Hello historians, thanks for reading and I hope this is ok here. I'm doing research for my partner's family and his great grandfather has a mysterious background based in the Redbone settlement that developed in the Sabine area of the Louisiana Neutral Zone.

The neutral zone was a strip of Louisiana owned by neither the US nor Spain, and as a result became a No Man's Land. President John Quincy Adams called it "America's back door" because after the abolition of slave importation, slave ships came there. Outlaws, runaway slaves and anyone running from something came there. It was truly a Wild West sort of environment and feuds, murders, duels and shoot outs were common place even after the land became part of Louisiana officially.

One of the peoples to settle there were called Redbones - ethnically mixed people that are considered to likely be white European, African and native American, though at the time they claimed none of those. They were an insulated community that were considered warrior like. They frequently fought among themselves but would band together to protect each other from outside influence. There were famous feuds involving them, including one day long shoot out that was instigated by a white man approaching a Redbone girl.

My spouse's great grandfather lived in this area and from everything we are finding, his mother was a Redbone and his father was a white man. The family story is that the mother was murdered by the Klan, but that may have mutated over the years.

I've been working on this for awhile and feel like I've reached an impasse for official records. There's no record of this murder, or where his great grandfather was raised. I know this is a long shot but I feel like my best bet is someone maybe local, or who has studied this area and /or the Redbones. Thanks for reading.