Military & Wartime

Abilene, TX

This monument honors Edward, James, and George Taylor, three sons of Anson Taylor said to have died in the fall of the Alamo on March 6, 1836. Taylor County was named in their memory, and the marker — erected by the Daughters of 1812 with the county's help — carries the famous line attributed to Alamo commander William Barret Travis: 'I shall never surrender or retreat.'

Georgetown, TX

John McQueen Taylor came to Texas from Tennessee in 1829 as a colonist in Lorenzo de Zavala's empresario grant, arriving while the region was still Mexican territory. He took part in the 1834 Anahuac disturbances and, as a soldier in the Texas Army, fought in the Grass Fight and the Siege of Bexar during the Revolution. He later served as a justice of the peace before settling in Williamson County to raise his family.

Comanche vicinity, TX

This burial ground began beside the Concord Primitive Baptist Church, organized before 1881 in the pioneer country north of Comanche, with its earliest marked grave that of F. M. Warren in that same year. Warren's father, Posey W. Warren, was a deacon and likely founder of the church, and the surrounding land belonged to large settler families like the Browns, one of whom was a Confederate veteran. When a Methodist congregation formed here in 1901 on land from Alabama native James "Hood" Taylor, the site took on the name Taylor's Chapel Cemetery.

Athens Township, PA · est. 1928

Where the Chemung meets the Susquehanna stood Teaoga, a Iroquois watch post guarding the southern approach to the confederacy's territory, and nearby the Delaware settlement remembered as Queen Esther's Town. The broad river flats were rich grazing land, but in September 1778 — amid the frontier warfare of the Revolution — Colonel Thomas Hartley's expedition swept up the valley and burned both towns. These raids were part of the escalating cycle of retaliation between Continental forces and Britain's Iroquois allies on the Pennsylvania frontier.

Cambridge, MA

In the last winter of World War II, Allied airmen flew punishing missions over the Balkans, striking Axis positions across a Yugoslavia ravaged by occupation and resistance. Corporal Albert Stanley Teeven, Jr., a young member of the U.S. Army Air Forces, was killed over that country in February 1945, only months before victory in Europe. His hometown of Cambridge set aside this circle in his name, turning an ordinary street corner into a lasting act of remembrance.

Ennis, TX

The first grave here belonged to the Rev. William J. Kirkpatrick, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister who died in 1867; a congregation soon organized in his honor and built a church nearby. The surrounding land came from the plantation of Confederate veteran Major Henry Pannill, who buried his own son here in 1867 before deeding the ground to the church's trustees. The village of Telico grew up around the site, then withered after 1900 as families drifted to the railroad town of Ennis, and the cemetery—holding more than 300 graves, nearly half of them children—fell into neglect until a caretaking association formed in 1937.

Santa Cruz County, AZ

Juan and Juanita Telles began building this roadside shrine in 1941, fulfilling a vow to God made in exchange for the safe return of their sons serving in the war. A living example of the folk-Catholic devotional tradition of the Pimería Alta borderlands, it was re-dedicated in 1988 by the Pimeria Alta Historical Society.

Crockett County, TN

This marker points the way to the grave of a Revolutionary War soldier who joined the Continental cause in 1776 and endured the brutal winter encampment at Valley Forge, where Washington's ragged army drilled itself into a disciplined fighting force. After years of battle he turned west, fighting in the frontier campaigns against Native nations before receiving an honorable discharge at Pittsburgh — then the raw edge of American settlement at Fort Pitt. Like many aging veterans, he eventually followed the frontier south and west, coming to rest in the West Tennessee country that became Crockett County.

Burkburnett, TX

Cowboys and settlers renamed this stream when they found, near where it meets the Red River, the ruins of a military post held by the U.S. Tenth Cavalry from 1873 to 1875. Its Black troopers and white officers — Buffalo Soldiers, many of them Civil War veterans who had also served at Fort Sill — guarded the frontier during the Indian Wars. Legend holds that after an Indian attack on the timber outpost, the men and horses lost in the fighting were buried together in a single grave somewhere along the creek.

Sanderson, TX

Terrell County was carved from Pecos County in 1905, part of the wave of new counties organized across West Texas as railroads and ranching pushed settlement into the arid Trans-Pecos. It was named for Alexander Watkins Terrell (1827–1912), a Confederate officer who went on to serve sixteen years in the Texas Legislature. The town of Sanderson, a stop on the Southern Pacific line, became its seat of government.

Brownfield, TX

Carved from Young and Bexar territories and created in 1876, Terry County was not formally organized until 1904, when settlers finally arrived in numbers to work its farmland. It honors Colonel Benjamin Franklin Terry, the planter who raised the celebrated Terry's Texas Rangers cavalry regiment and fell early in the Civil War in 1861. Brownfield became its county seat at the heart of this farming country.

Yoakum, TX

Founded in the 1850s and named for the family of county judge James D. Terry, Terryville raised a cavalry company for the Confederate Army and had a post office by 1869. In the 1880s the post office and most residents relocated about 2.5 miles away, and the original office closed in 1907. Today an old cemetery marks the first townsite while a Baptist church survives at the second.

Harrisburg, TX

On April 19, 1836, the Texas army under General Sam Houston crossed Buffalo Bayou near this spot on a raft built from the dismantled house of settler Isaac Batterson. From this crossing the troops began the final march that ended two days later in the decisive victory at San Jacinto, winning Texas independence.

Bellaire, TX

After the Alamo fell in March 1836, Sam Houston's army retreated eastward with Santa Anna's Mexican forces in pursuit across the prairies of southwest Harris County. On April 18, Texan scouts led by Erastus 'Deaf' Smith captured three Mexicans near this spot — including courier Capt. Miguel Bachiller — whose dispatches revealed the size, location, and plans of Santa Anna's division. Armed with that intelligence, Houston intercepted the Mexicans and crushed them in a surprise attack at San Jacinto on April 21.

College Station, TX

Almost as soon as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas opened in 1876, it created the Corps of Cadets to meet its mandate to teach military science to its then all-male student body. The Corps sent more officers into World War II than any other institution in the country, including West Point, and spawned enduring traditions like the Aggie Band, Fish Drill Team, and Ross Volunteers.

College Station, TX

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas — the ancestor of today's Texas A&M — threw itself into the war effort with remarkable intensity. More than 2,200 Aggies served, some enlisting with Allied armies even before America joined, and the campus was designated a U.S. Army training base where soldiers learned radio mechanics, auto and carpentry trades, and meteorology for aviation and gas warfare. The Signal Corps meteorology school here was the only one of its kind among the Allied nations, and as male faculty left for service, women joined the teaching staff for the first time in the college's history.

Austin, TX

Lincoln's 1860 election set off a secession crisis across the South, and Texas was swept along despite Governor Sam Houston's refusal to convene the legislature. Secession leaders organized their own convention in Austin in early 1861, adopted an Ordinance of Secession, and then — unusually — put the question directly to voters, who ratified it. When Houston would not swear loyalty to the Confederacy, the convention removed him and installed his lieutenant governor.

Austin, TX

Facing a Federal blockade of the Gulf coast, Texas created a single new wartime agency — the State Military Board — to arm and supply itself. Trading state bonds and, above all, cotton, the board ran goods through neutral Mexico and past the blockade by fast runners, buying guns, powder, and cloth and seeding local factories for cannon and percussion caps. Chronic shortages of money and transport blunted its reach, but it helped earn Texas its nickname as the Storehouse of the Confederacy.

Houston, TX

On April 21, 1836, the small Texan army under Sam Houston formed for its decisive assault on Santa Anna's camp near the San Jacinto River. This marker records the order of battle: cavalry on the right under Mirabeau B. Lamar, infantry and the famed "Twin Sisters" cannon in support, Edward Burleson's regiment in the center, and Sidney Sherman's on the left. The surprise attack that followed lasted only minutes yet secured Texas independence.

Benjamin, TX

Pleasant C. Sams came to Texas from Arkansas as a boy in the 1850s and was left in charge of the family mills at sixteen when the Civil War broke out, ordered by his father to give the flour to Confederate widows. After serving in a Confederate frontier regiment and famously slipping through enemy lines to reach his bride, he settled in West Texas and became a founding cattleman, merchant, and banker at Benjamin. He led the Benjamin Commercial Company and the town's First National Bank.

Jacksonville, TX

In 1863 the Chapel Hill Manufacturing Co. built an ironworks on this site to make farm and kitchen tools the Confederacy badly needed, smelting native East Texas iron ore with Cherokee limestone and charcoal from nearby hardwoods. A crew that included 100 enslaved workers from Louisiana fed ore down the hillside into the furnaces, where molten iron was cast into molds. By the 1880s at least sixteen ironworks operated across East Texas.

Alpine, TX

Brewster County honors Henry P. Brewster, a South Carolinian who came to Texas in 1836 and served as state attorney general before throwing himself into the Confederate cause. When the South seceded he helped gather arms and matériel from Texas and served as adjutant and inspector general under General Albert Sidney Johnston, later on special duty with General John Bell Hood. At his own request he was buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico; the state raised this memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy in 1963.

Brenham, TX

During the Civil War, Texas county commissioners courts—a chief justice and four commissioners—became engines of the Confederate war effort, arming and clothing troops, aiding war factories, and distributing scarce medicine, salt, and cloth to soldiers' families. They organized patrols and home guards and raised money through bonds, scrip, and a special war tax. Prosperous Washington County financed hospitals, contracted army uniforms, printed its own scrip, and ran a camp of instruction and a soldiers' home in Brenham.

Alpine, TX

Lawrence Sullivan "Sul" Ross rose from private in 1861 to brigadier general by 1863, leading a largely Texan cavalry brigade through hard fighting in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Tradition holds he had five horses shot from under him across 135 engagements. The State of Texas erected this memorial in 1963, and a college bears his name.

Linden, TX

Dr. M. D. K. Taylor, an Alabama physician who came to Texas in 1847, represented Cass County in the legislature for 24 years and was reckoned the ablest parliamentarian of his day. As a speaker of the Texas House during the Civil War, he helped pass laws to raise, arm, and supply some 90,000 Texas soldiers and to defend the state's long frontier and coast. With the Union blockade choking imports, the legislature he led established plants to make guns, powder, cloth, and salt, taxed property, and levied tithes of produce to meet the crisis.

Austin, TX

Opened in 1908, this Austin home cared for the aging wives and widows of Confederate veterans, women left without support in their final years. Organized and funded largely by the United Daughters of the Confederacy before being turned over to the state, it grew to include dormitories, a parlor, and a hospital. Over more than half a century it sheltered thousands of women until it closed in 1963.

New Braunfels, TX

When Texas voted on secession in 1861, ten heavily German counties opposed leaving the Union, an unusual dissent in a Confederate state—though Comal County broke the other way. Many German Texans had only recently taken naturalization oaths and found the doctrine of states' rights hard to parse; some avoided service out of concern for their families while others slipped away to join U.S. units. Still, the majority backed the Confederacy, and three companies from Comal County earned praise for their discipline and morale.

Austin, TX

During the Civil War, Texas sent some 90,000 men to fight for the Confederacy, yet still had to defend 2,000 miles of coastline and frontier against Federal forces, Native raids, and outlaws. That burden fell largely on the state Adjutant General, who filled troop requisitions while organizing the Frontier Regiment's chain of forts from the Rio Grande to the Red River—and doubling as inspector, quartermaster, ordnance, and commissary officer. Five men held the demanding post between 1861 and 1865.

Austin, TX

When Texas joined the Confederacy in 1861, a minority of Texans—many of them immigrants, Northerners, or Unionists—refused to follow. Some crossed the Rio Grande to organize the 1st Texas Cavalry (U.S.) under Col. E. J. Davis, while others formed the nucleus of a second Union regiment in New Orleans; the two merged in 1864. Captured Confederates could win release as "galvanized Yankees," sent to fight on the frontier rather than against former comrades, though some Union Texans did face old neighbors in the Red River campaigns.

Fort Worth, TX

From the end of the Civil War until World War I, Confederate veterans dominated economic and civic life across Texas, gathering yearly in United Confederate Veterans camps in nearly every community. Unlike Union soldiers, who drew federal pensions, ex-Confederates relied on state aid—land grants in the early 1880s, then pensions approved in 1899—and on homes for veterans, wives, and widows built in Austin. By 1965 Texas had spent more than $71 million on these benefits.

Trinity, TX

East Texas rode a river of pine, and few mills ran it better than the Texas Long Leaf Lumber Company, which bought the Thompson Brothers' Trinity mill in 1922. Under Paul Sanderson's 22-year leadership the operation became a national leader in yellow pine and hardwoods, employing as many as 450 people and pioneering selective cutting, reforestation, and fire protection. During World War II the mill cut up to 140,000 board feet a day—lumber that reached Europe and Africa and earned the coveted Army-Navy "E" Award in 1944. The mill's 1955 closure devastated Trinity's economy and closed a defining chapter in the town's life.

Austin, TX

The Civil War devastated Texas journalism: the state's newspapers shrank from 82 titles with a combined circulation of 100,000 to fewer than 20 by early 1862 as editors enlisted or ran out of ink and paper. Surviving papers printed on wallpaper, tissue, straw paper, and brown wrapping, often shrinking to half a page, while editors scavenged months-old letters and clippings for news. The 'State Gazette' even kept a pony express rider at the Brenham railhead to rush in Houston papers just 18 hours old.

Tomball, TX

By 1861, Harris County sat at the hub of nearly 500 miles of Texas railroads, with lines fanning out toward Orange, Galveston, the Brazos, and beyond, stitched together with stagecoach links to reach Austin. During the Civil War, Confederate troops guarded and maintained some lines while others were torn up to deny them to Union invasion. Overtaxed and unable to replace worn track and rolling stock, seven roads were ruined, and by 1865 only two still ran trains.

Fredericksburg, TX

Edmund Kirby Smith, born in Florida in 1824, graduated from West Point, fought in the Mexican War, and commanded frontier camps in 1850s Texas. Resigning from the U.S. Army in 1861, he rose to lead the Confederacy's vast Trans-Mississippi Department, where Texas cotton financed his army and sheltered his family amid threats from Union forces and the French in Mexico. After the war he taught mathematics to young Texans at the University of the South until his death in 1893.

Galveston, TX

After the pirate Lafitte was driven from Galveston, West Indian settlers arrived and the island grew into the chief port of a rising Texas, declared a port of entry by Mexico in 1825. It briefly served as capital of the Republic when President Burnet's cabinet fled the interior during the 1836 San Jacinto campaign, and Michel B. Menard soon bought the townsite for $50,000. During the Civil War, Confederate forces evacuated the city in 1862 but retook it in 1863 under General John Bankhead Magruder, capturing Union ships and troops and holding it to the war's end.

Galveston, TX

During the 1889 centennial of George Washington's inauguration, descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers formed the national Sons of the American Revolution to keep the founding era's memory alive. Inspired by that movement, a group of Texans met at Galveston's Tremont Hotel on December 8, 1896, to organize the Texas Society, electing former Texas House speaker Ira Hobart Evans as president. Admitted to the national body in 1897 as Galveston No. 1, it seeded more than thirty chapters across the state.

Nacogdoches, TX

Along the historic King's Highway, in use since 1691, passengers boarded stagecoaches at Nacogdoches throughout the Civil War, one of the best-served stage towns in Confederate Texas with three stands and three lines. A Waco-bound traveler left at 6 a.m. and rode nearly five days to arrive, connecting onward to San Antonio, Austin, and beyond. In all, thirty-one stage lines carried mail, soldiers, and civilians across wartime Texas, most linking to railroads or steamers for far-reaching travel.

Moscow, TX

Born near Moscow, Texas, in 1878, William Pettus Hobby rose from newspaperman to publisher to Lieutenant Governor, and became Governor in 1917 upon the impeachment of James Ferguson. His tenure brought free schoolbooks, compulsory attendance, a state budget system, and crucial leadership on Texas's World War I effort and the cause of woman suffrage. In 1931 he married Oveta Culp, herself a formidable public figure who would command the Women's Army Corps in World War II and later serve in President Eisenhower's cabinet.

Kermit, TX

When Texas joined the United States in 1846 it claimed some 98,300 square miles reaching into five future states. After the Mexican War, anti-slavery forces sought to shrink the slave state of Texas, and in the Compromise of 1850 Texas gave up a third of its area for $10 million, using the money to pay Republic debts and seed a public school fund. A corner post four miles east marks the resulting boundary at the 103rd meridian and 32nd parallel, where Texas meets New Mexico's southeast corner.

Socorro, NM

In early 1862, Confederate forces from Texas pushed up the Rio Grande in an ambitious campaign to seize New Mexico Territory and open a path to the West. Near Socorro they clashed with Union troops at the Battle of Valverde, part of a short-lived Confederate bid for the Southwest that ultimately failed. This memorial recalls those Texas volunteers and the Civil War's often-overlooked western theater.

Dallas, TX

With some 90,000 Texas men away fighting for the Confederacy, the civilian labor of a whole society fell to the women left behind in a land of few factories and a tightening naval blockade. They ran farms, businesses, and newspapers; loaded shells and made gun caps; spun, wove, and dyed homemade cloth; brewed coffee from acorns and medicine from herbs; and faced raids and marauders along thousands of miles of coast and frontier.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1967

Thaddeus Kosciuszko was a Polish-born military engineer whose fortifications helped the Continental Army win the Revolution, most famously at Saratoga and West Point. After the war he returned home to lead a doomed uprising for Polish independence, and when exile brought him back to America he lodged in this Philadelphia house in 1797–1798. Here he received visitors including Thomas Jefferson and drafted a will devoting his American assets to freeing and educating enslaved people.

Henderson, TX

On August 5, 1860, fire consumed the entire business district of Henderson, one of Texas's most prosperous towns. That summer, blazes across the state stoked a panic that abolitionists and enslaved people were burning Texas towns, and Henderson's fire fed the flames of secessionist fury. A committee of fifty-two citizens hanged Green Herndon and an enslaved woman for setting it, though evidence was never established. Secessionist Louis T. Wigfall seized on the disaster, and Texas delegates later listed the burning of Henderson first among the events leading to secession.

Killeen, TX

The 1st Cavalry Division traces its lineage to the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, raised in 1855 at Fort Belknap, and was formally constituted at Fort Bliss in 1921 to guard the Mexican border. Dismounted and sent to the Pacific in World War II, it seized the Admiralty Islands and, on MacArthur's order as his 'First Team,' captured Manila. In Korea it raced to Osan and became the first force into Pyongyang; in 1965 it was reborn at Fort Benning as the Army's first airmobile division and went on to serve in Vietnam. Since 1971 it has been based at Fort Hood.

Matagorda County, TX

Built in 1909 for A. B. Pierce, a Spanish-American War veteran who helped found the town of Blessing, this home became a gathering place for the area's civic leaders and visiting Episcopal clergy. It was here in 1916 that Pierce's wife Adelaide co-organized the Matagorda County Federation of Women's Clubs and served as its first president. The house has been a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark since 1968.

Morristown, NJ

During the Continental Army's hard winters at Morristown, this house on the corner of South Street served as quarters for General Nathanael Greene, one of Washington's most trusted commanders. The marker recalls a moment of Revolutionary intrigue: Colonel Alexander Hamilton meeting here in connection with a suspected spy, reportedly preparing a deliberately inflated tally of American strength to deceive the enemy. Such deception was a real weapon of the war, used to make a ragged, undersupplied army look far more formidable than it was.

Morristown, NJ

In the spring of 1780, Morristown was the winter headquarters of the Continental Army, where Washington's troops endured one of the harshest seasons of the war. It was here that the young Marquis de Lafayette, newly returned from France, brought word to Washington and his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton that a French expeditionary force of soldiers and warships was sailing to join the American cause. That alliance, forged after the American victory at Saratoga, transformed a struggling colonial rebellion into an international war that France now openly backed with men, money, and its navy.

Corpus Christi, TX

Mexican Americans served by the hundreds of thousands in World War II, only to return home to entrenched discrimination. In Corpus Christi, decorated Army veteran and physician Dr. Hector P. Garcia gathered some 700 fellow veterans in 1948 to found the American G.I. Forum, dedicated to securing the benefits and rights they had earned. When a Three Rivers funeral home refused services for a fallen soldier, Private Felix Longoria, the Forum's response — the 'Longoria Affair' — thrust it into national prominence as a leading Latino civil rights organization.

Kingston, GA

On April 12, 1862, a Union raiding party led by civilian scout James J. Andrews commandeered the locomotive "General" at Big Shanty in a daring bid to cripple the Western & Atlantic Railroad and sever the Confederacy's supply line to Chattanooga. Forced to lose time waiting out southbound traffic on the single-track line, the raiders pressed north—while conductor William A. Fuller and his crew gave relentless chase, first on foot and a push-car, then aboard the engines "Yonah" and "Wm. R. Smith." Kingston was a critical bottleneck in what became known as the Great Locomotive Chase.

College Park, GA

This memorial arch carries a spare dedication — 'In Memory, Sgt Johnson, Class 1935' — the kind of institutional tribute placed to honor a member of a school or unit who was lost. Such commemorative arches and plaques became common in the early twentieth century as communities and campuses marked the service and sacrifice of their own. The inscription names the man and his class year but leaves the fuller story to memory.

Marietta, GA

In the spring of 1865, as the Confederacy collapsed, Union Gen. Henry M. Judah made his headquarters at the Archibald Howell Home in Marietta. Surveying a countryside stripped of crops by the 1864 fighting and an economy paralyzed by surrender, Judah proposed issuing corn and bacon to destitute local families until they could plant again. The approved rations helped stave off hunger and steady the region through the first hard months of peace.

Athens, GA

Designed by Athens gunsmith John Gilleland, a member of a home-guard unit of men too old or infirm for regular Confederate service, this double-barrelled cannon was meant to fire two chain-linked balls at once to "mow down" advancing enemies. Cast in a local foundry, it failed in testing because the barrels could not be discharged at precisely the same instant, sending the balls on wild, erratic paths. The gun survives in Athens as a beloved curiosity—one of a kind and famously ineffective.

Hinesville, GA

Built in 1839 by Mary Jane Bacon, widow of Major John Bacon, this Hinesville home is a fine example of the "plantation plain" style, its two-story front section still much as it was raised by the region's best craftsmen. Kept in the same family for generations, it survived a harsh visit from Sherman's troops in December 1864, who pillaged and burned the barn and outbuildings but spared the house itself. Careful later restoration returned the rear rooms to their 1839 character.

Floydada, TX

By the 18th century the Comanche had made the canyons and plains of what became Floyd County their stronghold, dominating trade and warfare across Texas after pushing rival tribes south. In October 1871, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie led U.S. cavalry, guided by Tonkawa scouts, against the Kotsoteka and Quahadi bands who refused reservation life. In Blanco Canyon, Quanah Parker's warriors struck first and drove off the soldiers' horses; the fighting wounded both Mackenzie and Lieutenant Carter, and though the campaign frustrated the army, it began the destruction of Comanche power on the Southern Plains.

Chatham, MA

For most of the Revolution the fighting passed Cape Cod by, but on a June day in 1782 the war reached Chatham's own waters. In a brief clash in the harbor near this spot, local men confronted the maritime raiding that troubled the New England coast in the conflict's final year. It was the town's single episode of active hostilities in the long war for independence.

Port Lavaca, TX

Late in 1863 the Union Army pushed into Calhoun County, a rare thing in Texas, aiming to seize Fort Esperanza and control the mouth of Matagorda Bay. On December 26, some forty Texas Rangers tried to burn the Norris Bridge over Chocolate Bayou as roughly three thousand Union troops advanced. The Rangers scattered on horseback after their captain ordered a retreat, and the only death came when nervous Union gunners mistook a distant herd of cattle for the enemy and killed the cows instead.

Brownsville, TX

On May 8, 1846, the opening battle of the Mexican-American War was fought on this coastal prairie, where General Zachary Taylor's outnumbered U.S. army used its "flying artillery" to defeat Mexican forces. The victory helped launch a conflict that would redraw the map of North America.

Canyon, TX

At dawn on September 28, 1874, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie's 4th Cavalry descended a treacherous path into Palo Duro Canyon and surprised a large Native encampment sheltering there. Though the warriors fought from the canyon walls to cover their families' escape, Mackenzie burned the camp and supplies and captured some 1,400 horses — destroying a thousand of them — leaving the tribes without shelter or mounts and forcing their return to the reservations.

Wayside, TX

In 1874 the U.S. Army launched a sweeping campaign to force the Southern Plains tribes onto reservations, and it opened here with a grinding five-hour running fight. Colonel Nelson Miles's column of 744 men pursued Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa bands across the Panhandle, in a clash that saw the Army's first use of the Gatling gun west of the Mississippi. Though warriors slipped away, the destruction of their villages helped end free Native life on the southern plains.

Brownsville, TX

On May 9, 1846, U.S. forces under General Zachary Taylor defeated the Mexican army of General Mariano Arista in the Battle of Resaca de la Palma. Coming at the very outset of the Mexican-American War, the victory drove Mexican troops back across the Rio Grande and secured the American claim to the contested land between the Nueces and the river.