Sam W. Haynes - Unsettled Land

I T WAS CLEAR FROM THE BEGINNING THAT THE B EALES COLONISTS were out of their depth. They were not weather-beaten, hardscrabble frontierspeople. Some had never wielded an axe or plowed a field in their lives. But in the spring of 1834 they found themselves on the banks of Las Moras Creek, a few miles above the Rio Grande, lured to this remote spot by the promise of free land. Numbering about sixty men, women, and children, they had been recruited in New York City by an English land agent, John Charles Beales, authorized by the Mexican government to settle an area on the upper Rio Grande, about three hundred miles from the Gulf Coast. A handful were Americans, but most hailed from the British Isles, France, and Central Europe. They included Eduard Ludecus, a well-educated twenty-six-year-old native of Weimar, Germany, whose rsum included a job as a clerk in a dry goods store. Another settler, John Horn, owned a shop in London before setting out for America with his wife, Sarah, and their two boys. Even Beales, a doctor by training, was himself a stranger to Texas, with no experience in the business of settling a raw and untamed wilderness.

As the immigrants surveyed the land on which they would make their new homes, they were overcome by feelings of despair. Stretched out before them lay an unending vista of thornscrub and mesquite. They may not have been seasoned farmers, but they needed only to look at the hard, sunbaked soil, where rattlesnakes and scorpions seemed to lie under every rock, to know that little could grow there,

Incredibly, no one had told Ludecus about the Comanches, either. From their encampments on the Low Plains far to the north, raiding parties on horseback regularly passed through the area on their way to plunder the ranches below the Rio Grandean important piece of information Beales neglected to share with the colonists until they arrived. To protect the group, the land agent hired a few dozen armed men from the Mexican towns along the river. Some were longtime veterans of the northern frontiers many years of conflict with the tribe, but others seemed as frightened of the Comanches as the Europeans were. The immigrants could at least be thankful for the presence of a band of Shawnees, who happened to be on a hunting expedition in the area. They, too, were far from home, having drifted onto the prairies of northeast Texas some years earlier, one of many American tribes that migrated into Mexico after the turn of the century. Bitter enemies of the Comanches, the Shawnees had befriended the greenhorns, providing the little colony with a steady supply of wild turkeys from the woods along the creek.

Whatever their misgivings, the immigrants were here now, and they tried to make the best of it. They spent several days clearing away the underbrush for what they hoped would one day be a town plaza, and erected huts with the only materials available to them: mesquite poles daubed with mud for the walls, clumps of prairie grass as thatch for the roofs. In late March they held an elaborate ceremonyor as elaborate as the primitive conditions would allowchristening Mexicos newest town the Villa de Dolores, after Bealess wife. Laying a cornerstone where they intended to build a church, the members of the little community then swore loyalty oaths to the Mexican republic and held elections for municipal offices. Their business concluded, the settlers ended the day with a concert and a ball, as Ludecus wryly put it.

That night, under a star-studded, obsidian sky, the residents of DoloresEuropeans, Americans, Mexicans, and Indiansgathered around a large, blazing fire. For such a special occasion the colonists donned their most formal attire, better suited to a New York City promenade than a rugged wilderness, the men in round felt hats, frock coats, and stiff-collared white shirts, the women in their finest embroidered dresses. Some members of the audience lounged on deerskins; others sat on the newly cut trunks of mesquite trees.