G. D. Cross
Jacksboro, Jack County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(1855 - 1941) Born in Arkansas. Served in Hunter's Texas Ranger Company 1873-1874, helping remove Indians from Texas. Later became merchant and farmer. Married Mary A. E. Shawver, 1881. Had 13 children. Built this picnic table (where his ranger unit once camped) to be used at family reunions. (1969)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
G. D. Cross, born in Arkansas in 1855, rode with a Texas Ranger company in the mid-1870s during the violent frontier campaigns that pushed Native peoples out of North Texas. He later settled into ordinary life as a merchant and farmer, raising thirteen children with his wife Mary. In his memory of those ranging days, he built a picnic table on the very ground where his unit had once camped, turning a former military bivouac into a gathering place for family reunions.
Why it matters
The marker captures the frontier-era Ranger service that opened West Texas to Anglo settlement — and the way an aging pioneer chose to memorialize that hard history with a family table on the old campsite.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1870s, Jack County sat on a violent frontier. Fort Richardson had been built near Jacksboro after the Civil War to guard the North Texas settlements. The region was contested ground between Anglo settlers pushing west and the Comanche and Kiowa peoples, who had hunted and raided across these plains for generations and were fighting to hold their homelands.
The fighting was brutal on both sides, and Jacksboro sat near the center of it. After the Civil War, Texas relied on companies of Texas Rangers, along with federal troops, to fight Native peoples on the frontier. In the mid-1870s, the Red River War brought a final, overwhelming military campaign that forced the Southern Plains tribes onto reservations in Indian Territory.
That is the context for a young Arkansas-born ranger's two years of service in 1873 and 1874. The marker says his company was 'helping remove Indians from Texas.' That plain phrase describes the end of Native independence on the Texas plains.
People & events
G. D. Cross was born in Arkansas in 1855. He was still a teenager when he joined Hunter's Texas Ranger Company, where he served in 1873 and 1874. The marker doesn't record battles or heroics, only that the company took part in the effort to drive Native peoples out of Texas. Rangers in those years spent long stretches in the saddle, patrolling, scouting and camping out in open country.
When his ranging days ended, Cross settled down. He became a merchant and a farmer, and in 1881 he married Mary A. E. Shawver. They raised a very large family of thirteen children, which says a lot about the life a frontier farm family took on once the region was 'settled.'
The detail that makes this marker memorable is a picnic table. On the spot where his ranger unit had once camped, Cross built a table for family reunions. A place tied to an armed frontier campaign became the place where his children and grandchildren gathered to eat and remember. The marker was placed in 1969.
Its place in the American story
Cross's short career as a ranger belongs to one of the defining and most troubling chapters of the American West: the forced removal of Native nations from lands that Anglo settlers wanted. What happened in North Texas in the 1870s matched what happened across the Great Plains. The Army, state forces and the mass destruction of the buffalo broke the independence of peoples like the Comanche and Kiowa.
For generations, markers like this one described that history only from the settlers' side, as the 'opening' of the land. Today we can read the same words more fully. They record a young man's service, and also the dispossession of people who had lived here long before Jack County existed.
The picnic table adds a very human element. It shows how pioneer families built their own memory of the frontier, turning a hard and violent past into a place where the family came together. How Americans remember is itself part of American history, and this marker preserves both the events and the way one family chose to honor them.
If you visit
This marker is in Jacksboro, a small North Texas town steeped in frontier history. When you stand here, think about the setting in the 1870s: open country, a ranger camp, and the constant possibility of conflict. Then think about how the same ground felt at a crowded family reunion decades later.
Nearby Fort Richardson is now a state park and historic site, and it's the natural companion to this marker. Its surviving buildings give the frontier-era Army and ranging campaigns something you can actually see. Together they give you a fuller picture of Jack County's contested past.
Jacksboro is an easy detour on a North Texas road trip northwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Bring your curiosity, and maybe a picnic lunch, and read the land with both of its stories in mind.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Jack County
Jacksboro, TX
Created in 1856 and named for Texas Revolution patriots W. H. and P. C. Jack, Jack County sat squarely on the violent post-Civil War frontier. Its citizens voted overwhelmingly against secession in 1861, and after the war Fort Richardson (1867) anchored the U.S. Army's campaigns against the Plains tribes. The 1871 Kiowa raid on the Warren Wagon Train prompted General Sherman to send Colonel Ranald MacKenzie after the raiders; the resulting trial of chiefs Satanta and Big Tree was among the first prosecutions of Plains Indians in a civilian court. The county was also, improbably, home to a 1907 corn club that helped seed the national 4-H movement.
Officers' Quarters
Jacksboro, TX
Built in 1867 from cottonwood cut in nearby river bottoms, this is one of five original officers' quarters at the Jacksboro army post and reputedly one of the last such structures standing in the country. Its style was typical of 19th-century western army posts. Among the officers quartered here was General Ranald S. MacKenzie, who led the campaigns that forced Native peoples onto reservations between 1871 and 1874.
James B. Dosher
Jacksboro, TX
James B. Dosher came to Texas in 1847 and rode with the Texas Rangers on the unsettled northern frontier before farming in Jack County. His life traced the arc of a hard border era, from Ranger companies to service with Confederate and Texas State forces during the Civil War. In 1870 he was scouting for the U.S. Army as a civilian guide when his gallantry at Bluff Creek earned him the Medal of Honor.
Fort Richardson
Jacksboro, TX
Established by the U.S. War Department in November 1867, Fort Richardson stood as the northernmost of a chain of posts guarding the Texas frontier against raids in the years after the Civil War. It was named for General Israel B. Richardson, mortally wounded at Antietam in 1862. As settlement pushed westward the fort's purpose faded, and it was abandoned in 1878; what stands here was partially reconstructed in 1936.