Eugene remained in Bremen from September 3 to October 13, 1830, spending most of his time in learning English. Olbers reported to Gauss that his behavior during those weeks was quite good, and also that a friend named Bredenkamp as well as a German merchant then established in Philadelphia would aid Eugene at the time of landing.
The crossing lasted from October 13 to late December, 1830, when Eugene landed in New York. Owing to a poor command of English as well as a lack of seriousness and desire to work at the time, Eugene did not find a job in New York or Philadelphia. By February, 1831, he had used up all the funds his father had placed at his disposal. In this serious situation Eugene enlisted as a private in the United States Army on April 19, 1831, for a five-year term. He was first attached to Company F of the First Regiment, U. S. Infantry, stationed at Fort Crawford, Wisconsin, under the command of Captain S. Loomis.158
On July 20, 1832, Loomis sent to Gauss a good-conduct statement for Eugene, needed in connection with his mother’s estate. At Fort Crawford Eugene was placed in charge of the post library. Gauss was surprised to find attached to Loomis’ certificate a letter of greeting from a young German named Heinrich Schliephacke, a Stranger to him, who had left home under similar circumstances in 1822 and had joined the American army. His old home was on the highway between Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel and thus only several miles from Gauss’ birthplace. He had aided Eugene in his new surroundings and praised him in the letter as a good soldier, predicting rapid promotion.
Eugene was later transferred to Fort Snelling, Minnesota. The post was under the command of General Zachary Taylor, and Jefferson Davis was a young officer there. By accident the officers found out that Eugene was an educated man, and he was put in charge of the post library. About the close of his term of enlistment159 his brother Joseph came to America to study railway construction. Joseph brought letters to General Winfield Scott and others and thought he could obtain for Eugene a commission in the regular army, if he desired it. But Eugene had other plans. Joseph did not succeed in seeing Eugene during his American sojourn.
At first Eugene had hope of getting a job in St. Louis, Missouri. If that plan failed, he desired to get a job on a southern plantation. He feared to leave the army because the future looked uncertain to him. In 1834 he had become first sergeant of his company, yet he was embittered when he reflected on what he might have been, and on the fact that men who were his equals in birth and education were now his superiors. He realized that he had been impetuous in leaving home.
On May 15, 1831, while he was still in a recruit depot near New York, Eugene wrote his father a letter full of remorse and contrition. At that time the life of a soldier seemed to be unbearable to him, yet in the end it was his salvation. In the letter just mentioned he stated that he would rather be a day laborer at one-fourth of the usual pay than to remain any longer as a soldier. A little later he wrote a second letter to his father asking for his aid in gaining a discharge, since his hope of dismissal on account of nearsightedness had vanished. Gauss refused in a letter which is a remarkable combination of a sermon preaching repentance and an expression of hope for a better future. Eugene had begun to save a little of his pay. He wrote to his father: “Your name is well known even here in this wilderness.”
During his army service Eugene became a pious Presbyterian and decided he wanted to be a missionary.160 His brother Joseph was displeased by this, but Gauss was not. In later years Eugene made an intellectual study of Christianity that convinced him, aside from his spiritual conviction.161 Many of the books in his library were theological. He conducted family worship in his home night and morning; it is said that his prayer was remarkable for clear statement and understanding and for unaffected earnestness and humility. He expressed satisfaction at having come to America, because otherwise he might never have professed the religion of Christ.
At the conclusion of his time in the army Eugene entered the employ of the American Fur Company, on the headwaters of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. He was attached to the office at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, in charge of Hercules L. Dousman.162 There he learned to speak the Sioux language with ease, and assisted a missionary named Pond in preparing a Sioux alphabet and in translating the Bible. At this time he met the French astronomer Nicollet.163
By the summer of 1838 Eugene was acting as clerk in the office of an insurance agent. He took a position as a private tutor the following spring. Following that, he returned to the Indians for a short time, in the service of the fur company.
Gauss was now convinced that Eugene had mended his ways and paid him his maternal inheritance. Eugene opened a store at St. Charles, Missouri, in 1840 and spent most of the balance of his life in that city. He finally settled down after having seen much of the country, with varied and sometimes dangerous experiences.
In St. Charles, Eugene Gauss had various business interests—flour milling, lumber, and so forth. He organized and was the first president of the First National Bank. On February 14, 1844, he married Henrietta Fawcett, who was born February 3, 1817, in Rockingham County, Virginia, near the city of Harrisonburg. Henrietta’s father, Joseph Fawcett, was of Huguenot ancestry, and her mother, Lucretia Keyes, had moved to Missouri from Virginia some years before Henrietta’s marriage to Eugene. Gauss was quite pleased when he heard of Eugene’s marriage plans and wrote him a cordial, affectionate letter. Eugene and Henrietta had seven children. They built a substantial brick residence in St. Charles, with lawn, gardens, and orchard, where they lived in old-time southern comfort and plenty. This house still stands, though now somewhat changed and with less grounds, and for many years has been out of the family, having been sold in 1885. In St. Charles the friends and connections of Eugene were chiefly among the Virginians, Kentuckians, and Carolinians who went to the town and county after the early French settlement.
Eugene Gauss was a man of very strong will and naturally quick temper. He was a student all his life and after he became blind in his last years his wife read to him and discussed various subjects with him as his constant companion. In all his intellectual life he was genuine and thorough, yet his modesty was a prominent characteristic. He was not a man to push himself or make use of his father’s name. A year before his death he spoke of his desire to study philology and thought that had he remained in Europe he would have been able to obtain a university professorship. He thought of the great difference this would have made in his life. Eugene was a man of shrewd judgment and often expressed wise views about his environment. He became quickly and thoroughly Americanized, and disapproved of the behavior of many German immigrants that he observed. The Revolution of 1848 interested him especially, and he made sharp observations on it in letters to his family in Germany.
When Eugene was over eighty years old and had become blind, he used to entertain himself by making long arithmetical calculations in his head. He computed the amount to which one dollar would grow, if compounded annually at the rate of 4 per cent interest from the time of Adam to that date (about 1894), assuming this to be 6,000 years. This, if in gold, would make a cubic mass so large that it would require light quadrillions of years to pass along one side of it. This mental computation was such as to be almost beyond belief. The only assistance Eugene had was from his son Theodore (1849–1895), who was asked to write down, at intervals during the several days he was so occupied, the results that marked the different stages of his work. Eugene arrived at his result by ordinary arithmetic. His son preserved the paper on which were written the long lines of figures which Eugene thought he might not be able to retain in his memory. On the sheet are several memoranda that are interesting. For instance, Eugene directed his son to write down the figures:
123456789057182178039
3680824926969613857
123456789060863002965969613857
×
The second line of figures was written down several days after the first and added to the upper one by Theodore. His father had directed him to b
egin the second line of figures by placing the figure 3 under the 7 of the upper line. In reading off the result of this addition Theodore read 7 in place of the 8 marked with an ×. Eugene detected the error and his son made the correction, showing that the blind and aged man was able to retain in his mind the long line of thirty figures. This wonderful computation shows an extraordinary memory, to say the least. Later he obtained the value of a cubic foot of gold as expressed in gold dollars. A professor of astronomy later checked the result and found it to be correct.
In 1885 Eugene moved from St. Charles to a four-hundred-acre farm on Highway 63 in Boone County five miles from Columbia, Missouri. There he died on Saturday, July 4, 1896, at the venerable age of eighty-five. The funeral took place from the First Presbyterian Church at St. Charles. His widow lived on until November 24, 1909, thus attaining the great age of ninety-two. Eugene and Henrietta are buried in Oak Grove Cemetery, St. Charles, Missouri.
Wilhelm August Carl Matthias Gauss, fourth son of Gauss and second son of his second wife, was born on October 23, 1813, in Göttingen. He was always known as Wilhelm. His life was less romantic than that of his brother Eugene. At the age of fifteen he left the secondary school in Celle simultaneously with Eugene, in order to be a farmer. After the close of his apprentice period he had several administrative positions on farms. Since he was rather quarrelsome and vehement, he did not hold one of these jobs very long. Finally he held a mercantile position in Potsdam for over two years, but only because he wanted to wait for the repayment of a bond he had put up, which, however, led to several years of litigation. As early as 1832 he had plans of migrating, convinced that his funds were insufficient to purchase a farm in Germany. On August 21, 1837, Wilhelm married at Levern near Preussisch-Oldendorf Aletta Christiane Luise Fallenstein (1813–1883), daughter of the Reverend Heinrich Fallenstein, pastor in Levern, and Charlotte Friederike Amalie Bessel. His wife was a niece of the astronomer Bessel, who was an intimate friend of Gauss.
A brother of the bride joined the young couple, and the three went on a sailing vessel to New Orleans and from there traveled up the Mississippi to Missouri. At that time America made uncontrollable appeals to Wilhelm’s imagination. As a matter of fact, he never became fully Americanized as did his brother Eugene. He was never quite happy in America and for many years played with the idea of returning to Germany. Wilhelm was very critical of life in America and of its people. He did not feel that a democracy is the best form of government, but favored a limited monarchy. Eventually he decided to remain in America for the sake of his eight children. His wife was never too happy in America; Eugene married an American, whereas Wilhelm had a German wife who did not adapt herself easily to the new environment. That and a difference in temperament will explain why one brother became a genuine American and the other did not. Wilhelm was a warm-hearted man of fine intellectual gifts, but in the home he was frequently very severe and unbending.
At first Wilhelm leased some land near St. Charles and soon afterward had his own farm nearby. But he was plagued by illness and crop failure to such an extent that he left his farm and in 1840 moved to Glasgow, in Howard County, Missouri, where he and his brother-in-law opened a store. Within a few years he had built up a sizable fortune. But farming appealed much more strongly to him than the life of a storekeeper. After a few years he bought and moved to a farm thirty miles from Glasgow near Brunswick, Missouri, where he lived until 1855. In that year Wilhelm moved to St. Louis and went into the wholesale boot and shoe business with his brother-in-law under the firm name Fallenstein and Gauss.
Wilhelm spent the remainder of his life in St. Louis. He acquired wealth and was recognized as one of the representative businessmen of St. Louis. In 1855 he took there with him a family of his slaves, as house servants. Before the Civil War he freed all of them, starting the father as a hack driver on his own account, by giving him a pair of horses and a carriage. To be an independent hack driver was the ambition of many a southern Negro of that time.
The Wilhelm Gauss residence was on California Avenue near Lafayette Avenue. It was a large house and had extensive grounds with orchard and gardens. After the death of Wilhelm’s widow in 1883 it was sold to the Missouri Pacific Railroad, which used it as a hospital. Much later it was torn down and there is now a school playground where the house once stood.
Wilhelm died August 23, 1879; he and his family are buried in the Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri.
Henriette Wilhelmine Caroline Therese Gauss, youngest child of Carl Friedrich and his second wife, was born on June 9, 1816, in Göttingen. The name Wilhelmine was for Olbers, but she was always known as Therese. She resembled her mother in appearance, and her character was very similar to that of her mother. Therese was quite different from her half sister Minna. She was clever and kindhearted, but was also very sensitive and looked on the dark side of life. Therese was definitely an introvert. Her father and her sister Minna noticed this trait in her character; they could not understand her melancholy nature. She was probably maladjusted sexually. Therese and her sister Minna did not get along too well together. Therese was frequently ill, but much of her “illness” was probably of psychosomatic origin. It is believed that she had lung trouble, contracted from her mother. After Minna’s death in 1840 her health seems to have improved.
After her sister moved to Tübingen in 1838 she took over the running of the Gauss household and cared for Gauss’ aged mother. In his last years she nursed her father and was his constant companion, manifesting deep love for him and unusual loyalty to duty. She sacrificed everything for him and was tenderly and closely attached to him.164 After the death of Minna she was his all.
In September, 1855, several months after her father’s death Therese went to Switzerland. She was at first in Montreux, later in Vevey and on Lake Geneva. Her letters of that time are full of complaints about her health and about the fact that nobody in Göttingen had written to her. As a matter of fact, she had written to no one there.
On September 23, 1856, at Elsterwerda Therese married Constantin Wilhelm Staufenau (1809–1886), an actor and theatrical producer from Thuringia with whom she had corresponded uninterruptedly for fourteen years. The marriage seems to have been a happy one although Therese did not survive very long. The couple made their home in Dresden,165 where she died February 11, 1864. There were no children.
Therese’s marriage led to strained relations between her and her brother Wilhelm. He had expressed himself rather freely in a letter to Joseph, which fell into her hands for some unexplainable reason. Wilhelm felt that Staufenau was marrying her for her money and said so in the letter. Eugene and Joseph perhaps had the same feelings, but she never knew it if they did. Hence her relations with them in her last years were more pleasant.
Staufenau married a second time on July 15, 1865, Miss Johanna Horack (1832–1891), daughter of his physician in Dresden. At her death she returned to the Gauss family money which had come from Therese.
Gauss was a tender father only to his daughters. It would be wrong to conclude that he did not have deep affection for his sons. True, he did not write frequently to them—except that in his last years he wrote numerous letters to Joseph. He was rather proud of the high official position which Joseph occupied, but also had real joy in the knowledge that his two sons in America were conquering life in a new world. He had many sorrows but at the expense of a great struggle armed himself with firm serenity before the world. He did not wish to appear weak before his fellow men, and he found outward serenity necessary for scientific work. His correspondence with his children, with other members of his family, and with intimate friends shows that he did not lack the deepest emotions.
Appendix E — Genealogy
This section contains information only on descendants of Gauss and his half brother. His ancestors have been covered fully by Rudolf Borch in Ahnentafeln berühmter Deutscher (Leipzig, 1929), Lieferung 1, p. 63. These charts are not a complete listing of the descendants
. The decimal-letter system, explained in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (LI, 305), has been adopted for arrangement of these data. This system of notation goes as follows:
Gebhard Dietrich Gauss, the earliest member of the family on this chart, is lettered a; his children are lettered aa, ab, and so forth. The children of his elder son are lettered aaa, aab, and so forth; and so on through each succeeding generation. For convenience in counting, a space, corresponding to a decimal point, is left after the fourth letter.
Descendants of Gebhard Dietrich Gauss
First Generation
a. Gebhard Dietrich Gauss, son of Jürgen Gauss and his wife, Cathrine Magdalene Eggeling, was b. about Feb. 13, 1744 at Brunswick, Germany, and d. there Apr. 14, 1808. He was a gardener, bricklayer, and official of the local burial association, m. (1) Apr. 28, 1768. Dorothea Emerenzia Warnecke (Sollerich), b. 1745 and d. Sept. 2, 1775, m. (2) at Velpke on Apr. 25, 1776. Dorothea Benze, dau. of Christoph Benze, stonemason, and his wife, Catharina Maria Crone; Dorothea was b. at Velpke June 18, 1743, and d. at Göttingen Apr. 18, 1839.
Second Generation
aa. Johann Georg Heinrich Gauss, b. at Brunswick Jan. 24, 1769, and d. there Aug. 7, 1854. He followed the same occupation as his father, m. (1) at Brunswick Oct. 20, 1808, Marie Friederike Juliane Dannehl of that city. m. (2) at Brunswick Nov. 19, 1826, Christiane Sophie Regine Höber of Wolfenbüttel.
ab. Carl Friedrich Gauss, b. at Brunswick Apr. 30, 1777, and d. at Göttingen Feb. 23, 1855. Professor of mathematics and astronomy, director of the University of Göttingen Observatory, m. (1) at Brunswick Oct. 9, 1805, Johanna Elisabeth Rosina Osthoff, dau. of Christian Ernst Osthoff, master tanner, and his wife, Johanna Maria Christine Ahrenholz; the bride was b. Aug. 5, 1780, at Brunswick and d. Oct. 11, 1809, m. (2) at Göttingen Aug. 4, 1810, Friederica Wilhelmine (Minna) Waldeck, dau. of Johann Peter Waldeck, professor of law at the University of Göttingen, and his wife, Charlotte Auguste Wilhelmine Wyneken; the bride was b. Apr. 15, 1788, at Göttingen and d. there Sept. 12, 1831.
Carl Friedrich Gauss, Titan of Science_A Study of His Life and Work Page 42