Bandera Pass
Bandera vicinity, Bandera County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Celebrated Indian pass known from the earliest days of Spanish settlement. Identified with many a frontier fight and many a hostile inroad. Old Ranger trail from the Medina to the Guadalupe River and the United States Army route between frontier posts followed this route through the mountains.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This gap through the mountains has been a celebrated crossing since the earliest days of Spanish settlement, linking the Medina and Guadalupe river country. Generations of frontier fighting and raiding passed through it, and it served as an old Texas Ranger trail as well as a U.S. Army route between frontier posts. Its narrow passage made it a natural chokepoint in the contested Hill Country.
Why it matters
Bandera Pass stands as a landmark of the long frontier struggle among Spanish, Native, and American peoples for control of central Texas.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Penateka Comanches
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The Penateka, or "honey eaters," were the southernmost band of the Comanche, ranging across the Edwards Plateau and following the buffalo on which they depended for food, clothing, and shelter. Renowned horsemen, they made settlement west of this area perilous for decades. Pressure from Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army's Second Cavalry, reservation removals, and the Red River War of 1874–75 forced the Comanche onto reservation lands, where the breakup of holdings in 1901 scattered the people — who have since worked to rebuild their shared culture.
Bandera Pass
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For thousands of years this narrow gap in the hills between the Guadalupe and Medina valleys funneled travelers through the Texas Hill Country. Comanche and Apache trails converged here, a Swiss botanist recorded native burial customs at the pass in 1828, and by the 1840s it saw patrols and clashes between Texas Rangers and Native peoples. Later it carried U.S. Army surveyors mapping routes to California, then cattle drives up the Western Trail, and finally a state highway.
Site of Camp Verde
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The U.S. Army opened Camp Verde in 1855 to guard the Texas frontier, and the next year it became headquarters for one of the country's strangest military experiments: some forty camels imported at Secretary of War Jefferson Davis's urging, tested as pack animals for crossing the arid Southwest before the idea was judged impractical. Confederate forces took the post in 1861; the U.S. Army returned in 1865 and abandoned it in 1869. The camel corps remains one of the most memorable curiosities of the antebellum army.
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Established by the U.S. Army in 1855, this frontier post became the headquarters of one of the nineteenth century's most unusual experiments: a herd of camels imported at the urging of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to test overland transport across the arid Southwest. The scheme proved impractical, and the post changed hands with the times — surrendered to the Confederacy in 1861, reoccupied by the U.S. Army in 1865, and abandoned in 1869.