By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

The Huaco Indians had fallen on hard times when they encountered the grandfather of Eddie Forsgard of Waco in the late 1850s.

Her grandfather, Swedish immigrant Samuel J. Forsgard (1828-1912) left his homeland in 1856 and came to Waco in June 1857, where he established a Swedish bakery. The shop at 115 Bridge St. — land now home to the Waco Convention Center — later expanded into a mercantile and restaurant, according to Eddie Forsgard’s cousin, 68-year-old Robin Evans of Waco.

The shop was a stopping point for cowboys on trail drives across the Brazos River. Drovers (cattle brokers) would put their gold in Samuel Forsgard’s safe for security until all the herd had successfully crossed, Evans said.

The 99-year-old Eddie Forsgard, the youngest of the immigrant’s grandchildren, said that although her grandfather died when she was very young, she still remembers some of the stories he told her about Waco’s frontier days, and how he acquired a pair of moccasins from the Huacos.

“When the Indians were being run out of Texas in 1858-1859 (Indian Removal Act), they were hungry, they had been reduced to nothing, basically horse thieves just to survive,” Evans said. “Well, the Swedish way is not to let anyone go hungry if you can help it. So he traded them food for what they had.”

That trade included a pair of hand-beaded moccasins, which have been in the Forsgard family for some 150 years now, Forsgard said. She remembered that they used to hang on the wall of the old family home on North Fourth Street for decades.

When the house was being renovated 30 years ago, a relative, fearing the priceless heirlooms would be stolen, hid them in the false bottom of a frontier-style cupboard called a pie safe, Evans said.

But that relative forgot to get them out again after the work was done. Until 12 years ago, the family thought they’d been taken after all, Evans said. Then one day, Evans was helping Forsgard clean out the pie safe, and the board fell down.

“When we found the moccasins, we both cried, because we thought they had been lost forever,” Evans said.

The moccasins are now kept in a sealed box, in the hopes of preventing further deterioration. The Forsgard Homestead on Fourth Street, completed by Swedish carpenters in 1908, is on the National Register of Historic Places. The property is located just blocks from where the original inhabitants of the area dwelt for centuries.

Sources; Handbook of Texas Online; Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife; TexasIndians.com; Our Land, Our Lives, by Patricia Ward Wallace; SwedesInTexas.com.