Sources

Every claim on this site rests on witnesses who disagree with each other, and the project's method is to keep the disagreement rather than resolve it. This is the evidentiary map: the witnesses with a dossier — who they were, when they wrote, what they had at stake — and the register that ranks the whole corpus on stratum, centrality, uniqueness and reliability. The formal citations are in the bibliography; the participants' own words are in the texts.

The witnesses

• Un naufrage au Texas

  Auguste Savardan · 1858 · French — primary, as act

• Du Texas

  Victor Considerant · 1857 · French — primary, as act

• Statuts de la Societe de Colonisation Europeeo-Americaine au Texas

  SCEAT founders (corporate) · 1854 · French — primary, as act

• Die sozialistische Expedition nach Texas

  Karl Bürkli · 4–5 September 1858 · German — primary, as act

• Do Ameryki i w Ameryce (To America and in America)

  Kalikst Wolski · 1876 · Polish — primary, as act

• Au Texas!!! (The Fulfillment!! / Twelve Years Afterwards)

  signs "C…" / "M.A. Col."; working identification F. Collas (Uriel #168) — evidence in findings · letter dated 1 Sept 1855 ("Mutuelle"); published 1858 in Jean Journet, Documents Apostoliques et Propheties (Paris), pp. 154–174 · French original (not held); English translation only — primary, as act

• White Cliffs of Dallas

  George H. Santerre · 1955 · English — secondary

• The Effect of the Assimilation of the La Reunion Colonists on the Development of Dallas and Dallas County

  Velma Irene Sandell · 1986 · English — secondary

• La Reunion colonist biographies (Au Texas / Maitron-derived)

  Michel Cordillot · 2003 · French — secondary

• La Réunion, a French Settlement in Texas

  William J. Hammond & Margaret F. Hammond · 1958 · English — secondary

• La Réunion as Social Mirror of Frontier Texas and Icon of Modern Dallas

  Donald J. Kagay · c. 2011 · English — secondary

• Sabotaged: Dreams of Utopia in Texas

  James Pratt · 2020 · English — secondary

• Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism

  Jonathan Beecher · 2001 · English — secondary

The register

Work-level survey of the whole corpus, ranked on explicit axes. This is the evidentiary map; per-source dossiers live alongside it (src/sources/<id>/dossier.md), file-level detail stays in INVENTORY.md. Built on the source hierarchy and matching method in CLAUDE.md and the full file catalog.

How to read it

The unit is the work/witness, not the file (Savardan = one row, not his PDF + OCR). Ranking is on separate axes — there is no single "importance" score, because the corpus has high-importance/low-reliability witnesses (Santerre) and central/unreliable ones (Considerant) that one number would mislead on.

• Stratum — act (participant writing during, with motive) · testimony (record, low rhetoric) · secondary (later reconstruction). See README.md.
• Central — bearing on the core questions (why it failed · the post-colony build-Dallas trajectory · property/land · identity resolution). H / M / L.
• Unique — is it the only witness to its content? H = sole witness (no triangulation; lean hardest on source criticism).
• Reliability — by domain, not global. Carried in the notes.
• Status — transcription + dossier state. ✦ = has a dossier.

The centrality/uniqueness/reliability calls are a first pass — adjudicate them. The high-value action items are the danger cells and the to-dossier queue at the bottom.

Tier 1 — core witnesses (cross-stratum)

The dozen the project actually rests on. Read these first.

Primary — as act (participants, with motive)

The motive is data. Where these three core voices — Considerant, Savardan, Bürkli — diverge on why it failed is the project's central Rashomon node.

The Considerant↔Savardan half of that node is worked out claim-by-claim in considerant_savardan_correspondence.md — Naufrage (1858) is a page-by-page rebuttal of Du Texas (1857), mapped here chapter-by-chapter (Mique, Cousin, the flight, the funds tally). Start there before settling any Considerant claim.

Primary — as testimony (records, low rhetoric)

Closest to fact; still gapped (a deed records a price, not a reason). Several are high-value but locked up untranscribed — see danger cells.

Secondary (later reconstruction)

Judged on method + access, not motive.

Danger cells — high stakes, low support

Where conclusions are most exposed (central + low-reliability and/or sole witness). These need the most source-critical care:

• Santerre, White Cliffs — high centrality, sole witness for many colonist names, low reliability on specifics. Every Santerre-only fact is a hypothesis, not a fact. Identity resolution leans on it hardest.
• Ship manifests — sole witness to arrivals. All three now transcribed (Nuremberg 307 / Uriel 211 / Lexington ~267; rosters in doc/colonists/ships/). Danger cell cleared, though Lexington's per-name reliability is low (faint scan) and Uriel/Lexington still warrant a high-res second pass on the French/Swiss blocks. Next: mine the rosters against COLONISTS.md / Cordillot.
• SCEAT map — sole support for the railroad-corridor thesis (a load-bearing claim), held only as an image with no transcription/analysis.
• Wolski / Colas — the only eyewitness-outsider and the only hostile contemporary voices; each is single and motivated, so each is both precious and uncorroborated.
• Frenchtown retrospectives — frequently the only source for a colorful anecdote, but they are memory 40–100 years on. Sole-witness + low-reliability.
• Considerant Du Texas — central but maximally motivated; never settle a material fact on it alone. Its specific claims are answered point-by-point by Savardan in considerant_savardan_correspondence.md — check the rebuttal first.

To-dossier queue (next promotions)

Sources important enough to deserve a src/sources/<id>/dossier.md but lacking one:

1. ~~Wolski~~ — done (wolski/dossier.md; Reunion chapters transcribed PL+EN). 2. Colas, Au Texas!!! — the adversarial primary voice; gives the corpus a genuine opposing witness. 3. Considerant press coverage (1848–58) — as a single "reception" dossier; the perception-as-it-happened layer. 4. Deed records — a class dossier (the testimony spine deserves its weighting note even though it's structured, not narrative). 5. Ship manifests — class dossier (transcription gap now closed; all three rostered). 6. ~~Hammond~~ — done (hammond.md; clean text from Gutenberg #58590). 7. Pratt / Rey — triage dossiers once read.

To acquire — known but not in repo

Sources cited elsewhere (chiefly Pratt's bibliography) that we don't hold and that would materially help:

1. Eloise Santerre, "Reunion, a Translation of Dr. Savardan's Un naufrage au Texas… with a Bibliographical Dictionary of the Settlers" (MA thesis, SMU, 1936). An existing English translation of Savardan + a settler dictionary — check before doing the pending Savardan translation from scratch. 2. Amédée Simonin, diary (Library of Congress; interlinear translation by Alexandra Pratt) — primary colonist diary, 1855–56. 3. Julien Reverchon, diary (Dallas Historical Society) — primary. 4. Alice Bureau, diary (Gabrielle Cadier-Rey private collection) — primary. 5. Wolski, American Impressions (Coleman trans., 1968) — the fuller English translation. (The Polish original, Do Ameryki i w Ameryce, is now held; this remains useful as an accessible rendering beyond the New Light excerpt.) 6. Considerant, The Great West (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1854) — the U.S.-facing 1854 pitch, companion to Au Texas; distinct from the held European Colonization in Texas (1855). Located, public domain (HathiTrust htid uiug.30112112353716) but gated to automated download — pointer + links at doc/text/books/1800/considerant/the_great_west/SOURCE.md. Grab via browser, then transcribe. 7. Davidson, Did We Think Victory Great? (University Press of America, 1988) — the pre-Beecher English Considerant biography. Out of print and scarce; likely superseded by Beecher (2001) — low priority. (His 1973 SWHQ article is already held; see below.) 8. Fairchild, "Fourierism's Feminine Defender… Clarisse Vigoureux," Romance Quarterly 50.3 (2003): 186–194 — paywalled; ILL/author-direct. The one scholarly lead on the women / musical-life gap (see Known coverage gaps). See sources/bibliography/authors/fairchild. 9. Verlet, Des pionniers au Texas, 1850–1880 (2012) — Verlet's monograph (Castroville / Panna Maria / Cabet / Réunion). Only the review is online (now held); the book is not. Fullest modern French treatment by the Swiss-contingent scholar. 10. Cordillot, La Sociale en Amérique (Éd. de l'Atelier, 2002) — the full biographical-dictionary volume behind the held Cordillot excerpts. 11. German/Swiss layer — Karl Bürkli scholarship (the East-Dallas / Swiss-contingent thread; no open full-text trove — fourier.ch is the Swiss army quartermasters' assoc., a name collision). Priority: Schiedt, Die Welt neu erfinden. Karl Bürkli (1823–1901) und seine Schriften (Chronos, 2002) — the definitive modern study, the German Beecher-equivalent; Hafner, Karl Bürkli. Der Sozialist vom Paradeplatz (Echtzeit, 2023) — new biography; Lang, Karl Bürkli, ein Pionier des schweizerischen Sozialismus (1920) — a Univ. of Zürich PhD diss., public-domain but not found digitized (e-rara / Helveticat / Sozialarchiv). Ref: HLS art. 013413 (Bürgi, free). The German side independently corroborates the slavery-pressure axis. 12. "Escape to—and from—Utopia: Fourierist Philosophy and Musical Life in the Colony of La Réunion, Texas," American Music 33.2 (2015): 141–175 — peer-reviewed; the strongest women/music-gap source. Author unconfirmed (Fairchild vs J. M. Cooper); paywalled, ILL. 13. Lamarche, "Les usages du droit dans les communautés utopiques aux États-Unis (1843–1878)" (PhD diss., Paris-Nanterre, 2022) — legal/constitutional history of US utopian communities (Fourierists + Icarians) incl. the Réunion era; feeds the SCEAT-statutes / corporate-structure / deeds line. Open-access (HAL tel-03987882) but bot-gated; pointer doc/text/theses/la_reunion/lamarche_2022_SOURCE.md. 14. Lead: Cahiers Charles Fourier n°33 (2022), "Expérimentations fouriéristes, États-Unis" — a US-experiments issue (Bestor/Brisbane, Lamarche/North American Phalanx, Pendery/Brook Farm); American context, not Réunion. Article URLs not scrapeable; access via charlesfourier.fr/spip.php?rubrique141.

Acquired since first draft: Pratt Sabotaged and Beecher's Considerant biography — reading notes now held (see secondary table); full volumes still useful but no longer blocking. Rejebian, "La Réunion: The French Colony in Dallas County" (SWHQ 43.4, 1940, pp. 472–478) — the earliest scholarly article, now held (OCR transcription doc/text/articles/la_reunion/la_reunion_french_colony_rejebian_1940.md, via the Portal to Texas History). French-scholarship layer — Cahiers Charles Fourier dossier: ten full-text articles (Guarneri, Beecher-FR, Verlet ×3, Pratt, Desmars, Güttler, Clermont, Brémand) now held in doc/text/articles/la_reunion/cahiers_charles_fourier/ (FR + EN translations). The under-tapped French layer flagged in "Known coverage gaps" — partly closed. Source: charlesfourier.fr (Association d'études fouriéristes). Biographical notices — Dictionnaire biographique du fouriérisme: eight leadership notices (Considerant, Cantagrel, Bureau, Savardan, Godin, Guillon, Daly, Allen) now held in doc/text/biographies/ (FR + EN; Allen natively English) — the colonist-map feeder.

To promote (held, under-triaged): Davidson, "Victor Considérant and the Failure of La Réunion," SWHQ 76.3 (Jan 1973) — held as doc/text/articles/considerant/secondary/davidson_considerant_failure.pdf but logged above only as a generic "davidson" PDF; deserves a proper citation and dossier triage.

Known coverage gaps

• The transition period (1857–1873) is thin in the primaries — the act-voices (Savardan, Bürkli, Considerant) end ~1858; Sandell + the deed record carry it, largely alone.
• Women appear chiefly as deed-signing widows; utopia_for_women.pdf and Fairchild's research (sources/bibliography/authors/fairchild) are the only leads.
• Colonists who left or failed are nearly absent from every stratum — a gap, not an absence of such people.