de León, Martín (1765–1833)
de León, Martín (1765–1833)
Martín de León (b. 1765; d. 1833), successful Mexican rancher, colonizer, and founder of Victoria, Texas. De León was born in Burgos, Tamaulipas, in Mexico, to Spanish parents. He became a muleteer and merchant, and in 1790 joined the Fieles de Burgos Regiment in Nuevo Santander, reaching the rank of captain. He married Patricia de la Garza in 1795 and had ten children who became community leaders in Texas and northern Mexico. In 1824, de León founded the colony of Victoria on the Guadalupe River with forty-one Mexican families from Tamaulipas. De León's cattle raising made Victoria one of the most prosperous of the Texas colonies. He died in the cholera epidemic of 1833.
See alsoTexas .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Victor M. Rose, Some Historical Facts in Regard to the Settlement of Victoria, Texas (1883), repr. as A Republication of … Victor Rose's History of Victoria, edited by J. W. Petty, Jr. (1961).
Roy Grimes, ed., 300 Years in Victoria County (1968).
Arthur B. J. Hammett, The Empresario Don Martín de León (1973).
Additional Bibliography
Crimm, A. Carolina Castillo. De León, a Tejano Family History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
A. Carolina Castillo Crimm