Boone's tale of the Texas Hill Country as one of the last and rawest frontiers in America — the Comanche and Apache, the German settlers, and the rare peace of the Meusebach treaty.
Look out over all these rolling hills — Boone Merrick — going soft and blue to the horizon, so peaceful now. And I want you to know that this pretty country was, for a good long while, about the rawest, bloodiest, most dangerous frontier in all of America. Right here. These hills.
For untold generations, this was the country of the Lipan Apache, and then above all of the Comanche — the fiercest horsemen the plains ever produced, who ruled this hill country and the plains beyond it with a grip nobody could break. And then, in the middle eighteen hundreds, came the settlers, pushing west into it — and a great many of them, in this particular corner, were Germans. Whole shiploads of German families, fleeing the troubles of the old country, came to Texas and pushed up into these very hills, founding towns like Fredericksburg and settling canyons like this Sabinal, trying to farm and ranch a frontier that was still, very much, Comanche land.
And so this became a borderland, and borderlands bleed. For decades — through the eighteen fifties, the sixties, right on into the eighteen seventies — these hills were raided and fought over, hard. Comanche and Apache war parties swept through these canyons on moonlit nights; there were killings and captives and burned-out cabins; and the settlers forted up and fought back just as hard. Some of the very last Indian raids in the whole state of Texas happened right here in this hill country, later than almost anywhere else, because these hills were remote and rugged and the frontier held here long after it had moved on elsewhere. Every one of these quiet canyons has an old, hard story in it.
But I'll leave you with the better piece of it, because there is one, and it's rare. When those German settlers first came, their leader — a fellow named Meusebach — did something almost nobody on any frontier ever did. Instead of just taking the land at gunpoint, he rode out, unarmed, into the Comanche heartland to meet the chiefs and make an honest treaty, face to face. And astonishingly, it held. The Meusebach-Comanche treaty of eighteen forty-seven is remembered as just about the only frontier treaty between settlers and natives in American history that both sides actually kept. For a while, in one corner of this bloody frontier, two peoples chose to keep their word to each other instead of killing. It didn't last forever, and it didn't spread, but it happened, right here in these hills — and it stands as a small, stubborn proof that it didn't have to go the way it went everywhere else. Walk easy, friend. This gentle country was hard-won, by everybody who ever loved it.
Photo: George Catlin · Public domain
