DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, most treaties you hear about in Texas history — you already know how they end. Broken promises, bad blood, somebody riding off angry into the distance.
So when I tell you what happened on this stretch of San Saba County ground in the first two days of March, 1847, I want you to hold onto something rare: this one turned out different. Twenty Comanche chiefs came to this site. Twenty.
That's not a casual gathering — that's a council, a serious convening of serious men. And on the other side of that meeting sat Otfried Hans, Freiherr von Meusebach, a man who carried a title all the way from the old country and had the good sense to set it down when Texas called. He was there representing the German colonists, and he would go on to become a citizen of this state under the name John O.
Meusebach — born 1812, and the record tells us he made it all the way to 1897. Over those two days — March first and second — they talked. They worked.
And when it was done, a treaty of peace had been agreed upon between those twenty Comanche chiefs and the German colonists Meusebach represented. Now here's the part I want you to really hear, because it's the whole reason we're still talkin' about this spot. This treaty was never broken.
Never. Not a caveat, not a footnote, not a quiet asterisk buried in some archive somewhere. The State of Texas saw fit to erect this marker in 1936, and those are the very words carved into it: this treaty was never broken.
In a history full of agreements that didn't last the season, two men — or rather, twenty-one men and a freiherr who became a Texan — shook hands on this ground and meant it. And the ground remembers.
What the marker says
On this site a treaty of peace was agreed upon, March 1-2, 1847, between twenty Comanche chiefs and the German colonists represented by Otfried Hans, Freiherr von Meusebach (1812-1897), who became a citizen of Texas under the name of John O. Meusebach * * This treaty was never broken. Erected by the State of Texas 1936