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C h a p t e r 5 Four Mile Prairie It was one thing to admire the prairie west of Brownsboro but quite another to get land there. Texas was in a period of massive political development that was driving property acquisition into tortuous channels. Elise pinpointed the problem in her last dispatch to Norge og Amerika: “Before Texas joined the United States, the government gave some of those prairies to a man whose name I have forgotten. Later, though, this gift was annulled and the man brought a legal case against the government .” Getting secure titles to “some of those prairies” would take Elise and her friends three years and tax all their ingenuity. Like other immigrant path- finders, they would find initiative and flexibility essential to their success. They were caught up in historic developments to which they must adapt, the tumult of American expansion into new territory. The man whose name she had forgotten was Charles Fenton Mercer. Sam Houston had awarded him an empresario grant under a land distribution policy started by the Spanish in the s, when Texas was part of that country’s empire in Mexico. Empresarios were given enormous tracts of public land (one such grant made by the Spanish was for , acres) in exchange for bringing in settlers and establishing law and order in their territories. The empresarios, in effect, were immensely powerful real estate agents. Mexico continued the policy after it gained independence from Spain, even appointing some citizens from United States to the office. Stephen F. Austin, for whom the Texas capital is named, was one of these.1 Empresario territories were called after the grantee, Austin’s colony, Mercer ’s colony, and so on, but when Texas broke away from Mexico in , it abolished the system. Sam Houston, however, thought it was the best way to promote settlement, and while serving as president of the Republic of Texas in  he got it restored and then made the grant to Mercer in . As things turned out, Mercer was the last empresario. Elise, Wilhelm, and Reiersen would have to be nimble to get claims on his terrain. Mercer’s colony ran roughly from Waco to Dallas and into East Texas, covering a territory so large that it was eventually split into eighteen counties , among them Kaufman and adjoining Van Zandt County, where Elise and her friends aimed to acquire land. The grant was perfectly legal, but land distribution was becoming a hot political issue swarming with angry adversaries. Some opponents argued that Texas was giving away property and getting nothing in return. They were joined by veterans of the Texas war of independence who were aggrieved because they had been awarded land bounty certificates for their military service, but Mercer was challenging these when they made claims on his holding. Other individuals held headright certificates (land grants on condition of developing ranch or farm homesteads) that infringed Mercer’s domain. A large contingent of squatters, politicians, and speculators hankering after soil favored direct government land sales to the public. Land certificates, sometimes representing hundreds of acres, were trading fast, adding to the confusion over who owned what. Houston had made his award to Mercer on January , . The next day the Texas Congress, goaded by the populist sentiment generated by the adversaries, passed a bill banning further empresario contracts. Houston vetoed the law, but the Congress overrode him. Charged up with victory, the Congress launched an investigation into the land certificates that Mercer had already sold to settlers. Matters grew worse. Mercer’s colonists found squatters as well as headright and bounty holders moving onto their lands. Surveyors from a county adjoining his grant came in, measured off parcels, and claimed them. Fighting broke out between the various parties, and Mercer’s surveyors skirmished with civil and military forces when they joined in to settle things down. When Mercer sued in the courts to confirm the deals he had made, he was hamstrung by the furor and by having to litigate his rights. Buyers trying in good faith to acquire property on his grant were stymied.2 While this turmoil was going on, Republic of Texas authorities started negotiating an annexation treaty with the United States. If the treaty won approval, Texas would become part of the United States and its land, under ordinary circumstances, would become part of the U.S. public domain. At that point the land in Texas would be “Congress...

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