DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Spring of 1838. The settlements of northeast Texas were raw and restless, and the frontier had just reminded a group of Fannin County men exactly how raw.
Raiders had hit their homes, hit them hard enough that roughly ninety of those frontiersmen decided they weren't going to sit still about it. Two captains stepped up to lead them: Robert Sloan and Nathaniel T. Journey.
Ninety men, two captains, one punitive expedition heading west into country that most Anglo-Americans had never laid eyes on. Now, that's a long column of determined people moving through what was still very much somebody else's territory. The trail didn't stop until they reached the vicinity of what is now Euless and Arlington, deep in the land that would one day become Tarrant County.
Out there they found a small Indian village. They attacked it. Several Indians were killed, and a few horses were recovered.
That's what the record says, plain and unadorned. What happened there in the spring of 1838 was violent, and the marker doesn't dress it up, so neither will I. What the marker does call it is this: the Sloan-Journey Expedition is among the first known Anglo-American activities in what is now Tarrant County, and it helped pry open north Texas to white settlement.
Ninety men following two captains into the unknown, and the world on the other side of that trail never looked quite the same again.
What the marker says
In the spring of 1838, Captains Robert Sloan and Nathaniel T. Journey led a group of about 90 northeast Texas frontiersmen on a punitive expedition against the Indians who had raided their homes in present-day Fannin County. The trail led them to the vicinity of present-day Euless and Arlington, where they attacked a small Indian village, killed several Indians, and recovered a few horses. The Sloan-Journey expedition is among the first known Anglo-American activities in what is now Tarrant County that helped to open north Texas to white settlement. Supplemental: This marker was relocated to River Legacy Parks in 2003.