What Came to Pass in Eagle Pass

"Eagle Pass, Mexican Section, 1939"
(Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration)

 

The Norwegian bark, Arendal, a three-masted 19^th-century ship, sailed from Bordeaux to New Orleans in the winter of 1850. Upon arrival in the polyglot city, the captain immediately placed a newspaper notice stating he would not be responsible for debt that the crew might incur.

It was January 21 when two French passengers, Adolphe Duclos and his sister Josephine, descended into the muddy streets. They drew no attention, but the Arendal’s cargo created a stir. Hundreds of bottles, casks, crates, baskets, and pipes of claret, kirsch, Saint-Julien, Saint-Emilion, Haut Sauterne, absinthe, Belle Creole champagne, Pauillac, La Rochelle brandy, and Mont Ferrand “ordinary red wine” did not sit for long on the docks.

Port of New Orleans ~1850
(German print)

Overnight, the spirits and wines became available for sale in local shops. Not to mention olive oil, macaroni, vinegar, mustard, sardines, dried fruits, truffles, and other treasures from across the sea.  

Josephine went off to find a room in a boarding house. She couldn’t wait to unpack her trunk stuffed with corsets and crinolines. Soon, she would marry and have a family.  

Twenty-five year old Adolphe planned to become a merchant on the Texas-Mexico border. He spoke French and English fluently; possibly Spanish. In New Orleans, he met with cotton brokers, for the city handled more cotton than any port in the U.S. and cotton would be the centerpiece of his business.

 

Then he was on his way to Eagle Pass, Texas, a windswept border town named for Mexican eagles (technically falcons called crested caracaras) that swooped through the cottonwoods and willows along the Rio Grande and its tributaries.

To get there, Adolphe traveled by boat along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, stopping in Galveston and Corpus Christi before debarking on a strategic barrier island, the port Brazos Santiago. Here, at the mouth of the Rio Grande, sandbars had recently been made navigable with flat-hulled steamboats.

Pushing northwest toward Eagle Pass, Adolphe might have canoed upriver, but it is likely that he went overland. The shallowness of the Rio Grande made it largely impassable by boat.  

Adolphe was about to join a community that numbered close to 400. Its population had doubled two years earlier when the U.S. Army built nearby Fort Duncan, its stated purpose to fend off attacks by the Lipan Apache Tribe. The soldiers wielded frontier justice over runaway slaves, bandits, immigrants, smugglers, and anyone else who got in their way. The controversial Texas Rangers were welcome there, too.

"View of Fort Duncan, near Eagle Pass" (1852). Engraving 
commissioned by US Secretary of the Interior, 1857.
(University of Texas at Austin)

Within this zone of "Anglo" safety, Duclos set up shop and built his fortune over time. He purchased Arkansas- and Texas-grown cotton in San Antonio and brought it to Eagle Pass in convoys of mule-drawn wagons that stretched for miles. Eventually he acquired a cotton press, which enabled him to compress the cotton into standardized bales. Each bale weighed as much as 500 lbs. but transporting them—as opposed to loose ginned cotton—was far more efficient.

Next the cotton crossed the river to Piedras Negras, the Mexican sister town of Eagle Pass, before heading to Laredo and southeast to Matamoros, a boomtown on the Rio Grande.  

While the route crosses flat, lowlands terrain, the wagons loaded with cotton and the muleteers who drove them were easy targets for thieves. Moving any kind of goods around Texas posed big risks.    

During these long years of border wars, American entrepreneurs and Mexican government officials brutalized and exploited Mexican laborers. Violent retaliation ensued.  

 

***

 

A long way from France, Duclos called himself “Adolfo” and it stuck. His certificate of naturalization bears that name.

In 1872 he traveled to Washington, D.C. to testify before the U.S.-Mexican Claims Commission about a raid on Piedras Negras that occurred years earlier, in October 1855, when he was a fledgling entrepreneur in Eagle Pass. 

This commission was created to adjudicate fast-multiplying claims of damage by Mexico against U.S. property owners and vice versa. In the case of Pedro Tauns vs. The United States, 190 Mexicans had asked for reparations following a brutal assault on Piedras Negras led by a Texas Ranger, James Callahan.

 Unattributed, Facebook

They argued that Callahan’s band of Rangers and vigilantes had the full support of the U.S. Army out of Fort Duncan. The U.S. insisted that Callahan’s destruction of Piedras Negras was part of a counterattack on Lipan Apaches and thus justifiable.

Adolfo Duclos was asked to estimate the monetary value of possessions that had been destroyed during the raid. “I knew the village of Piedras Negras, and was well acquainted with the condition and circumstances of all of its inhabitants at the time of the raid of filibusters,” he began.

Texas Rangers, 1868: James Thomas Bird
(left) and John J. Haynes (right).
(Source: True West Magazine)

The people were “the poorest class of Mexicans, living in huts built of pickets stuck into the ground, with grass roofs, and without windows or floors,” Duclos continued. These jacales, he guessed, had little value—$50 each, perhaps.   

Twenty of Duclos’ Texas compatriots joined him in testifying that the victims of Callahan’s raid had filed fraudulent claims for farm animals, jewelry, libraries, clothing, homes, and more. The witnesses based their testimony on personal acquaintance with the petitioners.

In April 1872, the U.S. agreed to compensate 150 claimants: the Mexican government would distribute $50,000 among them. By that time, Duclos had left Eagle Pass in the dust.

“A Mexico Jacal,” On a Mexican Mustang Through Texas,
from the Gulf to the Rio Grande (1883)

 

To be continued.

https://www.throughthehourglass/

A Librarian's Journey - Part 2

New York State Library Reading Room
(New York State Library School Circular of Information, 1909-1910)

 

When he arrived in 1919 at the New York State Library School, Hung Yu-Feng became its sole Chinese student. However, he was not new to the world of library science.

Born in 1892 in Anhui Province in eastern China, Hung likely grew up in a straw hut. Although Anhui produced vast crops of rice and tea, floods and famine tormented its population. Partly traversed by a railway that would take 80 years to complete, Anhui drew plenty of missionaries. 

The American Methodist missionary Arthur J. Bowen plucked Hung from his village and placed him in a religious academy when he was a boy. In 1912, urged onward, Hung enrolled at the University of Nanking.

Arthur J. Bowen

Established just two years earlier, the University of Nanking merged three American-sponsored Chinese Christian colleges. Subsequently, the New York State Board of Regents granted it accreditation.

At Nanking, Hung worked with Professor Harry Clemons, formerly a reference librarian at Princeton who arrived in China in 1913 to organize the new university’s library school. Intelligent and generous, Clemons effectively straddled library studies and Bible studies. As an employee of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., he and other Americans in China could pursue twin commitments in this way.

W. H. Clemons

New York State Library School Junior Lecture Room, 1920
(American Library Association Archives)

In Albany, all of Hung’s 17 peers in the Class of 1921 were college graduates with some library experience. As a fluent English speaker who had served under Clemons as assistant librarian at Nanking, Hung was competitive. The rigorous three-year curriculum would not have fazed him, already well-versed in bibliography, classification, cataloguing, indexing, subject headings, and book selection.

The school also required fieldwork. One summer, Hung worked as a cataloguer in the Library of Congress’s Chinese Collection, which originated in 1869 with a gift from Tongzhi, the sickly boy emperor of the Qing Dynasty. By 1919, the Chinese Collection of maps, manuscripts, and books was substantial.   

On April Fool’s Day, 1920, Hung and his schoolmates visited libraries in Hartford and Providence. Well-hatted, they posed for a picture on the steps outside the Connecticut State Library.  

Some look happy; others impassive. Either way, they would make their mark in a nation with 93.5% literacy (the percentage is still debated). With the professionalization of librarianship, jobs proliferated at public schools, university reference departments, and trade and public libraries.

In 1921, Hung Yu-feng returned to Nanking, where the newly incorporated Southeast University hired him as director of its Meng Fang Library. He oversaw its construction, organized a national library association, married and fathered at least one son.

After the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the Republic of China was led by Sun Yat-sen and his Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party. But warlords wracked the mainland, and civil war became inevitable—especially after Chinese Communist Party members aligned with the Kuomintang’s left wing during the early 1920s. In March 1927, the Kuomintang officially split left and right.

Now the right wing of the army, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, swept through Nanking, executing foreigners and Communists, terrorizing professors, students, and diplomats, leaving death and destruction.

In September 1927, Albany’s Library School News Letter reported:

 

Hung Yu-Feng, ’21, librarian of Southeastern [sic] University, Nanking, China, has been relieved of that post, due to the reorganization of the university and the library, the outcome of political events.

 

After the Nanking Massacre and the Nationalist takeover, Hung continued in the library field and published a book about library management in 1935. The school newsletter announced his death in 1963.

Reflecting on Hung, I have concluded that he was a master administrator. During the 1920s, the call for credentials and expertise in the professions ushered in greater emphasis on efficiency. 

Thus, librarians trained in the U.S. focused on design, organization, and systems. From Albany to Nanking, this type of management enabled libraries to flourish during an important time of growth. 

And the expanse of Hung's life: immeasurably astonishing.  

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/10/a-librarians-journey-part-2.html?m=1

   

A Librarian's Journey

 

Postcard of Angel Island, 1915

Hung Yu-Feng arrived at Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, on a foggy September day in 1919. His unlikely destination: Albany, N.Y., where Hung would study for three years at the New York State Library School.

Although Congress had passed the horrendous Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, exceptions were made routinely, especially for students. In fact, Hung was one of 206 Chinese students traveling on the S.S. Nanking, an American-made ship operated by the China Mail Steamship Company.  

Twenty-seven-year-old Hung held a B.A. from the University of Nanking, where he had worked as an assistant, associate, and acting librarian. Now, his tuition and expenses would be paid largely through a “Boxer Indemnity Scholarship” arranged by his sponsors, A.J. Bowen, a missionary and president of the University of Nanking and Frank K. Walter, a New York State Library School official.

The scholarships were established by Congress in 1908 with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt. They were perhaps the sole positive outcome of the Boxer Rebellion in China, a bloody conflict driven by rage about imperialism, missionaries, and foreigners who denigrated Chinese culture.

University of Nanking, 1920

The Rebellion started in 1899 among Chinese peasants but soon grew into a national movement. By 1901, the U.S., Germany, Russia, Italy, France, Japan, Austria-Hungary, and England had formed an alliance and collectively sent 20,000 soldiers to put down the uprising.

Presumably the goal was to protect foreign delegations; in fact, some of the nations hoped to gain new territory. But no land would be granted through the Boxer Protocol signed in September 1901, about one month after the victorious alliance troops reached the Imperial City.

Instead, the Protocol granted the alliance nations $330 million worth of indemnities, to be paid out in silver by the Qing Dynasty across 39 years, ending in 1940.

Onerous and crippling, the payments devastated China even though eventually some nations forgave part of the debt.

In 1908, the United States waived its claim to its remaining share of Boxer Indemnities. The balance would be applied to the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. 

Initially, the program focused on math and science students. Before long it encompassed library studies. Modernization of university and public libraries had been a goal of Chinese leaders since 1898. American librarians sailed to China to support the effort. Their work was funded by Christian missions and foundations. 

 

***

 

Typically, Chinese visitors were detained for weeks or months at the Angel Island Immigration Station. They endured tortuous rounds of interviews and invasive, humiliating physical exams. Perhaps Hung was fortunate enough to pass through quickly; then boarded the Southern Pacific Railroad headed to Chicago, where he switched to the New York Central.  

At the end of the four-day trip, Hung stepped out of Union Station into New York’s state capital, population about 112,000. 

Union Station, Albany, N.Y., early 19th century

Albany, which started life as a Dutch trading post in 1614, lay along the west bank of the Hudson River. Its Romanesque capitol rose on a hill in a neighborhood ever busier with politics and higher education.

From a rooming house on High Street, where he lived with eight lodgers, Hung could walk toward the Medical College and over to Washington Avenue where the State Education Building housed the Library School.     

The other lodgers hailed from Czechoslovakia, England, Luxembourg, Ireland, Germany, and Massachusetts. The head of the boarding house, Eugenia Mitchell, is listed in the 1920 census as a missionary whose profession was Bible study.   

Arriving in Albany a few days after classes started, Hung hurried up the long staircase and walked between the marble columns toward the bronze doors, then slipped into the soaring rotunda.

State Education Building, Albany, N.Y., 1915

 

To be continued.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/09/a-librarians-journey.html?m=1

Firefly Sky

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/08/firefly-sky.html?m=1

 

Now and Then

 

Why We Celebrate Our Holidays 
by Mary I. Curtis (1924)

In the chilly spring of 1888, James Russell Lowell was invited to give an address at the newly established Reform Club of New York. 

A well-known political and social observer, the bushy-bearded Lowell had honed his intellect since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1842. Poet and essayist, diplomat and abolitionist; a linguistics scholar who became the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Lowell moved in distinguished literary circles.

Lowell also drew contempt. Some of his peers dismissed him as a moody lightweight who espoused convenient, inconsistent arguments. He and the Transcendentalist author Margaret Fuller detested each other. “Posterity will not remember him,” she once wrote.   

However, in his remarks at the Reform Club, just a few years before his death at age 72, Lowell identified an interesting twist in American culture. It seems especially intriguing now, when we face controversial interpretations of patriotism and American history.

Up until the start of the Civil War, Lowell told the elite audience, Americans were filled with optimism, “seeing the future in rose-color.”  

He had an explanation for this antebellum anticipation of endless American glory. 

“The hues of our dawn had scarcely faded from the sky. Men were still living who had seen the face and heard the voice of the most august personage in our history.”

Did he mean George Washington? I believe so. 

“This was what may be called the Fourth of July period of our history,” Lowell said.

During that time, he explained, Americans were still close to the epochal events of the past. Inevitably, many traditions had fallen by the wayside. A few old holidays—once momentous celebrations—had lost their meaning, and industrialization chipped away at community cohesion.

Yet thousands of Americans still remembered the big events or held onto the 18^th- and 19^th-century stories recounted by people who were there in the moment. For many years, those memories drove profound feelings of citizenship. 

Of course we could not live perpetually in the Fourth of July period, but it continued to glimmer.

During the Bicentennial in 1976, the writer Brendan Gill mused aloud that we possess founding documents but no recordings of founding voices. After a pause, his friend Ned announced: “I have heard an eighteenth-century voice.”

 

“We pressed him to tell us how that was possible,” Gill recalled. ‘I was born in 1883,’ Ned said, ‘and I was brought up in part by my great-grandmother, who as a little girl was taken down to the new Federal Hall, on Wall Street, to observe Washington being sworn in as the first President of the United States. That was in 1790.’”

Statue of George Washington
Federal Hall, New York City
(National Park Service)

Through these remarkable leaps, 20^th century Americans could touch the deep past. My mother liked to recall a parade in the 1930s where she watched veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic march by.

Really? I’d ask, dubiously.  

Yes, really. In fact, there is a newsreel of the parade. On Memorial Day 1935, Civil War veterans were among the soldiers who marched up Broadway toward the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Riverside Park.  

Universal Newspaper Newsreel, May 1935

G.A.R. veterans at the 1935 parade

Even today, the past may resonate unexpectedly, unprompted by a monument, fireworks or a battle reenactment. You might be driving on Interstate 435, a beltway that surrounds the Kansas City metropolitan area. Along the way, the road slopes down to a marsh. The land is undeveloped although not primeval. A low bridge carries you across the Missouri River. 

You might recall “Shenandoah,” a popular 19^th-century American folksong.

 

            Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

            Away, you rolling river

            Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

            Away, I’m bound away, ’cross the wide Missouri.

             

“Shenandoah” is a lilting river ballad filled with love and longing. Any online search will tell you that. Shenandoah was an Indian chief whose daughter the riverboat captain wished to marry but had to leave behind. 

And there you are, back in time and place, brushing up against the Fourth of July period of our history. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/07/now-and-then.html?m=1

Vilna Lamplight

 

My grandparents during the late 1920s

When the 19-year old immigrant arrived in New York City in 1914, he knew all about fur. This was borne out by a story that he—my father’s father—liked to tell my brother and me. The incident took place in the shadowy nineteenth century long before his birth.

The family lived in Vilna, a city in Lithuania, a Northern European nation that borders the Baltic Sea on the east and Belarus to the west. During that time, Vilna was part of the Russian Empire.

His grandparents owned a fur shop—beautiful minks, he described, laid out on deep wooden counters.

One day, like many other days, the Cossacks came to plunder Vilna.*

Inside the store, they demanded: “Give us the furs.” But his grandmother cried, “Never!” and flung her body across the pelts. Why would they spare her life?

By the time we heard this story for the first time, in our grandparents’ apartment in the north Bronx, he had retired from the fur business and liked to watch the Lawrence Welk Show on a Zenith color television.    

Now, looking at early 20^th century photographs of Vilna: the cobblestone streets crowded with old, bearded men and little boys wearing caps and short pants, I understand fully the distance that he, like all immigrants, traveled.  

In the winter of 1934, a naturalized American at last, married with two sons, co-owner of a small fur processing company, he returned to Vilna. His parents had died but several brothers and at least a dozen cousins remained.

“I went back to Vilna,” he would often say. “I stood under the lamplight and waited. And my own brother walked by. I stopped him and . . . ” 

Here he would tear up. “I said, ‘It’s Josef, it’s me! Your brother!'” 

That is all I know about his visit except that the encounter with his brother must have occurred in the Jewish Quarter. Also that most of the family members whom he saw on that trip were still living in Vilna in June 1941 when the German occupation began.  

In May, while visiting Vilna, I looked for the light under which he perpetually stands. But there are so many. Turning down this street and that, a multitude of iron lanterns revealed themselves and lit up my grandfather’s story.  

I am ever, ever grateful that he left to become an American. 

 

Note: Following the formal recognition of Lithuania's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Vilna became Vilnius. After World War I, when the city was part of the Second Polish Republic, it was called Wilno. 

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/06/vilna-lamplight.html?m=1

Through a Screen, Darkly

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/06/through-screen-darkly.html?m=1