Cabet obtained from the Peters Immigration Company in 1847 a million acres of land in North Texas. The land was given to him on condition that a settlement should be made upon it before the 1st of July, 1848. In January, 1848, the first cohort, numbering sixty-nine persons, embarked at Havre, France. They arrived at Shreveport, Louisiana, the following April. From there they marched on foot to their chosen home in Texas, carrying firearms, household goods, and provisions. “Oh, if you could see Icaria!” they presently wrote back to the brotherhood in France. “It is an Eden. The forests are superb; the vegetation rich and varied. We have horses, cows, pigs, and chickens in abundance.... Many Texans come to see us. They are good-natured and very honest. We camp and sleep out of doors. We lock up nothing and are never robbed.”[36] Houses were built and fields ploughed and planted. By midsummer the Icarians in their cosy hamlet were on the lookout for the second cohort of colonists. But before it arrived the cholera broke out in Icaria. Many of the settlers died; nearly all those who were left abandoned their homes in a panic and returned to New Orleans, where Cabet himself joined them with several hundred recruits from France. A new and more fortunate Icarian settlement was finally made in Missouri. A few years later (1853) a procession, also composed of French emigrants, passed along Main Street in Houston. They had just landed from the steamboat _Eclipse_ on the bayou at the foot of the street. At their head walked a tall gentleman in a velvet coat and three-cornered hat. He carried a drawn sword in his hand, and the tricolored flag of France floated above his head. His long white hair streamed over his shoulders. The whole company, men, women, and children, sung the Marseillaise hymn as they marched along. The tall gentleman was the Count Victor Considerant. He had come with his followers from France to Texas to found a Phalanstery, a community much like that already attempted by Cabet. His watchword was “Liberty and Equality.” The faces of the emigrants lighted with joy as they traveled away over the prairies, following this beautiful vision. They founded their town on the east fork of the Trinity River, in Dallas County, and called it Reunion. But the brotherhood soon fell to pieces. The emigrants scattered over the country, finding it pleasanter to own homes in a land of true liberty and equality, than to live by the count’s fine theories. Many descendants both of the Icarians and of Count Considerant’s colonists are to be met with in North Texas.