Euro-American settlers began moving up the Bosque River from Waco in the 1850s. In 1853, Norwegian settlers started a community half way up the river. The families of the men who died in the Alamo were awarded 4, 409 acres and the John Blair family were recipients and they refused to leave Tennessee and sold the land that became Stephenville. In 1848 James Stephen bought the land and six years later traveled up the Bosque River from Waco to established an as yet unnamed slave family in a trading post. The Black family was left on the site of the future Stephenville square for a year to determine the disposition of the mostly Comanche and Anadarko that frequented the area. The Natives and the Black family were on friendly terms as they traded for smoked buffalo hams and deerskin bags of honey. A year later, in 1855, the surveyor George B. Erath and early Waco settler, Neil McLennan, escorted the Stephen brothers, thirty mostly Scots-Irish settlers and eighteen slaves to the Stephenville site.