A Story of the Loyal Germans of the Texas Hill Country During the Civil War The town of Fredericksburg, located in the Texas Hill Country near the center of the State, was settled by the German Immigration Society in 1846. The town was a hundred miles past the frontier so the Germans made their own peace treaty with the Camanche Indians who were at war with the Texas at that time. During the next fifteen years German settlers continued to arrive, spreading out to cover a large part of the surrounding country. They learned to farm local crops that suited the local soil and learned to be stockmen as well. In general they prospered. In 1861 the Germans watched Texas succeed from the Union and join the Confederacy with a great deal of dismay. They, like the rest of the frontier settlements, depended on the U.S. Army for protection from the Indians and Mexican bandits. The U.S. Army was rounded up by the Confederates and shipped north by boat leaving many of the frontier forts abandoned. None of the Germans owned slaves or believed in slavery so they did not want to participate with the South in what they saw as a fight for slavery. Most of the Germans had been through the process of becoming United States citizens so they had recently sworn their allegiance to the United States of America and they intended to honor that oath. In June of 1861 the Germans in the Texas Hill Country formed a Union League to express their support for the North in the war that had started at Ft. Sumter two months earlier. This alerted the Confederates to the problem that they had in their midst. While staying true to the history of this time and the historical timeline we shall move to the sping and summer of 1862, place characters in our story and let it move forward from there.