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WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1837
a certain oath, obtain an order of survey, and go on to procure land. Under a mode of proof so loose, so easy, so private it may be, too, and attended with so few circumstances calculated to impress the mind with a proper sense of consequences, it might be a safe conjecture that all the territory of Texas would not be sufficient to satisfy the claims that rapacity, speculation and perjury, altogether, would continue sooner or later to forge and to bring into legal shape, with a view to participate in advantages intended only for honest men. I mean by this suggestion to make no undue reflection on the integrity of the people of Texas. Luckily they are not the persons who, in the nature of things, can be guilty of the species of fraud to which I allude. It must be strangers of course, and they, I fear, would be found coming, by hundreds and thousands, to procure their leagues and labors in this land of promise, knowing that they could do it at no other expense than the breath which would enable them to say amen to a false oath administered, as it might be, within the walls of a grog shop or brothel. In illustration of this suggestion, I have to state for your information that undoubted intelligence has reached me of hun- dreds of persons, who have been already introduced into eastern Texas, for the purpose of practising the kind of fraud to which I have alluded. These men have come in from Louisiana, Ar- kansas, and elsewhere-declared their intention of becoming citizens, (a thing they could do in an hour after their arrival,) and have taken out certificates of such declaration, upon which, immediately considering themselves entitled to head rights, they have sold the same to speculators who have gone on, in hundreds of instances, to make their surveys accordingly, and now have their plots in their pockets, ready to enter them the moment the land offices are opened. These mock citizens of Texas have in the meanwhile gone back to the United States, with the inten- tion no doubt, of returning again in the fall to procure more head rights, finding it a speculation so easy to be accomplished. That some real citizens of Texas are in collusion with those imposters, there can be no doubt, and it is hoped that the infamy which is their due, for such unblushing knavery, will some day overtake and brand them with all the odium which should attach to such public robbers. The looseness of the direction made in the bill for the shape the surveys are to assume, presents to my mind another serious objection. What is meant by one half of the square, fronting
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