Kiowa Raid of 1868 (SW Part of County)
Valley View, Cooke County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On Jan. 5-6, 1868, Chief Big Tree and 150 to 200 Kiowas raided Willa Walla Valley, Clear Creek and Blocker Creek. Burned homes; killed 13 people; scalped one woman alive. Captured 10 women and children; 3 escaped, 2 were ransomed. Raiders reached Elm Creek at Gainesville before blizzard forced withdrawal. More damage and deaths would have resulted if George Masoner had not become the "Paul Revere" of valleys and warned settlers of impending danger. Indian raids such as this one were in retaliation for loss of hunting grounds to settlers. (1968)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On January 5–6, 1868, a large Kiowa war party swept through the valleys of Cooke County, burning homes and killing thirteen settlers before a blizzard forced them back. Captives were taken, some escaping or ransomed, and the toll might have climbed higher had a settler named George Masoner not ridden ahead like a frontier Paul Revere to warn the scattered farms. The raid was one episode in the long, brutal struggle as Kiowa and Comanche bands answered the loss of their hunting grounds to encroaching settlement.
Why it matters
Raids like this were the violent frontier edge of westward expansion, where Native nations fought the settlers taking their land.
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Related people
- · Big Tree
- · George Masoner
Related events
- · Kiowa Raid of January 1868
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Cross Timbers
Gainesville, TX
The Cross Timbers are two long belts of dense oak woodland running from Oklahoma into central Texas, standing in sharp relief against the open prairie on either side. To Plains and East Texas peoples the timber marked a natural boundary between hunting grounds; to nineteenth-century travelers it was both a famous landmark and a stubborn obstacle to wagons. Into the 1870s it defined the edge of Anglo settlement, since Plains Indians avoided the thick growth.
Gainesville
Gainesville, TX
Founded in 1850 and named for General Edmund P. Gaines, whose troops had backed the young Republic of Texas in 1836, Gainesville sat on the edge of the frontier in Cooke County. It served as a Confederate military supply headquarters during the Civil War and long stood as a bulwark against raids, while growing into a hub of agriculture, industry, and oil — and home to the famed Gainesville Community Circus.
Forester Ranch
Sanger, TX
William S. Forester drove his family from Tennessee to the Denton County frontier in the early 1850s and carved out a ranch on open range still contested with Native peoples, a danger that cost his teenage son Sol his life while herding cattle. His son Lock, a Confederate veteran, expanded the spread past 6,000 acres and made its "Two I Jinglebob" brand well known, before a third generation carried the ranch into the twentieth century. For over a century the Forester Ranch shaped the cattle country of North Texas.
A. H. Fortenberry
Slidell, TX
In the 1850s A. H. 'Sevier' Fortenberry brought his family from Arkansas into what was then raw Texas wilderness, farming and raising stock while joining his neighbors to fend off raids on the scattered settlements. On October 30, 1868, he was intercepted and killed by Indians as he rode to join a defensive posse, and was laid to rest in Denton County's Pollard Cemetery. He is remembered as likely the last person killed in the Indian conflicts of this vicinity.