th century. Like us, they were too busy with too many things to even begin to consider the eventual, much less the imminent, disappearance of their city. To the contrary, the 19th-century faith in progress led them to hold expectations of infinite growth and prosperity. And in many ways they had good reason.
Indianola, originally called Indian Point, began in 1844 as little more than a landing spot for ships of German immigrants. Under the auspices of the Adelsverein of Biebrich am Rhein, the immigrants landed in Texas with the intention of traveling inland to central (or, as that region was then called, western) Texas settlements that in time would become New Braunfels and Fredericksburg. Disease and difficulties in traveling overland persuaded a number of the Germans to remain at Indian Point and scratch out a living as best they could.
Much to their surprise, what the German and, later, American settlers discovered was that the place they had chosen out of necessity for their refuge was an excellent location for a port. Its waters, though not quite as deep as Galveston’s, were of a good depth; better, in fact, than almost any other place on the Texas gulf coast. Within a period of 15 years, the small settlement, which renamed itself Indianola, became a prosperous port, smaller than Galveston (then the largest city in Texas) but large enough to pose a serious threat to the bigger city’s interests.
Charles Morgan, the New York shipping magnate, slowly shifted the bulk of his business from other Texas ports to Indianola. His vision, shared by most Indianolans, was to make the city the gateway of commerce to the New Mexico and California territories acquired in the aftermath of the Mexican War. It was not such a wild dream. The distance from Indianola to Santa Fe, El Paso, and Chihuahua was much shorter than the route from Independence, Missouri, then in use. As the city grew in importance, the addition of a railroad seemed all that was needed to insure the prosperity of the city into the 20th century.
Then suddenly it all ended. In 1875 what we might now call “the hurricane of the century” made landfall at Indianola with winds estimated at 150 miles per hour. Located barely above sea level, the city did not stand a chance. At least 300 of the town’s population of 3,000 died—mostly by drowning. Ninety percent of the buildings (including the gulfside warehouses of numerous tradesmen) disappeared—as complete a picture of devastation as the men and women of that day could imagine. It was the first hurricane to strike a populated region in Texas.
In the aftermath of the storm, efforts were made to move the town three miles inland along Powder Horn Lake (actually a bayou connected to the Gulf of Mexico by a narrow strait). The town fathers proposed some minimal dredging to open the lake to shipping in hopes that the town could recover. The new site might well have protected the town from the ravages of future hurricanes. But one of Morgan’s lieutenants vetoed the action, threatening to cut ties with Indianola should the move take place, an act that would have destroyed the town commercially as certainly as any hurricane.
As a consequence, the newly rebuilt Indianola stayed in its original place, somewhat smaller than before in both population and physical size, and just as vulnerable to hurricanes. When the next “hurricane of the century” hit the gulf coast a mere 11 years later, against all odds it again made landfall at Indianola. The results were similar to the first. Within days following the second disaster, a special election was called to address the question of moving the county seat from Indianola to Port Lavaca. The proposition passed, and most of the people moved away—to Guero, Victoria, or San Antonio. The handful that remained would face one more disappointment. Two years later, a fire destroyed the few buildings left in the business district. After that, the post office was moved out, and the town was officially declared dead.
Brownson Malsch’s history of Indianola is not exactly Gibbon. For one thing, it lacks clear focus. Chapters that state one topic as their theme have a bad habit of rambling over half a dozen others. (My favorite is one entitled “The Government Depot,” in which the author treats not only that subject, but music, the rivalry with Port Lavaca, a yellow fever epidemic, and the local bawdy houses—all in the space of nine pages.) This scattergun approach has its virtues: the book is loaded with facts of all kinds. No one can say Malsch doesn’t know Indianola. But the reader who leaves the book scratching his head can certainly be excused.
In spite of this hailstorm of rather disconnected facts, a picture of life, not only in Indianola but in 19th-century Texas, does emerge. It was a world in which a fever-infested wasteland became a town of saloons and ginger-beer gardens, gas-lighted homes and streets, and churches of all denominations filled with people who worked hard and hated high taxes. They respected the Yankee soldiers who occupied their town during Reconstruction almost as much as they hated the politicians who sent them there, marveled at advances in modern technology, such as steamship refrigeration that, as an editorial in the New Orleans Picayune put it, yielded “cattle turned into gold,” and looked forward to a future of limitless prosperity and wealth. All in all, they were rather like us: living, eating, drinking, and marrying, even on the day that God sent the winds that reminded them their city was not eternal.
[Indianola: The Mother of Western Texas, by Brownson Malsch (Austin: State House Press) 351 pp., $19.95]
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