By Jerry Flook, Garland Historian
Published in the Garland-Rowlett Messenger, January 2012
Prior to the removal of the Indian threat from the region of the Three Forks of the Trinity River (East Fork, Elm Fork, and West Fork), it had been a virtual no-man’s land for white settlers. Aside from a few expeditions by Spanish friars from the missions near the coast and occasional French traders from Louisiana, it was over 250 years after Spain claimed the territory before the white man showed much further interest. The first Anglo-Americans to venture into the area were probably mustangers, such as the notorious Philip Nolan, who around 1800 captured large numbers of wild horses and herded them back into French Louisiana for sale (and also did some of the earliest mapping of eastern Texas). About that same time a few Anglo settlements sprang up in northeast Texas along the Red River, including Pecan Point, Jonesboro and Coffee’s Station inhabited mostly by an assortment of adventurers, traders, and fugitives. Much of the eastern portion of the Three Forks region was included by the new Republic of Texas in Nacogdoches Land District.
The new republic had a large area to administer but little source of operating funds. One obvious remedy was to sell public lands and encourage settlement by Americans, who would find the forests and prairies of eastern and central Texas very appealing if it were not for the Indians who fiercely defended the same territory. When Mirabeau B. Lamar took office as president of the Texas Republic he vowed to eliminate the Indian menace. In 1839 he expelled the Cherokees of East Texas from their farm lands and dispersed most other East Texas tribes, including Caddos, Delawares, Biloxis, Creeks, Kickapoos, Shawnees, Seminoles, and Muskogees into Arkansas, Oklahoma, and the Tree Forks area. However it was the government’s intention to force all remaining Indians beyond of the West Fork of the Trinity. Finally in 1843 a treaty was concluded with the Indians of the Three Forks in which they agreed to stay west of a line drawn roughly through present-day Gainesville and Fort Worth. In actuality, however, Indians continued sporadic raids into the region until around the end of the decade.
Simultaneously with the effort to subjugate the Indians the Republic began sending explorers/surveyors into the Nacogdoches Land District to locate and lay off tracts for land grants. The public surveyor of the Nacogdoches District was Warren Angus Ferris, who in 1839, even before the Indian removal, was given the task of surveying several large league-and-labor size (4,605-acre) parcels in the Three Forks wilderness. These so-called First Class grants were given to individuals having lived in Texas prior to 4 March 1836. In truth, however, Ferris was also secretly working for a company of Mississippi land speculators headed by Dr. W. P. King. One of King’s goals was to establish a new city to be named “Warwick” on the site later to be chosen for the city of Dallas. It was Ferris and his crew who would give names to many of the local waterways in the Three Forks area, including Duck Creek, White Rock Creek, Mesquite Creek, Big Buffalo Creek, Mustang Creek, etc.
In November 1839 Ferris and a party of 29 men set out for the Three Forks. On the twelfth day of travel they picked up the trail of Indians, whom they followed until they met at the edge of a cane-break near present-day Grand Saline. Ferris shot one Indian in the heart at a distance of 80 yards. The other Indians scattered, leaving at their capsite five horses and items such as meat, corn, beans, axes, ropes, and kettles. The Indian killed by Ferris was found to have been armed with an English rifle, a Prussian pistol, a Bowie knife, a butcher knife, and bow-and-arrows.
Most of the surveying party decided they had enough excitement and turned back, but Ferris and three others forged ahead on a course believed to be roughly that of the railroad between Grand Saline and Mesquite. But when they reached a point near the present-day intersection of Buckner and Samuell boulevards they detected a much larger Indian party ahead (near present downtown Dallas) and they too turned back.
In 1840 Ferris and his men, along with Dr. King, were back surveying and built a fortified encampment, called King’s Fort, on the present site of Kaufman. Their surveying of what became known as King’s Block in Kaufman County continued through the scorching summer and by August most of the men were hungry, exhausted and ill. One man had died. At the point of the party turned back toward home, one of them reporting that upon his return he was entirely barefooted and had no other article of apparel but a leather hunting shirt and a pair of leather leggings.
The indomitable Ferris was back that fall and again the next spring (1841). C. A. Lovejoy, Ferris’s half-brother and a member of the surveying party, wrote to a friend on 1 June 1841:
Found the Bois d’Arc [East Fork] 2 or 3 miles wide . . . so full of trees, brush and grape vines that it was impossible to get through with a raft of any size. After 4 days exertion, being in the water neck deep, half the time wading, and the other half swimming, we succeeded in getting our horses through the bottom . . . But in getting over, all our powder got wet and all our guns, pistols, etc. At this point, the Indians made their appearance and met us. Killed one man and we retreated across the river and took up it to cross higher up and circle around until we reached the settlement [fort?] . . . We had now been several days without eating and starved more or less 2 weeks, and as we had no ammunition to kill game if we could find it, we were forced to kill a horse. Well, we are it and in 4 or 5 days reached the settlements.
A few weeks later [July 1841] a visitor to King’s Fort reported the following incident:
[We] found ten men at the fort, most of them sick. At five o’clock, when the men were lying down, the alarm of Indians was heard. We ran of our guns and on sallying out saw about 25 Indians coming from an adjoining wood. They raised the war whoop and swept by close to the fort on full gallop, driving all our horses with them. We exchanged a few shots and killed one of their horses and wounded some of them. After reconnoitering and making a grand display they left us in possession of three of their mules and a quiver of arrows, a Comanche saddle, and some skins.
Ferris finished the King’s Block project that year [1841], having produced a block of some 114 First Class surveys, including much of present Kaufman County, and portions of Dallas, Collin, Hunt, Rockwall and Van Zandt counties. As it turned out, most of King’s land certificates were forgeries, leaving his surveys open for claim by others. Dr. King died of yellow fever in 1841 and his vision of Warwick died with him. Few, if any, of the original grantees of Ferris’s First Class tracts ever took possession of them, but instead sold their land certificates to others who actually filed for the patents.
The sides of Ferris’s First Class surveys run northeast-southwest and northwest-southeast rather than north-south and east-west, establishing the diagonal orientation of several of the roads and streets of Dallas County. Examples of this Garland are Centerville Road (follows lines of the Theophilus Tanner and John Little surveys) and Naaman School Road (follows a line of the Daniel Crist survey).
Warren Ferris settled on White Rock Creek in 1847 on land he had earlier surveyed in the name of his half-brother, Lovejoy, since he could not legally survey land in his own name. He also surveyed for the Texas Emigration and Land Company, a group of American land speculators with whom the Republic contracted to establish and empresarial colony (better known as Peters Colony). The land company, upon importing a given number of settlers, would receive title to generous tracts of public land. The settlers, in turn, would be granted “headrights” of 640 acres for married men and 320 acres for single men. These Third Class headright certificates were the basis of most of the surveys in Dallas County and were the stimulus for the wave of settlement in this area beginning in the mid-1840s. In 1850 Ferris surveyed the boundaries of Dallas County. He died in 1873.
Several of Ferris’s surveying instruments and his leather hunting shirt and leggings are in the collection of the Dallas Historical Society and several years ago were displayed at the Texas Hall of State at Fair Park. Ferris kept fascinating notes on his surveying of the Dallas County boundaries, many of which have been published in Land is the Cry: Warren Angus Ferris, Pioneer Texas Surveyor by Susanne Starling.