Gone But Not Quite Forgotten

North of Arlington lies the empty site of the Metroplex's first Anglo settlement.

By Ron Wright
Special to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

A Texas treasure lies near the bank of a crescent-shaped lake in eastern Tarrant County under centuries-old trees that once shaded the likes of Edward Tarrant and Sam Houston.

Here, more than a century and a half ago, men and women braved a hostile wilderness to create the first Anglo-American settlement in the Tarrant-Dallas county area. The endeavor cost some of them their lives, and their final resting place became the area's first pioneer cemetery.

They called their establishment Bird's Fort, and what took place there gave birth to what was destined to become our own monument to modern civilization, the Fort Worth-Arlington-Dallas Metroplex.

Today, a granite marker serves as a lonely reminder of their enterprise—of what once was so that we here could one day be. It is a reminder of courage that should be remembered on a site that should be preserved for all future generations of Texans.

It was a place of big dreams, and the biggest dreamer was Jonathan Bird.

In August 1841, Bird requested and received from Gen. Edward Tarrant of the Texas Militia a commission as brevet major with permission to build a fort and establish a settlement. The settlement was to be near the site of the Battle of Village Creek (in present-day west Arlington) that Tarrant and 70 of his men had waged against Indians only months earlier. The enticement for Bird was the promise of free land to those who established forts and settlements under the Military Road Act passed by the Congress of the Republic in 1840. The legislation sought to create a line of small forts from the Red River to Austin as a means to bring in and protect new settlers in an area of Texas that had heretofore been an Indian domain.

Bird chose a site several miles east of Village Creek on the bank of a small spring-fed lake north of the Trinity River. There, he and his company of rangers constructed a crude log blockhouse and a stockade made of logs set on end in picket form with entrenchments all around. Several cabins were constructed, three of which were inside the stockade.

When the construction was completed, most of the men returned to their settlements on the Red River and began moving their families to the fort, but the newly arrived pioneers quickly met misfortune. Indians had burned away most of the prairie grass and with it most of the game, and provisions from the Republic of Texas that had been promised as part of the Military Road Act were not forthcoming. Bird purchased the first wagon of supplies out of his own pocket. And there was the constant threat of bullets and arrows from the native welcoming committee, which kept a watchful eye on the fort.

The winter proved to be unusually cold and deadly. On Christmas Day 1841, Wade Rattan was killed by Indians when he, Alex Webb and Solomon Silkwood traveled several miles from the fort to hunt for game and to meet an overdue supply wagon.

The men treed a bear and were trying to cut the tree down when Indians attacked. Webb and Silkwood escaped on foot and got back to the fort. Silkwood later died of exposure. When a detail of men returned to the site several days later to retrieve what was left of Rattan's body, they found Rattan and his faithful dog, Watch, who had stayed with his master, guarding his body from wolves and vultures. Rattan and Silkwood were buried on a hill some 300 yards northeast of the blockhouse and were soon joined by three more of the fort pioneers: William Bird, his daughter and a Mr. Cartwright, who were killed by Indians while they were carrying water from the nearby spring.

In January 1842 a young John Neely Bryan visited the fort to urge the inhabitants to relocate to his place on a bluff a short distance below the confluence of the West and Elm forks of the Trinity River only a few miles east. Bryan had located there the previous November and had named his bluff Dallas. At this time, the Bird's Fort pioneers learned that recent legislation by the Congress of the Republic had extended the Peters Colony south, encompassing the land around the fort. This effectively ended any claims to the land that Bird and his followers had been promised. By the end of March 1842, the fort was vacated, with some of the settlers joining Bryan (who would later marry the daughter of one of the Bird's Fort families) and the others returning to settlements on the Red River.

The next year, dreams of pioneer homesteads on free land were replaced by dreams of peace. In the summer of 1843, President Sam Houston issued a call for a grand council of the Indian tribes in Texas to be convened at Bird's Fort in August to discuss the terms of a treaty that would be the centerpiece of Houston's Indian policy. Houston's party was awaiting the chiefs' arrival when the broken remnants of the failed Snively expedition, an inglorious attempt to capture Mexican wagon trains loaded with gold on the Santa Fe Trail, arrived at the fort to disband on Aug. 6.

When the time for council had passed and some of the tribes had not arrived, an impatient Houston returned to the capital, leaving Gen. Tarrant and George Terrel [sic] to negotiate the final treaty. On Sept. 29, 1843, the Bird's Fort Treaty was signed by chiefs of 10 Indian tribes; the Texas Senate ratified it on Jan. 31, 1844. The treaty established a boundary between Indian land and the white settlements, with trading houses established along the treaty line. It was one of the most sweeping treaties in Texas history and ushered in a new era of settlement in the eastern Cross Timbers.

The first of the treaty trading houses was licensed in 1844 at Marrow Bone Springs a few miles southwest of the fort in present-day Arlington. The location of the trading house led Col. Middleton Tate Johnson to establish a ranger post in the area in 1846, which began the settlement of Johnson Station. (Denizens of Johnson Station moved three miles north when the railroad was built in 1876 and began a new town called Arlington). And it was Johnson who guided Brevet Maj. Ripley Arnold in 1849 to a site near the confluence of the Clear and West forks of the Trinity River several miles west of Johnson Station and suggested that Arnold establish his new army camp there. The camp would become Fort Worth.

The wooden structures of Bird's Fort are gone now, but much of the original site remains. Since the 1880s, the site has been owned or leased by a number of sportsmen's clubs. Thanks to the Armentrout family of Dallas, which has owned the property since 1917, the site has been saved from commercial development. But the future is in doubt.

Located in an unincorporated area of Tarrant County that is rarely visited by the public, the site of the fort is almost completely surrounded by one of the largest ongoing commercial developments in North Texas: the development of roughly 2,000 acres north of the Trinity River near Arlington.

The impact of Bird's Fort, its people and events, extend throughout the Metroplex, from the relocation of Bird's Fort pioneers near John Neely Bryan's bluff to the establishment of Fort Worth and Arlington years later. It is a history worthy of modern reflection because events there led in part to what we have here and who we are here today.

History is more than just stories from the past. It is the flow of human experience from which many of us learn and which all of us eventually join. It is the reservoir from which our values, beliefs and traditions spring. History helps define us as a people; it gives us depth. For millions who call the Metroplex home, that history began locally with the establishment of a tiny outpost in the wilderness of northeast Tarrant County called Bird's Fort. It is a history that should be remembered and saved.