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Sabotaged: Dreams of Utopia in Texas

James Pratt · 2020 · English — secondary

Transcription: src/sources/pratt/notes.md (chapter notes, 924 ln)

We hold detailed reading notes (all 21 chapters + afterword), not the full volume. Page citations pending against a physical copy.

What it is

The first modern monograph on the colony (U. Nebraska Press, 2020), the culmination of Pratt's long Dallas Historical Society research. Reconstructs the whole arc — European preparation, voyage, land purchase, the brief community life (~Feb 1854–Jan 1856), and collapse — across 21 chapters, plus an afterword on the colony's influence on Dallas.

Author's position

Dallas-based researcher, long associated with the Reunion research project; describes a "chase after scattered materials" to reassemble sources dispersed at dissolution. Drew on Dallas archives and Savardan's personal library.

Stake

Savardan is Pratt's hero; the title's "Sabotaged" frames the failure as Considerant's betrayal — abandonment and mismanagement, not the colonists' inadequacy. Sympathetic to the rank-and-file and to the Dallas afterlife.

Access / structure

Unusually multi-vantage: separate chapters reconstruct the preparation as seen "from Paris / Guise / Brussels / La Chapelle-Gaugain / New York." Strong on both the European organizing and the Texas ground. The Afterword, "La Reunion's Influences on Dallas," speaks directly to this project's central thesis.

Known distortions / how to weight

Cross-references

[[savardan]] (Pratt's hero and main source), [[beecher]] (converging on the colonization-society thesis), [[considerant-du-texas]] (Considerant's own apologia for the collapse Pratt indicts).

Reading notes

2024-11-09

Introduction: Charles Fourier's Philosophy in Brief

Fourier proposed a completely nonrepressive society in which basic human drives would be expressed and cultivated. He wanted a community tied together by the bonds of emotion. In Fourier's view, human nature was created by God, and society should respect that.

He advocated elevating the status of manual labor.

He championed variety and short periods for work.

Fourier recognized twelve fundamental passions: the five senses, four passions of the soul (friendship, love, ambition, and parenthood), and three "distributive" passions. The latter consisted first in the love of variety.

Adam Smith was wrong in his liberal political economy because it created stunted and repressed human beings.

Rivalry and conspiracy were the second distributive passion he addressed. In Fourier's vision, productive phalanx teams would compete with one another...

He defined the third distributive passion as two or more different varieties of passions combined. Fourier was an arden advocate of sexual liberation and a staunch defender of sexual preferences.

1. The Doctor's Community

...his home, Chateau Gaugain, which dominated the village of La Chapelle-Gaugain.

The few [abandoned] babies that survived became extra work hands, a reward to those families. The foundlings could look forward to a life without education, a life of ignorance and servitude.

When he read the ideas of Charles Fourier, he embraced the philosopher's dictum to combine talent, resources, and labor to reorganize society.

...Dr. Savardan decided to turn his chateau into an asylum for foundlings.

2. A Better Site for a Phalanstere

...a group that stood for social betterment, the Ecole Societaire in Paris, founded to carry out the precepts of Charles Fourier.

Allyre Burea, administrator of the Paris office, responded on behalf of the exiled leader, Victor Considerant.

In this tract the doctor, railing against conditions for foundlings and their 50 percent mortality rate before reaching age twenty-one...

Savardan had been appalled by the rural ignorance, outmoded farming practices and machinery, ...

In 1850 Savardan sponsored a communal bakery in a village near La Chapelle-Gaugain to improve the quality and cost of bread, thereby making himself highly unpopular with those previously in control.

Fourier and his followers were understood as threats to the church.

...dovecote...

Albert Brisbane, a resident of New York and frequent visitor to France...

The coup sent Brisbane to Begliulm, from where he was able to convince Considerant to sail with him that fall to America at Brisbane's expense. Considerant's goal in going to America was to escape the ennui of his four years of exile for a few weeks.

The Mormons were already establishing a colony farther west. If they could do it, why not the Fourierists?

* Dr. Savardan went to Belgium at the end of December 1854 to see how serious Considerant was about the components that the doctor knew were essential for a thriving community if they were to overcome the barriers he had met in France: a common kitchen, common school, library, common carriage, common bath, common laundry, infirmary...

Money poured in, almost $400,000 by the end of the year.

The directors sent Francois Cantagrel, an architect and an engineer who had been a member of the legislature with Considerant...

3. First Emissaries to the Frontier

Edmund Roger Arthur Lawrie Reverend John Allen

It was Forefathers' Day, December 22, a day still being celebrated in the New World in 1854, 234 years after the first pilgrim landed in New England.

...two of these men believed that Associationism, or the Combined Order, would succeed the present social order of isolation, incoherence, and conflict...

[John Allen] had prepared for this mission for seven years, since that day in 1847 when he had left the failing Brook Farm.

From Maine to Indiana, Allen's career had touched the major reform movements from the late 1830s until now, 1854: temperance, abolition, workingmen's protection, and Fourierism.

...Reverend Allen was painfully aware that he was unable to deliver on his fundraising promise to Considerant.

Midwesterners did not bite on the Fourierist idea; it no longer captured the American imagination, largely due to the many failed experiments in the previous decade.

...Allen had arranged for five hundred cuttings from his vineyards to be crated and accompanied by his twelve-year-old son, Fred.

His original plan had been to follow Considerant's 1853 itinerary: hurry to Cincinnati, enlist Reverend Allen to travel with Cantagrel, from there, establish a business correspondent, order a saw mill and provisions, and find men for a first building crew.

While riding across Arkansas, Cantagrel had seen streams of wagons and riders going to Texas. This dismayed him and made him nervous. On behalf of those immigrants about to leave Europe to join him, he wanted North Texas to be empty.

architect-engineer-lawyer

Cantagrel had long questioned Albert Brisbane's character. Yet Brisbane had pledged $20,000 to the Texas enterprise.

Considerant's book had stimulated subscriptions of 650,000 francs in the enterprise. That was the equivalent of 130,000 American dollars.

After more than twenty years of talk about a reorganized society in France, Belgium, and Switzerland, after three failed attempts at phalanxes in France, one near Oran in Algeria, one off the coast of Brazil, and over thirty American trials, these men were determined to reconstitute the whole of society in the wilderness of Texas.

??? For Roger, the trip was a romantic chance to see the world and possibly to get near the great man Considerant, his schoolboy idol. ???

* Reverend Allen's brother-in-law Marx Lazarus. *

He was growing uncomfortable traveling in the South with a loud-mouthed abolitionist Yankee. Cantagrel knew about the Know-Nothings' political movement. Antiforeign sentiment, invisible when Considerant was in the States eighteen months earlier, had blossomed because of a glut of immigrants.

Cantagrel used the time to review the geography of America. They were at the far edge of the eastern hardwood forest. The next day they rode west. During the next three days, the forests gradually gave way to intermittent prairies. The trees grew shorter as the sky grew bigger. The soil changed from a mix of red sand clay to sandy loam and then to black waxy clay.

Several generations of frontier perseverance had bred a special practical knowledge that substituted for formal education in these Anglo settlers whom the four travelers found themselves among.

Americans had lived in this province of the buffalo and Native American for a decade or less.

But the most desired purchase was a female black slave with a child, thought to be these farmers' ladder to fortune.

...in Antwerp six Frenchmen and six Belgians boarded the ship Lexington and watched the sails fill.

4. Preparations and the View from Paris

Dr. Savardan's long work in the French countryside canvassing and studying the details of community organization, rural medicine, farming practices, and the education of foundling children made him an ideal person to lead a group of people across the Atlantic to found a new phalanstery.

Dr. Savardan's confidence in Allyre Bureau's honesty and commitment made it easy to plunge into organizing for the new colony.

...Bureau had been a follower of Considerant's passion for the renewal of society.

For the five and a half years Considerant had been exiled, Dr. Savardan and the circle of leaders had become accustomed to traveling to Brussels for Ecole Societaire business.

Dr. Savardan looked with disgust on the new streets, straight and wide, being cut through the old city so that Napoleon could move the army about more easily to control his opponents.

On its first floor was the bookstore, which helped support the fortunes of the Ecole Societaire.

Other than Considerant's mother-in-law, Clarisse Vigoureux, and her friend Just Miron, Bureau had been Considerant's earliest collaborator.

Bureau's role as the focus in Paris of the clamor to go to Texas was becoming uncomfortable to him. He did not relish judging people, their strengths and their resources, and telling many of them "no." He had confessed to Considerant his dislike in turning down so many simply because they lacked enough funds. Couldn't they advance credit for good people? Considerant had declared such an idea to be folly and advised Bureau to put it out of his mind.

Allyre Bureau was the chief component of the oil that made the Fourierist machine in Europe work. If the Fourierist dream of Texas were to come to fruition, it was up to him. The load felt very heavy.

5. Preparations and the View from Guise

"The Society...must be set up in such a way that the exigencies of capital never contradict those of Labor and that no one can ever say we created a new Ireland...It is therefore by the well-conceived advantages it offers workers that the enterprise will succeed."

By December 1854, when the two men met at the Paris stockholders' meeting, Godin was taut, shouting to himself, "Action! Action!" Considerant should have been back in Texas getting that free land eight months ago instead of sitting in Brussels writing tracts.

Now thirty-seven, he was an industrialist. He owned his own foundry, and all of France wanted his invention, an iron stove that could heat a house without having to build a masonry firebox and chimney.

With railroads fully in place, it was now easy to distribute the heavy cast-iron stoves throughout the country.

Godin's business had made him a rich, successful capitalist, but he was also a Fourierist. Godin would have smiled if he had known the Surete's recent evaluation of him: an honest man, therefore dangerous and to be watched.

As a precuation, he had set up a second factory in Brussels. One never knew when a known Fourierist might be surprised by Napoleon III.

* Godin planned to go to Texas himself after the first wave of colonists established La Reunion. *

He would increase his contribution from the earlier one-hundredth he had suggested to Cantagrel to one-fiftieth of 4 million francs, or 80,000 francs, if the 4 million were subscribed. One-tenth should be necessary to buy land.

6. Preparations and the View from Brussels

...a roomful of people waited outside hoping to be chosen to go with him to America.

He had people to manage in Brussels, Paris, Texas, New York, Cincinnati, Patriot, and New Orleans.

True, it had been the modest little people sending monthly checks since the 1830s that had made the Ecole survive. They were members of a believers' network all over France who had kept the Ecole and later the Democratie pacifique housed in the rue de Beaune.

Godin in Guise would go later to Texas when they had agriculture organized and were ready for other industries.

Godin was the only rich man among the leaders, and he knew a great deal about manufacturing.

* Considerant smiled, thinking of his book. He was proud of it. From reactions in the summer, so sure was he of its appeal that he had underwritten the first 540,000 francs of its cost. *

Those 100,000 francs Savardan bragged of would have gotten a few hectares west of Paris, but in Texas it might buy forty thousand acres!

Everyone had tried to make associations too small; the first Conde certainly was, and Savardan's second try would have been as well.

Certainly, Fourier's goal could never succeed without at least 1,600 workers and without all the trades necessary for the initial industry.

In Texas it would be better to deemphasize the idea of a phalanx at first. They should concentrate on buying land that would appreciate while bringing together a group of friends and allowing them to grow together gradually in association.

...his dead wife's maid and the maid's brother, as well as a mason on Savardan's estate

* Jean Goetseels had bought fifty thousand shares and had sent his seventeen-year-old stepson, Philip, with the first Belgian group. *

But now a cadre of builders had appeared here who wanted to go, representing a shift in Considerant's original position of hiring Americans to do the initial work at the colony.

* Cousin had assembled the dozen building craftsmen and fledgling architects who had finally gotten off on the Uriel on December 25. For Considerant, that was a relief. With this vanguard of builders out of the way, he could focus on the final chapter of his book and the two other groups leaving in January and February.

The moment Considerant reached New York the important thing would be to get the right introductions to Texas leaders in order to acquire an empresario grant.

* Messages between France and Texas took three months. But in two years a cable was to be laid across the Atlantic like the cable laid to send messages three years earlier between France and England. Communication speed would improve. *

With only water transport to pay for to Shreveport, within two hundred miles of their destination, travel costs to the region of upper Texas were much cheaper than traveling via ship and train through New York.

Raisant was a man of pluck and daring who got in trouble with the Surete for his courage. Considerant naturally admired such qualities, since they were the qualities he admired in himself.

A good thing he had run into Kalikst Wolski in New York...Cousin would need help when his ship arrived in New Orleans, and Wolski was of superior intellect, flexible, and at home anywhere. Poles were like that.

[Daly was an architect, though not considered in league with Pierre-Francois-Henri Labrouste.

The annual Revue d'Architecture was a prestigious accomplishment of Daly's. Everyone was familiar with those big leather-bound works, which had been coming out once a year for fifteen years. Daly published well-done color plates, and there was nothing else like the review in Europe.

7. Preparations and the View from La Chapelle-Gaugain

He had determined to go to Texas himself. If after a year or two it had become all he hoped, then he was resolved to come back to get his family and friends, to rescue them for good from the current miseries of European civilization.

Fourier's specific strictures against overseas experiments...

He applauded the July Revolution when Lafayette embraced Louis-Philippe as a prince who was devoted to the principles of the Revolution.

From the Paris stockholders' meeting the week before last, he had traveled to Brussels with Karl Burkli. Burkli was a Swiss leader of the movement who planned to follow Savardan in March shepherding thirty of his fellow countrymen.

He had put down 3000 francs as an ante - not a great investment, but an expression of commitment toward the beginning expenses of a center of operations in Texas - and an additional 1000-franc gamble to buy headrights for land. He had put up 50 francs for two people who worked on his estate, Catherine and Abel Bossereau.

* This adventure seemed his one great chance to help realize that vision away from the control of the emperor. *

Considerant alos had accepted Savardan's offer to manage the details of administration in Texas, an aspect of the enterprise he and others of the Centre feared Considerant would not be capable of organizing well.

Bureau in Paris was now saying that 2500 to 3000 persons wanted to go to Texas. Exiles who had fled the emperor's police and some Belgian Fourierists had already been sent to sea on Christmas Day. Another ship would leave in a week. These two groups were leaving in time to gain a year in planting, taking great quantities of seeds, pips, and cuttings that had been contributed to the cause.

Bureau had reported the week before last at the stockholders' meeting that independently of the subscriptions raised, very conservatively, and leaving out the "maybes," emigrant applications showed that the resources that they counted on taking with them to the colony had reached the sum of 7 to 8 million francs.

The productive fields and big park behind the house to the north now returned to woods, where late Stone Age menhirs, six feet high and shrouded in ivy, stood under the trees.

Perhaps, he thought, he had a particular concern for orphans, as he was half one himself. His father had died when he was eleven months old.

[James Fenimore] Cooper had lived in Paris for seven years during Savardan's youth. Everyone in France remembered Natty Bumppo.

8. Preparations and the View from New York

"He had such fervid faith in supernal and eternal things that he even 'talked of our meeting thirty-five thousand years hence under Saturn's ring; and we agreed to do so! Thirty-five thousand years from that very evening." - Mary Ann Dwight

* Like Dr. Savardan, Brisbane defined his role in the world as working for Humanity. *

In [Traite de l'association...] [Brisbane] came "across an idea that [he] had never met before - the idea of dignifying and rendering attractive the manual labors of mankind.

Considerant's passion for social change had caused him to be nicknamed Phalanstere.

...Fourier's belief that when in harmony, humans would grow to a height of seven feet and grow a tail, a useful appendage.

[Albert's] father had gone in the first survey party to the Holland Purchase, the frontier in New York before the new century...When Brisbane Sr. died, he left each of his sons a quarter of a million dollars built on the principle of speculation.

...Brisbane's mentor, Jean Manesca...

In the future, settled far away in Texas, the Association in Fourier's plan would have no hideous fourtenn-hour-day sweat shops where people lived packed fifty thousand in a square mile, as Brisbane had seen in Liverpool, London, and New York.

On the map before him, Brisbane saw that the Red River was much better for a phalanstery than the Naches, Trinity, or Brazos. One had to go all the way out of the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico to find the mouths of these other rivers.

In the doldrums in 1842, following the 1837 panic and its 1839 echo, his words had so struct a chord in middle-class and artisan working-class imaginations that in the course of three years more than thirty communes had sprung up, only to founder in a few weeks or months. By 1855 it was obvious that the failure of the thirty-odd experiments in the 1840s had lost him his persuasive authority, even among many socialists. He could no longer use the term "Associationism" but talked instead of "Social Progress and Reform" and "Workingmen's Protective Unions."

In the country at large, the social agenda was being overwhelmed by the debate on slavery and Bleeding Kansas.

??? The army was preparing to settle the Comanches ???

Considerant counseled to go slow in creating the commune but to promptly buy land as an investment for the stock company.

9. Finding Land

In Paris, Texas, Cantagrel, Roger, Reverend Allen, and Lawrie divided paths, with Cantagrel and Lawrie headed toward Dallas and the other two headed west. It was Cantagrel who was charged with finding land for the new colony that would realize the dreams of Dr. Savardan, Brisbane, and the others. Tired, dirty, and saddle sore from two weeks' riding, Cantagrel found a haven, a bed with sheets for the first time in weeks, at the Art Saloon, owned by Adolphe Gouhenant, on the Dallas town square.

Gouhenant was not a stranger to Cantagrel. They first met in socialist circles in Paris.

"You are much too late to acquire the site of former Fort Worth as free land. You will have to look hard to find free land of any size in Dallas County and if found, it will be in small bits. Most likely you won't find it. If you want free land, you need to look much further west."

To find land, Cantagrel, like Considerant before him, leaned on the French speakers he found on the prairie. They were members of the 1848 Cabet colony, who by now had almost seven years' experience with the frontier.

Along with Adolphe Gouhenant's name he remembered the names of Lucien Bourgeois and one other native Frenchman in the village, Maxime Guillot.

No suitable land that was free remained to the east of Dallas. Even hard-to-clear bottomlands had been patented.

As [Gouhenant] also pointed out to Cantagrel, few people had cash, and in a cash-hungry society, one surely would find plenty of land if one paid in gold. Many of these settlers were frontiersmen who never stayed anywhere more than five years and would leap at gold.

To identify free land, Cantagrel needed a landsman to find it for him, but it would be hard to hire a landsman, since they had moved out towards the unallocated land.

[Icaria] founded their colony in southwestern Denton County.

Now [Bourgeois] was a frontiersman courting the window Sampson and living in Dallas, where he served as the village's first tailor when he wasn't plowing.

Since it was winter and dry, they took the Long Bottom trail west from teh village of Dallas instead of going north to the narrower California Crossing.

Long Bottom was so dubbed because it held a due west trail through the bottomland of the Trinity. The trail lay south from the river meanders against a bluff that rose on its left side and ran for five miles.

Lawrie found the country "west of Dallas...most beautiful and fertile. The handsomest land [he had ever seen was] just west of the Elm Fork of the Trinity. Soon an immense red-gold expanse that Bourgeois called Grapevine Prairie opened to their right, unbounded to the northern horizon.

Bourgeois told them that the great [buffalo] herds passed west of Fort Worth now, though "now and then a few scattered ones wandered east as far as Grand Prairie. Wild horses, too, had for the most part retired west of the Trinity River.

To the west, Grapevine Prairie ended in a wall of straight post oaks and red oaks rising out of a thicket of undergrowth. This marked the soil change supporting the real Eastern Cross Timbers.

Bourgeois told them that many remnant tribes of eastern Indians had recently inhabited these thicket timbers, hiding from the roving Plains Indians to the west and also from the invading white man behind them. Now they mostly had been driven north across the Red River.

In another ten miles, between Big Fossil and Little Fossil Creeks, they came to Birdsville, the seat of Tarrant County government. This hamlet sat on the literal frontier, the site of the westernmost organized government before El Paso and Santa Fe.

All the colony needed of forest was a tract for firewood, which naturally occured in drainage draws.

The eight-acre garden, which Considerant had proclaimed in his book would never grow weeds, was nowhere to be seen. Indeed, there were weeds everywhere in what was now known as Fort Town (and later Fort Worth).

That evening, the party met Surveryor King, who knew of a large unallocated tract on the Brazos.

They passed out of the Eastern Cross Timbers into prairies with motts, or small groves, of a tree they had not seen before, a curly-leafed, dark, evergreen oak that Bourgeois called "live oak." It dotted the red-gold grassed hills in the vicinity of Creamland, a hamlet of two or three cabins perched on the "hog back" between the Trinity and Brazos.

Bourgeois explained that the prairie was probably being prepared for spring plowing by burning the grass, the first act of settlement.

...Jim Ned, a chief of an Indian tribe camped not far from where they had last seen their horses...to reveal a $35 return fee. Without a fight, they paid the asking price.

...settlers hereabouts would have great prejudice against Allen's New England accent.

He now fully realized that finding free long on which to build shelters by the time colonists arrived was questionable...he had to consider cash purchase options. Gouhenant put the word out that there was a serious cash buyer in the village.

There was a section of cleared land with river frontage in Long Bottom that Enoch Horton was willing to sell.

Cantagrel listened more seriously to the argument that cattle could provide an immediate profit center on such arid land, though he knew that his Fourierist friends were not habituated as range cowboys. While the testament in Au Texas to the ease of growing cattle became clear, there was still the problem of a very distant market at railheads in Kansas.

The temperature dropped fifty degrees within two hours, introducing the suddenness of Texas winters to these Yankees...They had heard that the cold probably would go away in four days, the normal winter cycle.

They understood they were on the surface of a vast ancient sea bed, grandly eroded by ancient glaciers to form two river systems.

Belknap Road

...problems of verifying land claims...

...Hedgecoxe "War"...

Cantagrel wondered, maybe that's what they should do - go to Austin and examine the maps.

If he did not find better information in Austin on free lands, he would be forced to pay for a parent site for the colony.

Four-horse coaches of the United States Small Line passed through Dallas Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for Austin; they left from the Crutchfield House at the corner of the town square. "Through in three days," advertised the stagecoach line in the Dallas Herald. Cantagrel and Reverend Allen left on Monday, February 5, arriving in Austin Wednesday evening.

With the legislature in session, the men were unable to find beds in this center of informal Texas politics.

Other than confirm the fact that the lands in North Texas had been put on reserve for railroads, the governor could do little for Cantagrel but point the way to the Land oFfice.

Uncomfortable in this antiabolition, antiforeign environment, the men tried to be invisible. Walking the streets that night, they noticed "a very remarkable number of drinking and gambling shops" and the absence of a bookstore.

From map copies they had made in the Land Office in Austin, they now knew who owned the land of the abandoned fort.

And Brazos waters were bitter from the mineral deposits through which they flowed.

Cantagrel knew that for a year and a half, the Peters Company had been allowed to pick its own lands as payment for bringing settlers. As a result, much of the choice lands farther west on the Brazos had been claimed. The better river, the Trinity, was more settled. Around Dallas, land was harder to find and more expensive. Taller trees showed that the East Fork watershed had distinctly more rainfall.

* The first land acquired was to be for the colonization society's parent site. It had to quickly function as the center of operations. It had to produce food for the pioneers coming in the fall. He focused on sites in Dallas County. * He decided to buy the Horton section, the McCracken section, and the land of L. G. Coombs, in all, 2,436 acres of land, situated three miles west of Dallas. They were higher in price than others offered, but they had more advantages: Cantagrel chose land that potentially would have access to water transport on the Trinity River itself. The east-west future railroad was projected to cross the land. And it straddled trails to several communities. The land had three characteristics: it offered a variety of soils - up to eight hundred acres of rich alluvial plain lowlands next to the river, with at least fifty of those cleared for farming, and on the north side of the river channel one reached a forty- to fifty-acre triangle by a rope-suspended footbridge.

In the middle of the one-by-three-mile tract - another seven hundred to eight hundred acres - a prairie highland of thin calcareous soil grew shorter-stemmed grasses. It would support a good town site, cattle grazing, and grape culture. Cantagrel could see that a good breeze in summer, important to avoid lowland fevers, would bathe the top of the bluff. On the chalky soil, cedar forests also grew. Springs flowed out of the oak-covered bluff overlooking the lowlands. Farther south an area of hardwood forest shaded a flowing creek on the McCracken tract. On the southeast corner of that tract were two mounds, the site of a former Tonkawa village. *

Alexander Cockrell's major bridge of the region under constuction - of cedar logs over the Trinity channel next to the village of Dallas - pointed toward their purchased lands.

...but its length did not reach a bluff at its western end. The bridge ramped back down to the floodplain, making it functional only in modest floods.

The land Cantagrel purchased was at a crossroads of trails. Routes from Dallas to Birdville and Fort Worth, Johnson's Station, Mountain Creek, and Cedar Hill all crossed it going west and south. There was also a river-bottom trail that ran northeast to the town of Cedar Springs, where a mill had been built.

Up the hill, Reverend Allen began making an enclosure and breaking ground for his five hundred vines, which were soon to arrive. He began working in the first days of March.

10. Sailing to America

Twelve people bound for Texas left from Antwerp on Christmas Day. Their ship, the Uriel, a 156-by-33-foot packet of eight hundred tons with a 24-foot draft, was an eight-year-old American ship built in Boston. Vincent Cousin, thirty-two, had been appointed leader of the Uriel pioneers. Cousin was the son of an industrialist and had practiced architecture in Brussels. He came from a wealthy liberal political family in Mons that had several involvements with New World communes.

...ten more ...ten more "pioneers" on the Lexington crying, "Vive Fourier!" to Ferdinand Guillon, Fourierist midwife for this sailing.

Alexander Raisant, a second-time traveler to the United States, led a group of nine in the Lexington. In Februrary, Dr. Savardan and forty-five others would follow on the Nuremberg. Then Karl Burkli with twenty-five on the Francisco, the Reverchons on the Wurtemberg, and others would follow.

...Julien spends the night on deck wrapped in his overcoat and thinks of Chateaubriand, who said he changed dreams on changing countries.

11. Expectations

Another misfortune, that Champ d'Asile of the Bonapartists in 1818, farther down the Trinity at Liberty: just like the Cabetists, all land held in common; labor for the common good.

That beautiful empty canvas, waiting to become their champs d'asile, their "place of asylum."

In this long and tormented existence, far from hindering the work of her husband by absorbing and jealous personality, she did not cease, at his side, to devote herself discretely as a faithful companion, valiant, and full of abnegation.

She had introduced her now son-in-law to Fourier's ideas and nourished his interest as he listened to her salon conversations while a student in his teens at the College Royal de Besancon.

At age sixty-six, Mme Vigoureux was investing herself in the dream of her life. She was not that old, she reasoned...She wanted to collect on her long investment. She wanted to be a part of the society in Texas. How would she fit in?

From the Union, Julie saw two thin spires but no imposing buildings. The reality of the New World hit her. This was not Paris.

It was all confusing, as northern Know-Nothings had absorbed much antislavery sentiment that the Whigs were ignoring.

A week after Considerant arrived, Arthur young, a very old and munificent English friend of Fourierism, arrived unannounced in New York. He had undertaken an odyssey across the Pacific and North America from Australia to once again push a Fourierist experiment in the reorganization of society.

Early on in New York, Considerant met Paul Henri, a thirty-seven-year-old French lithographer with his wife and four children. Henri had recently crossed the ocean and was convinced to join the colony later in the year.

12. Storm Clouds

In Washington, Considerant called on President Franklin Pierce. At the White House, Considerant marveled with the other visitors at the presents just arrived from the Japanese government in response to relations recently demanded by Admiral Matthew C. Perry.

Just as Considerant appeared in the United States, the compromise forces that had put Franklin Pierce in power two years previously were breaking up.

In 1853 Considerant had heard nothign of any antiforeign movement in the United States. But at the beginning of 1855, Know-Nothingism constituted the most perplexing problem in American politics.

The day after Considerant arrived in the capital, February 20, he wrote Julie in New York to send a message to Cesar Daly the moment his ship arrived: "Get to Washington immediately!" Faced with a confusing scene, he needed Daly, the dandy architect, to interpret.

Considerant wanted especially to see Sam Houston, since Houston had signed the empresario grant to the Peters Company for half of North Texas fourteen years before.

On March 15 he wrote again that the best lands west of Fort Worth had been put on reserve. He signaled a major change for the colony's location, saying they should look for land at twenty-seven degrees latitude on the Nueces or Rio Grande.

Considerant's days in New York were consumed with details of land acquisition and money transactions. At the same time, he was trying to grasp the great events swirling around him.

On March 30 Considerant gave Vesian $200 to leave New York on a real estate funding quest. He deposited $3000 in a Louisiana banking house for Vesian to draw from while accumulating headright scrip in Texas.

In New York Considerant remitted $1,000 to Rupert Nussbaumer in Houston. Reaching Houston with the plant stock, Nussbaumer on the Lexington vanguard had seen theat their stock would not make it another month in the chests rocked across the Texas plains.

These funds were probably for expenses in connection with their plant stock, now planted in Houston ground. Nussbaumer agreed to remain in Houston to superintend the new nursery and help others coming from Europe.

Daly received about $5,300 to carry to Texas.

In France, to Considerant's news of Texas land changes, Godin in Guise had an instant reaction: Get to Texas; make a methodical exploration of lands to colonize; merge with the Peters Company; see if a railroad project is possible for us to promote... The therories of Au Texas I fear no longer apply...

By the time this advice reached New York, Considerant had gone south. Considerant and Julie, Mme Vigoureux, Josephine Cantagrel with Simon and the baby, and Cesar Daly left on April 14.

13. From Sails to Steam to Feet

An electric telegraph at the mouth of the Mississippi signaled arrivals to New Orleans the instant ships entered the river, allowing newspapers to always announce their coming thirty-eight hours before they reached the docks a hundred miles up the delta. Thus Kalikst Wolski, the Polish engineer and Considerant's designated guide, knew to meet Vincent Cousin's and Alexander Raisant's ships at the New Orleans dock. The Uriel from Antwerp and the Lexington from Le Havre, the first to carry colonists organized by the European American Society of Colonization in Texas, arrived within twenty-four hours of each other the last week of February 1855. Dr. Savardan and his group would not arrive until later that spring.

...descriptions of plants that Cousin's group brought from Antwerp on the Uriel. They included 450 Auxerre grapes, 100 white Chasselas, a grape of Ischia, 3000 fruit trees, and 2000 strawberry plants from a nursery at Vilvorde and another in Bleneau, Yonne, that belonged to a Republican refugee now fled to Brussels. The paper did not report that Raisant's group on the Lexington brought forty thousand assorted grapevines from different vineyards in France, as well as forty thousand fruit trees, several hundred grafted plants, an assortment of grains, pips of grapes and berries, fruit tree pits, and so on.

Gardeners Barbot, Michel, and young DeGuelle were refreshed by the sight of the big fig trees growing in the open.

In the ten days while they questioned and debated, Wolski helped find canvas to buy and then have sewn into a dozen tents...

Meanwhile, Vincent Cousin and Kalikst Wolski bonded as confidants and shared decisions as leaders of the group.

Bivouacked outside [Houston] to save money, they set up their tents in a circle to protect their goods and began camp life. Rupert Nussbaumer, forty-eight years old, was one of those concerned about the plants they carried. In his early life he had farmed in the Swiss canton of Soleure as animal husbander, driver of teams, operator of a cheese dairy, and manager of a pigsty. But for the past eight years he had found work and participated in the Fourierist cause in Paris. With him on the trip was his twenty-six year old son, Jacques, also a farmer.

The owner [of the Houston farm] had used two acres to grow sweet potatoes, carrots, and cabbages; he used the other four acres for corn.

About March 27, Cousin released $400 of society gold to buy the six acres of land, three miles from Houston, fronting on the bayou.

All [colonists] hung small horns around their necks so that if they were lost in the unknown wilderness, they might announce their wherabouts.

Two days later Considerant arrived on a river boat from Cincinnati. He no longer seemed the same man who had come from Europe to New York less than three months before. Even to himself, he seemed filled with guilt, which at times took the form of depression.

Godin had reacted by return mail: "Do not buy land where we would have to fight the Indians."

??? There were five from Considerant's own Jura who stayed in New Orleans because of their leader's frozen attitude. ???

[The humidity] was particularly oppressive to the colonists from the Hautes-Alpes. One of those was Jean Nicolas, the doctor from a valley in the western flanks of the Cottian Alps...

Within four days, as quickly as he could, Dr. Jean Nicolas found passage to Galveston and sailed with ten "of the most impatient" of the new colonists on April 25. A few days later, the bulk of Dr. Savardan's group left New Orleans with Charles Francois Bernard Bussy, a former Republican government functionary from the Paris suburb of La Villete. They carried the equipment brought from Le Havre...

Bussy was the same age as Savardan and Nicolas, though he traveled in a better class than steerage. He was the only person crossing to La Reunion with a servant.

[Savardan] purchased twenty barrels, weighing around a thousand pounds, of biscuit of two different types. One biscuit was sweetened and the other unsweetened...He then bought ten barrels of beer, weighing two thousand pounds. Buying beer was at least partly for health purposes, in the doctor's mind. He had observed during the ocean crossing that "beer like almost all the light bitters, was a valuable relief for impairments of digestive functions."

As for Considerant, he saw a need to set up banking relations as close as possible to La Reunion, given the fact that they were about to go into an environment in which there were no banks. He also would need to carry gold. The bank in New Orleans did not honor Considerant's letter of credit. A check had also bounced in New York because Brisbane failed in his responsibility.

When Mademoiselle Gaudel had gone to Paris from her home in Rouen the past winter, she and Aimee Beucque had planned to communicate through the spirits back to the rue de Beaune office in Paris.

The true gateway to Texas and the largest town in Texas, Galveston had doubled its population to nine thousand since the last census. The streets were lighted throughout with gas.

In Galveston, Vesian recommended to Considerant that he open accounts with Saltzmann and St. Cyr to act as customs brokers and forwarding agents.

The ten-hour tide and width of the bayou regulated Houston commerce that reached it from the sea; these two ships filled the port's capacity and were its total complement.

Houston had doubled its inhabitants in the past five years. Still, only five thousand inhabitants...This was the place all the products of their phalanstery would come for sale. Except for Jefferson and Shreveport in rainy years, or if the Trinity could be cleared, this was the closest port they had to get their products to market. It was a long way.

14. From Houston to the Three Forks

Colas, a a self-proclaimed anarchist, had walked to La Reunion with the earliest group to escape his exile in Belgium.

[Considerant] harnessed his pretty little gig, which cost him $100 in Cincinnati, with two beautiful gray mares bought for $400.

Dr. Savardan droe a four-wheeled cabriolet buggy drawn by a "good old" horse.

Creeks were a new problem for Europeans used to bridges. Imagine these cultured Europeans arriving at "ravines sixty to ninety feet deep...across which the Americans have traced with their wagons, in the middle of tree trunks, brushwood, vines, and brambles, the most impracticable roads that one can imagine."

Out of the forest, all the colonist groups saw the first small hill, on top of which grew a hamlet called Anderson. The town was unique in Texas, a medieval village in format, without surrounding walls.

The inn was the last public hostelry the colonists would encounter on their route north.

An officer for each [group] recorded the supplies used, as the Society of Colonization in Texas charged back to the individuals everything they used, including transportation.

As described by Dr. Savardan, dinner was a "good soup, whether of meat or onion or of beans. Bouillon in which appear, with the beef or the mutton, prairie chicken or poultry-yard hens; lastly all that is old, except me. Lacking boiled beef, sometimes an omelet, or beans, or lentils. Roast meat, made up of all that the hunt or the farmyards can supply us of young ones. Lastly, for dessert, apple sauce or cheese and the cup of coffee."

They nearly always shot game birds - prairie hens, dove, quail, or wild turkey - and rabit. Occasionally, a farm sold the group eggs, milk, or fowl to share.

Rice, beans, sardines, baked apples, good coffee, and excellent biscuits were the easy example he set for his charges.

* Around the campfires, women and children made their beds in the wagons. The men strung hammocks or laid their rolls under wagons. "Almost all the men of the convoy dressed in red flannel, according to the custom of American sailors, and wore a long beard."

One day Abel killed a fine rattlesnake more than a meter in length; the next day he killed a six-foot-long python [Texas rat snake? bull snake?]

A fisherman as well as a hunter, and despite Savardan's prohibition, Abel stuck his leg in every hole to fish.

...the convoy reached Lancaster, fifteen miles from their goal.

Translator Edmund Roger endeared himself to Dr. Savardan by volunteering to ride back to teh caravan with news that there were no oxen that could help them to reach La Reunion.

As they neared La Reunion, they left the forest and entered an immense flat prairie. Day by day the scrub plants were replaced by more lush vegetation: wild wheat, rye and barley, verbenas, sunflowers of all sizes, and larkspur.

15. First Days Building and the Bloom of June

"We have everything to create in Texas; thus, we will have to create more than we consume; consequently, we must be true workers there; it is the price of success." - Jean-Baptiste Andre Godin

In early March 1855, as soon as agreement on the land was reached, Cantagrel, Reverend Allen, and the two young men accompanying them set up headquarters in the cabin on the Horton section in the lowlands near the Trinity River, the first land for which Cantagrel had contracted. Cantagrel then hired workmen around Dallas County, directed the clearing and plowing of riverside land, bought several pairs of oxen to move trees, stockpiled a good reservoir of logs for future construction, and, on the mesa top, selected a townsite around a small creek.

A mile south, the prairie gave way to mixed hardwoods surrounding a larger creek that was called by the name of its land patentee, Coombs.

To the north, the prairie mesa on which the townsite stood fell away precipitously into the forested Trinity River valley. At the bottom of this bluff, a trail through the rich, alluvial lowland led to the Trinity River, to a rope suspension bridge over its waters...

In all, twenty-four persons, including one woman, two youths, adn two children, were erecting the future colony when Alexander Raisant, the first of many colonists who were on their way, rode into this scene the first day of April.

[Raisant's] mission was to detach from the caravan the needed builders and double-time them back to the colony site. On the way south, he met Sauzeau and Topin, Frenchmen of their group who had anticipated Raisant and who beat him back to the colony by a week. Seven Belgians followed Raisant back to the colony site to give Cantagrel needed assistance with construction.

* Arriving at last on May 3, Cousin, guide Wolski, and their group saw the large building they had heard about when they stopped to refresh themselves at a nearby settler's home. The report was true. Even more, construction on a second large building had been started, and an isolated kitchen had been set up near the first structure. Wolski admired the remarkable speed with which Cantagrel had managed the construction and credited the American laborers...

Each found a spot in one of the four rooms where he could stake out a space with his mattress and trunk.

Wolski was not one to overlook housing options for himself. Hearing from Roger that a two-celled cabin existed down the bluff a mile or more to the north, Wolski petitioned Cantagrel to let him, Cousin, and Roger occupy it. Cantagrel had to stay on top of the bluff to manage the enterprise, and Reverend Allen had moved to the top of the bluff with his son.

* [Raisant letter, p.155] *

Wolski now knew that the months of April to October, which are so delighful in France, change this place "into a sorrowing waste."

Leven G. Coombes and his wife, Jane, had rushed to Austi once they saw the prospect of gold on the horizon for their land. Coombes had received a patent on March 16, giving him the ability to legall transfer ownership to Cantagrel.

Wellington Latimer, representing the Dallas Herald, interviewed Cantagrel...The Dallas Herald reported the interview, in which Cantagrel acquitted himself and his enterprise well.

On May 16 Cantagrel reported to Paris that fifty-one people were not present at the site. A "Furyite," as the census-taker called Reverend John Allen and his son from Massachusetts, along with one of Allen's brothers-in-law from New York, had been the first on the land...

A lahf dozen American workers recruited in Cincinnati...

A French miner family of four adrift in Texas thought they saw an opportunity to settle... A Cabetist who had already become a settler in Dallas, as well as the son of another Cabetist newly immigrated to find his father... A former North American Phalanx member probably came overland from New Jersey. Four exiled French anarchists, bored with being marooned in Belgium, arrived with Cousin. Five young Belgian architects just out of school and an older one from Louvain... A teenage son of an exiled French deputy, another scion of a major Belgian investor, a Belgian poet, exiled news writers, Republicans out of place under the emperor's new government, a Polish and a French engineer, two doctors, a Belgian accountant all followed Considerant's words as first "pioneers." Also attracted to this migration in New Orleans was a French tailor and a Parisian family of seven led by a seasoned construction superintendent, Pierre Frichot. He and Raisant, of all these people, understood American scale, as they had traveled in the country before.

16. Confronting the Vision

Most nights their sleeping accommodations were the hammocks they brought from Paris hung between the trees.

With two former members of the North American Phalanx, Louis Willemet to cook, and Jules Haize to drive the horses hitched to the gig. *

...Josse Vrydagh, a young Belgian architect...

In contrast to translator Wolski, who saw at La Reunion an Eden with a few problems, Considerant felt scorn. Could not the leader of their new utopia see the enormous work they had done for him?

Dr. Jean Nicolas would arrive with eight more colonists ten days later, and in less than a week some thirty-five under Dr. Savardan would appear...

Now there might not be the double advantage of this "theater of operations" of which he had written in Au Texas - accruign wealth in land speculation and creating homes for Fourierists in great phalanxes.

Could he become a railroad promoter to get land, as Godin in Guise suggested was an option?

Considerant's actions soon showed his rejection of La Reunion. Within weeks of his arrival, all the paid American help that Cantagrel hired had left or been dismissed - but for one Johnson, the man Considerant had hired and paid to come from New York. The Americans faded away, many leaving because the executive agent did not want to pay American wages.

When Dr. Savardan arrived two weeks after Considerant, he saw in La Reunion a different glass - one that was half full. As he walked the land with Cantagrel, rather than mastodons of ugly buildings, he saw the beautiful view over the Trinity Valley. All Could not be done at once, but someday artists among them would paint that view.

New arrival Pierre Topin wrote his father, "So we have at last arrived. Cantagrel has found a magnificent domain to buy. Construction has begun on a cliff that has a view! You have to see it - flanked on each side half way up by three beautiful springs. When all this has been cleared, irrigated, landscaped, and cared for as we propose to do, and as we have the means, it will be difficult to find a more beautiful and more agreeable place to be.

Well-financed colonists such as Vincent Cousin wanted to move gradually toward the reconstitution of society. Others, led conspicuously by Dr. Savardan and Reverend Allen, wanted to immediately organize to live communally in a phalanx.

* One of the first tests was Dr. Savardan's request to open a school now that the Bar family of highly trained teachers had arrived. There were twelve children at the colony, and locals were anxious for their children to join the school. The fee charged to the locals would cover most of the expenses. *

much-needed irrigation system of farmland through the canal.

Architect Cesar Daly...was forced much of the time to stay in bed...

...the building of a cave to keep perishables cool.

Daly designed an entrance door that Savardan described as delineated with "the greatest simplicity, yet with a very satisfying monumental character."

With seasoned architects Cantagrel and Daly present, Considerant in his prideful pique appointed Vincent Cousin as architect of the colony, with disastrous results.

In his writings, Daly entirely hid the colony's existence under a year of "travel in America" with those three words. True, he was indisposed a good bit, but when he finally did communicate, he sent to Paris only one sentence on the entire subject of La Reunion: "Considerant will always be as he has been, and will never change."

The followers of Fourier aspired to prerogatives that the Bourbon kings had enjoyed with formal gardens, fountains, pavilions, and promenades.

By June 1855, some 105 persons needed to be housed and fed. By the end of June, four small buildings had been completed.

* The third week of June the colony was faced with its first death. Young Vesian died of typhoid fever on June 21, twelve days after he reached La Reunion. *

Pragmatist Cantagrel argued that they should not waste their best land for that purpose, but Considerant thought it a nice spot by a pond, along the trail north to the river. Dr. Savardan was upset at Considerant choosing a site in low, flood-prone land instead of a hilltop for such a purpose - it was an insult to the dead to not protect them better.

A mill carpenter named Pascal offered to make use of the saws and the mills that Godin in Guise had selected and transported to La Reunion at great expense. The equipment had been sitting gathering dust adn rust. Pascal knew well how to install the equipment, having owned and constructed his own machine saws and mill, but Considerant deemed him incapable and opened negotiations with Americans to sell the equipment. Pascal recoiled at the idea and asked Considerant if he might demonstrate at his own expense "the usefulness of the mill and saws, and to work them at his own risk and peril in the capacity of contractor." Pascal also offered to "build a distillery for maize, sorghum grass, and wild fruits and to attempt the manufacture of beer." Considerant rejected all of Pascal's suggestions. Discouraged, Pascal left La Reunion.

He hired on salary Alexis Barbot, a vigorous journeyman and market gardener from the suburbs of Paris, to be the general director of horticulture, although Dr. Savardan and Barbot knew nothing about farming.

On this second day of summer, with water already drying up in the three springs that had seemed so copious a month before, two [men] were hauling water from the river, two others were digging a well, and two more were making barrels.

Two men were covering the live yeast, punching down a great trough of dough, and pulling hot loaves out of the portable metal oven.

One of them, Jean Priot, who had joined in New Orleans, was becoming concerned about pay. He had not agreed to the proposal of one-third cash salary...A few weeks later Priot had had enough of La Reunion and his lack of pay. He left for Dallas, hired a lawyer, and sued Considerant for his money.

Considerant and Barbot had already decided this was to be a formal French garden...

Doctors Nicolas and Savardan, alumni of their own long garden experience in La Sarthe and Hautes-Alpes, had an immediate visceral rejection of the expenditure of energy in this formal garden fashion at such an early stage in harnessing the wilderness. The doctors watched Barbot in his big garden squander over $3000 in funds on walls, irregular canals, long sandy paths, the planting of pepper trees in geometric patterns, and those great glass hothouses.

Eleven persons were indisposed that day, principally from boils caused by microscopic insects and a few casees of diarrhea.

...women earned four cents an hour, while the men were paid up to ten cents an hour.

...innumerable insects and poisonous plants: gnats, chiggers, sand ticks, wood lice, bed bugs, mosquitoes, flies, poison ivy, smilax sticker vines, stinging nettle, tarantulas, scorpions, centipedes, mason wasps, snakes, wolves, coyotes, wild cats, skuks, and alligators greeted the Europeans, who were accustomed to poppies in the fields of Europe - a nature tamed and benign under temperate skies.

...what the settlers called "hog plums."

We gathered, without much difficulty, about two loads of grapes and returned as true winemakers, crowned with vine branches and flowers.

Victor Considerant's wife, Julie, held an evening cedar salon for select colonists. Near the dwellings at La Reunion was a small woods overgrown with Cedars...They sat on the rug she placed on the floor of the woods or rocked in one of the hammocks hung from tree to tree above the snakes and insects below.

The colonists held dances on Sundays, to which they invited the locals.

17. Trying Out Life

To be sure, there are hot days well into October, but never with hot nights after mid-September.

Some 12900 acres of land in western Dallas County had been optioned or purchased. The Belgian parent corporation in August had turned over to the settlers the management of the lands purchased, called the Company of Reunion.

One of these properties included a sawmill, so sawn lumber became much cheaper.

But fall also brought further deterioration of Rupert Nussbaumer's health, which had been in decline since the summer.

...wet cupping glass to relieve the pain.

Since Considerant had rejected Dr. Savardan's plea for an infirmary, Nussbaumer was sleeping in an attic. Unfortunately, the attic ceiling leaked rain onto his bed, thanks to Belgian architect Cousin.

Nussbaumer died on September 26 of typhoid fever.

After Vesian's death, they had been able to soon smile again. He was, after all, a young single man out of the army from Marseilles, an agent of Considerant barely known to them, not a fellow Fourierist. His typhoid fever was an unlucky accident. It was different with their comrade Rupert Nussbaumer, who had hosted their Paris meetings in his family bar. He had two children and a wife who didn't yet know and wouldn't for six weeks. He was buried in that lowland muck that Considerant had chosen for a cemetery site. It rained at least all of eight days.

The doctors extended their gardening idea by means of a "serial constitution," and amateur gardeners began to join them. Eventually, there were about twenty volunteers, so that the administration council assigned to the gardening society the landscaping of the entire valley in order to make it a colonial park.

Anglo settler Sam Jones and Frenchwoman Louise Dusseau were becoming attracted to each other.

From La Reunion, Cantagrel wrote Godin in Guise on October 7, "Only well-off Phalansteriens, without children, should come to Reunion." Godin replied, "Have no illusions; they [well-off persons] won't budge. It's poverty that makes them willing to change their lives, move, etc."

Belgian poet Adolphe Leray, forty, and his foreman, Desire Desutter, twenty-five, who had come with him the winter before, left La Reunion, as he wittily but trenchantly wrote in a poem, "without even a carrot."

About September 28, Chavennes, the young French clockmaker who had come with Nussbaumer to the colony the month before, returned to Houston following Nussbaumer's death.

On October 7 Cantagrel wrote announcing the addition of 640 acres south of and contiguous to 2 acres on which were established the central buildings, the mill and the sawmill of Green-Coombes. Cantagrel summarized land then bought as 12926 acres total, of which 5194 had been rented to a signle tenant, 2240 with some plowed land and some construction. The remaining 5000 were obtained by "localization" of headrights.

In October Dr. Savardan and Abel Dailly asked Considerant for permission for Alexis Renier, thirty-one, a skilled mason who had grown up on Savardan's estate in La Sarthe, to build a stone chimney for the forge, the current mud-and-sticks chimney having disintegrated.

But according to Savardan, the least harvest that a thousand acres would produce would be 4000 bushels, and if the population doubled to three hundred, and each person annually consumed 8 bushels, the wheat harvest would produce a surplus of 1400 to 1600 bushels. The planting and tilling work would require seventy oxen driven by seven laborers working every day for six months. For the harvest, it would require fifteen days, fifty cradles of four good mowing machines, and fifty helpers for binding the sheaves.

The colony did not have a quarter of the necessary equipment. And where would they store 4000 bushels?

Jean Journet, a constant Parisian propagandist against Considerant's brand of Fourierism, published Fritz Colas's September letter to a friend in Savoy, a letter highly critical of colony leaders.

Another 650 acres contiguous to the townsite were purchased. In western Dallas County, sometime in August, seven Swiss from Zurich were farming colony land. These seven, who chose not to enter the commune, settled on a tract between the forks of the river. They rented it from the company on a third share of the harvest on the ten acres already broken and on codition of ceding to the colony at the end of three years several acres in cultivation...Further, they agreed to build a road through woods owned by the colony from the farm to the river in the direction of the sawmill. The colony would then extend the road by the sawmill to the settlement site, opening the woods to productive exploitation. The sawmill onsite would reduce the cost of wood by 40 percent.

Near the end of October Cantagrel reported that Charles Burkli was working like a madman to start a tannery, certain to be profitable. Burkli had arrived in early July leading twenty people from Switzerland.

Since the raw material cost so little in Texas, and only poorly made shoes were available at great expense, Burkli's goal of establishing a tannery and later a shoemaker's shop made great sense.

All Burkli lacked was a hangar, essential to protect the workers and their tools from the sun and rain. His request for a hanger was presented to Considerant. Not only did Considerant reject the request, but he made it known that he considered the use of the brushwood to produce the tannin "a destruction of property." In a few months Burkli left for Central America. Eighteen others who came with him from Switzerland also left La Reunion, discouraged by the "insulting conditions of existence" Considerant made for them.

Concern had grown sufficiently in Paris by the middle of October that management dispatched a letter to its accountant, Simonin, in New York, asking him to go to Texas to review accounts, since he was already familiar with springtime equipment purchases for the colony.

On November 1, a Thursday, Justice of the Peace Allen Beard united colonist Dusseau and settler Samuel Jones of Dallas. They met at a dance held at Reunion. The first formal social integration had begun.

18. Considerant and Texas Politics

Considerant wanted to found a "socialist state" analogous to the Mormons' Utah territory within which an "integral phalansterian community" might serve as a central locus for all kinds of social experiments.

Considerant dreamed of himself as an empresario of his own land.

Considerant also knew that during the past decade the Germans had brought over five thousand settlers to receive land from the state. Why shouldn't the state continue the practice with the French?

* Also within that first week in the House of Representatives among petitions offered by members, "sundry citizens" asked for the incorporation of the village of Dallas...

Daly, forty-four, was also gifted as a speaker, but in excellent English. To be more friendly to the Texan ear, he likely called himself Daley, his father's Irish pronunciation of his name, rather than his mother's un-Texan French one.

He understood their new milieu and went to work as a lobbyist to accommodate Fourierism to Texas.

However, much to the frustration of Simonin, Considerant avoided all small talk with him and evaded answering any questions about La Reunion accounts for the entire six months of Simonin's Texas trip.

Considerant belittled the idea of Simonin calling on the governor, but Simonin ignored him, took his personal letter of introduction procured in New York from Mayor Merrill, and called on Governor Pease within three days of arrival.

* Pease...held a very long view and broad context for governing Texas, which made him an outstanding leader. In empty Texas, a group of educated persons with today's equivalent of many millions in cash promising education and industry would be a plum in the mind of a man of his aspirations for his new state. *

Antoine Superviele...He had been a lawyer in France and later practiced in Texas, but in this period he acted as a merchant in San Antonio and as a real estate agent selling headright certificates.

By Friday, Simonin had begun interviewing principal merchants and land developers about business in Texas. Simonin drew out Antoine Superviele to list and discuss the qualities of the ports of Texas, the chief importers in San Antonio, the value of their stock, where they bought...

Why didn't Considerant have the petition ready the minute that the legislature convened, just after November 5? The reason may have been that he was engaged on two fronts at once, hedging his bets by quietly investing in land in a second frontier location even before the legislature acted on his plea.

Between November 30, 1855 and March 28, 1857, Considerant acquiredfor his stockholder company forty-seven thousand acres in Sabinal Canyon, near present Utopia. Considerant was likely either sold by or put in touch with a seller of lands by Antoine Superviele. Frederick Law Olmsted, thena reporter for the New York Times, may also have recommended contacts to Considerant.

Was Considerant refusing to talk to Simonin about La Reunion accounts because he was concealing land purchases in a location three hudnred miles from La Reunion?

Simonin was either very astute or very lucky, or both, to find and engage so many major Texas figures of the period to give him advice. Henri Castro, a learned, wise, humane man, had become a U.S. citizen in 1827. He returned to France in 1838, then became a member of the Lafitte banking house. The Republic of Texas named him consul general in Paris because of the loan he achieved for the republic. Castro then became an empresario in 1842, chartered twenty-seven ships, and brought to Texas 485 families and 457 single men between 1844 and 1847. He was a role model for Considerant. Castro, servant of his Alsatian colony, now sixty-nine as he talked to accountant Simonin, was as much German as French.

Simonin and Daly moved from a base very different from Considerant's. After a month of Daly's attention, Austin attitudes toward the colony began to change.

As the new year began, there were at least three problems they had not foreseen...slavery...railroads...their leader...

Just after New Year's, Henri Castro explained to Simonin the business of investing in land development, including how to loan capital to a farmer family and reap profits in five years.

Then to the surprise of Daly and Simonin, Vincent Cousin arrived from La Reunion on the first Saturday of the New Year, summoned by Considerant. Considerant wanted his own man by his side. He knew that Simonin would soon go to La Reunion and that Daly would be departing for New Orleans...

On being introduced to Cousin, Simonin was appalled. Like Roger, Cousin "has the air of one who does not pay attention to his intimate toilet, wear clean underwear, or take care of his person."

"Of what use is Doctor Roger; how can he be helpful to you? It seems to me that if you were in need of someone this is not the man you would want." There was about his person "evidence of an old filth, a quality of which almost all those who have been in Considerant's house have hinted to me."

However on January 8 the Senate offered a caution to future impresarios when it considered prohibiting the issuing of land patents as a penalty to the Texian Emigration and Land Company (the fourth name given to the Peters Colony by its latest investors)

Senator Superviele and Jean Goetseels, an important Reunion investor, were there.

In Simonin's view, the huge quarrel Considerant made over five or six old issues he claimed had not been returned to him showed that he was mentally declining, growing senile, perhaps due to the weight of responsibility.

19. Downward Slide

Once at La Reunion [Jean Goetseels's] first msision was to extract his seventeen-year-old stepson Philippe from what he considered a morally corrupt splinter group led by a prescript newspaper writer named Sauzeau. They were living at what they called Mutuele. Next, Goetseels demanded his $30,000 investment back. Cantagrel gave him certain items of La Reunion stock and equipment. Goetseels bought the land where the splinter group was squatting, located on beautiful Mountain Creek, a virginal tributary of the Trinity River West Fork, and kicked the squatters off. He then tried to found New Leuven in competition with La Reunion. He lured some of the Reunion young architets from his hometown in Belgium to come build a house for him and his family. La Reunion now had splinter colonists.

Simonin wrote in his diary, "It is fortunate that Dr. Savardan is in the middle of the colonists. He gives them the example of abnegation, of frugality, of activity, of work, of gaiety and liveliness. Considerant could gain some great advantages, it seems to me, from the presence of this doctor at Reunion."

Dr. Savardan had hoped for a third competing garden with the arrival of these two experienced horticulturalists, but Reverchon refused to participate. He told Simonin that after watching Francois Cantagrel manage the colony, he wanted to take a stick to him. To Dr. Savardan's dismay, the most experienced horticulturalist not only did not want to garden at La Reunion but also did not want to participate in the commune at all. He chose to live alone on Coombs Creek and build a garden for his personal use. Now La Reunion had another splinter group.

Reverchon's great knowledge was proven by his having spent $300,000 of his own fortune in agricultural experiments.

After the harsh winter, they were building homes to escape the disadvantages of dormitories. One was a wood-farme home, and the other was made of mud brick, each to hold eight households.

...the company of La Reunion had cleared and now cultivated 430 acres of land, two-fifths of which were enclosed. A herd of sheep and a pigsty had been enlarged. They now had six hundred head of cattle, all branded. "During the rigors of one of the harshest winters in Texas memory [they] lost only two oxen and a horse."

A few colonists died. Abel Bossereau, the strong, able-bodied man of twenty-eight who was one of Savardan's choices from La Sarthe, died of typhoid. A teenage daughter of Jean-Baptiste Louckx, just arrived from Belgium, died. Dr. Savardan treated a young man named Mique, who was sheltered in an abandoned cabin in the Dallas hamlet after Considerant banned Mique from La Reunion because he had not been given permission to come.

New colonists from France were arriving every day. Doderet, a notary from Burgundy, possessed a knowledge of agriculture and rural construction, as well as an independent fortune. He arrived that cold winter.

After an absence of five months, Considerant, Roger, and Cousin returned by stagecoach from San Antonio on March 24.

Simonin, who was also present that day, was astounded at Considerant's behavior toward the two doctors: "This fact proves, like so many others, that Considerant does not any more understand how to direct souls practically than to direct the other affairs of his enterprise."

Was Considerant seeing this progress at La Reunion to be a threat to his new land purchase for a different colony?

The colonists feared that Considerant intended to privatize the land of La Reunion, that the land would be bought and sold.

Finally, [Cantagrel] became so frustrated the he resigned on April 4. Alarmed, Considerant rode out onto the prairie with Cantagrel and told him, "I will blow my own brains out if you persist in resigning." Considerant promised Cantagrel more authority and autonomy. Cantagrel relented.

On April 8 Cantagrel wrote to management that he would continue as director only until Paris sent his replacement. When Considerant abrogated his agreement to cede power, Cantagrel resigned again.

Dr. Savardan and Considerant continued to discuss the dissolution of the colony, but only by Considerant's preferred method of communication: exchanging notes.

In mid-April Considerant, Cantagrel, and Simonin met to discuss how to close La Reunion. Considerant could not answer the most basic quetsion posed by Simonin: What are you going to do with all the people and all the equipment and all those big ox carts full of materials shipped from Europe now at the Reunion site? La Reunion was a commune with communal land, housing, tools, farm equipment, animals, bakery, and kitchen.

On April 26 Considerant finally admitted the truth. He at last told Cantagrel and Dr. Savardan that he was definitely leaving for "the west," taking two colonists he wanted with him to start another establishment that would be in the "proximity" of La Reunion.

Considerant again urged the privaziation of La Reunion.

In early May Considerant finally relented to Dr. Savardan's request a year earlier to open a school, even though the number of children to be taught remained the same. What had changed was the teachers. The Bar family of teachers, who had been assigned low-paying jobs, had left La Reunion for Dallas. They had been unable to earn a living at the utopia. They eventually returned to New Orleans, nearly ruined.

Cantagrel, who deplored Considerant's refusal to recompense colonists who had contributed to the community, resigned as director without equivocation. Cantagrel left with his family to return home to Europe.

Considerant announced that he had found a replacement for Cantagrel: Alexandre Duthoya, an accountant who had come to La Reunion to replace Simonin as the bookkeeper. Dr. Savardan argued against making Considerant's replacement nominee, Duthoya, both treasurer and a director, as they were conflicting roles.

But on August 6, instead of honoring the compromise agreement and giving the colonists half their wages, previously withheld, Victor Considerant sneaked away from La Reunion, headed to San Antonio under the dark of dawn and accompanied by Cousin.

He kept his empresario dream, even if it was reared on the backs of some three hundred unpaid immigrants, as well as the others still to arrive at La Reunion. The colonists would not be compensated for their efforts.

The great Fourierist leader abandoned his utopia and the people who had followed his call into the wilderness.

20. Demise

In late August, a letter arrived from management in Paris designating Dr. Savardan the acting leader until Allyre Bureau, the kindly corporation leader in Paris, could reach La Reunion and assess the situation. Duthoya was to remain as bookkeeper. The letter, however, was addressed to Dr. Savardan in care of Considerant. Julie Considerant intercepted the letter and sent it to her husband in San Antonio.

Bureau arrived on a freezing cold day in mid-January 1857, having just spent a few days with Considerant in San Antonio.

Considerant had told him to give up on La Reunion. Dr. Savardan made clear his wishes to continue the association.

Bureau became melancholy and preoccupied with suicide. At this point, he had moved into Considerant's home with Julie.

The next day, Bureau prepared but did not post a placard signed by him stating, "The Society of Reunion Is Dissolved." An advisory committee was formed. Director Duthoya and Dr. Nicholas prepared to leave.

Bureau posted the sign that evening. By morning the sign had disappeared, but the restaurant was full of people spouting "menacing stump oratory." The next day everyone lined up for their money. They were given work tickets, which could be used as money at La Reunion to buy land or tools or equipment then owned by the commune. Work tickets were of value to those who sought to remain and buy land at La Reunion and work for themselves, but they were of no value to those who had no means of making a living there and wanted to leave and seek their income elsewhere. What could those people do with a work ticket? The laborers demanded money from Bureau instead of the worktickets.

Once Bureau was gone, Cousin implemented Considerant's agenda. He disbanded the advisory committee, placed all functions under himself, and refused to honor the leases drawn up but not yet executed. Cousin wanted to sell, not lease, everything, even though the people had no money to buy. To make matters worse for the colonists, Cousin unilaterally set high prices.

When Bureau was still in charge, he had approached Dr. Savardan and several friends with the idea of purchasing the Horton property together - 320 acres and the home. Guillemet would farm the land. They all approached Bureau to buy the land as a "collective reimbursement and offered to pay eight dollars an acre," which would realize a profit for the society.

Cousin insted on fifteen dollars an acre, depspite letters from management in Paris stating that it had no intention of benefitting from members of La Reunion.

By April, "instead of a prosperous cooperative community, [they] had the old colony disorganized and more and more deserted and Cousin's city with three log cabins inhabited by unhappy people."

Cousin created a boardinghouse. Eight people rented rooms.

...Dr. Savardan decided it was time to leave. He put his affairs in order, renting his property; the agreement included a clause requiring the renter to plant a certain number of trees each year and to build a fence enclosing the property. He packed his trunk, wrapped the painting of his wife, and prepared for the trip back to Chateau Gaugain. Dr. Savardan took his leave on August 18 at 8:00 a.m.

The following spring, Bureau, his wife Zoe, and their family returned to La Reunion, where Bureau purchased the doctors' east-side garden park. He ran the land company and a store, trying to salvage the stock-holders' investments in the colonization society. They brought a piano, and Bureau composed. Their twnety-four-year marriage ended when Zoe received a letter saying Bureau had died of yellow fever on his way back to her from Houston, a trip he made to restock the store.

Zoe booked passage on an old wooden boat and took her family back to Paris in poverty. She blamed Victor Considerant as the instrument of her loss and never forgave him.

21. Endings and New Beginning

They settled on the Left Bank, where Julie sold her paintings of flowers on the street and Victor, dressed in a serape, could be found pontificating and posturing as a socialist sage.

Afterword: La Reunion's Influences on Dallas

In 1855...The town's founder had left for the California gold rush, then come back and sold most of his headright along the brow of a bluff carved by the meandering river, along with the right to operate a ferry. Alexander Cockrell bought the headright land and ferry rights in 1853.

The next January 1856, the nascent villagers got a charter for the town of Dallas from the state legislature. Later that year, ninety-two people voted to establish a city government. Currenty was in land deeds, headrights, and a market of headright scrip. Land, animals, and slaves were the only mediums of exchange. It would be another thirteen years before a bank opened in Dallas.

This group had amassed $400,000...

The second group had opened bank and credit accounts in New Orleans and Galveston.

It was peopled with yeomen farmers, primarily from the South, a few merchants, and a feverish bred of lawyers, "land men," and surveyors consumed with cornering free or cheap prairies.

They included new professions never seen on frontiers: architects, educators, two civil engineers, a man trained in astronomy, even a botanist and poet.

...shaded defiles near water where the air was ten degrees cooler than on the prairie tops.

Especially the French and Swiss demanded different foods and a different standard of food preparation. To preserve perishables, they dug a cave in the escarpment hill. They introduced the first specialization of food processing as a component of a civilized society.

Considerant refused to divulge his actions to accountant Simonin, made extraneous loans unrelated to the colony, hoarded funds, and did not know how to lead men.

Jacob Nussbaumer, disillusioned with communal life, moved across the Trinity River in 1857 to establish an abattoir east of Dallas on Mill Creek and on what became Swiss Avenue.

...the Europeans brought a new view of agronomy to the area.

La Reunion Fruit Farms...

Ten years beore, [Reverchon's] short experience as the head of farming for the Fourierist commune Sig in Algeria, at a latitude closer to that of Dallas than France, was preparation for Texas.

Reunionists must also have contributed the first designed buildings to the community. Young architects, just out of school in Louvain, were among the early arrivals in 1855.

Cockrell was murdered in the street in front of the St. Nicholas Hotel before it was completed, and the building itself lasted little more than a year, until the fire of 1860.

Ironically, [Emile Remond's] knowledge of argillaceous compounds led in the twentieth century to the Reunion townsite itself being strip-mined for cement.

There had been an Indian village on the southeastern corner of the tract later sold to Emile Remond, which he mined for artifacts.

* Allyre Bureau's bucolic view of his residence at La Reunion is the earliest known extant example of a spontaneous sketch made in Dallas by a European. *

Finally, the Europeans brought a tolerance for humankind that was considered a threat by the Texas slavery-advocating frontiersmen.

Dissident Colas reported that the Fourierists had their own doctrinal police.

The mature colonists who had already prospered in Europe - the intellectuals Burkli and Daly, the professionals such as Nicolas and Savardan, the dyer and witty poet Leray, the teachers, and the architects who wanted to practice their profession - soon left. Without strong communal leadership, the colony could not support individual intellectual and professional pursuits. Those depended on accumulated wealth.

The Fourierists who stayed were mostly too poor to leave...

Why did fairs begin in Dallas as early as four years after the utopian Fourierists arrived?

Most importantly, the colonists brought a civilizing view of collective specialized life, as practiced in cities, to this frontier yeoman culture where each person was judged on his ability to function completely independently of anyone else. For the first time, city dwellers, fresh off the boats from Europe, provided services that had been lacking in this nascent community. *

Appendix

Aude, Department of: In eastern France; supplied eleven colonists to La Reunion in 1855.

Bar, Kaspar: In 1845 Bar wrote an important biography of educator Heinrich Pestalozzi after studying with him. Bar brought his wife and musical daughters to La Reunion to establish a school on the famous man's principles but was refused by Victor Considerant. His family suffered great hardship before returning east.

Besancon: Seat of the Department of Doubs. Early Fourierists resided there, and Victor Considerant attended secondary school there.

... ...

Notes

... ...

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[in repos/la_reunion]

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