Native American History

Plymouth, PA · est. 2003

As the Revolution began, the Continental Congress ordered a chain of frontier forts to shield settlers in the contested Wyoming Valley, and Shawnee Fort was one of them. It guarded Connecticut-backed Yankee settlers — both from British-allied raiders and from Pennsylvanians who claimed the same lands — and served as the garrison of Capt. Samuel Ransom's company, which fought under Washington. Burned after the bloody Battle of Wyoming in 1778 and rebuilt, it was finally swept away by a flood in 1784.

Smithfield Township, PA · est. 2010

Near where the Brodhead Creek meets the Delaware River, the Shawnee-Minisink site preserves traces of some of the earliest known people in the northeastern United States — campfires, hundreds of stone tools, and the remains of fish and fruit left nearly 13,000 years ago. These finds surprised archaeologists, revealing that late Ice Age inhabitants ate a more varied diet than the big-game-hunter image long suggested. The site is a touchstone for understanding the first Americans in the region.

Robert Lee, TX

For centuries the sheltering ledge above Walnut Creek drew nomadic Native peoples to its running water, firewood, and commanding lookout, midway between the Colorado and North Concho rivers. After 1850 the same spot served frontier scouts from Fort Chadbourne and Fort Concho, surveyors, and ranch line riders. It was here that rangers, militia, and settlers gathered just before the disastrous Battle of Dove Creek in January 1865.

Shenango Township, PA · est. 1947

For roughly a generation in the mid-eighteenth century, a village of Wyandot and Delaware people stood on the nearby riverbanks. It lay within the sphere of the Seneca, the westernmost nation of the Iroquois Confederacy, whose influence over the upper Ohio country was then at its height. A few Seneca bands lingered in the region into the early 1800s before the tide of white settlement pushed them west.

North Towanda Township, PA · est. 1948

The Sheshequin Path was a Native trail linking the Iroquois homelands of the north with the important Indigenous town of Shamokin to the south. Along this route the colonial interpreter and diplomat Conrad Weiser traveled to Onondaga, the capital of the Iroquois Confederacy, to represent Pennsylvania in council with the Six Nations. Weiser's journeys over such paths helped keep an uneasy peace between the colony and the powerful League.

Lewis Township, PA · est. 1949

Long before roads crossed these mountains, the Sheshequin Path threaded the wilderness as a branch of the great Warriors Path, offering a shortcut from Tioga to the Great Island on the Susquehanna. The route climbed through the tangled valley of Lycoming Creek—dense forest, swamp, windfall, and storm—country so forbidding that Indigenous travelers spoke of a demon holding power there. It was one of the vital corridors of the Six Nations' world in the Pennsylvania interior.

Lewis Township, PA · est. 1949

In 1743 the frontier diplomat Conrad Weiser followed the Sheshequin Path up Lycoming Creek toward the Onondaga council fire, the seat of the Six Nations' confederacy. He traveled on a peace mission for Virginia, in the vivid diplomatic language of the day to "take the hatchet out of the head" of the Iroquois. With him went mapmaker Lewis Evans and the pioneering botanist John Bartram, whose journey became a famous early record of the Pennsylvania backcountry.

McIntyre Township, PA · est. 1949

In 1745 the Moravian bishop Augustus Spangenberg passed through this valley along the Sheshequin Path on his way to the Onondaga council of the Six Nations. He left a memorable description of woods so thick that "one does not see the sun all day," hemmed in by mountains that pressed close as ant hills. His journey was part of the Moravians' remarkable engagement with the Native peoples of the Pennsylvania frontier.

Sunbury, PA · est. 1947

Shikellamy was an Oneida leader who served as the Six Nations' overseer on the Susquehanna, managing the Iroquois Confederacy's authority over the Delaware and other peoples displaced into the region. From about 1728 until his death in 1748 he lived at the important Native town of Shamokin, on the site of present-day Sunbury, a hub of diplomacy between Native nations and colonial Pennsylvania.

Sunbury, PA · est. 1915

This memorial honors Shikellamy — also called Swataney, 'Our Enlightener' — the Oneida leader the Iroquois Confederacy sent to oversee the Susquehanna peoples from Shamokin, on the site of present-day Sunbury. First stationed here in 1728 and named vice-gerent in 1745, he became a skilled diplomat who kept the peace between the Six Nations and colonial Pennsylvania until his death in 1758. He was buried near this spot, remembered as a steadfast friend of the province.

Kelly Township, PA · est. 1921

On the plain below this ridge once stood the town of Shikellamy, the seasoned Iroquois leader who served as the Confederacy's overseer of the tributary peoples along the Susquehanna. The Pennsylvania interpreter Conrad Weiser passed through here in 1737 on one of his diplomatic journeys to the Iroquois council at Onondaga. In 1745 Shikellamy was named vice-regent of the Confederacy and made his headquarters downriver at Shamokin, today's Sunbury.

West Chillisquaque Township, PA · est. 1947

Before making Shamokin his main seat, the Oneida leader Shikellamy kept an earlier residence near this spot. As the Six Nations' vice-regent over the Delaware and other refugee peoples, he spent most of the years 1728 to 1748 governing Native affairs along the Susquehanna until his death at Shamokin, now Sunbury.

Town of Southampton, NY

This monument bears the seal of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, whose people have lived and fished along eastern Long Island for thousands of years, long before English settlers founded Southampton in 1640. Their reservation on Shinnecock Neck is among the oldest self-governing Native communities in the country. The seal stands as an emblem of a nation that endures on its ancestral shore.

Austin, TX

This shallow, sandy crossing of Shoal Creek was a natural ford long used by Native Americans, settlers, and cattle drovers moving through the Colorado River valley. During the days of the Republic of Texas in the late 1830s, Vice President Mirabeau B. Lamar camped near here by the tiny village of Waterloo while on a buffalo hunt — and was so taken by the setting that he championed it as the site of the new nation's capital. Waterloo was soon renamed Austin and became the capital of Texas.

Concan, TX

This rugged pass takes its name from a silver mine the Spanish are said to have opened in the 1700s; the ore proved poor, but fourteen shafts still honeycomb the hills. In the early 1830s James Bowie—later a hero and casualty of the Alamo—built a fortification nearby, and in 1831 his men fought off a daylong Comanche attack. The fight's celebrated hero was Bowie's enslaved companion, remembered as 'Black Jim Bowie,' who braved the open ground to bring water to the besieged.

Susquehanna Township, PA · est. 2001

Born near this spot, Simon Girty became one of the American frontier's most divisive figures. Captured by Native forces in 1756 as a boy, he spent years among the Senecas, mastering their language and ways, and later served the American army as an interpreter before deserting in 1778. Thereafter he led British and allied Native war parties against frontier settlements and remained hostile to the United States through the War of 1812, dying in exile in Canada.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2017

Born near Harrisburg, Simon Girty was captured and adopted by the Seneca as a teenager in 1756, and he came to move fluidly between Native and colonial worlds. He worked as an interpreter at Fort Pitt before defecting to the British in 1778, after which he advised and accompanied Native war parties in raids on frontier settlements during the Revolution. Reviled by many American settlers, he remains a deeply contested figure and is buried in Canada.

Lumber Township, PA · est. 1950

Long before roads followed these ridges, Native travelers wore a path up the Sinnemahoning Creek valley, reaching Canoe Place — today's Emporium Junction — and continuing to the Seneca towns at the Big Bend of the Allegheny. Such trails were the region's highways, threading through mountains along the easiest grades. Early settlers pushing into Clinton, McKean, Cameron, and Potter Counties followed the very route the Seneca and their neighbors had established.

Nacogdoches, TX

Before 1800, this spot was known across East Texas as "Old Soledad," the headquarters of William Barr and Samuel Davenport, licensed traders who did business with the region's Native nations. In the Spanish borderlands, such traders were the crucial go-betweens, exchanging manufactured goods for hides and deerskins and knitting frontier economies together. A 1936 state marker fixes the site's place in that vanished world.

Leander, TX

In 1836, as the Republic of Texas was born, Texas Rangers under Captain John J. Tumlinson raised a blockhouse here—the first Anglo post in what became Williamson County. It stood only briefly, destroyed by Native raiders in 1837. Its short life captures the precariousness of the earliest frontier defense.

La Grange, TX

Built around 1828 as a fortified place of defense, this twin blockhouse—known as Moore's Fort—took its name from frontiersman John Henry Moore, a noted Indian fighter who commanded the Texans at the Battle of Gonzales in October 1835. The city of La Grange itself was established on Moore's land in 1831.

Marfa vicinity, TX

Alamito Creek had been a corridor of human activity since prehistoric times when Spanish explorers first passed through in 1535 and Mexican families began raising rancheros here around 1715 despite Apache pressure. In the 1850s the storied Chihuahua Trail brought freight wagons rumbling past, and by 1870 Alamito was a farming community led by North Carolina pioneer John Davis, who married into the founding Herrera family and served peach brandy to travelers. A railroad reached the site in 1930 and renamed it Plata, but today only ruins of the homes, chapel, school, and canal remain, with wagon ruts still cut into the bedrock.

Gilmer, TX

Early in the nineteenth century a band of Cherokees established a village on this East Texas ground, part of the tribes that had migrated westward ahead of American expansion. They lived here until 1839, when the Cherokee and their allied peoples were forcibly driven from the young Republic of Texas.

Spur, TX

Behind earthen breastworks at this spot, Major Thomas M. Anderson of the Tenth U.S. Infantry maintained a supply camp during the Army's campaigns on the Southern Plains. From here he provisioned the Fourth U.S. Cavalry under General Ranald S. Mackenzie, whose 1874–1875 operations broke the resistance of the region's Native peoples. Those campaigns forced Indigenous nations onto reservations and opened the plains to Anglo settlement.

Arlington, TX

In 1840 Jonathan Bird raised a fort along the Military Road linking the Red River to Austin, part of the young Republic of Texas's effort to hold and settle its northern frontier. Nearby in 1843, Republic commissioners signed a major treaty setting a boundary line between Indian nations and white settlements, and the battered survivors of the failed Snively Expedition sought shelter here. The spot sat at the crossroads of diplomacy, migration, and conflict on the Texas prairie.

Arlington, TX

In 1841 Gen. Edward H. Tarrant authorized Jonathan Bird to plant a fort and settlement near a crescent lake—the first Anglo-American colonizing attempt in present Tarrant County. Hunger and conflict scattered the Red River settlers, and in 1843 the disbanded Snively expedition, disarmed by U.S. troops, drifted through the abandoned post. That September, Republic officials and leaders of nine Native nations signed the Bird's Fort Treaty here, drawing a line between Indian lands and colonization.

McKinney, TX

John (Jack) McGarrah and his family came from Tennessee in 1842 and opened a trading post here, becoming among the first settlers of present-day Collin County and defending their family fort against raids. When the county was created in 1846, its seat was laid out here as Buckner, where citizens elected their first officials on the Fourth of July and raised a company for the Mexican War. Found to sit outside the county's legal limits, the seat was moved to nearby McKinney by 1848, and Buckner reverted to farmland.

Wills Point, TX

Neal Martin's long life spanned the making of Texas: born in 1777, he came from Kentucky in 1816, hunted buffalo in Van Zandt County, and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in the war for Texas independence. He later rode as a Texas Ranger, campaigned in Indian conflicts, and served in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War. He was buried here at the age of 102, his grave later marked by a great-granddaughter.

Caldwell, TX

The Camino Real, or Old San Antonio Road, was the great artery of early Texas, tracing ancient Indian and buffalo trails and echoing the 1691 route of Spanish padres. Stretching roughly a thousand miles from Saltillo in Mexico into Louisiana, it carried explorers, traders, soldiers, and settlers for generations before it was surveyed around 1800 as the "King's Highway." Here it also marked the boundary between the early colonies of Stephen F. Austin and Sterling C. Robertson.

Throckmorton, TX

Established in January 1856 by Major W. J. Hardee's 2nd U.S. Cavalry, Camp Cooper guarded the Texas frontier against the Comanche and oversaw a nearby Indian reservation. Robert E. Lee commanded here for nineteen months before the Civil War, and the post launched the 1859 Cimarron Expedition. Texas troops seized it in February 1861 as the state left the Union.

Del Rio, TX

Established as Camp San Felipe in 1876 as an outpost of Fort Clark, this U.S. Army post was one of a chain of forts defending the isolated settlements of the Southwest Texas frontier. General E. O. C. Ord created it to guard against raiding parties crossing the Pecos and Devil's Rivers. After the town of Del Rio grew up around it, the camp took the town's name; with the end of Indian raids by 1890, troops moved on and the post was abandoned in 1891.

Juno, TX

Established by the U.S. Army in 1857, Camp Hudson guarded the vital San Antonio–to–El Paso road against Indian raids and was named for a lieutenant who died of wounds from an earlier fight in Texas. Federal troops evacuated it at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, reoccupied it afterward, and abandoned it for good in 1868.

Camp Wood, TX

Camp Wood was established in May 1857 to guard the San Antonio–El Paso road and the Rio Grande Valley against raids, part of the chain of frontier posts the U.S. Army strung across Texas before the Civil War. It stood only a few years, abandoned in March 1861 when federal troops were withdrawn from Texas at the outbreak of the war. Its brief life marks the fragile military presence that shadowed westward travel.

St. Stockton, TX

Fed by water rising along geological faults, Comanche Springs gushed as one of the largest and most reliable oases in arid West Texas, drawing Native peoples since pre-Columbian times. Spanish wanderers — possibly Cabeza de Vaca around 1536 and the Mendoza expedition in 1684 — paused at its waters, as later did Comanche raiders on their war trail, gold seekers bound for California, and the Butterfield Overland Mail. Modern irrigation eventually drew down the aquifer until the springs ran dry.

Olney, TX

A lone cottonwood and a dependable spring made this spot a vital oasis on the nineteenth-century Texas frontier, its ground still scarred by wagon ruts. In 1849 Captain Randolph B. Marcy camped here while mapping a road for California gold-seekers, and over the next decade the spring watered soldiers establishing Fort Belknap, surveyors scouting Indian reservations, and the Butterfield Overland Mail. Rangers and cavalry under "Rip" Ford and Earl Van Dorn also staged here before riding north to fight Comanche raiders.

Cottonwood, TX

After the U.S. Army's campaigns of 1874 broke the power of the Plains tribes, settlers rushed into this corner of Callahan County, drawn by game, water, and good ranching and farming land. Cottonwood Springs, founded in 1875 at the head of Green Briar Creek, quickly grew into a trading center with stores, two churches, and a school—though it saw its share of gunfights. When a post office opened in 1883, the name was trimmed simply to Cottonwood.

Point Comfort, TX

This point on the Texas coast served as an early landing where supplies were unloaded for the interior. During the Texas Revolution, Captain Jack Shackelford's Alabama volunteers, the "Red Rovers," came ashore here on their way to the fighting. A town founded at the site in 1836 was short-lived, burned in an Indian raid in 1840, and the state marked the spot in 1936.

Weches, TX

Daniel McLean first came to Texas in 1813 with the Gutierrez-Magee expedition and survived the disastrous Battle of the Medina. He returned as a member of Austin's original colony, settling this league in 1821 as the first permanent resident of the area now in Houston County. He and his brother-in-law were killed in a raid in 1837, and he lies buried near this marker.

Maud, TX

Where Trammel's Trace met the water, a crossing first used by Caddo people and later by French and Spanish explorers became Mark Epperson's ferry sometime before 1837. Travelers relied on it until a wooden bridge, and then the modern span of 1924, made the ferry obsolete. When Lake Texarkana flooded the original site in the 1950s, the state moved this 1936 monument seven miles to higher ground.

Ysleta, TX

Founded around 1681 at Ysleta, this Spanish mission is among the oldest in what became the United States, established generations before the famous missions of California. It grew alongside the Tigua (Tiwa) people who helped the Franciscan padres build it and who have maintained their presence and traditions there for centuries. Rebuilt and restored over time, it remains an active church at the heart of Ysleta, often called Texas's oldest community.

Voss vicinity, TX

In the 1860s and 70s, Flat Top was a busy crossroads on the West Texas frontier, taking its name from a flat-roofed stone building that stood here. First settler Richard Coffey sometimes sheltered with neighbors in Pickettville Fort against raids. The site sat on the 'Wire Road,' which followed the Army Signal Corps telegraph line between Fort Concho and Fort Belknap, and served as a change station on the Fort Concho–Brownwood stage route.

Schulenburg, TX

Laid out on Keziah Cryer's land grant, the town of Lyons took its name from settler James Lyons, killed in an 1837 Comanche raid that also carried off his son Warren. By the 1860s Lyons had stores, a Masonic lodge, school, and post office and sat on the wartime 'Cotton Road' to Mexico—but it withered in the 1870s when the Southern Pacific Railroad bypassed it.

Murphy, NC

In the late 1830s the federal government forced the Cherokee Nation from its ancestral homelands in the southern Appalachians, and the town of Murphy sat at the heart of that upheaval. Fort Butler was one of a network of stockades built across western North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama where soldiers gathered Cherokee families before marching them west. General Winfield Scott directed the roundup in 1838, and detachments held at posts like this one began the long, deadly journey to what is now Oklahoma — the route remembered as the Trail of Tears.

Austin, TX

Established in June 1836 and first commanded by Colonel Robert M. Coleman, this stockade — also called Coleman's Fort — was one of the young Republic of Texas's farthest frontier outposts. Manned by Texas Rangers under Coleman and later captains Michael Andrews and William Eastland, it guarded settlers along a contested edge of settlement until it was abandoned in November 1838. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936, the republic's centennial year.

Mobeetie, TX

Established in June 1875, Fort Elliott was among the last military posts built in Texas as the U.S. Army sought to force Indigenous peoples off the Panhandle plains. Around its walls sprang up Mobeetie, a rough rendezvous for buffalo hunters and traders, until the fort was abandoned in 1889 and the frontier era it enforced drew to a close.

Uvalde, TX

Fort Inge was established in 1849 by Captain Sidney Burbank and named for Lieutenant Zebulon M. P. Inge, killed at Resaca de la Palma in 1846. Set on the Texas frontier near Uvalde, it guarded the southern Overland Mail route against raids and sheltered travelers and troops through the mid-nineteenth century. Abandoned during the Civil War, it was reoccupied by federal troops from 1866 to 1869 and later served as a Texas Ranger camp.

Uvalde, TX

Established on the Leona River in 1849 and named for a lieutenant killed at Resaca de la Palma in the Mexican War, Fort Inge guarded the southern Overland Mail route against raids in the years before the Civil War. Robert E. Lee visited in 1856, when the post was a tidy cluster of a dozen simple buildings. Confederate troops held it during the war, and federal soldiers returned in 1866 before it was abandoned in 1869.

Ladonia, TX

Not long after Texas won its independence, pioneer Isaac Lyday raised a stockaded compound near the North Sulphur River, complete with living quarters, storerooms, and a shared community well. As raids intensified in the late 1830s, families crowded inside its walls for safety, and Texas Ranger Captain William B. Stout arrived in 1838 to organize a Ranger company that Lyday himself was elected to lead. The fort sheltered settlers until the danger eased around 1843.

Fredericksburg, TX

The U.S. Army established Fort Martin Scott in December 1848 to shield travelers and settlers on the Texas frontier from Indian attack, naming it for Major Martin Scott, killed the year before at the Battle of Molino del Rey in the Mexican-American War. Its garrison saw many skirmishes before the post was occupied only intermittently after 1852. Confederate forces held the site during the Civil War, and it was permanently abandoned in 1866.

Dinero, TX

Fort Merrill rose on the Nueces frontier in February 1850, established by Captain S. M. Plummer of the First U.S. Infantry to shield settlers pressing into South Texas. It honored Captain Hamilton W. Merrill, a dragoon decorated for gallantry in the recent Mexican War. The post proved short-lived, permanently abandoned by the end of 1855 as the line of settlement moved on.

Itasca, TX

Established about 1846, Fort Smith was one of a chain of posts running from the Colorado to the Red River, built to shield settlers on the advancing Texas frontier. Named for Major Thomas I. Smith, it guarded a line of settlement pressing into contested Indian country. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936 to record the vanished post.

Ft. Stockton, TX

Founded on the Comanche Trail in 1859, Fort Stockton guarded the San Antonio-San Diego mail route and was named for Commodore Robert Field Stockton, who had helped seize California for the United States. Federal troops abandoned it during the Civil War and reoccupied it in 1867 as the army worked to curb Comanche raids and protect westward travel. The post was permanently abandoned in 1886 as the frontier it policed faded away.

Calvert, TX

On a November night in 1836, in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas, John Harvey's family was killed and his young daughter Ann and a servant girl carried off by an Indian raiding party along the contested Brazos frontier. Ann spent four years in captivity in Mexico before an uncle recovered her; she later married, returned to Texas, and settled — as the marker notes — near the very ground of the tragedy. The account captures the violence, dislocation, and improbable survival that shaped frontier settlement in the region.

San Antonio, TX

A South Carolinian who reached San Antonio in 1835, Samuel Maverick guided Ben Milam and the Texian force in the first assault on the town, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, and endured seven months as a prisoner in Mexico's Perote castle. Twice mayor of San Antonio, he rode with Jack Hays' Minute Men against Comanche raids and later helped negotiate the bloodless surrender of federal forts in 1861. His habit of leaving cattle unbranded gave English the word 'maverick.'

Brady vicinity, TX

According to this 1936 state marker, on November 21, 1831, a small party led by James and Rezin Bowie fought off a far larger force of Caddo and Lipan warriors near this spot, holding out through a day and a night. The clash took place in Mexican Texas, years before the Texas Revolution, as Anglo-American adventurers pressed into contested Indian and Spanish-Mexican borderlands. The Bowie name later became legend through James Bowie's death at the Alamo.

Comanche vicinity, TX

Founded in 1851 by John A. McGuire, Indian Creek was among the first settlements in Comanche County, and its most vital structure was a double-walled stockade called "Double Pens"—a fortified storehouse where women and children sheltered during Indian raids while the men were away. As the frontier quieted, the refuge gave way to civic life: a school in 1876, the Indian Creek Methodist Church in 1880 with its famous two-week summer camp meetings, and a cemetery whose first burial came that same year. Services ended in 1958, leaving the community to memory.

Newark, IL

Near this site stood Kendall County's first store, built by George Hollenback, until it was burned in May 1832 during the Black Hawk War. That conflict — sparked when Sauk leader Black Hawk led followers back across the Mississippi to reclaim ceded homelands — swept panic and violence across northern Illinois, driving scattered settlers to flee or fort up.

Alto, TX

Before 1835, Martin Lacy—an Indian agent for the Mexican government—built this home and trading post on the East Texas frontier. When the Killough family was attacked on October 5, 1838, in what became known as one of the largest such incidents in the region, settlers fled to Lacy's Fort for refuge amid the turmoil between Anglo colonists and Native peoples during the young Republic of Texas.

Texas City, TX

Around 1821 the privateer and War of 1812 veteran James Campbell — a lieutenant and close friend of the buccaneer Jean Lafitte at Galveston — put the sea behind him to settle here as a rancher. He had earlier taken a bride, Mary Sabinal, in Karankawa ceremony, and the couple raised their community on this coastal ground. The settlement endured until a hurricane destroyed it a second time in 1915, and the Campbells lie with other early Texans in the nearby cemetery.

Canadian, TX

In September 1874, during the U.S. Army's Red River campaign against the Southern Plains tribes, Captain Wyllys Lyman's supply wagon train was besieged in the Texas Panhandle. Fighting from a wagon corral, Lyman and 95 soldiers held off some 400 Comanche and Kiowa warriors for five days in what became the longest Indian battle in Panhandle history. A scout slipped away to Camp Supply, and cavalry rode 80 miles through a rainstorm to break the siege.