Dunt, Detlef b. May 7, 1793; Lutjenburg, Holstein d. 1847; Columbus,Texas

Author of one of the earliest German guidebooks to Texas, Reise nach Texas, nebst Nachrichten von diesem Lande fur Deutsche, welche nach Amerika zu gehen be- absichtigen (Journey to Texas: With Infor­mation about This Land for Germans Planning to Go to America), in 1834.

Stephen Austin’s colony in Texas, most no­tably the settlement of Friedrich Ernst in Industry. Dunt’s book is an important source for the early history of European and American settlements in Texas.

The book belongs to a particular genre of literature, the emigrant guide that flour­ished in the nineteenth century. These works address “how-to-do-it” questions be­ginning with who should emigrate, where the emigrant should go, what should be taken, and what is better purchased abroad. Dunt recounts that a Scot he met in Texas confirmed what many Americans who had traveled throughout the United States had told him: Texas, which still be­longed to Mexico, was far superior to any part of the states for European settlers. As Dunt explains, it was possible in Texas for a male head of household to acquire a vast land grant. Dunt cautioned that to obtain the maximum grant, the immigrant must not only be married but have his wife with him.

Dunt had not done well economically in Germany. He was still living in eastern Holstein in 1819 when he married a woman from the duchy of Oldenburg to the west. The marriage records note that his deceased father had been simply a Kaufmann (merchant or businessman), a term that without enhancement usually de­noted a small businessman. Dunt’s first three children were born in the town of his own birth.

Enticed by fellow Oldenburger Friedrich Ernst’s open letter of 1832 about the attractiveness of Texas, which circu­lated widely in parts of northern Germany, Dunt departed for Texas via Bremen on November 20, 1832. After sojourns of a few weeks in both New York and New Or­leans, he arrived in Texas early in May 1833. He returned to Oldenburg in the fall of 1834.

Almost two years elapsed before he carried out his plan, announced in his book, to emigrate to Texas, and then he failed to follow his own advice to bring his wife and take advantage of the generous land grants to which husbands accompa­nied by spouses were entitled. In February 1836, he and his two sons, aged thirteen and fifteen, set out for Texas, leaving his wife in Oldenburg with the couple’s two daughters, aged seven and ten—perhaps to care for the older daughter, who died the following year. In 1844 Dunt’s wife and their surviving daughter were still in Old­enburg, although by then they resided in Bockhorn/Wesermarsch, where the wife’s father lived until his death in 1843. Dunt himself made at least one more round trip between Texas and Oldenburg. The record of his surviving daughter’s confirmation in 1844 lists him as present at the ceremony in Bockhorn and as an innkeeper in nearby Berne/Wesermarsch. His stay in Germany must have been brief. In 1846 his wife em­igrated to Texas with their daughter, now seventeen, as well as a young man, the son of a postal employee in Oldenburg, whom the daughter married the following year. Officiating at the wedding in September 1847 as justice of the peace was Dunt’s old friend Friedrich Ernst of Industry, Texas. It is unclear from the records whether Dunt lived long enough into 1847 to see his daughter marry.

Walter Struve

See also Ernst, Friedrich; Texas; Travel Literature, Germany-U.S.

References and Further Reading

Brenner, Peter J. Reisen in die Neue Welt: Die Erfahrung Nordamerikas in deutschen Reise- und Auswandererberichten des 19. Jahrhunderts. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1991.

Gorisch, Stephan. “Die gedruckten ‘Ratgeber’ fur Auswanderer: Zur Produktion und Typologie eines literarischen Genres.” Hessische Blatter fur Volks- und Kulturforschung 17, 1985, 51—70.

Struve, Walter. Germans and Texans: Commerce, Migration, and Culture in the Days of the Lone Star Republic. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.