would afford them protection and assistance. At the time this contract was made with Castro, another was made with William Kennedy and the latter's confidential agent, William Pringle of London, for settling an English colony between the Nueces and the Río Grande.[8]

Similar colonization contracts were made during 1842 with interested Germans and others for settling along the southern and western borders. Alexander Bourgeois d'Orvanne and Armand Ducos received two contracts. One, dated June 3, called for the establishment of a colony of twelve to sixteen hundred German families or single men on the headwaters of the Frio and Medina rivers;[9]  and the other, granted also in the summer of 1842, provided for the location of five hundred families along the Río Grande from its mouth up to Reinosa. A third contract, granted to Henry Francis Fisher and Burchard Miller, on June 7, 1842, called for the settlement of six hundred families from Germany within eighteen months on three million acres of land located between the Colorado and Río Grande, and west of the Llano River.[10]  Interest in settling one thousand Europeans (Belgians, Hollanders, and Swiss) in Texas along the Río Grande was shown by Captain Victor Pirson, a Belgian agent who arrived in Texas in February-March 1842, and concluded a contract to that effect in November, which he proposed to transfer to a company to be chartered by the Belgian government. The Belgian government, however, having recently organized a company to colonize in Guatemala, vetoed this proposal for a second company.[11]