Rosalie Hart Priour and Annie Fagan Teal: Loyalty to the Land in the Irish Colonies of Mexican Texas

With the opening of Mexico’s northern border in the late 1820s, many foreign emigrants left their homelands for the wild Texan frontier. The offer of land and opportunity was especially appealing to many Irishmen. Consequently, a great many Irishwomen soon found themselves alongside their husbands and children struggling to survive in an unknown land. Rosalie Hart Priour and Annie Fagan Teal both accompanied their families into Texas in the early 1830s with the dream of owning land. Their experiences during the initial overseas journey, colonization, and through the Texas Revolution reveal not only the hardships they endured, but also give insight into the mind-set of frontier women, and a better understanding of what it was that drove them to leave their homelands for a wild, and unknown country. As disease, revolution, and disorder attempted to pull the people from their land, many men and women’s loyalty and even identity changed in order to maintain a hold on the land first given to them by Mexico.