History and Reminiscences of Denton County Page: 161

                                
HISTORY OF DENTON COUNTY               161
men distributed presents and awaited the council's answer. The
council overruled their chief and refused to send delegates to the
meeting at Bird's Fort.
The commissioners then started on their return journey of
about five hundred miles over the trackless prairies leading in
a southeastern direction to Warren's trading point on Red River,
thence south down the line by Elm Station and Hickory Station
to Bird's Fort, where they met George W. Terrell and E. H. Tar-
rant, two commissioners, who had about given them up as lost.
On September 29, 1843, Commissioners Terrell and Tarrant
closed a treaty with the following tribes: Tehuacanas, Keechies,
Wacos, Caddos, Anadarkos, Iones, Paluxes, Delawares, and a few
isolated Cherokees and Wichitas. But the most ferocious tribe
of all, the Comanches, stayed out and continued almost incessant-
ly on the warpath.
A new line of demarcation was agreed upon between the
whites and Indians and trading houses were to be established,
one at the juncture of the Cleai Fork and West Fork of the Trini-
ty River, at the present site of Fort Worth, one at Comanche
Peak, and one at old San Saba. Just how long this treaty had
effect, if it ever had any, we are not able to determine, but one
fact is well established, the Indians continued to roam over this
line, sometimes on peaceable missions, but frequently for the
purpose of committing depredations, and sometimes in war.
In 1842 John B. Denton had been killed on Village Creek and
now (1843) a new treaty had been signed at Bird's Fort, indi-
cating that this was the center of the Indian trouble at that time.
Texas was then on the eve of changing from a republic to a State
and the change was the all-absorbing topic for several years.
The United States, in the early fifties, adopted a new policy
in dealing with the Indians and established two Indian agencies
or reservations for them, one on Salt Creek in Young County,
near Fort Belknap and the other about twenty miles west on the
Clear Fork of the Brazos. The Comanches were so hostile toward
the other tribes and so numerous they vweie put at the Clear
Fol'k agency. They each had their hounds iln which to hunt.