Dallas founding document
Updated: Jul 11, 2021
I was snooping around the online archives of the Texas General Land Office and found this document. It’s for John Neely Bryan, the founder of the city of Dallas.
Bryan came from Tennessee in the 1839 to establish an Indian trading post at a natural ford along the Elm Fork of the Trinity River. Here, he dealt with bison hides taken from the Grand Prairie. He enticed fellow Tennesseans and other settlers to follow him to this little hamlet, which became a much safer place for Americans after Sam Houston negotiated peace treaties with Wichita tribes and Comanche bands at nearby Tehuacana, Fort Bird, and Grapevine Springs.
By 1841, the Peters Colony Land Grant Company was charged with distributing land in North Texas, which included the Dallas area. After a string of disputes by settlers who arrived prior to the company’s empressario (land grants based on Spanish law), and alleged records mismanagement that led to the burning of land records in today’s Denton County, Bryan retroactively certified his 640 acre homestead through this document in 1854.
The oath is interesting. First, the document falls under Nacogdoches District (the gargantuan county from which most of northeast Texas was carved). Bryan, “a married man,” does “solemnly swear that I emigrated to Texas, and entered the Colony, which was granted to Peters and others, as a Colonist, February and March 1st 1840 with my wife, and that I have since continued and still remain a setter in said Colony, and I have performed all the duties required of me as a good citizen, and that I have never heretofore received land from the Government of Coahuila and Texas, nor of the Republic or State of Texas, as an emigrant or Colonist. So help me God.”
The Spanish system of empressarios (original land grants) is still in place in Texas, unlike any other state of the Union. In order to obtain the maximum grant, one had to be a married man, too. This document helps to explain that.
