About 175 years ago, just a stretch south along the Brazos River, early Texans were deftly wielding their pens and declaring Texas’ independence from Mexico.

That declaration, which began in ink, would be sealed with blood during the next couple of months at the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto.

At the same time, the part of Central Texas that today surrounds Waco was a no-man’s land, literally. Few white men were brazen enough to claim land that was still under the terrifying thumb of the Comanche.

Barren land and a small marker are all that stand to commemorate where Fort Milam is believed to have stood.
Rod Aydelotte / Waco Tribune-Herald

“There really wasn’t anything here,” said Michael Toon, librarian with Baylor University’s Texas Collection. “It was wild country with a lot of wild Indians.”

By 1836, even the Waco Indians, who suffered attacks by other Indians, had left their village on the Brazos River.

But there are a few spots where Texas colonists tried to make their mark.

These sites are no Alamo, but even today they offer a hint of what this part of Texas must have been like before it was even a state.

One of the few settlements in the area at the time of independence was Fort Parker, located between present-day Groesbeck and Mexia. The Parker family and members of their church made their way down from Illinois and erected the fort in 1833.

Toon said the Parkers were warned against settling where they did.

“Fort Parker was really known as one of the farthest-flung outposts,” Toon said.

Most of the settlements at the time were around the coast. Central Texas was thick with the threat of Comanches, he said.

“They pretty much controlled any part of Texas they wanted to go to,” Toon said of the American Indians known for their violent attacks.

But the Parkers wouldn’t be swayed.

“They wanted the land and the land was real cheap. They couldn’t wait to get there,” said Sarah MacReynolds, director of Old Fort Parker, a reproduced fort on the site of the original.

The settlers used logs to build their cabins and a 16- to 20-foot high wall around the place and they went about life until May 1836.

Parker kidnapping

On May 19, 1836, began the story that would captivate people from middle school Texas History students to adults who hail from far beyond the Lone Star State.

On that day, Comanche warriors, accompanied by Kiowa and Kichai allies, raided Fort Parker, leaving several dead and kidnapping five, including 9-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.

Parker grew up with the Comanches, married and had children with chief Peta Nocona.

Eventually, a grown Cynthia Ann was brought back to relatives by Waco’s Lawrence Sullivan Ross, who was part of a Texas Ranger attack on a Comanche hunting camp. Cynthia Ann’s son, Quanah, went on to become a famous Comanche chief.

MacReynolds said Old Fort Parker gets visitors all the time, looking to get a little closer to Cynthia Ann’s story.

The fort has seen a surge in visitors recently, because of S.C. Gwynne’s book “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History,” MacReynolds said.

Descendants of the settlers and the Comanches also come back to support the park.

The fort — which exists today as a nearly 20-foot-tall cedar log wall with two blockhouses and cabins inside — still allows visitors to get a feel for pioneer life in 1830s Texas, especially in the summer when the heat inside the cabins is oppressive, MacReynolds said.

“Just to get inside those walls does it,” she said. “It makes you realize how tough it was.”

MacReynolds said during the week at this time of year is a good time to visit if you want the fort to yourself for a little colonial contemplation. Admission is $2 for adults, and there are inn rooms, camping and RV facilities at the site.

Not far from Fort Parker in 1834, Sterling C. Robertson founded Sarahville de Viesca southwest of what is today Marlin.

One of the few settlements in Central Texas when independence from was declared was Fort Parker, located between present-day Groesbeck and Mexia.
Kelly Lemons / Waco Tribune-Herald, file

Robertson had big hopes for the settlement he intended to be the capital of the Robertson Colony. And as far as real estate goes, the town was in a pretty good spot — near the falls on the Brazos River, a natural rock crossing that had long been important to settlers and Indians — according to the Texas State Historical Association’s Texas Handbook Online.

The settlement grew to a population of 200 and became Fort Milam in 1835.

Some accounts have the Sarahville settlers fleeing their new home because of Indian hostilities and other accounts suggest the town was abandoned during the Runaway Scrape, the flight of colonists in the spring of 1836, running from the Mexican Army before the Mexicans were defeated at the battle of San Jacinto.

Sarahville earned the name, “the town that died overnight,” according to the Texas Handbook Online.

In 1844, Sam Houston met at the falls of the Brazos with 10 Indian chiefs, including the Comanche and Waco chiefs, and discussed the need to make peace.

The minutes from that council can be found on the Texas State Library and Archives Commission website.

A marker in memory of Fort Milam stands today on private property where Sarahville de Viesca/ Fort Milam is thought to have been.

The course of the Brazos has moved some in the past 175 years, but standing atop the quiet, barren hill that falls away to the banks of the Brazos, it’s easy to imagine that it might have been an attractive place to plant roots.

The falls on the Brazos still exist, and Falls County operates a public park at the crossing.

In 1837, a battalion of Texas Rangers tried to make something of the abandoned Waco Indian village on the Brazos in what is today Waco.

They called it Fort Fisher. The venture lasted only a few months.

Patricia Ward Wallace, author of “Waco: A Sesquicentennial History,” writes that the founding of Fort Fisher was ordered in response to the raid at Fort Parker.

According to the Texas State Historical Association, it was decided that the men at Fort Fisher “were too far out to do good service.”

Within the next decade, potential settlers would see the Comanches had pushed north and would begin to claim and move onto land that would become Waco on March 1, 1849.

wgragg@wacotrib.com

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This 1838 map of Texas identifies “Waco Village,” where the Waco Indians lived but had abandoned by 1837. Little else in the area is identified, because, according to historians, little else was there. (Texas Collection at Baylor University photo)