Site of Indian Battle
Brady vicinity, McCulloch County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In this vicinity On November 21, 1831 James Bowie, Rezin P. Bowie, David Buchanan, Cephas D. Hamm, Matthew Doyle, Jesse Wallace, Thomas McCaslin, Robert Armstrong, James Coryell with two servants, Charles and Gonzales, held at bay for a day and a night, 164 Caddos and Lipans. After 80 warriors had been killed, the Indians withdrew Erected by the State of Texas 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
According to this 1936 state marker, on November 21, 1831, a small party led by James and Rezin Bowie fought off a far larger force of Caddo and Lipan warriors near this spot, holding out through a day and a night. The clash took place in Mexican Texas, years before the Texas Revolution, as Anglo-American adventurers pressed into contested Indian and Spanish-Mexican borderlands. The Bowie name later became legend through James Bowie's death at the Alamo.
Why it matters
The encounter dramatizes the violent collision of Anglo settlers, Mexican authority, and Native nations that defined the Texas frontier before independence.
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Related people
- · James Bowie
- · Rezin P. Bowie
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Pegleg Crossing on the San Saba
Menard, TX
This hourglass-shaped pass where McDougal Creek meets the San Saba River was a favored Native American campground long before it entered written history in 1732 as the site of a Spanish-Apache battle. Over the following generations it saw mustang hunters, Indian fighters, German settlers, and gold-seekers pass through, and it became a stagecoach station named—so the story goes—for a one-legged land commissioner. Its nearby 'Robbers' Roost' gained notoriety for hold-ups, and the crossing later served the Great Western Cattle Trail.
McCulloch County
Brady, TX
Created in 1856 from the vast Bexar territory, McCulloch County honors Ben McCulloch, a Texas hero who fought in the Revolution and in the Indian, Mexican, and Civil Wars. Frontier and Indian dangers slowed settlement so severely that two decades passed before the buffalo were hunted off and ranches took hold, and the county finally organized in 1876 with Brady as its seat. It holds the geographic center of Texas and the site of the 1831 Calf Creek fight, where James Bowie battled a much larger Indian force.
1870s Cowboy-Indian Fight
Calf Creek vicinity, TX
Near Calf Creek in 1874 or 1875, a band of eighteen Indians ambushed W.B. Brown and two companions, seizing horses, bedrolls, and provisions but letting the men escape with their lives. The episode belongs to the last years of the Southern Plains wars, when Native peoples driven off their hunting ranges struck at settlers' supplies as small victories in a losing struggle. It preserves the texture of frontier conflict in West-Central Texas at the close of the open range.
Onion Creek Indian Fight
Brady vicinity, TX
One night in 1866, five men from Richland Springs tracked stolen horses to an Indian camp near this spot and recovered them in a sharp encounter. A metal arrow struck a Mr. Lafferty and slid halfway around his skull; it was cut out with a pocketknife, and remarkably he survived. The grave of an Indian killed in the fight lies about thirty yards to the north.