In Memory of Thomas Christian, William Strother and Josiah Wilbarger
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In Memory of Thomas Christian, William Strother and Josiah Wilbarger, members of a party of five who were attacked near here by Indians in August, 1833. Christian and Strother were killed, Wilbarger was scalped and eventually died of his wounds. The other two escaped.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In August 1833 a party of five men was attacked near this spot in what was then Mexican Texas. Thomas Christian and William Strother were killed, and Josiah Wilbarger was scalped—famously surviving the ordeal for years before eventually dying of his lingering wounds—while two of the party escaped. The episode became one of the best-known frontier survival stories of early Texas.
Why it matters
The memorial recalls the dangers of the settlement frontier in the years just before Texas independence, when Anglo colonists and Native peoples clashed along the Colorado River.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In August of 1833, the spot this memorial marks was not part of any American state. It was Mexican Texas — a vast, thinly settled frontier that the government in Mexico City had opened to Anglo-American colonists through empresario land grants a decade earlier. Families poured in from the United States, drawn by cheap, fertile land along rivers like the Colorado, which winds past this very place. But the land was not empty, and it was not theirs alone.
The Texas of the early 1830s was a borderland in every sense. Mexican authority was distant and stretched thin; the Anglo settlements were young, scattered, and often beyond the reach of any organized protection. Tensions that would soon explode into the Texas Revolution were already simmering. And across this whole region moved Native peoples — Comanche, Tonkawa, and others — who had hunted, traveled, and lived on these lands for generations and who watched the newcomers arrive with alarm.
Into that uneasy world rode a small party of five men, doing the ordinary work of the frontier: scouting, surveying, or simply moving through country that had no roads and few neighbors. What happened to them here was not extraordinary for the time. That is precisely what makes it worth remembering.
People & events
The marker names three men — Thomas Christian, William Strother, and Josiah Wilbarger — three of the five who were attacked near this place. When the fighting was over, Christian and Strother lay dead. Two of the party managed to escape and carry word of the disaster. And Wilbarger, gravely wounded and scalped, was left for dead on the ground.
He was not dead. Wilbarger survived — an outcome so unlikely that it turned a frontier tragedy into one of the most retold survival stories of early Texas. Scalping was, in most cases, a mortal wound, yet he lived, was found, and was carried to safety. For years afterward he went on with his life, carrying the marks of that August day, before the lingering effects of his injuries finally claimed him.
It is his endurance, more than the violence itself, that fixed this episode in memory. Neighbors and later generations repeated the account, and it passed into the folklore of the region. Stripped of the embellishments that such stories always gather, the core is what the marker preserves: two men killed, two escaped, and one who should not have lived but did.
Its place in the American story
This small memorial speaks to a chapter that unfolded all across the American frontier, not only in Texas. Wherever settlers pushed into lands already inhabited, the same collision took place — families seeking new land, and Native peoples defending homes and hunting grounds they had held long before any deed was written. The names on this stone stand in for countless others whose encounters left no marker at all.
What makes this site distinctly Texan is its timing. In 1833, Texas independence was still three years away and American statehood more than a decade off. The people attacked here were subjects of Mexico, colonists on a frontier that would soon be swept into revolution. The dangers they faced were part of what drew settlers together, hardened their sense of themselves, and shaped the identity of the republic that was about to be born.
And the story reminds us that the settlement of the West was neither peaceful nor inevitable. Behind the tidy maps of grants and townsites lay real risk and real loss — borne by settlers and, just as heavily and far less often memorialized, by the Native nations whose world was being remade.
If you visit
Come to this place expecting quiet. The memorial sits in what has become part of greater Austin, but the story it tells belongs to a moment when this was open, unmapped country along the Colorado River. Stand for a minute and let the modern surroundings fall away; the men named here would have known only trees, water, and distance.
Read the three names slowly — Thomas Christian, William Strother, Josiah Wilbarger. A marker like this does its work best when you let the individuals register as people rather than as a date and a death toll. One of them survived something almost no one survived, and that fact alone is worth a pause.
If you're building a road trip through Texas history, this makes a fitting first stop before the grander sites of the Republic and revolution. It grounds the story where it really began: not in capitols and battlefields, but on the exposed edge of settlement, where ordinary people met extraordinary danger. Pair it with a drive along the Colorado to feel the landscape that shaped their world.
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
- · Thomas Christian
- · William Strother
- · Josiah Wilbarger
Themes & tags
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