Duden, Gottfried b. 1785; Remscheid (Westfalia), Prussia d. 1855; Remscheid (Westfalia), Prussia

Gottfried Duden was the author of Bericht uber eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas und einen mehrjahrigen Aufenthalt am Missouri in den Jahren 1824, ’25, ’26 und ’27.

In 1824, Duden had acquired 270 acres of land in present-day Warren County, close to the Missouri River and some 20 miles west of Saint Louis. Differ­ent from most settlers, he possessed suffi­cient financial means to live the life of a gentleman farmer for the next four years— apparently with only limited success in agriculture—before returning to Germany to publish his experiences in the form of thirty-six letters to an unnamed German friend. The book, although comprehen­sive, detailed, and accurate in the descrip­tions of his travels and sojourn in Missouri, often digresses into lengthy philosophical and sociopolitical comparisons between life in the wide expanses of the Missouri River valley and life in Germany. Many disaf­fected persons in Germany and Switzer­land read it and began to organize emigra­tion societies employing Duden’s advice. It obviously appealed to those living in the overpopulated area of Dudens home re­gion of the Rhineland, as well as to more affluent and educated readers throughout Germany and Switzerland with a desire to found homesteads based on nineteenth­century ideas of bucolic life abroad.

The popularity of Dudens book dur­ing his lifetime is attested by successive publications, first in Elberfeld, Germany, in 1829, followed by a second revised edi­tion in Bonn in 1834; two special editions, sponsored by the Swiss Emigration Society, appeared in St.

Portions of Dudens Report on a Jour­ney were first published in English from 1917 to 1919 by William Bek in successive issues of the Missouri Historical Review. A thoroughly annotated, but in some places tedious, English translation of the entire Report on a Journey, under the general edi­torship of James W. Goodrich, appeared in 1980. It also includes Dudens essay “Con­cerning the Nature of the North American United States or: Concerning the Bases of the Political Situation of the North Ameri­cans.” In it, Duden lays out his theory that sparse population and a conducive natural environment are the reasons for the perfect living conditions awaiting the settlers in the Missouri River valley. In comparing them to the conditions in his homeland, he states that the miracle of a beggarless soci­ety “occurs in a country where passports are unknown, where one can travel thou­sands of miles without once being asked one’s name, where, although all the ordi­nary police protection common in Ger­many is altogether lacking, theft, robbery, and swindling are rare.... In America, Eu­rope can recognize the results of its own overpopulation” (Duden 1980, 239f.). “A Postscript for Emigrating Farmers and for Those Who Contemplate Commercial Undertakings” is also included in the edi­tion. It briefly gleans the most salient pieces of advice from the thirty-six letters: the most advantageous travel routes, either via New York and Baltimore overland or through New Orleans and then by steam­boat up the Mississippi River; the cost of the respective travels; the means of pay­ment; the best ways of carrying money; the minimum financial resources needed for a successful enterprise; and those items best brought along from Europe versus those that can be bought more cheaply in the United States are some of the points discussed.

From a current perspective, Duden’s glowing description of life along the Mis­souri River is naive, filled with nineteenth­century German romantic notions of an untrammeled existence in an unspoiled wilderness that is just beginning to be opened to the uses of civilization. There are exceptions, however. His twenty-eighth let­ter deals with the many diseases to which a settler may be exposed and the lack of medical care, and his fifteenth letter allows a rare glimpse of the dangers and difficul­ties faced by the frontier settler, who is plagued by ticks, is bitten by rattlesnakes, and may lose his property to a raging forest fire. Immediately following in letter six­teen, in a manner reminiscent of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm’s “Little Red Riding Hood,” Duden describes several dogs at­tacking a captured wolf, a “beast of prey,” that is being tortured and eventually de­stroyed by neighbors. Duden displays am­bivalence toward this act of cruelty. There seems to be no ambivalence, but rather a bit of national pride, when he asserts that the descendents of Englishmen “proclaim without hesitation that they like the Ger­man immigrants best, whereas complaints about the Irish are common, as they are prone to be intemperate, lazy, and quarrel­some” (Duden 1980, 41).

The Report on a Journey is not only an excellent sourcebook about frontier life in Missouri in the 1820s. For an American readership, it also reveals interesting and often still relevant perceptions of the United States as seen from abroad. In addi­tion, it proves that some problems per­ceived as new today have existed for almost two centuries. One example is Duden’s passing comment about the Electoral Col­lege, where he notes in 1829 that people want to elect the president directly and no longer go through representatives (Duden 1980, 152).

Klaus Dieter Hanson

See also Travel Literature, Germany-U.S.

References and Further Reading

Boone-Duden Historical Society. “Local Map of Boone Duden Historical Society.” http://www.rootsweb.com/~moboonhs/ma p.html (accessed July 19, 2004).

Duden, Gottfried. Report on a Journey to the Western States of America and a Stay of Several Years along the Missouri (during the Years 1824, ^,25, ^,26, and 1827). Ed. and trans. James Goodrich. Columbia, MO: State Historical Society of Missouri and University of Missouri Press, 1980.