Native American History

Badin, NC

On a hill above the Yadkin River lies one of the most important early sites in the American Southeast. The Hardaway Site preserves traces of some of the first people to inhabit the region, with occupation reaching back roughly 12,000 years to the close of the last Ice Age. Its distinctive stone tools have helped archaeologists define the earliest cultural sequences of eastern North America.

Quanah, TX

Created in 1858 and finally organized in 1884, Hardeman County honors two brothers of the Texas independence generation: Bailey Hardeman, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Jones Hardeman, a member of the Texas Congress and Legislature. The county seat moved from Margarette to Quanah, a town named for the Comanche chief Quanah Parker. That pairing captures the frontier's transition, as land once dominated by the Comanche opened to Anglo settlement.

Newcastle, TX

Kentucky-born Peter Harmonson came to Texas in 1845 as a settler in the Peters Colony and helped organize Denton County, where he served as its first sheriff. In 1854 he moved his family west to establish a ranch near this site—Harmonson Rancho—and went on to help found Young County as its first chief justice. He died of a wound suffered in the Elm Creek Indian raid in 1865, and years later his old ranch was again the scene of a clash between Indians and cattlemen involving his son.

Houston, TX

Home to the Karankawa and Orcoquiza peoples and once eyed by Spain for a presidio, this region was permanently settled in 1822 by Stephen F. Austin's colonists. John R. Harris founded a village he named for his family and for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and it grew into one of the most influential colonial municipalities, playing a major role in the Texas War for Independence. The county was created in 1836, briefly held the Republic's capital, served as a Confederate command and ordnance center, and eventually grew into the world-commerce hub of Houston.

Seabrook, TX

This archeological site preserves evidence of Native life on the Texas coast reaching back thousands of years. It is a shell midden—a refuse heap of oyster and rangia clam shells left by early inhabitants beside their campsite—that also held a burial ground. Excavations recovered a Plainview dart point tied to very early peoples and radiocarbon-dated part of the midden to 1476 B.C., while ceramics buried with 32 individuals dated the cemetery to the first millennium A.D.

Marshall, TX

Long home to the Caddo people, this corner of East Texas drew Anglo settlers from the southern states in the 1830s, many taking Mexican land grants before Texas won independence in 1836. Organized in 1839 and named for revolutionary leader Jonas Harrison, Harrison County became the most populous and among the richest counties in antebellum Texas — a cotton economy built on slavery that, after emancipation, left it with a large Black population. The Texas and Pacific Railway later made Marshall a major rail center, its shops and offices anchoring the town's growth.

New York, NY

This small Brooklyn Heights playground honors singer-songwriter Harry Chapin (1942–1981), who grew up nearby and played in this very park before finding fame with songs like "Cat's in the Cradle." The surrounding neighborhood carries a much longer story: land the Lenape (Canarsee) knew as Ihpetonga, purchased by Dutch settlers, and transformed after Robert Fulton's steam ferry began daily runs in 1814 into what became Manhattan's first commuter suburb. In 1965 Brooklyn Heights was named New York City's first officially designated historic district.

Woodville, TX

This East Texas burial ground grew up around a water-powered mill on Sutton Lake and became the resting place of some of Tyler County's earliest Anglo pioneers. Families like the Barclays and Bevils arrived as Texas moved from a Mexican province to an independent republic in 1836, and their leaders helped organize the young county's government and courts, with John Bevil even serving as a delegate to the 1835 Consultation that set the Revolution in motion. James Walter Barclay's role as agent to the Alabama, Coushatta, and Pakana Muskogee peoples marks the uneasy meeting of settlers and Native nations on this frontier. In 1929 descendants formally deeded the ground as a community cemetery, and their families tend it still.

Porter Township, PA · est. 1946

Long before roads crossed these ridges, the Frankstown Path carried Native travelers and colonial traders through the region, passing the spot that became Hart's Log. The name came from a hollow log that the trader John Hart used between 1744 and 1755 as a feeding trough for his pack horses. The little settlement grew from that humble waypoint into the town later called Hartslog, and eventually Alexandria.

Texarkana vicinity, TX

For a thousand years, from roughly 800 to 1800 A.D., the Caddo people lived along the Red River near this spot, raising ceremonial earthen mounds and farming corn, squash, and beans. Skilled potters and traders, they linked the Puebloan peoples of the Southwest with the mound-building cultures to the east. Mounting pressure from Euro-American settlement eventually forced them from their homeland, and their descendants live today in Oklahoma.

Saint Jo, TX

The oldest of three graveyards in Saint Jo—once called Head of Elm—this hillside holds the area's pioneers and their descendants. Local tradition remembers settlers like Enoch Willett and his daughter Mary among those killed in Indian raids and buried here in the 1860s, though the first documented burial is that of infant Charlie Wyatt in 1874. Early residents recalled a far larger cemetery than the scattered surviving stones suggest.

Celeste, TX

Half a mile west of this spot rises the Sabine River, a waterway whose lower channel once divided the New World empires of France and Spain and, in 1836, became the border between the young Republic of Texas and the United States. The nearby fork bears the name Cow Leach, remembered for an Indian chief who lived in the area. The marker sits on a three-way watershed where waters part for the Mississippi, the Trinity, and the Sabine—the last pouring more water into the Gulf than any other Texas river.

Bremond, TX

Heards Prairie took its name from an 1841 frontier ambush that claimed the life of Major G. W. Heard, and pioneer families soon settled the surrounding land, building the community of Petteway with churches, schools, stores, a cotton gin, and a gristmill. Land donated in 1876 for worship, burial, and schooling grew into this 3.5-acre cemetery, whose oldest graves date to the 1870s. Cotton faded after World War II and much of the land later passed to coal mining, but the cemetery endures as a chronicle of generations who worked this prairie.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953

This 1810 house recalls John Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary who spent decades among Native peoples on the frontier as a preacher, interpreter, and keen observer of their lives. His written works on American Indian languages and customs became important early sources, drawn on by scholars and even by novelists shaping the nation's image of the frontier. In an age of mounting conflict and displacement, Heckewelder tried to bridge two worlds through faith and the written word.

Cherry Spring, TX

Heinrich and Johanna Borchers Kensing were German immigrants who reached Texas in 1845 and settled in Gillespie County before moving into Mason County. In July 1865 the couple were attacked by Indians near Platt Kopf; Heinrich died at once, and Johanna died three days later at a neighbor's house, leaving seven children. A 1972 marker records their fate on the exposed Hill Country frontier.

Helotes, TX

People have camped around Helotes for some seven thousand years, beginning with nomadic Native bands who followed game through the area. Anglo settlement began with an 1836 Republic of Texas land grant, and after 1858 Dr. George Frederick Marnoch's holdings became the townsite; Helotes grew around Arnold Gugger's store and became a stop for cowboys driving cattle to San Antonio.

Athens, TX

Henderson County voted overwhelmingly for secession in 1861 and sent roughly a thousand men into Confederate service, one detachment returning with only thirteen survivors. Camps of instruction and a supply depot at Fincastle gathered grain and goods, while local kilns turned out earthenware for the war effort. Among wartime residents were Cynthia Ann Parker, recovered from Comanche captivity in 1860, and John H. Reagan, who became the Confederacy's postmaster-general.

Athens, TX

Long before Europeans arrived, Caddoan peoples worked the rich clay deposits of this region into fine pottery, drawing on resources the land offered in abundance. The modern industry began in 1857 when Levi S. Cogburn, from a Georgia family of potters, started making cups, saucers, and plates in Athens. After his death the trade revived in 1885 under M. K. Miller and his sons, whose Athens Pottery Company launched a run of tile, brick, and pottery plants that made Henderson County a ceramics center.

Gallatin, TX

Henry Cemetery grew from the graves of a remarkable migration: Woodson Henry and roughly thirty-five Muskogee (Creek) families who left Chambers County, Alabama, for Texas in the 1830s. The burial ground was founded in 1852 when Ezekiel Henry laid his daughter to rest, and it soon held the whole extended family. A section in the northeast corner holds African American burials, including Peter Johnson, a formerly enslaved man given Jinkins family property upon his emancipation, and a World War I veteran, Aaron Quarll.

Giddings, TX

Henry Prentice Redfield came to Texas as a boy and, at sixteen, took up arms for its independence—fighting at Gonzales, the Siege of Bexar and San Jacinto in the revolution of 1835-36. He went on to fight in frontier conflicts with Native peoples, was wounded at Plum Creek in 1840, and later rode with the 1st Texas Cavalry in the U.S.-Mexican War at Resaca de la Palma and Monterrey. He lived until 1900, a veteran of nearly every early Texas war.

Shafter, TX

In the 1850s Milton Faver established the first Anglo-American-owned ranch in the Big Bend country, an isolated empire of springs at Cibolo, Cienega, and La Morita. To hold this ground against Apache raids, he built three fortress-like quadrangular adobe compounds, ranching in a borderland far beyond the reach of law or army.

Leander, TX

This site marks the graves of homeseekers led by John Webster who, in August 1839, were attacked by a Comanche band while traveling toward what is now Burnet County. Trapped after trying to flee in darkness, all the men were killed; Mrs. Webster and her two children were captured and later released. The episode, remembered as the Webster Massacre, was one of many violent clashes between Republic-era settlers and the Comanche.

Garden Valley, TX

In July 1839 the army of the young Republic of Texas encamped here under generals including Thomas J. Rusk and Edward Burleson during the campaign against Chief Bowles and the Cherokees and their allies. After the decisive fighting in nearby Van Zandt County on July 16, the soldiers disbanded and returned home nine days later. The state marked the spot during the 1936 Texas Centennial.

Loyal Valley, TX

German immigrants Moritz and Auguste Lehmann settled along Squaw Creek in the 1850s Hill Country, where in 1870 raiders seized their young sons Herman and Willie. Willie was freed within days, but ten-year-old Herman lived eight years among the Apache and Comanche, adopted into Quanah Parker's family. Returned to his German family by soldiers in 1878, Herman remained torn between two worlds and kept his Comanche ties for the rest of his life.

Lander County, NV

For untold generations before European contact, Great Basin peoples worked the pass near Hickison Summit, funneling migratory deer herds toward a natural ambush between low buttes. Success took the coordinated effort of several families to trap, kill, and process the animals. On the rock walls they left three panels of petroglyphs, images tied to the ritual and spiritual life of the hunt, pecked seasonally by a group's shaman as omens for a good season.

Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947

Across the river from this point stood the "Middle Town" of the Goschgoschink cluster, later called Hickory Town, one of the Native refuge villages the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger came to in 1767. Here Zeisberger held his celebrated debate with Wangomen, a Munsee religious leader who challenged the missionary's Christian teaching — a rare recorded clash of spiritual worldviews on the colonial frontier. The town also marked the northern end of Indian paths running up from the south, along which trade goods reached these upper-Allegheny communities.

Washoe County, NV

High Rock Canyon holds a record of human presence stretching from around 3,000 B.C. to the gold rush, written on its towering volcanic walls in rockshelters, campsites, and petroglyphs. Northern Paiute people ranged this remote country when John C. Frémont passed through in 1843. Soon after, the Applegate brothers blazed an emigrant trail through the canyon in 1846, Peter Lassen followed part of the route in 1848, and by 1849 gold seekers crowded the narrow passage westward.

Morgan Mill, TX

Georgia-born John B. Hightower brought his family to Erath County before the 1860 census, ranching a large spread on which they had already buried three children. In 1870 the family formally set aside nearly two acres as a cemetery, whose first non-family burial was Reuben Phillips, found dead near the ranch after an Indian attack. Deeded to a cemetery association in 1895, the burial ground still holds veterans, lodge members, and generations of area residents.

Lincoln County, NV

Founded as a camp around 1865 and laid out as a townsite in 1866, Hiko took its name from a Shoshone word meaning roughly 'white man' or 'white man's town.' W. H. Raymond hauled a five-stamp mill up the Colorado River to Callville and then 140 miles overland by oxen to process Pahranagat ores, and in late 1866 Hiko became Lincoln County's first county seat. Raymond poured nearly $900,000 into the district before it failed, and after the mill moved to Bullionville in 1870 and the county seat to Pioche in 1871, the town declined.

Spring Valley Township, OH

During the Revolutionary War's western frontier, the Ohio Country was a violently contested borderland, and George Rogers Clark led Kentucky militia north across the Little Miami on punitive expeditions in 1780 and 1782 against the Shawnee towns. Guiding the columns were two of the frontier's most storied woodsmen, Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone, whose knowledge of the trails and river fords made such deep strikes possible. The men who camped here two miles above Caesar's Creek were part of a war being fought far from the coastal battlefields most Americans remember, in the forests and canebrakes west of the Appalachians.

Putnam vicinity, TX

Battle Creek earned its name in 1840 when a party hunting raiders was itself attacked near the water. Two decades later cattleman John Hittson built what is believed to be the first ranch headquarters in Callahan County on that same ground — just corrals, branding pens, and a modest shelter used at roundup time. It marks the moment open Texas rangeland began to be organized into working ranches.

Allen Township, PA · est. 1925

In the tangled early history of Penn's Woods, this ground sat beside an Lenape (Delaware) town near the Lehigh River, home to leaders the colonists knew as Lappawinzo and Tishcohan. Their names are bound to the notorious Walking Purchase of 1737, when Pennsylvania's proprietors used a decades-old, dubiously drawn deed to claim land measured by a day-and-a-half's walk. The colony hired fast, trained walkers like Edward Marshall, who strode far beyond what any ordinary traveler could cover, extending the boundary and stripping the Lenape of vast holdings.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1975

Founded in 1730, this Lancaster congregation stood at the heart of a bustling colonial town where the Pennsylvania frontier met the settled east. Its early building even hosted a 1762 Indian treaty council, a reminder that diplomacy with Native nations often unfolded in the plainest of civic spaces. The stone church dedicated in 1766 still guards the graves of two Pennsylvania statesmen of the Revolutionary era, Thomas Wharton and Governor Thomas Mifflin.

Snyder, TX

Vermont-born J. Wright Mooar came west at nineteen and, with his brother, established the first buffalo-hunting camp in the Texas Panhandle in 1873. Over his career he shot an estimated 22,000 bison — including a rare albino whose hide his descendants still preserve — and later supplied game to railroad crews and turned to ranching. His marksmanship earned the respect of Comanche chief Quanah Parker, who became his friend.

Snyder, TX

A Vermont native who came west at nineteen, J. Wright Mooar became one of the most prolific buffalo hunters of the American plains, establishing with his brother the first hunting camp in the Texas Panhandle in 1873. In 1876 he killed a rare albino buffalo in Scurry County, a hide later displayed at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Over his career he shot some 22,000 buffalo and earned the respect of Comanche chief Quanah Parker, who became his friend in later years.

Snyder, TX

In 1873 J. Wright Mooar and his brother John established the first buffalo-hunting camp in the Texas Panhandle, part of the hide trade that swept the southern plains. Wright's marksmanship became legendary—he downed a rare albino buffalo in Scurry County in 1876 and claimed some 22,000 kills, a skill that even earned the respect of Comanche chief Quanah Parker, later a friend. The brothers turned to ranching here in 1877, and Wright became a pillar of Scurry County life.

Castell, TX

Emil Kriewitz left Potsdam for the Texas coast in 1846 and threw himself into the frontier's every hazard—first as a U.S. soldier, then as an agent of the Adelsverein, the German society organizing settlement along the Llano River in Comanche country. To build trust he lived among the Comanche himself, a striking act of diplomacy in a violent borderland. He married Amalia Markwort in 1857, built this home and a small "Sunday house" around 1867, and served his community as justice of the peace and postmaster until his death in 1902.

Mason vicinity, TX

Taking over leadership of the German colonies from Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, John O. Meusebach guided settlement into the Hill Country and secured a treaty with the Comanches that opened the land between the Llano and San Saba rivers to peaceful settlement. He later retired to a farm on this ground, and the German colonists he brought left a lasting imprint on Texas through their thrift, craft, and blending of Old World custom with frontier necessity.

Juno, TX

In July 1857 a small detachment of the U.S. 2nd Cavalry under young Lt. John Bell Hood tracked a fresh trail toward the Devils River, only to be lured into an ambush by a decoy flag near an Indian camp. Roughly a hundred Comanche and Lipan Apache warriors closed in, and grass fires set by the women hemmed the soldiers into brutal hand-to-hand fighting. Outnumbered several times over, Hood's men held and broke the attack; two troopers died and several, including Hood, were wounded before a relief column arrived from Camp Hudson.

Burnet, TX

The Rev. Isaac Hoover, a Methodist Protestant minister from Tennessee, established this burial ground about 1850 and soon began holding services in a nearby oak grove. The oldest stone dates to around that year, and among the graves is a Whitlock family killed by Indians. The tract holds well over two hundred marked and unmarked graves and remains in use.

Liberty Hill, TX

Pioneers who reached this stretch of Williamson County in the 1840s founded the town of Hopewell and endured the dangers of frontier life, including Comanche raids — Wofford and Mary Johnson and their daughter were killed nearby in 1863. The cemetery grew up around the earlier grave of Cornelia Johnson and was deeded to a local congregation in 1877. Today the graveyard, holding area pioneers and Civil War veterans, is the only trace left of the Hopewell community.

Girvin, TX

This ford on the Pecos was one of the great crossroads of the West, where the ancient Comanche Trail from the Llano Estacado to Mexico met the routes of American expansion. Surveyor John R. Bartlett found it in 1850 marked by horse skulls, giving it its name. The Butterfield Overland Mail, the road west from Fort Concho, and the Goodnight-Loving cattle trail all funneled through this single crossing.

Spokane County, WA

In 1858 Colonel George Wright marched from Walla Walla to crush Native resistance in the interior Northwest. After defeating allied tribes in battle, he captured some 800 of their horses and had them killed on the bank of the river to cripple the tribes' ability to keep fighting. The slaughter, remembered on this monument, was a deliberate and devastating blow in the U.S. Army's campaign to force the Spokane and neighboring peoples onto reservations.

Girvin, TX

Horsehead Crossing was the great ford of the Pecos River, named for the horse and mule skulls that littered its banks—animals driven up the Comanche War Trail that drank themselves to death after the long dry haul. After the 1849 gold rush it became a vital landmark, offering the first water in some 75 miles, and by 1858 it anchored a stage stand on the Butterfield Overland Mail. Confederate and Union eyes watched it during the Civil War, and in 1866 Goodnight and Loving blazed their famous cattle trail to this very point.

Grapeland, TX

Rising to 552 feet, the highest point around, this oblong knoll gave Native Americans, pioneers, and soldiers a commanding view of the East Texas landscape and was already known as Houston's Mound by the 1830s. William T. Sadler, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto and a respected surveyor, acquired land including the mound in the 1820s. He and other surveyors used its vantage as a benchmark to verify the boundaries between Houston County and its neighbors.

Sheffield, TX

Howard's Well was one of the few reliable water sources on the brutal San Antonio–El Paso road, rediscovered by ex-Texas Ranger Richard A. Howard during John Coffee Hays's 1848 expedition to map a wagon route west. Forty-niners bound for California gold, mail lines, and army surveyors all watered here across the mid-19th century. It was also a crossroads of conflict: in 1872 Comanches and Kiowas ambushed a wagon train nearby, a raid that hardened federal Indian policy.

Hueco, TX

Hueco Tanks, whose natural rock basins trapped precious rainwater, was one of the most important watering places in the Southwest, used by Native peoples, emigrants, and travelers alike. Near here the Apache repeatedly contested passage through their country. From 1858 to 1861 the site served as a station on the Southern Overland Mail line linking St. Louis and San Francisco.

Alvord, TX

In 1874, during one of the last Indian raids in Wise County, tragedy struck a newly arrived settler family. While C. W. Huff and his son worked a remote part of their land, raiders killed Mrs. Huff and her daughters Palestine and Molly. Neighbors buried the victims in a wagon bed, and in 1879 Huff donated the land around the grave for a cemetery.

Huntsville, TX

Authorized under the Republic of Texas and begun in 1848, the Huntsville "Walls" Unit became the state's first penitentiary, receiving its first inmates into a half-finished facility in 1849. Over the next century it ran inmate-labor textile mills, endured the notorious convict-lease system until its 1910 abolition, and launched Depression-era ventures like the license-plate plant and the famed Texas Prison Rodeo. Its cells held figures from Kiowa chiefs Satanta and Big Tree to gunfighter John Wesley Hardin.

Huntsville, TX

Kentucky native Pleasant Gray and his wife Hannah settled here in 1835 on land granted through Mexico's colonization effort, beside natural springs that had long served as a campsite for the Bedias Indians and for travelers passing through. Gray and his brother opened a trading post, subdivided the land, and advertised lots as far as Alabama and New Orleans, naming the new town for Huntsville, Alabama. Incorporated in 1845 and even noted by British adventurer William Bollaert, the springs supplied the town's water until an artesian well replaced them in the 1890s and the spring was finally boarded over.

Spur, TX

This memorial honors Private Gregg, William Max, W. H. Kilpatrick and other soldiers of the 4th U.S. Cavalry who died in this region during the Indian Wars campaigns led by General Ranald S. Mackenzie in the early 1870s. Fighting the Comanche across the West Texas plains, these troops faced hardship and danger far from public notice. The marker's stark, dated language — praising them for having "cleared the plains for the white men" — itself reflects the attitudes of the era in which it was written.

Austin, TX

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.

Alto, TX

This part of present-day Cherokee County lay at the heart of the Hasinai Confederacy of Caddoan peoples, whose principal tribe, the Hainai, gave rise to the very word "Texas." Here lived the grand xinesi, the chief priest charged with guarding the sacred fire; should it ever die, custom demanded he carry new flame with solemn ceremony to rekindle the community's hearths. The 1936 state marker records a spiritual and political center of Indigenous life in the region.

Winona, TX

This site recalls the aftermath of the Battle of the Neches on July 16, 1839, when forces of the Republic of Texas defeated the Cherokees and allied tribes, killing their leader Chief Bowles. Army scouts fanned out through the surrounding country in the days that followed. The 1936 state marker commemorates that campaign, which drove the Cherokees from East Texas.

San Ygnacio, TX

Established in 1750, Mission Dolores was a visita — a mission station visited by a priest from a larger parent mission — set up as part of José de Escandón's sweeping effort to settle and Christianize the lower Rio Grande frontier of New Spain. The state of Texas marked its remembered site in 1936.

Zapata, TX

In 1750, the Spanish crown pressed north of the Rio Grande under José de Escandón's ambitious plan to colonize the frontier province of Nuevo Santander. A visita — a chapel served periodically by a priest riding out from a parent mission — was established here to draw the region's Indigenous people into Spanish settlement and the Catholic faith. The State of Texas placed this marker in 1936, its Centennial year, to remember one of the earliest European footholds in the lower Rio Grande country.

Serbin, TX

This grave holds James Goucher and five of his family, killed in a raid by Indians on November 26, 1836, in the dangerous first year of the Republic of Texas. A true pioneer, Goucher had cut the first road from San Felipe to the settlements on the Colorado River—a route known for years afterward as 'Goucher's Trace.' The State of Texas set this monument in 1936, the state's centennial.

Utopia, TX

In June 1841, near this spot in the rugged hill country of the young Republic of Texas, Captain John Coffee Hays led a small company of Texas Rangers, aided by allied Mexican fighters under Captain Flores, in a sharp clash with a band of Comanche warriors. Such encounters were the grim, constant reality of a contested frontier where Rangers, settlers, and Comanche bands fought for control of the land. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Abilene, TX

In 1541 the Spanish explorer Coronado is thought to have crossed this region while searching for the fabled riches of Quivira, though his exact route over the Texas plains is now lost. Realizing his guide, dubbed "The Turk," had led him too far south, Coronado halted at a small canyon, conferred with his captains, and turned his compass due north. When he finally reached Quivira, likely in present-day Kansas, he found no gold — only the grass huts of a Wichita village.

Archer City, TX

In the mid-1700s, Native peoples of this region met French traders from Louisiana at a nearby trading ground, exchanging furs for manufactured goods — including guns and ammunition the Spanish crown forbade but could not stop. The Spanish explorer José Mares noted evidence of the French during his 1787 road-mapping expedition, and decades later, in 1854, Captain R. B. Marcy and Indian agent Robert S. Neighbors camped nearby while scouting reservation sites. The area was a meeting point of three empires and many peoples.