Comanche Bondage: Beales’s Settlement of Dolores and Sarah Ann Horn’s Narrative of Her Captivity

No homeseekers were ever plagued with more bad luck than those who followed the Englishman John Charles Beales to southern Texas late in 1834. On the banks of Las Moras Creek, not far from the Rio Grande, they established the colony of Dolores. Among them were the British-born Sarah Ann Horn and her husband and two small sons. For the pretty Sarah Ann, who shared her neighbors’ fear of Comanche raids, the year or so in Dolores was a preview of a special hell to come. The threat of an invasion by Santa Anna, an uncongenial climate, a lack of trees for lumber, an unnavigable river, crop failures, and a scarcity of commodities contributed to the colonists’ discouragement and discord.

In Comanche Bondage the distinguished southwestern historian Carl Coke Rister has written the history of the Dolores enterprise, drawing on Beale’s journals and other documents, and including reports of the survivors. Leaving Dolores in the wake of news about the Alamo and Goliad disasters, the Horn family and their neighbors the Harrises headed toward Matamoras. They never arrived there. Later a broken Sarah Ann Horn told the horrifying story of the murder of the men and of the years of captivity she and Mrs. Harris and their children endured at the hands of the Comanches. Rister has edited and annotated her 1839 narrative, which complements and extends his account of Beales’s folly.—Print Ed.