Native American History

Abbott, TX

D. C. Carr established this ranch in 1854 on land straddling Hill and McLennan counties, part of the early growth he and his brother J. C. brought to the towns of Abbott and West after arriving in Texas in 1840. A log cabin on the property served triple duty as store, post office, and stagecoach station until 1881. The land still holds traces of an earlier Indian camp and burial mound near a cave formed along the Balcones Fault.

San Patricio, TX

On a rise above San Patricio lies a burial ground older than the Anglo town, used by Indian peoples and Mexican settlers before empresarios John McMullen and James McGloin planted their Irish colony of San Patricio de Hibernia in 1830. The colonists kept using the old cemetery, and its graves record the turbulence of the Texas Revolution — Lt. Marcelino Garcia, killed at Lipantitlan in 1835, and soldiers who fell in the Battle of San Patricio in 1836. Empresario McGloin himself lies here in an unmarked grave, alongside settlers lost to scarlet fever, duels, and the ordinary attrition of frontier life.

San Patricio, TX

This hilltop cemetery is believed to have served Native peoples and Mexican settlers long before Anglo colonization reached the area. After Irish empresarios John McMullen and James McGloin founded San Patricio de Hibernia in 1830, the colonists kept burying their dead here, beneath wooden crosses and stones inscribed in Spanish and English. Among those laid to rest are Lt. Marcelino García, killed at the 1835 battle of Lipantitlán, and soldiers who fell at the battle of San Patricio in 1836.

Dallas, TX

The springs on this ground drew Native peoples long before a settler acquired the property in the 1840s, and the same water later helped make Dallas the crossing point of two major railroads in 1871 — the spark for the town's explosive growth. In 1876 the city set aside ten acres near the springs as its first public park, a leafy center of fountains, a zoo, and a wading pool that a heritage society would later reclaim as a museum of restored historic buildings.

Falcon, TX

In 1746 the Viceroy of New Spain commissioned Colonel José de Escandón to colonize this stretch of the Rio Grande, and the first settlers arrived three years later; an official 1767 survey converted their holdings into individual land grants, beginning private land ownership in the region. Around 1800 José Eugenio Ramírez founded the Ramireño ranch here, and the community that grew around it was renamed Falcon in 1915 for his wife, María Rita de la Garza Falcón. When Falcon Dam flooded the townsite in 1952, residents carried their history to higher ground at this relocated village.

Newcastle, TX

This powder magazine is the best-preserved original building of Fort Belknap, one in a chain of federal posts strung from the Red River to the Rio Grande to shield settlers after Texas joined the Union. Named for its builder, Brig. Gen. W. G. Belknap, the fort held sixteen stone and picket houses by 1853 on the edge of contested frontier country. The State of Texas restored the magazine in 1936.

Ft. Stockton, TX

This ground served as the burial place for soldiers of Fort Stockton and the civilians of the town that grew beside it after the post's founding in 1859. Troops here guarded the San Antonio–San Diego mail line and countered raids along the Comanche Trail, and the graves testify to a brutal frontier where few lived past forty. When the fort closed for good, the remains of 56 soldiers were reinterred at Fort Sam Houston in 1888.

Fort Davis, TX

For a brief, dramatic span in 1861–62, this frontier outpost on the San Antonio–El Paso military road served as a Confederate supply point, held by Texas Mounted Rifles after the U.S. Army withdrew. Troops passed through en route to the ill-fated campaign to seize New Mexico and Arizona — and the Pacific gold routes — while Apache warriors ambushed a patrol under Lt. Mays in the Big Bend that August.

Mason vicinity, TX

Built of stone quarried from the post hill beside a spring long used by Native peoples, Fort Mason helped guard the Texas frontier against raids. Colonel Robert E. Lee commanded the post from February 1860 until February 1861 — and it was here, as the Union began to fracture, that he wrestled with the choice that would define his life. Vowing he would draw his sword only in defense of his native Virginia, Lee left Fort Mason on February 13, 1861, and rode toward the coming war.

Millcreek Township, PA · est. 1946

Long before highways, travelers crossed this high ground on the Presque Isle Portage, the carrying-path that linked Lake Erie to the headwaters flowing toward the Ohio. It formed part of the older Venango Trail worn by Native people through the forests of northwestern Pennsylvania. In 1753 the French widened an Indian path into their military French Road, and the modern highway still shadows and departs from that ancient route here.

Sheffield, TX

This route began as ancient Indian trails and the Old Chihuahua Trail linking San Antonio to El Paso and Mexico, later extended to the Gulf port of Indianola so imported goods could be freighted inland and traded for silver, gold ore, and leather. In 1848 the U.S. Army recharted it, marking water holes and camps, and strung forts along it — Clark, Davis, Lancaster, Hudson, and Stockton — to guard the frontier. Settlers, gold seekers, and even the Army's experimental camel trains traveled it despite frequent clashes with Comanche, Apache, and Kiowa people, until safe passage was finally secured around 1870.

Hallettsville, TX

This marker recalls the gallows used on September 12, 1879, for the public hanging of a Native man known as "Pocket," convicted of killing an Englishman named Leonard Hyde. Public executions of this kind were grim community spectacles in frontier Texas, where formal justice was still raw and often meted out in the open. The record survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Lancaster, PA · est. 2015

Lancaster's colonial jail once stood just north of this spot, serving the county from 1753 to 1851. In December 1763, the last surviving members of the Conestoga—a small community descended from the once-powerful Susquehannock—were sheltered here for their own safety. A frontier mob known as the Paxton Boys broke in and murdered them, and no one was ever charged for the killings.

Bend, TX

Established in August 1858 by settlers who came to worship carrying guns against possible Indian attack, this Methodist campmeeting saw the preacher hang his rifle in a tree within reach while guards watched the congregation's horses. Held between the summer's work and the fall harvest, the annual gathering became a season of both spiritual revival and social life, with many marriages beginning in courtships struck up here. Families held their lots for generations, and the present tabernacle replaces the brush arbors settlers once rebuilt each year.

Hedley, TX

The Old Mobeetie Trail followed a path far older than any map—worn over centuries by migrating bison and the Native hunters who followed them across the Texas Panhandle. In the 1870s it carried the first dugout-dwelling settlers, buffalo hunters supplying the hide trade, and soldiers to Fort Elliott, while the frontier town of Mobeetie briefly served as county seat for 28 counties. As the Rath and later the Jones and Plummer trails, it became a great artery for longhorn drives to northern railheads before farming 'nesters' finally settled the land along it.

Jacksonville, TX

Beginning as a Native American trail, this East Texas road carried Spanish priest Calahorra on a 1765 peace mission and, by the 1820s, became a vital route for hauling salt from the Neches Saline to Nacogdoches. It saw survivors of the 1838 Killough massacre flee toward Fort Lacy and Texas troops march to fight in the Córdova Rebellion and the Cherokee War of 1839, and later guided Mexican War volunteers and waves of new settlers. Towns like Jacksonville, Dialville, and Larissa grew up along its path.

Roans Prairie, TX

Founded in 1867 alongside the Oakland Baptist Church, this Grimes County burial ground holds the graves of many of the area's earliest settlers. Oakland sat on the Coushatta Trace—an old trail of the friendly Coushatta people that became a stage road linking Austin and Huntsville—and served as a popular way-station for the Bates and Black stage lines until 1880. The marker layers Native, pioneer, and stagecoach-era history into a single quiet crossroads.

Pleasanton, TX

Raised in 1874 from locally quarried red sandstone, the Old Rock Schoolhouse served Pleasanton as a free public school, a Baptist meeting house, and a summer teacher-training normal school. A storm cellar in the yard doubled as a refuge during Comanche raids, a reminder that classroom life here sat on an unsettled frontier. Later reincarnated as a store, residence, and apartments, it was eventually stripped back to its original stone and returned to teaching.

Austin, TX

James Andrew Patton oversaw the building of this stone store in 1898, its walls laid by a German mason in the tradition of the early German rock buildings of central Texas. Patton had earlier ridden as a Texas Ranger in conflicts with the Comanches before becoming a civic leader and postmaster known fondly as 'the mayor of Oak Hill.' His family and others ran a general store here for years, with a Woodmen of the World lodge meeting upstairs.

Kerrville, TX

The Old Spanish Trail threaded through the Hill Country from San Antonio past Bandera Pass, Camp Verde, and Kerrville, a route used for centuries by Comanches and Lipan Apaches. In 1732 Spanish forces under Juan Antonio Bustillo y Cebalos fought the Apaches at Bandera Pass, and over following decades soldiers, missionaries, and adventurers followed the trail toward the San Sabá country and its rumored silver. By the 1850s Camp Verde and Camp Ives anchored military patrols along the same ancient path.

Mexia, TX

Founded in 1838 around a spring donated by Moses Herrin, Old Springfield grew into the seat of newly formed Limestone County by 1846, complete with a two-story brick courthouse, a Methodist district that seeded the Northwest Texas Conference, and a short-lived college. The town's fortunes turned when the Houston & Texas Central Railroad passed it by in 1870, and two devastating fires in 1873 — one consuming the courthouse — hastened its end as buildings were carted off and the county seat moved to Groesbeck. Today only the old cemetery and Springfield Lake, inside Fort Parker State Park, carry the name of what was once the county's leading town.

Medina, TX

This hill-country homesite sits on land once tied to surveyor John James and Confederate General John Bell Hood, in country so contested that raids delayed any building until 1878—just two years before the town of Medina took shape nearby. The Standard family has held the property since 1889, and it endures as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. Its story is one of persistence on a frontier where settlement waited on the easing of conflict.

Matamoras, PA · est. 1948

Around 1740, when the upper Delaware valley was a raw and contested frontier, Dutch settler Simon Westfael raised a sturdy stone house here that neighbors could flee to when violence flared. Structures like this doubled as homes and fortifications in an era when European farming families lived amid the tensions of frontier warfare. Local memory long called it the Old Stone Fort, or Fort Matamoras.

Nacogdoches, TX

Around 1788–91, civic and military leader Don Antonio Gil Y'Barbo built a stone house at the crossing of El Camino Real and La Calle del Norte, its walls quarried from local glauconite. Over the next century the building served as home, store, courthouse, jail, saloon, and fortress against filibustering raids, and Sam Houston opened his first Texas law office here in 1833. Demolished in 1902, its stones were reused for a faithful replica built in 1936 on the Stephen F. Austin campus.

Leavenworth, KS

This stone wall dates to 1827, the founding year of the military post that became Fort Leavenworth, and reflects the frontier fortifications raised in the earliest days of the U.S. Army's westward presence. Built during a period of tension between the government and Plains nations, it stands as a physical trace of the fort's origins on the edge of settled America.

Boys Ranch, TX

Just northeast of here sprawled Old Tascosa, the self-styled cowboy capital of the Texas Panhandle. An easy crossing of the Canadian River made it a trading spot long before permanent settlement, and after the buffalo vanished, sheepherders, then cattlemen like Charles Goodnight, poured in during 1876. Isolated hundreds of miles from other towns, Tascosa drew gunmen and lawmen alike and buried its dead in its own Boot Hill—until barbed wire, the giant XIT Ranch, and a bypassing railroad choked off the open range and left it a ghost town.

Bandera, TX

This winding hundred-mile road from San Antonio to Kerrville served through the 19th century as a strategic patrol route for the Texas Rangers guarding the frontier. Bandera sat midway along the trail near Bandera Pass, a notorious ambush spot, making the town a focal point for Ranger activity. The route's most famous clash came in 1841, when Captain 'Jack' Hays and forty Rangers were ambushed by a large Comanche force in the pass and fought a desperate, close-quarters battle.

Snyder, TX

Camp Springs took its name from W. H. Camp, who dug in beside the springs in 1878, but the land's human story ran far deeper, with pictographs and campsites left by Indigenous people who sheltered in nearby caves. The great California emigrant trail blazed by Captain R. B. Marcy in 1849 passed through this country, and in 1856 Robert E. Lee followed part of that same route while patrolling for Comanches. A post office opened in 1891 as the settlement took hold.

Karnack, TX

This region was the ancestral home of the Caddo people before it became one of the most contested corners of the 19th-century frontier — part of the lawless "neutral ground" from 1819, where settlers famously refused to pay taxes to any authority. Founded on Caddo Lake in 1838, Port Caddo boomed into a rowdy river port of gamblers and boat crews, and its residents plunged into the violent Regulator-Moderator War of 1840–44. It thrived to some 500 people after Texas joined the Union, then withered as rival towns, a falling lake, and the railroad passed it by.

Utopia, TX

Founded in 1852 by San Jacinto veteran Capt. William Ware, Waresville was the first nonmilitary settlement in Uvalde County, a cluster of log and native-stone homes tucked into Sabinal Canyon. Life on this frontier was perilous: settlers were lost to Indian raids between 1856 and 1866, and Ware himself was buried in the colony cemetery in 1853. Though the post office moved on to nearby Utopia in 1883, the cemetery, early homes, and the site of the first store still mark where the canyon was first settled.

Ysleta, TX

This mission was first founded in 1613 at Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico and dedicated as San Antonio de Isleta. During the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, Tigua Indians carried their patron saint south alongside fleeing Spaniards and re-established the mission near El Paso in 1682. Renamed several times over the centuries, its present chapel still holds walls and bells from a 1744 building — and it continues to minister to the Tigua people.

Corsica, PA · est. 1950

The Olean Road, an early route running from Olean to Kittanning, followed the older Catawba Path — a trail once used by Five Nations (Iroquois) war parties on their long raids against the Catawba people of South Carolina. Near this point it crossed another Native path linking Venango (present-day Franklin) with Chinklacamoose (present-day Clearfield). The layered names on the land record centuries of Indigenous travel and warfare before settlers ever arrived.

Sherman, TX

In 1851, thirteen-year-old Olive Ann Oatman was captured in Arizona after six of her family were killed, then sold to the Mojave, who treated her kindly but marked her chin with the blue cactus-needle tattoo she carried for life. Ransomed by the army at Fort Yuma in 1856, she lived in California and New York, married J. B. Fairchild in 1865, and about 1872 moved to Sherman, where he founded a city bank. She lived there until her death in 1903.

Weatherford, TX

Oliver Loving helped open the great post-Civil War cattle-driving era, blazing routes that carried Texas longhorns to distant markets. Partnered with Charles Goodnight, he was badly wounded on a drive toward New Mexico in 1867 and, after days without aid, died of his injuries. His dying wish was honored when his son and Goodnight brought his body 600 miles home by wagon for burial in Parker County.

Springfield, MA

This towering wooden figure is one of the "Whispering Giant" sculptures carved by artist Peter Wolf Toth, who created monumental tributes to Native Americans across all fifty states. Named Omiskanoagwiak, it is dedicated to the Indigenous peoples of the Pioneer Valley — the Native nations who lived along the Connecticut River long before European settlement. The carving honors their enduring presence and heritage in the region.

Lindale, TX

In the summer of 1839 the young Republic of Texas waged war on the Cherokee and allied tribes living in its eastern reaches, culminating in the Battle of the Neches in mid-July. Nearby, on Burleson Lake, stood the last camp of the Republic's army under generals Douglass, Rusk, and Burleson before Secretary of War Albert Sidney Johnston ordered it mustered out. From here the soldiers departed for home on July 25, leaving behind a campaign that drove the Cherokees from Texas.

Megargel, TX

After the Comanche lived from 1854 to 1858 on a state reservation near Camp Cooper, the U.S. government removed them and their goods north to Oklahoma. On August 3, 1859, the exodus camped near this spot on a head branch of Kickapoo Creek, escorted by a company of the 1st U.S. Infantry under Capt. C. C. Gilbert and Indian agent Matthew Leeper, while to the east Maj. George H. Thomas escorted more than a thousand Lower Brazos Reserve Indians on the same forced journey. Megargel was later founded here in 1910.

San Saba, TX

On this ground in March 1847, twenty Comanche chiefs and German colonists led by John O. Meusebach agreed to a treaty of peace opening the Fisher-Miller land grant to settlement. Unusually for its time, the agreement was honored by both sides and, as the marker notes, was never broken. It stands as a rare, lasting accord between Native people and European immigrants on the Texas frontier.

Nacogdoches, TX

For roughly a century a stone house stood on this Nacogdoches site, thought to have been built about 1779 by town founder Antonio Gil Ybarbo and sold by him in 1805. It later served as headquarters for Indian traders William Barr and Samuel Davenport and, over its long life, did duty as trading post, warehouse, town hall, fort, barracks, church, tavern, and saloon before being demolished in 1902. A reconstruction rose in 1936 on the college campus.

Fieldton, TX

In the summer of 1872, Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie of the U.S. Army marched 240 men and eight officers along the draw near this spot as part of the Army's campaign to force Native peoples off the Texas frontier. His swift, secret movement toward New Mexico aimed to break up a network of traders who paid Indians to raid settlers' cattle and horses. The track his soldiers beat across the plains served later scouts and settlers and is still remembered as Mackenzie's Trail.

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.

China, TX

Named for one of the Atakapan-speaking peoples it once linked, the Opelousas Trail ran from La Bahia — later Goliad — to the Mississippi in Louisiana, a route worn by Native trade for centuries before Spanish soldiers and French traders followed it. After 1820, settlers streamed in from Louisiana and the South, and cattlemen like Martin de Leon and James Taylor White drove great herds along it to market in New Orleans. In 1836 Texas families fled down the path in the "Runaway Scrape," and later the captured Santa Anna was led along it as a prisoner of war; the Confederate Army used the road, and parts of it became U.S. Highway 90.

Nacogdoches, TX

Catholic worship in Nacogdoches reaches back to Spanish missions of the early 1700s, interrupted by French incursions and periods of abandonment. When the Diocese of Galveston formed in 1847, Bishop Jean Marie Odin elevated Nacogdoches from mission to parish, officially founding Sacred Heart with French priest Louis Chambodut as first pastor. Its original 1847 frame church, on Elm (later Pecan) Street, served until the 1930s before the congregation moved and the old building was relocated for preservation.

Calhoun County, TX

In the early 1790s, Spanish priests sought to plant a mission among the Karankawa of the Gulf Coast, both to spread Christianity and to strengthen Spain's grip on the frontier. Dedicated in 1793 as Nuestra Señora del Refugio—"our lady of refuge"—the mission stood in the heart of Karankawa country but drew reluctant, sometimes hostile recruits. After a raid nearly destroyed it in 1794, it was relocated up the river, becoming the last Spanish mission ever founded in Texas.

Santa Barbara County, CA

These ruins mark the first location of Mission La Purísima Concepción, founded in December 1787 by Padre Fermín de Lasuén as the eleventh in California's chain of Spanish missions. The mission gathered Chumash people into its religious and agricultural community until a powerful earthquake destroyed the buildings in December 1812, prompting relocation to a new site. What remains here is the original footprint of that lost complex.

Palestine, TX

Born in 1917 near Groesbeck, Osjetea Briggs became a Native American photographer, journalist and author who documented downtown Palestine and its people from the studio she opened there in the 1950s. She founded and edited her own weekly, the Elkhart Eagle, whose column "Walk in My Moccasins" won recognition — and later a 1992 book of the same name — and she advised the Anderson County Council of Honor for four decades. Active in Democratic politics, she served her East Texas community until her death in 2002.

Refugio, TX

This parish traces its origins to the Spanish mission Nuestra Señora del Refugio, established in 1791 and relocated to this area in 1795—among the last missions founded in Spanish Texas. After earlier buildings were razed, an impressive Victorian/Romanesque sanctuary rose here in 1901, and the church still reflects the unusual blend of Spanish and Irish Catholic heritage that settled this stretch of the coast.

Mandeville, LA

Catholic missionaries reached the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain early in the eighteenth century, evangelizing the Choctaw, Chinchuba, and other peoples; among the pioneers was Fr. Michael Baudouin, superior of Louisiana's Jesuit mission. A resident congregation was organized at Mandeville in 1850, and the missionary-poet Adrien Rouquette, 'Chahta-Ima,' also labored here. The present Our Lady of the Lake church was dedicated in 1953 under Benedictine care.

Llano, TX

The community of Oxford took shape in 1880 when Confederate veteran A. J. Johnson laid out a townsite in Llano County, and a year later neighbors set aside ground nearby for a burial place. Among those resting here is Johnson himself and James R. Moss, who captained the 1873 Packsaddle Mountain fight—one of the last engagements that drove raiding Native peoples from the county. The cemetery preserves the memory of a frontier settlement now largely gone.

Llano, TX

On August 4, 1873, atop Packsaddle Mountain a few miles east of here, Captain J. R. Moss led a small party of settlers — among them his kinsmen and neighbors — against a band of Native fighters said to outnumber them three to one. The settlers prevailed in what the marker records as the last Indian battle in this region. The fight closed a long era of frontier conflict in the Texas Hill Country.

Corpus Christi, TX

Padre Island takes its name from Padre Jose Nicolas Balli, a priest from a prominent Spanish landowning family of the lower Rio Grande Valley. Ordained about 1790, he secured a grant of island land from the Spanish crown, and in 1804 founded its first settlement, Rancho Santa Cruz, running large herds of cattle, horses, and sheep with his nephew as foreman. Balli also began the island's first mission — meant both for settlers and to Christianize the Karankawa — and started an early church and school near present Matamoros while serving as a missionary across the valley.

McCracken County, KY

Where the Tennessee River meets the Ohio, William Clark—of Lewis and Clark fame—laid out the town of Paducah in 1827, giving it a name tied to the Chickasaw and their remembered chief Paduke. The rivers and, later, the railroads made it a busy trade center and the seat of McCracken County. It sent Alben Barkley to the vice presidency, produced humorist Irvin S. Cobb, and was seized early in the Civil War by Union generals Lew Wallace and William T. Sherman.

Paducah, KY

Paducah is the only major Kentucky city bearing an Indigenous name, honoring the legendary Chief Paduke. His people, a group associated with the Chickasaw, lived and hunted in this area until their land was ceded in the 1818 Jackson Purchase. When General William Clark—of Lewis and Clark fame—platted the town in 1827, he set aside its earlier name, Pekin, in favor of Paducah.

Lincoln County, NV

Fed by three springs and named for a local Native people, Pahranagat Valley has been farmed since the mid-1800s and briefly boomed after ore was found in 1865. A stamp mill at Hiko made it the county seat until mining faded and Pioche took the honor. The valley won odd national fame in 1867 when journalist Dan De Quille of the Territorial Enterprise spun his tall tale of magnetic "traveling stones," a hoax so straight-faced that readers took it for truth. Today the town of Alamo and a wildlife refuge share the well-watered meadows.

Palo Pinto, TX

Created in 1856 and organized in 1857, Palo Pinto County takes its Spanish name — "spotted oak" — from the mottled bark of a common regional tree. Its abundant water and game had long made it a favored Indian locality before Anglo-American settlers, including legendary cattlemen and trailblazers Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, arrived in the 1850s. The 1880 discovery of mineral water and the coming of the Texas & Pacific Railroad drew a wave of new settlers.

Panhandle, TX

As the buffalo herds vanished and Native peoples were forced onto reservations in the 1880s, the town of Panhandle rose as the region's early capital and, in 1887, the terminus of the Santa Fe Railway. Immigrant trains delivered colonists who plowed the old range into wheat fields, and the town became the seat of Carson County in 1888. Nearby lie the area's first oil well of 1921 and the site of a World War II ordnance plant.

Silver, TX

Long before wagons and cavalry passed this way, Panther Gap marked a route along an ancient Indian trail through the West Texas hills. Before the Civil War it guided travelers and soldiers moving west of Fort Chadbourne, and after 1880 it carried the region's traffic toward the railhead at Colorado City. Its name honors the panthers—cougars—that still prowl the surrounding country.

Beeville, TX

The fierce Karankawa people crossed this creek and named it for the kite-shaped pebbles along its bed, and in the 1830s the leaders of the Power and Hewetson colonies passed here under Mexican land grants; tradition holds the Mexican Army camped on a tributary while marching to crush the Texas Revolution. By 1857 the town of Papalote had grown into the county's center of amusement, boasting a cowboy-built dance hall, cockfights, and horse races, and it boomed when the railroad arrived in 1886. The twentieth century undid it — a failed citrus scheme, fears of Pancho Villa's raids, and finally the 1948 highway bypass — until only a scattering of households remained.

Humboldt County, NV

Hudson's Bay Company trapper Peter Skene Ogden passed through Paradise Valley in 1828, and settlers arrived in 1863 to farm land that would supply mines across Nevada and Idaho. Conflict with local Native Americans soon followed, prompting the U.S. Army to establish Camp Winfield Scott nearby from 1866 to 1870. The town changed names with its fortunes — Scottsdale, then Paradise City as a mining supply center, and finally Paradise Valley once livestock raising came to dominate.

Hurst, TX

The land for Parker Cemetery was donated in 1901 by Isaac Duke Parker, a Texas legislator whose family sits at the heart of one of the frontier's most famous sagas. His father Isaac Parker gave his name to Parker County and was uncle to Cynthia Ann Parker, taken captive by Comanches in 1836 and raised among them as wife of Peta Nocona and mother of Quanah Parker, the last great Comanche war chief. The cemetery gathers this remarkable pioneer lineage in one place.