The Pocket Utensil  

Seth McFarland

 

September, 2022

 

In 2019, a donation was made to the Santa Fe Trail Center - a unique utensil with a direct connection to the Santa Fe Trail. The folding utensil belonged to Henry Mayer, and was donated to the museum by Mr. Peter Levy. The tool includes a fork and bottle opener. Mr. Mayer would have kept this handy tool on his person at all times, and it would have been used on a regular basis on his travels across the Santa Fe Trail. The nineteenth century folding cutlery has ivory scales and is possibly Bavarian in origin, although there is no visible hallmark to identify the maker. Similar utensils were also made in England and the United States. This personal effect would have been generally used by a gentleman of the time such as a merchant or tradesmen. A fixed blade knife was often used by hunters and soldiers.

 

Henry Mayer was born in Germany in 1816, the same year as the Treaty of Munich. As a young man, he left Europe and arrived in New Orleans in 1834, and quickly established a sales business. Before long he started freighting along the Santa Fe Trail, with business trips that extended south to Chihuahua, Mexico. On a trip to Cincinnati, he spent time at the home of a family friend and entertained a young Rebecca Cohen with stories of his trail travels. In 1851, Henry proposed to her. Two months after their June 1852 marriage, Rebecca began a honeymoon journey at the age of fifteen. They traveled by horseback and covered wagon from Independence to Chihuahua with 500 hundred mules and 50 men. They arrived in late November and lived in Chihuahua for two years before moving to San Antonio, Texas. Henry died at age 90 in 1906, while Rebecca died in 1930 at age 93.

 

On the trip from Independence to Chihuahua, Mrs. Mayer was surrounded by a buffalo herd as she rode horseback, and was rescued by her husband and other members of the party through what they considered a miracle. Subsequently she took half a dozen other trips with him from Independence to Chihuahua, a distance which took them four months to travel. He figures prominently in her account of their journey and was a well-established businessman. Mr. and Mrs. Mayer settled in Chicago in 1874.

 

This material came to light only quite recently. One of their daughters, a stenographer, recorded many of Mrs. Mayer's stories for posterity. Joy Poole, a historian and co-founder of the Santa Fe Trail Association, collected these materials and has added a foreword, while Kay Goldman has added an introduction. Information on Henry and Rebecca Mayer is available in Vickie Vogel's "Travels and Travails of Henry Mayer" in the December 2014 article in Texas Jewish Historical Society News Magazine, and in Alice Anne Thompson's "Having a Grand Time: Rebecca Cohen Mayer on the Santa Fe Trail, 1852" in the Kansas Historical Society's Kansas History: Journal of the Central Plains.