The Mysterious Village on the Bosque, 1

Contributing to the collapse of the Penateka Comanches, (Honey-Eaters) that frequently camped on the Bosque River, many young men turned to whiskey sometime after the Texan War for Independence. The source of some of that whiskey might have been a community that began as a haven for Delaware and Shawnee Indians as a reward for their services as interpreters and diplomats with the Comanches and as auxiliaries in Texas’s War for Independence. Sam Houston gave land on the Bosque River to twenty Native families, relatives and friends of the tireless advocates of peace: John Conner and Bill and Jim Shaw. The location of this grant is still unknown, but I have the impression that it was somewhere along the middle of the river. It was described as a “heavily wooded spot untouched by settlement on the river.” The Delaware and Shawnee peoples had endured two hundred years of useless treaties and forced removals and had acquired much of the Anglo lifestyle, including clothing, log cabins, and a rational mindset. Perhaps the most outstanding personality in this short-lived “town” as it was called, was John Conner, whose father was a successful trader in Ohio. His mother was an Anglo woman captured and raised by the Shawnee. Conner lived among the Delaware people and married the daughter of a prominent chief. Around 1820 he headed west, driven by what he later called an intense “wanderlust.” Conner traveled alone and on foot to the Pacific Ocean and then down to the Mexican Southwest in his early twenties. He traveled to Mexico City and wandered around northern Mexico for three years until moving to Texas and joining the Delawares, who had migrated in from the crowded east.