TRIPS INTO HISTORY - Page 88 of 91 - Historic Sites in the U.S. and Travel Ideas

The Peters Colony in Texas

There was a time during the settlement of pioneer Texas where large tracts of land were given to agents with the hope that adventurous pioneers would relocate there and help build communities. Pioneer life was never easy but the issuance of land was a big draw for many.

Land grants had actually been commonplace in the Texas region for quite some time. Both the Spaniards and then the Mexicans had encouraged European pioneer settlement for a variety of reasons. The most important reason was to help establish some type of buffer between the ruling government and the Indians. This of course was one of the big dangers of pioneer life on the frontier.

For a very long time the Comanche Indians had fought encroachment into this area. The fighting was often quite brutal and during one particular conflict the Comanches raided all the way southeastward to the very shores of the Gulf of Mexico in the area of Matagorda Bay. During the earliest days of Texas a coastal port, named Indianola, was one of the largest ports for immigrants coming to what is today the Lone Star State.

Many people may have heard of these “empresario colonies” being established in Texas while under Mexican rule but this colonization lasted well into the Republic of Texas era. Beginning in 1841 several contracts had been given out to the Texas Land and Emigration Company in north Texas. This area extended roughly to Willbarger county to the west, down to the Dallas and Fort Worth area to the sou which today th and into present day Collin county to the east. It was a very large tract of land which today includes the largest concentration of North Texas population.

William S. Peters, the founder of the Peters colony of Texas, was born in England in 1779. He moved to North America in 1827 with his wife and six of his children. He worked in Canada as a military bandmaster and was forty-eight years old when he entered the United States.

After a musical partnership ended between Peters and a William Browning, they traveled from Louisville Kentucky to England to find investors for what became known as the Peters Colony.It’s not really known why Peters became interested in Texas What is known is that he was and followed it up with an effort to find investors to make it happen. Peters eventually located the original twenty investors and they petitioned the Texas Republic to contract land to them which at first was to be a colony of Englishmen but the investors ended up being half American and half English. In response, the Republic of Texas through it’s Fifth Congress enacted a the law on February 4, 1841, that authorized the president of the Republic of Texas to enter into an “empresario contract” with Peters and his associates.

Of the American investors, six were related to Peters’ three sons and three sons-in-law. The entire arrangement was a business venture. It’s doubtful as to how many of the initial investors themselves even journeyed to Texas if at all but at the same time the Texas Republic wanted all the settlers they could obtain. The image below is an example of a small Texas pioneer cabin from the author’s private collection.

During the decade of the 1840s William Peters made at least one trip to England to organize and contact immigration associations that might agree to send immigrants to the colony in Texas. He was unsuccessful in trying to talk Robert Owen, an English socialist, into his new project however he was successful in working out an arrangement with a Frenchman named Cabet. The land allocated in the agreement with Cabet was a tract the state had granted Peters’ colonization company in alternate sections with the implicit condition that they secure immigrants. The company in turn granted the Icarians (Cabet’s group) the right of acquiring half of each of its sections. Because of this, the lots the Texas pioneers eventually owned were not contiguous. It has been said that Peters initial goal back at the beginning was to establish a colony of hard working middle class Englishmen in the Texas Republic however The Peters Colony was ultimately settled by Americans.

The Texas Land and Emigration Company’s contract declared that the investors themselves would retain one half of the lands settled on the condition that at least two hundred families were to be settled in three years. The Republic of Texas also had colonization laws for pioneers that further stated that a married man was entitled to 640 acres and a single man to 320 in return for which the settler promised he would reside on and work the land. Today, the visitor on a Texas vacation can learn more about the very earliest settlement events that helped build Texas.

There are many historical societies in many towns and cities which are situated in what was the land of The Peters Colony. You will find some very detailed tract maps at the Texas Electric Railway Museum in downtown Plano Texas. Plano is about 20 miles north of Dallas off of US Hwy-75. The museum is on 15th St. just about five blocks east of US Hwy-75. Another good stop is the Frisco Heritage Museum in Frisco Texas at 6455 Page St. Frisco is about 25 miles north of Dallas just off the Dallas North Tollway. The city of Denton Texas which is about 30 miles northwest of Dallas is another good place to learn about the Peters Colony era. The Peters Colony contracts eventually covered all of Northeast Texas and the colony’s official land office was established near the settlement of Hebron in the southeast corner of present-day Denton County. An excellent stop in Denton is the Historical Park of Denton County located at 317 West Mulberry near the town square.

There are many reminders of the old peters Colony still today. One is the city of The Colony (city logo at left courtesy of The Colony) which is located north of Dallas Texas in Denton county. The Colony has a 2010 estimated population of over 40,000. The Colony is located inside the original Peters Colony lands. Several of it’s streets are named after the original Peters Colony landowners. There are also several streets and highways outside the present city of The Colony named after some of the people involved in the old Peters Colony. One example is Hedgcoxe Rd which is a large street in the residential Collin county city of Plano.

I think that anytime you bring people to a new land where a colony is established, the chances of having disagreements are pretty high. Everything was not smooth sailing in regards to the later years of the Peters colony. One such conflict actually ended up in what is referred to by historians as the Hedgcoxe War of 1852 or the Peters Colony Rebellion. The Peters colony colonists began protesting what they felt was an attempt by the land company to invalidate their land claims.

This conflict had really been simmering for quite some time. On February 10, 1852, the Texas legislature trying to put an end to this disagreement passed a law which was supposed to satisfy both parties, the land company and the settlers. According to its terms of the new bill, all of the current lawsuits between the state and the land company were to be withdrawn. The colonists were given more time to file their claims with some new guidelines. Furthermore, the state of Texas was to give the land company 1,088,000 acres of land. The colonists were not satisfied. They were concerned both by the possible sale of some claims and they were angry over the legislature’s generosity towards the land company.

Things only got hotter in May of 1852. A man named Henry Oliver Hedgcoxe, the agent of the land company, threw gas on the fire when he published an explanatory proclamation that stated the colonists had until August 4 to establish their claims with him. The colonists were angered at both the proclamation and the attitude coming from Hedgcoxe.

The colonists were further aroused when the attorney general of Texas, Ebenezer Allen, issued an opinion upholding the law. On July 15,1852, during a meeting by the colonists, Hedgcoxe was accused of fraud and corruption by an investigating committee. This is when the real trouble started. A day later, on July 16, 1852, John J. Good led 100 armed men from the mass meeting to Hedgcoxe’s office in Collin county. They grabbed Hedgcoxe’s files and moved to the Dallas County Courthouse. Hedgcoxe was ordered to leave the colony and fled to Austin. After this mass rebellion of sorts the land company softened their tone. On February 7, 1853, an amendment to the compromise law which was agreed to by both sides was passed. This essentially ended the dispute and some very minor differences were worked out over the next years through both the courts and Texas legislature.

The Peters Colony establishment was a very unique undertaking in as much as it began during the time Texas was a separate republic and lasted through and after the time of statehood.

Also see our article on a Visit to Luling Texas / Railroads, Oil and Watermelons.

What it Was Like to Travel on the Butterfield Overland Stage Route

It’s not easy to find the site of an old Butterfield Stage station these days. The Butterfield stagecoach stations simply disappeared over the years but there is one remaining site located in southern California on the historic Butterfield trail.

This is the Oak Grove Butterfield Stage Station located in Warner Springs California, about 50 miles east of Oceanside and 125 miles southeast of Los Angeles, and has the distinction of being the only surviving station on the old Butterfield Overland Mail route. During the Civil War the station was used as a Union outpost to help protect the route eastward towards Fort Yuma. Visiting this restored Butterfield station brings back thoughts about what it would have been like riding a stagecoach over the remote southwest. It certainly would have been an adventure and one with a lot of risks. The following descriptions may give you a sense of what a journey of this kind in the late 1850’s might have entailed.

A few years before the start of the Civil War in the year 1858 a key U.S. Mail contract was given out. It was the year that saw the emergence of the Butterfield Overland Stage route from St’ Louis Missouri to San Francisco California. This was a key historic event in the history of the United States as well as the history of overland transportation in general. At the time it was also considered the shortest route to California and it’s booming and growing towns, especially to the north around San Francisco and the Sierra Nevada gold fields. California had gained statehood in 1850 and with the booming port of San Francisco growing and the gold seekers still pouring into the state, it was apparent that communication and transportation had to be improved.

Similar to other new means of transportation, the start was typically with a government mail contract. With the California Gold Rush in progress and with the state itself joining the Union in 1850, communication with the west coast was more important than ever. Remember, this was an era before the transcontinental railroad and before the telegraph lines to California. As an example, in the 1850’s it generally took about 45 days for a letter to make it’s way from San Francisco to New York. The route for that letter would have been a steamer from San Francisco to Panama and then through the jungles of Panama to another steamer on the eastern side of the Isthmus. Quite a journey.

The Butterfield Stage route from St Louis would shorten the time somewhat. What is generally described as a twenty-five day trek from St’ Louis to San Francisco was along what was called the southern route. The route went through Arkansas, Texas, present day New Mexico and Arizona into the San Diego area and the northward to San Francisco. To say the journey was adventuresome would be an understatement. All research on the subject I have done pretty much points to the mail itself as being the top priority. After all, the government mail contract was the financial seed to begin the stage line in the first place. Carrying passengers along the route was important but somehow secondary. The Butterfield Overland Stage Line began operation in 1858. The first westbound stage made it to Springfield September 17, 1858, some three hours ahead of schedule. The first eastbound stage arrived in Springfield on October 22, 1858 That stage was carrying five passengers, along with mail, freight, and express parcels. Below is a picture of the Fort Stockton Texas barracks from the 1800’s. Fort Stockton was directly on the Butterfield Stage route in southwest Texas.

There are interesting stories about the people who rode the Butterfield Stage route and their observations are enlightening. Many of these journey’s were anything but boring. In fact, the Butterfield Stage Line ran through Arizona during the long Apache Wars. Many of it’s stages were attacked near the Dragoon Mountains not far north of Tombstone Arizona where Cochise had his stronghold. Riding through Arizona in the 1860’s and 1870’s would be anything but boring. The first question you might ask is: What should I bring along? A reporter for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin who rode the route in 1858 was quoted in his article “All the traveler needed to render himself comfortable is a pair of blankets, a revolver or knife (just as he fancies), an overcoat, some wine to mix with the water (which is not of the sweeetest quality) and three or four dollars worth of provisions”. he went on to say that “Arms are not furnished the passengers by the Company”.

Another journalist by the name Waterman L. Ormsby rode with the first Butterfield Stage heading west on September 16, 1858. Ormsby, a 23-year-old reporter for the New York Herald on this historic first run. Ormsby reported that mules were used to pull the stage coaches over the frontier portions of the route because, to Indians, the mules were considered less valuable than horses as property. Ormsby goes on to say that one team of mules had been trained to come to feed at the sound of a large gong. The stage driver, or sometimes referred to as a “whip”, planned to use the gong to call the mules back in case the Indians managed to steal them. Ormsby described that it took about 30 minutes to harness each mule and he was quoted as saying… “By the time a mule was caught and harnessed, often nearly choked to death, he was almost always nearly tired out before his work had commenced.”

If you thought the seating arrangement inside the Concord coach was a benefit, here is what it looked like. Passengers rode three abreast. There were two back rows facing forward and a front row facing backwards. Your luggage would sometimes be on your lap and U.S. Mail would likely be under your seat. This arrangement might make your seat on today’s jetliner seem pretty roomy. The stagecoach ran day and night with only short stops at stations for what most described as fairly poor food.

Also, realize that a passenger essentially had about three times to bathe while on the Butterfield route. While there were plenty of Butterfield stations not many of them had the necessary facilities. Sleeping was another challenge. passengers slept in the Concord coach while it was on it’s bumpy ride. It’s been reported that it took most passengers about a week to become accustomed to sleeping while traveling. Sleep during the first week was near impossible but after getting a bit acclimated to the ride things got a lot better. Here is a description of the sleeping situation as described by an English passenger on the eastbound Butterfield route in 1860. The passenger was quoted describing the posture necessary to sleep in a moving stagecoach … “sometimes slinging our feet by loops from the top of the wagon, or letting them hang over the sides between the wheels . . . and not seldom nodding for hours together in attitudes grotesque and diverse.”

If you find your self on a southern California vacation and you’re staying at Los Angeles hotels or hotels in San Diego and have a rental car, a stop at the famous Oak Grove Butterfield Stage station makes for a fun and historic addition to your travel itinerary.

See the Deadwood Stagecoach in Cody Wyoming

Many people familiar with the old west would say that the most famous stagecoach to have plied the trails of the frontier west was the Deadwood Stagecoach. This is Deadwood as in Deadwood South Dakota and the Black Hills. Deadwood South Dakota could easily have been called the capitol of the Black Hills.The photo below is of Deadwood circa 1877.

This is where people from all walks of life hastened to as soon as gold was discovered in the nearby hills. The fact is that Deadwood was, in a way, founded by none other than George Armstrong Custer. It was Custer who led an expedition into the Black Hills which was at the time a very sacred area of the country to the Sioux Indians. The Sioux in fact had ownership of the Black Hills per a treaty with the federal government. When Custer filed a report of his expedition to the Black Hills, whose purpose was to ascertain if gold was truly there, he emphasized that gold was there in abundance. Somehow, at about the same time Custer filed his report, the startling information also found it’s way to the eastern newspapers.

The national economy was in a slump at the time and this only added fuel to the fire and what appeared to be another California Gold Rush, this time in the Black Hills, was in the making. Beginning in April of 1877 the first stagecoaches started rolling between Bismark South Dakota and Deadwood. The Northern Pacific Railroad had a terminal in Bismark and this offered the fastest way to Deadwood from the east. Three time a week service began in May and it didn’t take long for the stages to make the trip daily. Deadwood South Dakota was booming and people were trying to get there fast. The coach of choice was none other than the Concord coaches which were built well for the rough western trails.The first Concord stagecoach was built in 1827 by the Abbot Downing Company. The innovation that made these coaches so popular lay in the construction of their suspension. Traditional stagecoaches employed metal springs which gave the coach a very bouncy ride when the trail got rough. Concord coaches instead used leather braces which gave the coach a gentle swinging motion, prompting Mark Twain to refer to the Concord as the “cradle on wheels.” Freight and passenger revenue was doing very well and in addition to that the stage company received the coveted U.S. Mail contract. During the stage lines heyday it was reported that they employed about 175 men. This was quite a large operation in 1877.

Anytime there was a flourishing stagecoach route, and the route to the Black Hills was one of them, there were stagecoach robbers. In that era they were often referred to as “highwaymen”. People handy with firearms such as Wyatt Earp were hired to sit beside the driver with a shotgun to protect passengers and gold from the highwaymen. There was a lot of criminal activity in the area. The infamous Sam Bass, pictured above, and his gang reportedly robbed the stage four times in two months. In fact, the Sam bass gang was credited with the largest Union Pacific train robbery that took place in Nebraska. The amount and value of gold dust being shipped via stagecoach was such that precautions were taken that included a special coach to protect the gold. The treasure box was bolted securely to the floor, the coach was even lined in lead, and there were two portholes guards could use to fire back at the robbers.

The transportation boom ended suddenly when the railroad reached Pierre, South Dakota. In 1880 the company moved the majority of its coaches and livestock to Pierre and opened an alternate line. After that the service on the Bismarck line was cut to tri-weekly trips and was soon after abandoned.

To illustrate how popular Buffalo Bill’s Deadwood Stagecoach was in his Wild West performances, while performing in England the highlight of one of the shows came when several monarchs, including the Prince of Wales and the kings of Denmark, Greece, Belgium, and Saxony, climbed aboard the Deadwood Stage with Buffalo Bill in the driver’s seat and rode around the arena while the Indians engaged in a mock attack. It doesn’t get much more real than that for the visiting monarchs. Obviously this was a show business first and gained wide publicity for the Wild West.

Today, you can see the original Deadwood Stagecoach which played a big part in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performances. The stagecoach is on display at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody Wyoming. The Cody Historical Center began as a log cabin tribute to William F. Cody, founder and namesake of Cody Wyoming, and has materialized into a seven-acre building which houses five museums and a research center. The museum is located at 720 Sheridan Ave. and features everything about Buffalo Bill Cody, his Wild West and the old west in general. They have done an excellent job with this museum and I would recommend anyone traveling on a Wyoming vacation to make a visit there. It is the largest repository of William Cody artifacts in the west.