DUANE
Duane's take
Here's what the official marker has to say, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, if you ever find yourself rolling through Cherokee County and you start wondering who it was that kept the peace when peace was the hardest thing in the world to keep — well, pull over a minute, because this story goes back to 1843. There was a village right here, a Delaware Indian village, and the people who lived in it had a reputation that carried weight across a whole lot of territory.
The Delawares were noted as interpreters and messengers of peace. Think on that a second. Not warriors of peace, not signers of peace — messengers of it.
That means they went out into contested, complicated country, found tribes who had every reason to stay home and stay suspicious, and they talked. And listened. And talked some more.
And somehow, they made it work. Because when it came time for the General Treaty at Bird's Fort — over in what's now Tarrant County — it was the Delawares who were chiefly instrumental in bringing the other tribes to the table in 1843. That's the marker's own word: instrumental.
Not incidental. Not helpful. Instrumental.
The kind of work that doesn't always get remembered, because when it succeeds, what you see is a treaty, not the ten thousand miles of hard conversation that made it possible. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936, and maybe that's the least Texas could do — to mark the spot where the peacemakers lived.
What the marker says
Noted as interpreters and messengers of peace, the Delawares were chiefly instrumental in bringing other tribes to the General Treaty at Bird's Fort (in the present county of Tarrant) in 1843. Erected by the State of Texas 1936