Colonel William B. Ochiltree
Perryton, Ochiltree County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Secretary treasury and last attorney general Republic of Texas. Secession Convention delegate 1861. Influential member Provisional Congress which drafted Confederate Constitution, mobilized manpower, set up financial structure, elected political leaders. Resigned to raise 18th Texas Infantry. Led troops to Arkansas in 1862 when regiment called in campaign to repel Union forces from state. A memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy Erected by the State of Texas 1963.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
William B. Ochiltree helped build two governments and then took up arms for a third. He served the Republic of Texas as secretary of the treasury and its last attorney general, then in 1861 sat as a secession delegate and a member of the Provisional Confederate Congress that drafted the Confederacy's constitution and mobilized its war effort. Resigning from politics, he raised the 18th Texas Infantry and led it into Arkansas in 1862 to help repel Union forces. This memorial, erected by the State of Texas in 1963, honors Texans who served the Confederacy.
Why it matters
Ochiltree's career maps the trajectory of a generation of Texas leaders — from the independent Republic through statehood into the Confederacy — and the mid-20th-century memorial marks how that legacy was later commemorated.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
William B. Ochiltree's career spans three Texas governments in a single lifetime. When he rose to office, Texas was an independent nation. The Republic of Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836 and spent almost a decade as a country of its own. It was short of money, exposed on its borders, and argued constantly over whether to join the United States. Running its treasury or serving as its chief lawyer meant governing a country that was never sure it would last.
Annexation in 1845 settled that question, and Texas became a state. Within a generation the country was coming apart over slavery and its spread into the West. In early 1861 a Texas convention voted to leave the Union, and Texas joined the other seceding states in forming the Confederate States of America.
This marker also belongs to a second era: the one in which it was made. The State of Texas put it up in 1963, during the national centennial of the Civil War. Across the South at that time, states placed memorials to Confederate service. Those markers tell you about the people they name, and also about how the mid-twentieth century chose to remember the war.
People & events
Ochiltree first shows up in the record as a builder of the Republic. He served as its secretary of the treasury, a hard job in a young nation whose finances were famously shaky. He was also its last attorney general, still holding that office when the Republic gave way to statehood. He was part of the small group of men who kept an improvised country running.
When secession came in 1861, he was a delegate to the convention that voted Texas out of the Union. He then went to the Provisional Confederate Congress. The inscription describes a body doing a remarkable amount of work very quickly. It drafted a constitution, raised soldiers, built a financial system from nothing, and chose political leaders. Ochiltree had helped build one government's institutions, and now he helped build another's.
Then he left the legislature for the field. He resigned from Congress to raise a regiment, the 18th Texas Infantry. In 1862, when Union forces pushed into Arkansas, the regiment was called there and he led it. He had moved from the treasury office to the convention hall to the Congress to the head of a column of soldiers, in about twenty-five years.
Its place in the American story
Ochiltree's life follows a path many Texas leaders of his generation took: from the independent Republic, through statehood, into the Confederacy. Few other states had a nation's worth of institutions behind them before joining the Union, and men like him carried that experience into each new government.
His work in the Provisional Confederate Congress ties this spot in the far Panhandle to one of the central events in American history. The Confederacy was formed to protect slavery, and the war it started would decide whether the Union survived and whether slavery ended. The men who wrote its founding documents and raised its first regiments set that conflict in motion.
The 1963 date matters too. Centennial-era memorials like this one are now historical objects in their own right. They show how Americans a century after the war framed its memory, in language that honored service and left out the cause. Reading the marker with both eras in mind gives you the fullest picture.
If you visit
You'll find the marker in Perryton, in the flat, wide-open country at the top of the Texas Panhandle, close to the Oklahoma line. Ochiltree County carries his name, which says something about his standing in Texas memory. It is also worth noticing that the man it honors did his work hundreds of miles from here, in the older settled parts of the state.
Take a minute with the inscription and read it as a timeline. Republic, statehood, secession, Confederate Congress, Arkansas. It is a short account of how quickly Texas changed governments in the mid-1800s.
Perryton is a good stop on a drive across the High Plains. There are grain elevators on the skyline and big sky in every direction. Pair it with other Panhandle markers and you'll see how settlement, which came late to this corner of Texas, commemorated people and events from the state's much older past.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · William B. Ochiltree
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ochiltree County
Perryton, TX
Ochiltree County, in the Texas Panhandle, was carved from Young and Bexar territories, created in 1876 and formally organized in 1889. It honors William Beck Ochiltree (1811–1867), a Texas Supreme Court justice, treasury secretary, and the last attorney general of the Republic of Texas who later served in the legislature, backed secession in 1861, and became a Confederate colonel. The county seat moved from Ochiltree to Perryton in 1920.
John Hemphill
Canadian, TX
John Hemphill, born in 1803, sat as a United States senator from Texas on the eve of the Civil War and argued forcefully for his state's right to leave the Union. He was elected a delegate to the provisional Confederate Congress at Montgomery, which framed the new government's constitution and machinery, and he died in the Confederate capital of Richmond in 1862. This marker was raised by the State of Texas in 1963 to honor Texans who served the Confederacy.
County Named for Prominent Confederate Colonel O. M. Roberts
Miami, TX
Oran Milo Roberts presided over the 1861 convention that carried Texas out of the Union—prompting Sam Houston's wry verdict, 'I don't know what they will do, but Roberts is honest'—then raised the 11th Texas Infantry and led a brigade in Louisiana. He served as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court under the Confederacy, was removed by federal Reconstruction authorities, and later won two terms as governor. Roberts County in the Panhandle bears his name.
First Battle of Adobe Walls
Stinnett, TX
In the closing months of the Civil War, thousands of Comanche and Kiowa warriors — allied with the Confederacy — clashed with a Federal column of some 372 men led by the famed scout Col. Kit Carson near the ruins of an old trading post on the Canadian River. Though Carson mounted what he called the greatest fight of his career, the vastly outnumbered soldiers were forced to withdraw, making this one of the largest Indian engagements of the war. A decade later, some of the same warriors would face buffalo hunters at the 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls, a fight that helped open the Panhandle to settlement.