The Indigenous Malones

In 1803, Ol' Man Malone was baptized in Nacogdoches at "Old Stone Fort", a presidio. Very little was known of his guardians or parents. He was neither man nor child at the time of his baptism.  When the record was recorded, that act within itself... gave him the legal surname: Malone.  Holding a SAFE surname granted by the authority of the Catholic Church & Spanish Crown, entitled Mario Malone (once mature enough), future property rights and voting privileges. These rights were granted in 1824, by the Federal Constitution of Mexico & the 1827 State Constitution of Coahuila y Tejas.  The Christian baptism was confirmed in (registros parroquiales eclesiasticos) parish registries, Mexico City. This is not family legend. This part is documented and confirmed by Rev. Dr. Dumas Malone and independent professional genealogist Mary Hall 2024.

In 1803, Ol' Man Malone was baptized in Nacogdoches at Old Stone Fort, a presidio. Very little was known of his guardians or parents. When the record of his baptism was recorded, that act gave him a surname: Malone. The baptism was confirmed by the Mexican Catholic Church records — held in Mexico City. This is not family legend. This part is documented.

It is important to remember: in 1803, this was not yet Texas. It was the northeastern frontier of New Spain — a colonial borderland where Spanish missionaries, French traders, Comanche raiders, and Indigenous nations all moved through the same corridors. Mario was not old at the time of his baptism. He was a man in his prime. What made him remarkable was not his age but his reputation. As the years passed, he became known as someone deeply wise and spiritually grounded — a man who understood the land, the systems pressing in on his people, and how to navigate both without surrendering either.

Who exactly Mario was before that baptism is one of the enduring mysteries of this line. The oral record holds competing accounts — and in 1803, that ambiguity was not unusual. Colonial administrators, missionaries, and census-takers of that era struggled to categorize the populations moving through the frontier and black land prairies borderlands. The categories themselves were unstable:

Some accounts said Mario was a remnant of the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821) — an Irish exiled mix, a so-called Wild Goose, left behind when the colonial tide shifted. Others described him as an African mix — possibly from the Indo-African labor migrations that moved through colonial ports and into the interior. Still others held that he was simply Ervipiame — one of the Indigenous people of the Brazos corridor who had been absorbing outside contact for generations. None of these accounts are mutually exclusive. In the colonial borderlands of 1803, a man could carry all of them at once.

What the record does confirm is the baptism, the surname, and the continuity. Mario Malone was present in Nacogdoches in 1803. He was present at Natan Samox — Sugarloaf Mountain — in the years that followed. He was present enough to raise his grandson James Henry after William's death at the Alamo in 1836. And the line he anchored has never left Milam County.

Through that Methodist fellowship, Dumas Malone conveyed to Rev. Nathaniel Aaron Burton directly what the records showed. The Malones were "on the Rolls" — the Tonkawa Malone's appeared on the National Archives Indian Census Roll (M595), recorded in variations of the name. This information was documented by 1st Lady, Deloris Burton M.A., who kept meticulous records through stacks of old-fashioned photo albums. She had plenty of written notes which spanned the years — 1886 to 1939 — In her photo album alongside a photograph of my grandmother she had written: Pawnee and Ponca Agencies.  It is confirmed  no one knew what it meant for years. However, that thread existed. It was not pursued further but has been recorded here.

Family oral history identifies William T. "Bill" Malone as the son of Mario — Ol' Man Malone — born in 1817 and killed at the Alamo in 1836. The family remembers him as a man of Indigenous and mixed-heritage community, not as the later identity assigned to him in competing accounts.

His Tonkawa wife, Fransis, was pregnant when he left for the garrison. Their son, James Henry Malone, was born in September 1836 after his father's death. The family holds that Ol' Man Malone raised both Fransis and James Henry. James Henry had 4 children and died mysteriously in 1861; the surviving record of his life is limited.

The public record around William T. Malone is not a single, settled story. Three families from Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia claimed to be his heirs. Although the Virginia family prevailed in the lawsuit, the outcome does not resolve the Malone family’s questions about Bill’s identity, including the family’s memory that he was dark-skinned while the claimant families were all Anglo. Texas historical accounts also reflect the complexity of the case. This page does not repeat disputed claims as fact. The Malone family did not know of a land bounty in its own oral record, and no claim to one is made here.

One detail carried in the family’s memory is that Bill lost a finger at age 15 in a livestock-rope accident, not because he was drunk. In the cattle country of early Texas, roping and handling unbroken animals were dangerous work, especially for Indigenous, Mexican vaquero, free, indentured, and enslaved laborers. these dangerous labors were assigned to "COW BOYs" not Anglo "COW HANDs".  The exact circumstances and treatment belong to oral history and are presented here with that care.

What remains central is not a disputed benefit or a borrowed pedigree. It is the family’s continuity: after Bill’s death, Ol’ Man Malone protected his daughter-in-law and grandson, James Henry Malone. (True Heir of William (Billy) Malones 600+ acre bounty.  Despite the erasure the line continued in what eventually became Milam County, through memory, kinship, and survival.

This is not hearsay. This is recorded Texas law — and it is largely absent from the history taught in Texas schools. The Malones were not alone in staying. Many free people of color, Mestizo families, and those who had blended into the land over generations made the same choice: stay, blend, and survive.

Consider what James Henry Malone was facing. He was born in September 1836 after his father, William T. Malone, (Billy T) was killed at the Alamo. By the time he was about six, the Republic's expulsion law threatened free people of color with removal or enslavement. The family's record is clear on one point: the Malones were never enslaved. They remained connected to kin and place in Milam County while the paper record around them grew thin.

James Henry's date of departure was not recorded.  We know his son, Jim “James” Malone, was born in 1856. The later census record applied the period classification "M"  for  “Mulatto” to Jim. That label reflects the state’s system of classification, not the full identity preserved in the family’s oral history.

Jim "James" Malone married Lenora Kerr, born circa 1858. Family oral tradition holds that the Kerr line was believed to be connected to the Creek Nation of Tennessee and also preserves a Melungeon connection. Those strands remain subjects for continued research; they are recorded here as family history, not as a substitute for documentation.

They never left. They blended. They reclassified. They survived. Hillard Rhiley Malone was reclassified again after James. The paper changed with every generation. The blood did not.

Hillard Rhiley Malone (1875–1970) and Georgia Ann King (1885–1957) built their life in Two Mile Bottom — the same bottomland the Burtons and Smiths had worked for generations. Georgia Ann was a midwife. She kept guinea fowl. She was the kind of woman who held a community together without ever being named in the record.

Their son Promise Malone became a dentist. His practice was burned in a night raid. The family absorbed that loss the same way they had absorbed every other attempt to erase them — and kept going.

The Malones and the Burtons shared the same land, the same water, and the same strategy: stay together, blend when necessary, and never let the record be the final word on who you are.

Oral history in this family has always said Lenora Kerr was Creek. She has no birth record — a fact that is infuriating but not surprising. Countless Indigenous women of her era were never documented by colonial record-keeping systems. It is a fact however, she lived. She married. She had children. The Malones are still here because of her. That is proof enough of her existence, even when the archive refuses to confirm it.

Marriage records confirm Lenora Kerr wed Jim (James) Malone on November 13, 1877, in Washington County, Texas. Washington County sits in East Central Texas, adjacent to Milam County — the same territory where the Kerr family had roots as early as 1858. Their son Hilliard was born September 27, 1877, in Washington County, shortly before or around the marriage date. Birth dates in old records can vary slightly, and this proximity is consistent with the record.

Creek Indians were very dark in complexion. This is not a peripheral detail — it is the direct answer to the phenotype question. Jim Malone's mulatto classification in census records was common for mixed-race individuals, including Native/White or Native/Black mixes. Lenora's Creek heritage, combined with Jim's own mixed background, produced Hillard: dark, Indian-featured, and carrying a documented hostility toward Anglo settler culture that was not accidental. It was inherited.

The generational color shift — Jim classified mulatto, Hillard born dark, Ira born light — is a classic pattern in mixed-heritage families where phenotype expression varies across generations. It is not a contradiction. It is biology, and it is history.

Georgia Ann King was a small woman. Petite. But she was the first one on the church steps when something needed to be said out loud, and she said it clearly.

She was a midwife. She delivered over 100 babies in Milam County, Texas — including the children of her own son, Ira Malone Sr. She was also a botanist in the practical sense: she knew the land, the plants, the remedies. She raised guinea fowl and sold eggs at market independently, on her own terms.

The story that has been carried in this family — told directly by Mary Helen Malone — is this: Georgia Ann King went to market to sell her guinea eggs. White men were sitting around waiting on their hired hands, drinking what was probably coffee. When she came through, one of them called out: 'Good morning, Miss Drag-a-tail — how do you sell your geese?' Her reply came without hesitation: 'Good morning, Mr. Kiss My Ass — twenty cents a piece.'

Those words did not come from a sharecropper. They came from a free woman who knew exactly who she was, what her labor was worth, and what she owed to no one. She was Ira Malone Sr.'s mother. She is part of why he turned out the way he did.

Georgia Ann King has not yet been fully documented in the written record. What we have is oral history — sourced from Mary Helen Malone — and the evidence of her life in the children she delivered, the land she worked, and the family she raised. A dedicated section for her story is planned as more documentation is located.

Two Mile Bottom is not a place on a map. It is a place in the body. The Great Eight — Ira Malone Sr.'s sons by Jessie Bell — grew up here. They jumped off the cliffs at Sugarloaf Mountain into the Little River. They played all day with no clock, reading the sun to know when to go home. They know this land the way you know something you were raised inside of.

The Texas Historical Commission erected a marker at Sugarloaf in 2012. It reads, in part: "Many from the Tonkawa Native American Tribe believe that Sugarloaf Mountain was their ancestral home." The marker stands at the site.  The melanated ancient people have always been there.

The Tonkawa Nation of Oklahoma purchased the land and erected a monument in 2023. They have not acknowledged the Mestizo families who never left — the families who stayed through the expulsion orders, the reclassifications, the night raids, and the erasure. That acknowledgment remains an open wound.