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"In this frail tenement a garrison of only ten or twelve men have bid defiance to the whole Indian force of that section, and have sustained their position with as little difficulty as if they were protected by walls and battlements of massive stone." |
With these words, the editor of the September 1, 1841 edition of the Houston Telegraph & Texas Register acknowledged the importance of King’s Fort to securing north-central Texas for white settlement. The fort was built on a bluff in the present City of Kaufman and had a commanding view of the prairies to the north and west. When it was built in the summer of 1840, King’s Fort stood near a major Indian trail—the Kickapoo Trace—about halfway between the established white settlements in present Anderson County and the Indian villages in present Tarrant County. During the first few years of the 1840’s, King’s Fort, or Kingsborough, was a staging ground for military expeditions against the Indians, a refuge for surveying parties, and a way-station for travelers to the upper reaches of the Trinity River. As the editor of the Telegraph recognized in 1841, to understand the settlement of north central Texas one must know the story of King’s Fort.
The two men most prominent in the establishment of King’s Fort were Dr. William Pope King, President of the Southern Land Company and the namesake of the fort and settlement, and Warren Angus Ferris, surveyor for the Company. Both had ambitious dreams to make their fortunes off the land surrounding the Three Forks.
William P. King (1798 – 1841) had worked at various occupations during his life including the medical field, so he was invariably called “Dr. King†by his acquaintances. At his death, he was described by those who had known him as a “valuable citizen†and an “[e]nterprising manâ€. He planned on a grand scale and had the personal magnetism to win backers for his plans.
In the fall of 1838, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, King co-founded the Southern Land Company to invest in and develop land in Texas. Shortly thereafter he moved the operation to San Augustine, Texas, where he concentrated his energies on developing carrying out the plans of the company. Among King’s partners in Texas were men of substance and influence such as George W. Terrell, John A. Greer, Richardson Scurry, and Samuel M. Flournoy. The Southern Land Company partners purchased certificates for ninety (eventually one hundred and fifteen) league and labor land grants amounting to over 500,000 acres. On August 28, 1839 King and Warren A. Ferris made a contract to survey lands for the Southern Land Company in a thirty-mile square block, tilted at 45 degrees, and centered on a bluff on the East Fork of the Trinity. For his surveying and outfitting of the survey expedition, Ferris was to receive a portion of the land.
New York native, Warren A. Ferris (1810  1873), spent six years as a trapper and chronicler of the American West before moving in 1836 to live with his brother in the Republic of Texas. A self-taught surveyor, Ferris’ duties as the Official Surveyor of Nacogdoches included physically surveying and recording abstracts on all the land of the district, which at the time stretched west to the Trinity River. His efforts in performing that task were hindered by the oppressing presence of Indians and extreme weather conditions. His need to travel into the frontier came on the heels of the killing of Cherokee Chief Bowles in July 1839, resulting in a hostile situation with the Indians who refused to locate on the Cherokee Lands and who remained in the region.
![]() Illustration by K K Hunt
Ferris’s first attempts at fulfilling his surveying contract with King were made in early September 1839 with fifty-five men and again in late September with forty-four men, but both trips were abruptly ended shortly after leaving Nacogdoches when fresh signs indicated that Indians were near. As early surveyor John Harvey had warned all who ventured into the territory, “When you least expect Indians, there they are.â€
In October 1839, Ferris made a third attempt. He organized an expedition with sixty men, divided into companies to watch and guard the surveyors, but on that trip their efforts were repulsed before ever getting out of east Texas. In November Ferris was able to find but twenty-nine men willing to make the trip back to the Three Forks region and after twelve days, near Jordan’s Saline, they came upon Indians hidden and ready to ambush them. The surveying party charged the Indians and drove them away, but not before Ferris killed one. In his memoirs Ferris wrote that the Indian was better armed than he and his men, with an English rifle, a Prussian pistol, a Bowie knife, a butcher knife and bow and arrows. After this encounter, the men of the party, except four, left Ferris and returned home.
One of the four who stayed with Ferris was a man who would be a true friend for the remainder of their lives. John Henninger Reagan (1818 – 1905) of Tennessee was in Texas by early 1839. His life’s accomplishments included being an Indian fighter, Attorney, District Judge, Texas Congressman, Postmaster General of the Confederacy, U.S. Senator and the first Railroad Commissioner in Texas. Reagan, Ferris, and the other three men continued Ferris’ fourth expedition. The weather was cold and wet. Fearing ambush, the little party of five traveled by night and hid during the day. By the time they finally reached Cedar Creek, east of the Trinity, Ferris proclaimed the trip too dangerous to proceed and they returned to Nacogdoches.
As soon as the weather improved in March 1840, Ferris and Reagan made another stab at surveying the land, but heavy rains pushed them back. These numerous failed attempts at getting the surveys completed alarmed King. His Southern Land Company could not do business without surveys for deeds, so in April 1840 King financed Ferris’ next expedition. On June 4, 1840, Ferris left Nacogdoches with a party of twenty-nine men and under the supervision and companionship of William King, who had decided to see the frontier for himself. Their plan was to have three divisions of surveyors, with a crew of additional men to guard the surveyors and to build a fort to serve as a base for the surveying parties.
The collaboration between King and Ferris would produce the first fort in Texas that was not initially requisitioned by any government agency. Construction was started in June 1840 and by August they had built a picketed stockade with a dwelling. Cedar and bois d’arc trees grew abundantly along the creek nearby and offered ample building materials. The pickets were formed of poles only a few inches in diameter and ten feet long, set about two feet in the ground, thus making the walls approximately eight feet high. From descriptions of King’s Fort in 1841, it is known by that time there was a gate of some type and there were four individual huts or cabins within the walls. The fort was located on a high, rounded bluff with a vista of at least 150 degrees to the north, west and south. It overlooked a tributary of the East Fork of the Trinity that lay ¼ mile west of the site. This deep creek, at least 200 feet below the bluff’s crest, was named King’s Creek by the surveyors and provided fresh water for livestock and human needs.
Illustration of how the fort may have looked
With adequate shelter from the elements and Indians, by the end of 1840 the surveyors had laid off the outlines of the “King Block†of surveys. The 45-degree tilt that King had required continued to be reflected in the lines of future surveys in what is now Hunt, Dallas, Rockwall, Henderson, Van Zandt, and Kaufman counties. Regrettably for Dr. King, however, the majority of the headright certificates held by the Southern Land Company proved to be fraudulent. He did manage to obtain clear title to the survey that included the fort. Throughout the remainder of 1840 and the beginning of 1841, King’s Fort was the center of operations for surveying parties. The strength of the fort and its location appeared to give it immunity from any molestation by the Indians who continued to use the Kickapoo Trace about a mile to the north. However in the summer 1841, the situation changed dramatically.
The southern troops rendezvoused at Ft. Houston (near Palestine) and began their advance up the east bank of the Trinity River. An advanced party from Ft. Houston arrived at King's Fort on July 17th. On that same day, Indians attacked the fort. A member of the advance party reported the details of the encounter in the San Augustine Red Lander of August 3, 1841:
The remainder of the Third Brigade arrived at King’s Fort on the 18th and 19th and awaited the arrival of their commander Col. Smith. On the 20th Smith arrived with troops from Nacogdoches and the entire brigade marched from King’s Fort that afternoon. By July 25th the entire party had arrived at the Indian village, only to discover that Gen. Tarrant’s troops had already driven off the Indians. Smith’s troops destroyed the village and the troops then split, with the original party from Ft. Houston returning there via the west bank of the Trinity, Tarrant’s group returned north towards the Red River, and Smith went back to King’s Fort before venturing back to Nacogdoches. In addition to the Indian’s attack on King’s Fort, another incident occurred in conjunction with Smith’s expedition—the killing of Marshall B. McKeever. McKeever was a citizen of Crockett who had killed Joseph Shanks at Houston County in the spring 1841. In June 1841, McKeever was tried for murder, but a mistrial (probably a hung jury) resulted, and he went free. At some point Marshall McKeever had acquired land in what is now Henderson County, and he was at King’s Fort in late July with the troops of Smith’s Expedition. While encamped at or near King’s Fort, McKeever and a man named James Borroughs had an argument. John Reagan intervened, and he assumed he had put an end to the quarrel. However, Borroughs shot and killed McKeever and fled the scene. While some men set out to detain Borroughs, Reagan buried McKeever near the fort in what would become the first interment of the Kaufman City Cemetery, only ¼ mile from the fort site. Borroughs was eventually captured and brought to trial. Adolphus Sterne of Nacogdoches recorded the result in his diary on May 10, 1842:
With the successful completion of the treaty with the Indians, the need for a fortified position east of the Trinity River was much reduced, and the settlement that Dr. William P. King had planned could go forward. However, King himself would not live to see it. On a trip back to Mississippi to gather settlers for his colony, King caught yellow fever and died in Vicksburg on Sept. 16, 1841.
One of these early settlers had indeed been at King’s Fort at its beginning in June 1840, and according to his memoirs, he was the man who shot the Indian’s horse in the forehead during the July 1841 raid. This was Robert Adams Terrell (1820 – 1881), the man for whom Terrell, Texas was named in 1873, and brother of William King’s business partner George Whitfield Terrell. He was a surveyor with Ferris in 1840 and 1841, and was one of the first white men to live in what became Kaufman County. Settlement in the area gradually continued, mostly around the fort and to the southeast. Terrell noted that prior to l844 there were only six or seven families in present Kaufman County, and that during l845 and l846 a good many families settled east of the Trinity River in what was called Mercers Colony. Terrell’s work as a surveyor for King and Ferris often resurfaced later in his life as he was frequently called to testify about the surveys when the legitimacy of the deeds were challenged in court. In 1845 the first known sermon was preached in Kingsborough by Rev. William Kinney Wilson, a Methodist minister. In his memoirs he wrote:
The last known contemporaneous reference to King’s Fort is made in the February 9, 1863 Kaufman County Commissioner’s Court Minutes , where it is mentioned as a landmark by County Commissioners in laying out a road. However, half a century after its construction, the ruins of the old fort were still known to children in Kaufman in the 1890’s. William Kelley was born 1888 in Kaufman and grew up there. He left his family a journal of his memoirs which include being at the fort as a boy on many occasions and playing there with a vivid imagination:
* and Justin Sanders are Kaufman County researchers, genealogists and historians. Their work as individuals and collaborators can be found on the Kaufman County TXGenWeb Project website at http://www.rootsweb.com/~txkaufma/
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