According to “Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow,” the settlement predated emancipation: “The remote Boykin, Bibles Hill, and Wilson Creek settlements all began with white-led, mixed-race families—families that probably could not have lived together at any place but a freedmen’s settlement. …The Boykin and Bibles Hill communities both began before Emancipation. Johnny Bibles settled on the Middle Fork of the Bosque River in Bosque County in 1855 with four Indian wives and several mulatto slaves, by whom he also fathered children. Bibles seems to have been of mixed race himself, though contemporaries thought he looked more Indian than anything else. Bibles avoided contact with white people, for whom he had great distaste, and in time a mixed-race clan of Bibles grew up along the remote Bosque. Ada Davis, who knew the settlement well, wrote in the 1930s: ‘‘The Bibles negroes of the middle Bosque are his [ Johnny Bibles’] descendents. They are a fiery set, with prominent characteristics of white, Indian, and negro races. They are defiant and zealous of their rights.’”