AUSTIN — They called him humble and hardscrabble, a bit of a loner.

He was a father, at times absentee, a gold prospector and, in his 50s, an enlisted man in the Confederate Army. Some in the Creek Nation, where he ran after shooting a man in 1855, knew him as the "Colonel."

John Neely Bryan called himself a farmer, but he's best known as the founder of Dallas. And yet, just months before his death, the first white man to stake claim to the bluff above the Trinity River was being described not as a politician or a pioneer, sojourner or soldier, but as a man who had lost his mind.

"I am the son of John Neely Bryan, now before the court," Edward T. Bryan testified on Feb. 1, 1877. "My father is insane."

'He is demented'

More than 100 years after his death, John Neely Bryan was recently back in the news. This week, the city of Austin released a report on its many visible ties to slavery, including streets, landmarks, and yes, even the capital's namesake himself.

That prompted Dallas Morning News reporter Claire Z. Cardona to ask how the city of Dallas got its name, since it was obviously not named for its founder. Buried in Claire's tale of mystery, about five paragraphs in, was a thought-provoking fact: "By the time he had died in 1877 at the State Lunatic Asylum, he had dubbed the city Dallas."

So if Bryan died at the asylum, which is in Austin, is he buried there?

It's easy to miss the asylum's cemetery, tucked away on a residential street a few dozen blocks north of the Capitol building. Flanked by a shopping center on one side and condos on the other, the place looks more like a vacant lot than a final resting place. It boasts just a handful of visible headstones and lacks any real greenery or landscaping.

The gate is always locked.

For more than 125 years, the state has buried the unclaimed remains of patients from the asylum on this small plot of land. More than 2,800 are interred there, including, by all accounts, the man who founded what is now the third largest city in Texas.

On a recent visit to the Austin State Hospital cemetery, four freshly dug graves awaited their inhabitants.

The sun shone down on the few headstones sticking awkwardly out of the dry earth like baby teeth. Cars rushed past, ignorant to the hundred years of history and thousands of souls hidden beneath the soil. A short walk from the entrance, in the far southeast corner, a lonely marker sat under the mingled shade of a mesquite tree and the District 51 Condominiums.

"John Neely Bryan," it simply states, "Founder of Dallas Texas."

But, really, Bryan's remains may not be there at all.

The founder's family committed him to the asylum (renamed the Austin State Hospital in 1925) when he was 66. Bryan had lived a rough life, much of it by choice, and by 1877 his mind was all but gone.

"His lucid intervals are very short, indeed only a few minutes at a time," Bryan's son Edward said at his father's "lunacy hearing" that year, according to a copy of the transcript provided to The Dallas Morning News by historian M.C. Toyer. He "talks foolishly and sometimes becomes very furious and wants to fight.

"He sometimes tries to burn up his bed clothes and tries to get away, says this is not his home, tries to get through the walls of the house."

While some have reported Bryan was committed for alcoholism, this was likely only part of the reason. Bryan had "steadfastly held to sobriety" in his twilight years, the son of one of Bryan's closest friends said, so the founder's fits were more likely attributable to the infirmities brought on from years of drinking combined with dementia.

"Having today examined Mr John Neely Bryan as to lunacy — I am of the opinion that he is demented, his condition being that of imbecility," Dr. J. W. Childers said at the time. "The cause is most probably intemperance and age."

Bryan spent less than 7 months at the asylum, living alongside men and women committed for everything from syphilis to schizophrenia, behaving promiscuously to bouncing checks. During his confinement, patients were still buried on the grounds, said historian Sarah Sitton, who wrote a book on the asylum, and it's likely he would have been able to see the cemetery where he'd soon be buried out of the patient ward's window.

John Neely Bryan died on Sept. 8, 1877. But his family wouldn't find out for several days. The mystery of his final resting place begins here.

'Buried ... as soon as possible'

The Bryan cabin in downtown Dallas is a replica, not the original, and the monument in Pioneer Park Cemetery is not the site where he was buried, said Toyer. Bryan's widow, Margaret, made the trip to Austin in the days after her husband's death, but it's extremely unlikely she brought the body back to Dallas.

"There's nothing in the family history that suggests that at all," Toyer said, adding the Bryans were "very poor" at that time and likely unable to afford to transport the body. "It was not an uncommon thing for anybody to be buried exactly where they died as soon as possible."

Because no one immediately claimed his remains, historians agree Bryan was likely buried on the asylum grounds, either in a simple pine box or with other patients in an open trench wrapped in a sheet. Soon after, the entire cemetery was moved from the hospital grounds to its current location.

Remains from the original plots are believed to have been reinterred in the new cemetery's southeast corner. At first, graves were marked with wooden stakes that rotted away over time. Eventually, the hospital began marking them with numbers chiseled onto flat slabs. Patients are still buried here — the last on March 6 — and those with means can erect headstones.

But Bryan didn't get one until 2006. His descendants, including one who shares the founder's name, placed a military marker in the general area where they believe he's probably buried. Bryan's namesake wanted to use ground-penetrating radar to make sure they had the right spot, but that idea was abandoned.

1 / 8A headstone marking the likely final resting place of John Neely Bryan at the Austin State Hospital cemetery was photographed on May 23, 2018. Bryan, the founder of Dallas, was committed to the hospital in Austin, then known as the State Lunatic Asylum, in February 1877 and died in September of that year.(Lauren McGaughy / Staff) 2 / 8A numbered slab marking the final resting place of a patient who died at the Austin State Hospital, known as the State Lunatic Asylum until 1925, was photographed on May 23 in Austin.(Lauren McGaughy / Staff) 3 / 8In this 2006 file photo, John Neely Bryan, great-great-grandson of the Dallas founder, stands by the headstone that will be dedicated Saturday at the Austin State Hospital Cemetery in Austin.(File Photo / Dallas Morning News) 4 / 8In this 2006 file photo, John Neely Bryan kneels by the headstone that will be dedicated Saturday at the Austin State Hospital Cemetery in Austin. (File Photo / Dallas Morning News) 5 / 8In 2006, members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans George W. Littlefield Camp #59 fire three cannon rounds in honor of John Neely Bryan, Dallas founder and Confederate soldier, during the dedication ceremony of Bryan's headstone at the Austin State Hospital Cemetery in Austin.(File Photo / Dallas Morning News) 6 / 8Drawing of John Neely Bryan, founder of Dallas. 7 / 8A replica of John Neely Bryan Cabin is pictured in Founders Plaza on Elm Street in downtown Dallas. The Old Red Courthouse rises above the cabin.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer) 8 / 8The John Neely Bryan memorial stands before the Confederate War Memorial in Pioneer Park cemetery in downtown Dallas.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

A small ceremony was held on Oct. 21, 2006. The Sons of the Confederacy brought a military band and cannon, and Toyer ballyhooed the founder as "a true American pioneer — one of the valiant few, who blaze the trail, and take the risk, and chart the course where others follow." A headstone was unveiled, which, was later revealed to be wrong (it swapped Bryan's rank and company with his son's, according to Steven R. Butler, who wrote the most recent biography of the founder).

But it's unclear whether Bryan's remains really reside underneath it. Maybe they were left interred on the asylum grounds. Maybe they fell off the cart en route to the new cemetery, which local residents remember happening more than once. Or maybe there's another option no one has yet guessed.

Was the founder of Dallas really buried in a unmarked grave in Austin? Probably. Is he buried right there, on that spot in the Austin State Hospital cemetery? Maybe.

"To the best of my knowledge the actual location or even approximate location of his grave is basically just a guess," Butler said. "We assume he was buried there among the other inmates of the institution and it's just too bad they didn't keep better records.

"It's a shame."

Much like how the city of Dallas got its name, its founder's true resting place is likely to remain a mystery.