The Development of Missouri

On the Missouri frontier, German immigrants mixed with the "Old Americans" and learned the ways of the backwoods hunters and subsistence farmers in the 1830s. Seven chapters cover the Civil War period when Gert Goebel was active in local politics and prominent in state government. Copied from Goebel's hand-written manuscript, "The Development of Missouri" is a German immigrant's first-hand account of life in the Missouri Backwoods. A very similar book, in German, was published in 1877. It was Goebel's desire to share his stories with fellow citizens who could not speak or read German so he translated the story into English himself. Excerpts appeared in the press occasionally but the full text itself, however, was never printed until now.