Abstract
Until the 1700s Texas was a peripheral and sparsely settled province in the Vice-Royalty of New Spain. Land grants by Spanish (until 1821) and Mexican (1821–1835) administrations stimulated an influx of Anglo-American settlers who soon seceded to form the short lived Republic of Texas (1836–1845). During this period the still prevailing system of property survey and mapping was established. In the first decades of U.S. statehood (since 1846), German immigrants were instrumental in improving the hitherto crude cadastral cartography by refining the County Maps, the key cadastral instruments in visualizing the land titles at the Texas General Land Office.
About the chapter title: An American phrase still used for a bold stride to turn one‘s fortune in a new land, coined by David Crockett (1786–1836), a Kentucky frontiersman and U.S. politician, when in 1834 he lost the re-election and sought a better fortune in Texas. There he joined the fight for independence and became immortalized as one of the defenders killed by Mexican troops taking the besieged Alamo in San Antonio, since then the symbol of Texan virtue, on March 6, 1836; Todish et al. (1998) Alamo Sourcebook, 1836: A Comprehensive Guide to the Battle of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution. Austin. The present article does accentuate some of the author’s cadastral observations in a broader journal chapter on Nassovian immigrants to Texas: Hin nach Texas, hin nach Texas, in: Nassauische Annalen, Volume 123 (2012), pp. 505–537, which also contains a number of color illustrations.
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Demhardt, I.J. (2014). “You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas” . In: Liebenberg, E., Collier, P., Török, Z. (eds) History of Cartography. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33317-0_15
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