By William Bork

A generation before Zane Grey and companions in the United States created historical tales and adventure novels about life in the American West, there appeared in serial form in 1877-78 in a German periodical publication, Frohe Stunden, translates to Happy Hours, an adventure tale set in Arizona Territory about 1868 Der Oelprinz, translates to The Oil Prince. Rewritten and published in book form in 1897, it has not gone out of print in the 100 years (minus one year) since that time. Further, it has been put on the stage, made into movies, and re-told in several comic book series.

Karl May, author of The Oil prince, called it a "travel tale" (Reiseerzaehlung). It is a story which contains all the stuff later western stories counted as essential: several unrivaled villains, comic relief characters, Native American heroes and heroines, the idealized savage or primitive man, false imprisonment, Indian fights between tribes, sharpshooters, but alas no romantic love, no heroine for the hero to save and NO SEX, N-O-N-E ! 

Opening paragraphs of the tale were taken almost word for word from J. Ross Browne's description of San Javier Mission, nine miles from Tucson, in his Adventures Among the Apaches, New York, 1868. Translated and published almost immediately into German, it no doubt had many readers, because during and after the Industrial Revolution in Germany one might state without much fear of contradiction that every family sent one or more emigres to somewhere in the Western Hemisphere, and mostly, perhaps to the United States. Eager readers awaited anything new about the United States and the western frontier. 

Then in the latter years of the century, Buffalo Bill and his Indians and Cowboys visited Europe where they created an enthusiasm for the U. S. Far West and our history which lives on to the present. 

Karl May was born in 1842 in a small town near Dresden in the then Kingdom of Saxony. Son of a poor weaver, one of 14 children (of whom nine died before the age of two), Karl was the only one of the six male children to grow to manhood, though two of his sisters outlived him. His writings make up a collection of 73 volumes which still are kept in print and continue to sell. Over the past 25 years I have met many German-speaking individuals, most all of whom have read at least several of May's stories. 

The Oil prince is the only one of May's stories of the American westward movement and Indian wars which is set in Arizona. The journey starts at Tucson's San Xavier del Bac and continues up through what we now know as the Apache Reservations and the eastern counties of Arizona to the Canyon de Chelly and the Navajo country. It concerns a Texas crook and promoter who has convinced another Texan, a weathy banker, that he can show him an area where oil is flowing in great volume per minute from a great spring, towards which they are now traveling. 

The group is joined by a goodly number of German immigrants, including several women and children who are under the protection of a philanthropic German woman of some means, Frau Rosalie Ebersbach, who speaks in a comical dialect creating a humorous diversion with her speech and other eccentricities. Tensions and apprehensions with several dangerous complications are created for the group by the presence of the music professor emeritus, somewhat eccentric and "off his rocker", whose undying ambition is to write a 12-act heroic opera (Heldenoper). (Is this a slight jab at Richard Wagner?) 

In addition, the story and the travels are complicated by the presence of a gang of thugs who have been marauding the countryside in southern Arizona, and warfare between the Navajos and a tribe invented by May, the Nijoras, whose chieftain takes them all prisoner in his pueblo. 

Resolution of all the problems brought on by this mix of evil-doers and the various innocents is the work of Sam Hawkins, a typical 'Man of the West', who is aided by his heroic friend in many adventures, Winnetou, and the Navajo chieftain, Nitsas-Ini. Winnetou is the legendary Apache chief and doer of colassal good deeds, one of Karl May's principal creations and protagonist of three whole volumes on his own. 

At one time there is mention of Prescott as the possible goal of the Oil prince after he has managed to get an Order of Payment drawn on a bank in San Francisco but the unraveling of all the skullduggery takes place to prevent the Oil prince from realizing any of his careful and crooked schemes, so he never gets near Prescott. 

Present-day editions of the novel include endpapers, maps of the Wild West in about the year 1868, and Arizona with the travel route (...Reiseweg). 

Since no English translations of Karl May's works exist in obtainable editions, several of us have been toying with the idea and have even made some moves to obtain authorization from the German Karl May Foundation in Bamberg to prepare and publish a translation of The Oil Prince here. If anyone is interested please drop me a line care of Sharlot Hall Museum. 

Karl May's great imagination and creative genius enabled him to give his narrative, of a region which he never saw, a sense of reality which deters one from criticizing or even thinking of any discrepancies or unrealities. When he does mention or describe the countryside in any specific way he achieves sufficient accuracy that one feels he knows where he is. May's personal library is in Bamberg where it was moved after WWII to prevent its possible dispersion during the years after the end of the war when the ideological disputes of the time put all of May's works in some question in East Germany. 

William Bork was born in Prescott in 1906 and has contributed many articles to Sharlot Hall Museum for Days Past publication.


Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number:(image3.jpg) Reuse only by permission.
Cover of Karl May's "DER OELPRINZ" ("The Oil Prince") originally published in 1897 in Germany. The book documents a German's impressions of the southwest in the 19th century.