Fredericksburg: The Treaty That Held
Near Fredericksburg, Texas
On May eighth, eighteen forty-six, a train of ox carts carrying a hundred and twenty German pioneers halted on the Pedernales River after a sixteen-day journey from New Braunfels. They were deep in Texas Hill Country, far beyond the line of Anglo-American settlement, with no military escort and no established trade relationships with the Comanche bands who controlled this territory. Their leader, Baron Otfried Hans von Meusebach, had renamed himself John O. Meusebach when he arrived in Texas because Americans could not pronounce his title. He was about to do something remarkable.
Meusebach called the new settlement Fredericksburg, after Prince Frederick of Prussia. About a hundred and fifty settlers died in the first year from cholera and the hardships of frontier life. But the threat that worried everyone most was the Comanche. In March of eighteen forty-seven, Meusebach rode into Comanche territory with forty men, met with the chiefs of the Penateka band, and negotiated what would become the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty. In exchange for three thousand dollars in gifts, the Comanche agreed to allow peaceful settlement of the land between the Llano and San Saba Rivers. Both sides, remarkably, kept the agreement. It stands as the only treaty in Texas history that was honored by both parties from the signing until the collapse of Comanche independence a generation later.
The legacy of those settlers is still present in every direction from Fredericksburg's market square. The original Vereins Kirche from eighteen forty-seven, rebuilt as a replica, stands at the center of town. The streets carry German names. The Easter fires tradition, where bonfires are lit on the surrounding hills on Holy Saturday to signal that the peace with the Comanche holds, dates to the earliest years of the settlement. And in a stone building downtown, the National Museum of the Pacific War preserves the memory of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was born here in eighteen eighty-five, the grandson of a German sea captain, and who grew up to command the entire Pacific Fleet during the Second World War.
