Native American History

Greene Township, PA · est. 1958

During the Revolutionary War this was a fortified frontier refuge, garrisoned in 1777 by a small detachment of Virginia militia at a time when the region was claimed as part of Monongalia County, Virginia. Life here meant constant danger on a contested border. On May 12, 1782, in an Indian attack near here, the wife and three children of Baptist minister Rev. John Corbly were killed on their way to church, and two more of his children were wounded but survived.

Lampasas, TX

Garrison Greenwood (1799–1859) left Illinois and arrived in 1833 — when Texas was still part of Mexico — traveling with the wagon train of Baptist leader Daniel Parker. He served as a ranger in the Republic of Texas, helped found Fort Houston in present Anderson County, and set up a Ranger post on the Trinity River. In 1836 he led settlers fleeing eastward ahead of Santa Anna's army in the great "Runaway Scrape," then lived out his days as a Texas farmer and father of fourteen.

Post, TX

Excavated in a 1959 highway salvage dig, this archeological site gave its name to the Garza point—a thin, finely worked triangular arrowhead with a notched base and serrated edges. Alongside the points, archeologists found more than two hundred artifacts around ancient cooking hearths: bone awls, wolf-tooth pendants, tubular beads, knives, scrapers, and drills. The Garza people who left them were roving hunters who camped here before 1500 A.D.

Gatesville, TX

Gatesville became the seat of newly created Coryell County in 1854, on a townsite donated by Indian trader Richard Grant and named for the nearby Old Fort Gates (1849–1852), a post established for protection against Native raids. The town grew slowly amid intermittent raids until a period of strong progress from 1870 to 1882, capped when the St. Louis & Southwestern railroad ran a spur line in 1882 to a jubilant public welcome. With the railroad came new homes, businesses, and even a frontier opera house.

Kerrville, TX

When crews built the Spur 98 bridge over the Guadalupe River in 2004, they uncovered an extraordinary Native American site with stone tools and projectile points older than 7,500 years—predating Egypt's earliest dynasties. For thousands of years, small bands of hunter-gatherers returned to these banks to harvest fruits, nuts, and roots and to hunt bison, deer, and rabbit, cooking in limestone ovens they built themselves. Radiocarbon dating shows people camped here across more than six millennia in a cooler, wetter Edwards Plateau.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1931

Raised in 1741 as Bethlehem's first house of worship, the Gemein Haus stood at the heart of the Moravians' remarkable communal experiment in colonial Pennsylvania. Its rooms sheltered a roll call of Moravian leaders — including the reforming Count Zinzendorf — and hosted the community's celebrated 1749 "Great Wedding." Most strikingly, it housed a school devoted to studying and teaching Indigenous languages, part of the Moravians' unusual missionary engagement with Native peoples of the region.

Canadian, TX

In the winter of 1874–75, the U.S. Army swept the Texas Panhandle in the campaign now known as the Red River War, and General Nelson Miles ran part of it from a dugout post near here. His columns fought eight engagements that season and, in November 1874, recovered two of the captive German sisters, Addie and Julia, with their older sisters freed the following February. From this rough headquarters Miles nominated soldiers for the Medal of Honor, among them the celebrated scout Billy Dixon, before Fort Elliott rose in 1875 to carry on the work.

Fort Worth, TX

Edward H. Tarrant fought under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans in 1814 before moving west, serving in the Republic of Texas Congress and rising to brigadier general in its militia. He led Texas Rangers at the 1841 Battle of Village Creek, helped negotiate treaties with Texas Indian tribes at Bird's Fort in 1843, and later sat in the state legislature and defended the frontier from Fort Belknap. Reinterred here in 1928 by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, he gave his name to Tarrant County.

Arlington, TX

On May 24, 1841, General Edward H. Tarrant led about seventy men in an attack on several Indian villages along what became known as Village Creek, seizing horses and recovered plunder. Twelve Native people were reported killed and many wounded; on the Texan side, Captain John B. Denton was killed and Captains Henry Stout and Griffin wounded. The clash was one of the sharpest frontier engagements of the Republic of Texas era.

Montell, TX

John R. Baylor arrived in the young Republic of Texas in 1839 and quickly became one of its most restless and controversial frontier figures, serving in the legislature and as a Comanche agent before the Civil War. In 1861 he led Confederate cavalry into the far Southwest, seizing federal posts and proclaiming a Confederate Territory of Arizona with himself as governor—part of a bold, ultimately failed bid to extend the Confederacy to the Pacific. His brutal order regarding the Apaches led to his recall, yet he fought on as a private at Galveston and rose again to brigadier general by war's end.

Lubbock, TX

A New York-born officer who rose to major general in the Civil War, Ranald Slidell Mackenzie took command of the 4th Cavalry in 1871 and led it in a series of campaigns across the Llano Estacado against the Comanches, Kiowas, and Southern Cheyennes. His surprise attack on villages in Palo Duro Canyon on September 28, 1874—where his troops captured and destroyed some 1,424 horses—left the Southern Plains tribes without the means to resist. Their forced move onto reservations opened West Texas to white settlement.

Fort Worth, TX

William Jenkins Worth of Hudson, New York, made a soldier's career that spanned the early republic's wars: badly wounded at Lundy's Lane in the War of 1812, he later commanded cadets at West Point, campaigned against the Sac and Fox and the Florida Seminoles, took part in Cherokee removal, and won a Sword of Honor from Congress for his conduct in the Mexican War. He died of cholera at San Antonio in 1849 while commanding the Texas and New Mexico military districts. Though he never saw this ground, the frontier post of Fort Worth was named in his memory.

Dumas, TX

The land around Dumas has been prized for its geology far longer than any oil derrick suggests. Prehistoric peoples mined flint from quarries along the Canadian River — an early Texas "industry" whose tools turn up across the western United States — and built sturdy, insulated homes from local dolomite slabs, an unusually advanced technique for the era. Centuries later, modern Moore County tapped a different underground treasure, oil and gas, to support dozens of industries.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1947

In 1796 the boy who would become America's great chronicler of Native peoples was born in this corner of the Wyoming Valley, of Connecticut stock. George Catlin trained and practiced law here before abandoning the bar around 1823 for the paintbrush, and within a few years he set out to record the faces and lives of Indian nations across the young republic. His hundreds of portraits and scenes remain among the fullest visual records of Native America before it was transformed.

Hampden Township, PA · est. 2021

Around 1740 the Irish immigrant George Croghan set up a trading post on this ground and built it into one of the most far-reaching British trade networks in colonial America. Reaching west into the French-contested Ohio Country, he learned Native American languages and customs to secure the furs that Europe craved. For three decades he was among Britain's most important go-betweens at treaty conferences with Indian nations.

Graford, TX

George Rice Bevers settled this spot on the Fort Worth–Fort Belknap Road in 1854, near Flat Rock Crossing of Keechi Creek, where he fed and housed travelers such as famed Indian agent Robert S. Neighbors. Palo Pinto County's first school opened nearby in 1856, and the family lived among noted pioneer neighbors like the Curetons, Goodnights and Slaughters. The nearby Bevers Cemetery holds a victim of the Indian raids of the 1860s that drove frightened settlers to seek refuge as far away as the Fort Worth courthouse.

Forward Township, PA · est. 1970

In December 1753, a young George Washington passed through this region on his return from Fort Le Boeuf, where he had carried a British demand that the French withdraw from the Ohio Country. Traveling the Venango Indian Trail, he came close to death here on December 27, 1753, when an Indian fired at him from less than fifteen paces. The perilous mission helped ignite the imperial struggle that became the French and Indian War.

Comanche, TX

A member of Stephen F. Austin's colony, George Washington Gentry came to Texas in 1835 and settled in what became Washington County, working as a farmer and surveyor. He took part in the Texas Revolution, fought in several skirmishes with Native peoples, and helped defend San Antonio during the 1842 Mexican invasions led by Vasquez and Woll before later moving to Comanche County.

Sattler vicinity, TX

Between 1844 and 1847 a society of German nobles, the Mainzer Adelsverein, sponsored the emigration of thousands of Germans to Texas, who founded New Braunfels in 1845 and Fredericksburg in 1846. Pushing west, these farmers, artisans, scholars, and scientists endured epidemic and privation, and a treaty with the Comanche opened millions of acres between the Llano and Colorado rivers to settlement. Much of the land they first settled now lies beneath Canyon Lake.

Mohave County, AZ

A few miles off this road lie the ruins of White Hills, a mining boom town that flared to life in 1892 and was largely gone by 1898. In just six years its mines yielded some twelve million dollars in gold and silver, with the original strike credited to a Native prospector. Today only foundations and scattered debris remain of the once-bustling camp.

Brenham, TX

Gideon Lincecum grew up on the moving edge of the southern frontier, in Georgia and Mississippi, where he absorbed both the natural world around him and the cultures of the Native peoples he lived near. A veteran of the War of 1812, he settled in Texas in 1848 and opened a medical practice built on herbal remedies rather than the harsh medicines of his day. As a self-taught naturalist he won international notice for his patient study of Texas harvester ants and kept weather records for the Smithsonian, working from a cabin later moved here to preserve it.

Utah County, UT

In the spring of 1865, the Given family settled and built a cabin on this stretch of central Utah frontier, plowing land amid rising tensions between Mormon settlers and Native peoples. On May 26th they were attacked; only two survivors ran for help that arrived too late, and the dead were buried in nearby Fairview. The episode came during the Black Hawk War, a bitter period of conflict in territorial Utah.

Dallas, TX

This marker traces the tradition of public thanksgiving in Texas, from Native peoples and a 1541 service by a friar of Coronado's expedition to Sam Houston's 1842 call for the Republic to give thanks. In Dallas, a rabbi, a priest, and Protestant ministers launched a shared community thanksgiving service in 1907, an early act of interfaith goodwill that led eventually to the 1968 founding of downtown Thanks-Giving Square.

Glencoe, MN

Laid out in June 1855 by Martin McLeod, John H. Stevens, and other town founders, Glencoe rose quickly to become the seat of McLeod County. When the U.S.–Dakota War erupted in 1862, fear swept the Minnesota frontier and the young town threw up fortifications, garrisoning as many as four companies of soldiers behind its walls. The fort marked here embodied a settlement bracing itself amid one of the era's most wrenching conflicts.

Lehighton, PA · est. 2005

In 1746 Moravian missionaries established Gnadenhuetten, a mission town meant to shelter a growing community of Mohican and Delaware converts and the first European settlement in what is now Carbon County. As the French and Indian War engulfed the frontier, tensions boiled over, and on November 24, 1755, the settlement was attacked and burned in a raid encouraged by the French. The victims were laid to rest in what is now the Lehighton Cemetery nearby.

Montpelier, IN · est. 1989

Under the 1818 Treaty of St. Mary's, the United States reserved a 3,840-acre tract on the Salamonie River for Chief Francois Godfroy of the Miami Nation, at a place called La Petite Prairie. Such individual reserves let some Miami leaders remain on ancestral ground even as broader lands were ceded. Godfroy's reserve was itself sold off in stages in 1827 and 1836.

Goliad, TX

Goliad ranks among the three oldest municipalities in Texas, rooted in the Aranama Indian village the Spanish called Santa Dorotea and anchored by the Presidio La Bahía and Mission Espíritu Santo, established in 1749. Renamed Goliad in 1829—an anagram honoring the Mexican patriot Hidalgo—it became a crucible of the Texas Revolution. In March 1836, Colonel James Fannin and his men, taken prisoner after the Battle of Coleto, were marched from the La Bahía presidio and executed on Palm Sunday in the notorious Goliad Massacre.

Goliad, TX

First known to Spanish settlers as a mission and presidio in 1749, this place — La Bahía del Espíritu Santo — became a strategic fort under Spanish, Mexican, and Texan control before its name was changed to Goliad in 1829. In 1836 it was the scene of the massacre of Fannin and his command, a rallying cry of the Texas Revolution. Organized as a county that same year, it later sent several companies to the Confederate army.

Chaves County, NM

Blazed in 1866 by cattlemen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, this famous trail ran some 2,000 miles from Texas to Wyoming, carrying herds across the open Southwest. Through New Mexico it followed the Pecos River north to Fort Sumner, where the government bought beef to feed the thousands of Navajo people held at the Bosque Redondo Reservation. The route became one of the great arteries of the post–Civil War cattle era.

Graham, TX

Named for a bend in the Brazos River, Gooseneck Cemetery grew from land donated by Kentucky native George Washington Fore and his son John Silas Fore, on ground that had once been part of the Brazos River Indian Preserve. The Fores also gave land for a school and a church that became Bunger Baptist. Burials date from just after the Civil War, and those interred include a Virginia-born War of 1812 veteran, James James, said to have died at age 114.

Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947

When the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger arrived in this stretch of the upper Allegheny in 1767, the name Goschgoschink applied to all three of the refugee Indian towns clustered along the river here. It was later attached specifically to the "Upper Town" that stood across the water. These were communities of displaced Delaware, Munsee, and Seneca peoples, gathered in the Ohio country during a decade of upheaval that followed the French and Indian War and preceded the American Revolution.

Decatur, TX

These bois d'arc trees are a remnant of a spiny hedge planted in 1861 around the log cabin of Stephen M. Gose, a Missouri emigrant who came to Texas in 1859 and served as justice of the peace, blacksmith, and Methodist leader. The dense, thorny growth was meant as a living barrier against raids on the exposed frontier. The surviving trees stand as a quiet witness to the dangers of frontier homesteading.

La Grange, TX

Opened around 1828 by Alabama settler James Gotcher, this trace linked San Felipe in Stephen F. Austin's colony with Bastrop in the "little" colony to the north. Short but dangerously exposed, it and the nearby Wilbarger Trace earned the grim nickname "via Dolorosa" of early Texas for the tragedies along them. Gotcher himself settled in this area, and in 1836 six of his family were killed and others taken captive in an Indian attack.

Nacogdoches, TX

In 1719, as Spain and France clashed over their overlapping colonial claims, the Marquis de San Miguel de Aguayo took over as governor of Spanish Texas and set out to secure its eastern frontier. In 1721 he led the largest entrada ever mounted in Spanish Texas—nearly 600 soldiers, missionaries, and caretakers—reestablishing six abandoned missions and building presidios that anchored Spanish authority against the nearby French. Along the way he forged alliances with Caddo and Hainai leaders, and negotiated a French withdrawal after learning the two crowns were no longer at war.

Nacogdoches, TX

Martin de Alarcon became governor of Spanish Texas in 1716 with a mandate to plant a secure presidio along the San Antonio River to supply the frontier missions. In 1718 his expedition founded the villa of San Fernando de Bexar—today's San Antonio—along with the mission San Antonio de Valero, later famous as the Alamo. Though missionaries resented his crackdown on French trade, his settlement and the turmoil that followed a 1719 French raid laid the foundations for one of Texas's great cities.

Grand Saline, TX

The great salt deposit at Grand Saline, first worked by Native peoples and developed into salt works by 1854, became a strategic source of salt for the Confederacy during the Civil War. When owner Sam Richardson went to war, his wife ran the operation until the Confederate government took over production, exempting salt workers from the army and drawing brine through hollowed gum-log pipelines to iron evaporating kettles that yielded over 10,000 pounds a day. With salt the only means to preserve meat and cure leather, it grew so scarce that women dug up smokehouse floors to reclaim it.

Coppell, TX

The Grapevine Springs, feeding the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, have drawn people for thousands of years, and in 1843 Republic of Texas President Sam Houston camped here during treaty talks with Native American nations, an agreement later signed at Bird's Fort. Donated as county parkland in 1936, the site gained rock walls, footbridges, and picnic facilities built by the Works Progress Administration. After wartime reversion and later gifts, the City of Coppell now maintains it while efforts continue to restore the WPA-era features.

Grassland, TX

On the wide South Plains, this site lay along an ancient Indian trail that later carried explorers, U.S. Army columns, and — after 1880 — stagecoaches and freighters bound north from Colorado City. In 1888 Enos L. Seeds established Grasslands Ranch here, named for a Cleveland estate, building a frame house and the region's first trading post and serving as postmaster. The little community that grew up around it endures today as Grassland.

Danby Township, MI

This grave marks the resting place of Okemos, a noted Chippewa (Ojibwe) chief who died in 1858 and whose name endures in Michigan's landscape. The Daughters of the American Revolution placed this memorial in 1921, part of an early-20th-century impulse to commemorate Native leaders even as the settler society that displaced them memorialized the frontier past. Okemos lived through the turbulent decades when Michigan passed from Indigenous homeland to statehood.

Manor Township, PA · est. 1951

This was the great artery of the mid-17th-century fur trade, the chief trail by which the Minqua—also known as the Susquehannock—carried beaver pelts eastward to the European settlements along the Delaware. The trade was so lucrative that the Swedes, Dutch, and English fought one another to control it. The path traced a route of immense commercial and political importance in the early contest for the region.

West Goshen Township, PA · est. 1951

In the 1600s, before English rule was secure, the Great Minquas Path was one of the most valuable trails in the region — the key artery of the fur trade linking Native towns of the interior with trading posts on the lower Schuylkill. Along it flowed the beaver pelts that made the Delaware Valley a prize, and the Dutch, Swedes, and English each struggled to control it. The path crossed near this spot, a quiet reminder of a contest for commerce and empire.

Salisbury Township, PA · est. 1951

An ancient Indian path once ran through the Gap just south of here, later becoming the original Conestoga Road. In the 17th century the Minquas—the Conestoga—used it to carry great quantities of beaver skins from the Susquehanna Valley to the trading posts near Philadelphia. What began as a Native trail hardened over time into one of the region's foundational overland routes.

Delaware Township, PA · est. 1949

The Great Shamokin Path was once the main Indian highway west, running from Shamokin—now Sunbury—toward the Ohio country. Along it traveled the Delawares (Lenape) as they were pushed out of their eastern Pennsylvania homelands by the pressure of colonial settlement. After the crushing defeat of General Braddock in 1755, Delaware warriors used this very trail to strike back at the frontier settlements during the French and Indian War.

Liberty Township, PA · est. 1950

The Great Shamokin Path was one of the major Native thoroughfares across Pennsylvania, running from Shamokin — now Sunbury — westward to the Delaware town of Kittanning on the Allegheny. Near here it left the Bald Eagle Valley to follow Marsh Creek and Little Marsh Creek, then climbed the Allegheny Front by way of Snow Shoe and Moshannon. The route reveals how Indigenous travelers read the landscape, choosing creek valleys and mountain gaps to cross rugged terrain.

Bald Eagle Township, PA · est. 1950

In 1772, the Moravian missionary Bishop John Ettwein led some 200 Christian Mohican and Delaware converts along the Indian path beside Bald Eagle Creek. They were journeying from the mission town of Friedenshuetten, near Wyalusing, to a new settlement called Friedensstadt on the Beaver River. The trek carried whole families through the Pennsylvania interior in search of a place to live out their faith in peace.

Bell Township, PA · est. 1950

The Great Shamokin Path was a major Indian thoroughfare linking the Susquehanna and Allegheny rivers, running near this spot long before European roads followed the same ground. Delaware and Shawnee people used it for hunting and trade, and warriors traveled it during the French and Indian War. In July 1772 the Moravian missionary Bishop John Ettwein led some 200 Native Americans and their cattle along this stretch as they migrated west to the settlement of Friedensstadt.

Fairfield, CT

In the summer of 1637, the year-long Pequot War reached its grim conclusion in the tidal swamps of what is now Fairfield. A band of Pequot survivors, fleeing the destruction of their Mystic fort weeks earlier, was cornered here by English colonial forces and their Native allies. The fighting in the boggy ground scattered the last organized Pequot resistance and effectively ended the war, one of the earliest and most consequential conflicts between English settlers and Indigenous peoples in New England.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

In the mid-18th century Carlisle sat at the edge of the Pennsylvania frontier, a gateway where colonial officials met with Native nations to negotiate land and trade. An inn on this site hosted Benjamin Franklin in 1753 while he and fellow commissioners treated with Indians, and four decades later it lodged Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox as Washington's cabinet passed through during the Whiskey Rebellion. A single roadside tavern thus touched both the colonial diplomacy of the 1750s and the young republic's first test of federal authority.

Snyder, TX

Greene Springs has drawn people for centuries as the first live water flowing into the South Fork of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, its potholes fed by a steady sandstone-filtered flow. Native peoples left food-grinding holes and petroglyphs on the creek walls, and archeologists have since recovered stone tools, beads, and arrow points. In the 19th century, military expeditions under Capt. R. B. Marcy in 1849 and Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1856 camped here, followed by buffalo hunters and westbound emigrants; the springs were named about 1881 for rancher "Jim" Greene.

Greenwich, CT

In the summer of 1640, two agents of the New Haven Colony struck a bargain with the Siwanoy people for the coastal land that would become Greenwich, paying in English coats rather than coin. Such cloth-and-goods transactions were the common currency of early New England land dealings, where two cultures with very different ideas of what it meant to 'own' ground met at the water's edge of Long Island Sound. The purchase planted one of the first English footholds in what is now Connecticut's southwestern corner, a frontier then contested between Dutch New Netherland to the west and the spreading Puritan colonies to the east.

Churchill County, NV

Grimes Point holds one of northern Nevada's largest and most accessible rock-art sites — roughly 150 basalt boulders bearing more than 1,000 petroglyphs. These carvings held magico-religious meaning, made in ritual by a group leader before communal hunts to ensure success, and the ridge above still shows traces of an aboriginal drift fence used to drive deer or antelope. Archaeologists estimate the petroglyphs date between about 2,500 and 500 years ago.

Ireland, TX

Born in Walker County in 1846, Wiley Parker Grubb joined the Texas Rangers as a teenager in 1863 and was wounded at the 1865 Battle of Dove Creek, a bloody clash with Kickapoo people near present San Angelo. He later married, bought family land in Coryell County in 1874, and built a prominent ranch, his gravesite becoming a small public cemetery in 1937. His life spanned the frontier's ranging and its settling.

Pine Springs, TX

At 8,751 feet, Guadalupe Peak crowns a rugged corner of far West Texas where a sheer limestone escarpment—once part of the vast Capitan reef that formed beneath a Permian sea—rises above the Chihuahuan Desert. The range's hidden canyons sheltered people for a very long time: carbon-dated remains in its cliff caves point to human occupancy some 12,000 years ago, alongside the bones of Ice Age bison and dire wolf. In later centuries it was Apache country, and Spanish conquistadors and prospectors like Ben Sublett spun enduring legends of hidden gold in its folds.

Victoria, TX

Spanish explorer Alonso de León reached this vicinity on April 14, 1689, naming the river for Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico. The crossing here had been used since long before, in the days of the region's Native peoples. At this ford the Mexican empresario Martín de León founded the town of Victoria in 1824, planting one of the few Mexican-led colonies in Texas.

Lawrenceville, GA

Long before Lawrenceville and Gwinnett County took their names from figures of the young United States, this land in the Georgia Piedmont was home to Native peoples—most recently the Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee, whose villages, trails, and hunting grounds laced the rivers and ridgelines here. This marker sets aside the courthouse-square story to honor those first inhabitants, who knew and cared for this country for countless generations before newcomers arrived. Their presence was written into the landscape itself, in place-names and pathways that outlasted the treaties and removals of the early 1800s.

Fredericksburg, TX

German-born Henry C. Keese settled this land in the 1870s and built a farmhouse of wood and hand-hewn native rock, raising his family through the hard realities of frontier life in the Texas Hill Country. The inscription recalls that the Keeses endured attacks during a period of ongoing conflict with Native peoples defending their lands, and that the family held the homesite for nearly a century. Faint traces of the early farm still mark the ground.

Charlemont, MA

Along the Mohawk Trail — the old Route 2 that follows an ancient Native footpath through the Berkshire hills linking the Connecticut and Hudson valleys — a bronze figure stands with arms lifted toward the dawn. Erected in 1932 by the Improved Order of Red Men, the statue honors the Native peoples associated with the trail and the surrounding mountains of western Massachusetts. Its title, 'Hail to the Sunrise,' echoes the upward-reaching pose of the figure greeting the morning sun. The monument has marked this stretch of the Deerfield River valley for generations of travelers.

Shiner, TX

Named for the crescent shape of its timber, Half Moon on Rocky Creek was a gathering place for Native peoples and travelers long before Spanish explorers noted it in 1689. Settlers arrived from the 1830s to trade and farm, and at its height in the mid-1880s the community boasted stores, a saloon, and a post office. When Henry B. Shiner donated land for a railroad in 1887, the rails bypassed Half Moon, and its people and commerce drained away into the new town of Shiner.

San Antonio, TX

Hamilton P. Bee was a fixture of early Texas public life, serving as secretary of the first state Senate, a legislator, and Speaker of the House in the 1850s before commanding troops in campaigns on the frontier. He fought as a cavalry lieutenant in the Mexican War, then rose to Confederate brigadier general, guarding the vital cotton road to Mexico and leading a brigade in the 1864 Red River Campaign, where he was wounded. His career threads through nearly every conflict of mid-19th-century Texas.

Lampasas, TX

When the first Anglo settlers arrived in the 1850s they found Native people already using these curative waters, and a town quickly grew up around the springs on the routes of stagecoaches, freight wagons, and cattle drives. Around 1882 Santa Fe Railway promoters built the lavish 200-room Park Hotel with a boardwalk to the springs, and it won fame as the South's finest health resort. The hotel later housed Centenary College until fire destroyed it in 1895, and the area is now a city park.