Title: TSHA | DeWitt's Colony
Headings: DeWitt's Colony
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DeWitt's Colony
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Breakfast in Texas: Recipes for Elegant Brunches, Down-Home Classics, and Local Favorites

Content: Although DeWitt colonists condemned the incident and drew up resolutions proclaiming their loyalty to Mexico, many Mexican officials made no distinction between the Anglo-Americans of DeWitt's colony and those of Haden Edwards 's Prompted no doubt by De León, who was also forbidden to settle within the ten-league coastal zone, the captain general of the Provincias Internas, Anastasio Bustamante, mindful of the possibility of recurrence of smuggling on the Lavaca River and suspicious that DeWitt was trying to relocate his colony, ordered Saucedo in San Antonio to remove DeWitt from Old Station in August 1827. Upon learning of the order, many colonists threatened to resettle in Austin's colony, so DeWitt applied for an extension, which was granted until December 1. Governor José María Viesca extended the date to June 1828. DeWitt probably was not intending to relocate his colony, since he had sent a party to Gonzales in January 1827 to build a fort, though the work had to be stopped because of Indian hostilities between the Comanches and their enemies, the Lipan Apaches and Tonkawas. Nevertheless, the fort was completed by April. By December DeWitt abandoned Old Station as ordered and took his forty colonists to Gonzales. The official census of 1828 recorded an increase to seventy-five colonists-eleven families and twenty-seven single men. They were primarily from the Upper South, especially Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky, though some came from Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New York. One was from England. In time the population became more balanced with colonists from the Lower South.