James Lyons, his wife, Martha and their children immigrated to Texas before 1830 and settled along the Navidad River in the area of present day Schulenburg.
The family lived on a five- hundred-acre tract in the E. Anderson league and their closest neighbor was Keziah Cryer who owned the adjacent league of land. James Lyons and his oldest sons built the family’s dwelling, a double pen “dogtrot” log cabin. James planted crops and raised cattle as most of the early settlers did.
In 1837, the southern section of present day Fayette County was still an unbroken wilderness and largely unsettled and thus unprotected from Indian attack. In the early daylight hours of a fall morning James Lyons and his youngest son, 12-year-old, Warren was tending cattle in a corral near their house when a war party of Comanche Indians suddenly appeared.
