Native American History

Wilson, TX

On December 4, 1874, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie and two companies of the U.S. 4th Cavalry were caught by a brutal snowstorm at this spot on the Llano Estacado. With no wood, water, or grass, the troopers spent what they called the most miserable night of their Southwestern service, and several horses froze to death. Mackenzie was scouting for scattered bands during the closing weeks of the 1874 campaign to force the Southern Plains tribes onto reservations.

Leakey, TX

On April 19, 1881, a band of Lipan Apaches raided the McLaurin homestead in Frio Canyon while John McLaurin was away. In the violence, teenager Allen Lease and Catherine "Kate" McLaurin were shot and killed, though her three small children survived unharmed — six-year-old Maud running for help. Neighbors and soldiers from Fort Clark trailed the raiders 70 miles and into Mexico, in what is remembered as the last Indian raid in the canyon.

Wallisville, TX

In 1757, Franciscan missionaries established Nuestra Señora de la Luz near the lower Trinity River to draw the Orcoquiza and Bidai peoples into Spanish mission life. Like many such outposts on the far northeastern edge of New Spain, it struggled to take hold and was abandoned by 1772.

Nursery, TX

In 1722, deep in Spain's northern frontier of New Spain, the Marqués de Aguayo and Father Agustín Patrón founded this Franciscan mission near Garcitas Creek, part of Spain's effort to hold Texas against rival claims by converting and settling Indigenous peoples. Moved to Mission Valley in 1726, it ministered to the Jaraname and neighboring nations before relocating a final time to Goliad in 1749, where its stone church still stands. The three moves trace the hard, mobile reality of mission life on a contested colonial edge.

Goliad, TX

Founded in 1754 for the Cujane people, this Spanish mission was one of the outposts through which Franciscan friars sought to convert and reshape the Native nations of the Texas Gulf coast. For four decades, until 1794, the missionaries pursued that work before the mission was abandoned. Its site now lies within Goliad State Park, near the better-known presidio and mission of the region.

Millersview vicinity, TX

On March 16, 1684, the Spanish expedition led by Juan Domínguez de Mendoza paused at the junction of the Concho and Colorado rivers to establish Mission San Clemente, meant to convert and "civilize" the Native peoples of the region. Far out on the edge of Spain's northern frontier, the mission was a fleeting outpost of a colonial enterprise that reached deep into what would become West Texas. Only its remembered site survives.

Rockdale, TX

Founded in 1749 among a group of San Gabriel River missions, San Francisco Xavier de los Dolores was one Franciscan attempt to gather the Coco, Mayeye, Orcoquiza, Karankawa and neighboring peoples. The martyrdom of Padre José Ganzábal and the turmoil around it drove off both Indians and friars, and the mission was pulled back to the San Marcos River in 1755. In 1762 it was reborn on the San Saba River under a new name, Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá, to work among the Lipan Apaches.

Menard, TX

Franciscan missionaries founded Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá among the Lipan Apache in 1757, backed by the wealth of the Count of Regla. The venture proved catastrophically short-lived: in 1758 Comanche and allied warriors, longtime enemies of the Apache, attacked and destroyed it, killing the padres Alonso Giraldo de Terreros and José Santiesteban. The ruined mission became a stark symbol of the limits of Spanish expansion on the Texas plains.

Alvarado, TX

For decades these springs on the road from Fort Worth to Waco drew both people and history to a single patch of Johnson County prairie. Caddo families were camped here when the Balch family arrived to claim Peters Colony land around 1851, and the two lived as peaceable neighbors before settlers' growing numbers pushed the Caddo toward Oklahoma by 1860. Later owner Lafayette Norman kept the spring open to weary travelers, giving it the name Norman Springs, until the great droughts of the 20th century dried it to a muddy trace marked only by a willow.

New Braunfels, TX

Established in 1756 on the Guadalupe River near present New Braunfels, this short-lived Spanish mission was the last chapter of the troubled Mission San Francisco Xavier, which had been battered by attacks, disease, and a friar's murder at its earlier site. Moved here to gather its scattered Mayeye Indian converts — who had refused to enter the Alamo mission in San Antonio — it sheltered only a handful of Spanish families and a few dozen Indians. Escalating Comanche raids forced the church to withdraw its staff in 1758.

Austonio, TX

Before Texas won its independence, settlers on this exposed stretch of frontier built a fortified block house as a refuge from raids. Elisha Clapp and his neighbors used the sturdy log structure as a rallying point in times of danger, a common feature of frontier defense in the 1830s and early 1840s. By about 1844, as settlement grew safer and denser, the block house was abandoned.

Gilmer, TX

Along the old Cherokee Trace stood the first town of Gilmer, where in 1845 the inaugural Upshur County Court met in the open shade of an oak. The next spring Judge O. M. Roberts pressed the nearby W. H. Hart home into service as a courthouse until a permanent county seat could be carefully chosen. The Old Gilmer Cemetery lies a mile north.

Chester, TX

In the early 1800s this spot was Ta-Ku-La — "Peach Tree" — the headquarters of the Alabama Indians, sited where two great pioneer trails crossed. Routes reaching from the Gulf at Anahuac to Nacogdoches and from Opelousas, Louisiana, toward San Antonio met here, making the village an important trading crossroads. As white settlement pressed in, the Alabama people withdrew southward, where their descendants hold the only Indian reservation in Texas; the site also gave rise to lumber and business magnate John Henry Kirby.

Weches, TX

Frontiersman Daniel McLean and his brother-in-law John Sheridan settled here in 1821, soon joined by other pioneer families. The little community—first called Boston, then Augusta after a postmaster's daughter in 1857—weathered deadly frontier violence, including the Edens-Madden Massacre, and grew to some two dozen stores, a Masonic lodge, and a coeducational academy. As ranching and forestry supplanted cotton, the town faded away.

Floresville, TX

By 1720 this land along the river was known as the country of the Cayopines, a Coahuiltecan people, and it became vital to the San Antonio missions, whose herds grazed here tended by herdsmen in adobe huts. Apache raids after 1731 drove those herdsmen to shelter at Mission Cabras, and the ground passed through Spanish ranchos and Canary Islander families before Anglo settler Stephen T. Cook opened a store in 1858 and named the place Lodi. Chosen county seat in 1867, Lodi lost that honor to Floresville in 1872 and reverted to ranching.

Austin, TX

This site sits in the community where settler Josiah Wilbarger survived a scalping in a dramatic 1833 rescue, a story emblematic of the dangers of the early Texas frontier. By 1875 the area had grown enough to warrant a schoolhouse, a 30-by-40-foot building on nearly five acres where a Mr. Goodnight taught 85 children in a single room. Later known as District 61 with the Colorado River as its southern boundary, Pecan Springs School grew to six teachers before it was annexed to Austin in 1951 and closed in 1956.

Ballinger, TX

Founded in 1862, Pickettville was the first civilian settlement in Runnels County, named for the picket houses and corrals its frontier families built. Ranching households — the Guests, the Wylie brothers and their hands, the Gordons, and the Coffeys — banded together for protection amid the Indian raids that intensified during the Civil War. In 1866 they drove their cattle off to open range, and their old picket corrals later held the herds of trail drivers passing through.

Oakhurst, TX

Built in 1844, Raven Hill was a plantation home of Sam Houston—hero of Texas independence, whom the Cherokee called 'The Raven' for his years living among them. The house served him during the era of the Republic and early statehood before he sold it prior to 1860.

Victoria, TX

Built before 1836 by Placido Benavides, son-in-law of Victoria's founder Martín De León, the Round Top House was known as "the Citadel of Victoria." When Comanche raiders swept through the region in the great raid of 1840, the sturdy house became a place of refuge for the town's frightened citizens.

Driscoll, TX

In 1764 the governor of the Spanish colony of Nuevo Santander commissioned Captain Blas María de la Garza Falcón to explore the coast and establish a way station, and by 1766 he had moved his family, followers, and livestock to what became Rancho de Don Blas, or Santa Petronila Ranch. The outpost served as a base for coastal expeditions and drew colonists north from the Rio Grande, its garrison patrolling against Indigenous raids and foreign intrusion. Many settlers withdrew during the Texas War for Independence in 1836 but later returned, and descendants remain in the area today.

Roxton, TX

In 1837, as the young Republic of Texas pushed settlement into the Red River country, Jesse Shelton raised a log house and stockade here that doubled as a way station and a refuge for families fleeing raids on the frontier. Designated a Republic post office in 1840 and used for Methodist worship, Shelton's Fort anchored the earliest civic life of Lamar County, where Shelton helped choose the county seat and served as a justice of the peace. The settlement that gathered nearby later took the name McGlasson after the man who bought the property in 1851.

Amarillo, TX

When the Santa Fe Railway raised this office building in 1928, workers digging the basement unearthed the bones of a mammoth, later displayed at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon. These Ice Age giants, cousins of today's elephants, roamed the Texas Panhandle in such numbers that their remains serve geologists as "index fossils" for Pleistocene deposits. Thousands of years ago, the hunters of the Clovis Culture stalked these very animals for survival.

McLean County, IL

In 1730, during the long and brutal Fox Wars, a coalition of French soldiers and their Native allies besieged and defeated a band of the Fox (Meskwaki) people on the Illinois prairie, a bloody episode in France's campaign against the nation. This marker, placed in 1951, records that clash and preserves the Native place-name 'Etnataek.' It stands as one of the few reminders on the landscape of the imperial and inter-tribal warfare that convulsed the region a quarter-century before American independence.

Saint Jo, TX

In 1759, Spanish commander Diego Ortiz Parrilla marched north from San Antonio with some 600 soldiers and Indian allies to punish the Comanches and their French-armed allies after the destruction of Mission San Sabá. At this bend of the Red River he found a fortified Taovaya (Wichita) village flying a French flag, its defenders well supplied with guns. After a four-hour battle cost him 52 men, Parrilla withdrew under cover of night and was harried for days on his retreat—a stinging defeat for Spain on its northern frontier.

San Augustine, TX

In 1826, colonizer Hayden Edwards defied Mexican expulsion orders, declared the Republic of Fredonia, and raised a flag of "Independence, Liberty and Justice." When settlers along the Ayish Bayou refused to join him, he ordered them banished — and on January 21, 1827, a small force of Anglo settlers and sixty Native American allies seized the Fredonian fort here without firing a shot, capturing 200 men. News of the rout sent Edwards fleeing to the United States, collapsing the rebellion.

Alto, TX

The Delaware (Lenape), long displaced westward from their Atlantic homelands, settled in East Texas where they earned wide respect as interpreters and diplomats among the region's many peoples. In 1843 they were chiefly responsible for persuading other tribes to come to the General Treaty at Bird's Fort, a peace council held during the days of the Republic of Texas. This site marks one of their village locations, commemorated by the state in 1936.

Utley, TX

Robert M. Coleman was one of the founding figures of the Texas Republic — a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, an aide to General Sam Houston at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, and a commander of frontier Rangers. He drowned in 1837, but tragedy followed his family: in 1839 his widow Elizabeth and son Albert were killed and young Thomas captured in an Indian raid near their homesite. The State of Texas honored him with this marker in 1936, and a supplemental plate added in 1968 records his role as an early official and namesake of Coleman County.

Perry, TX

On the night of January 1, 1839, in the frontier settlement of the young Republic of Texas, Indians attacked the home of George Morgan that once stood nearby. The raid killed George Morgan, his wife, Mrs. Jackson Morgan, and Miss Adeline Marlin. The tragedy was one of many violent clashes along the exposed edge of settlement in Falls County.

Nacogdoches, TX

James Dill came from Pennsylvania to the Texas-Louisiana borderlands as a frontier Indian trader in the era when this country was still ruled from Mexico City. Trusted by Spanish authorities, he became the first alcalde — roughly a mayor and magistrate — of Nacogdoches under the new Mexican government in 1821. The State of Texas marked his home site during the 1936 Centennial.

Falls County, TX

John Marlin built his home on the Central Texas frontier in 1835, in the uneasy borderlands of the new Republic of Texas. On a January day in 1839 a large party of Indians attacked the house, but its handful of defenders drove them off in a sharp fight in which one defender was injured.

Austin, TX

Reuben Hornsby and his wife Sarah built this home in 1832, the first in what is now Travis County and part of Stephen F. Austin's colonizing effort on the Texas frontier. Renowned for their hospitality, the Hornsbys nursed Josiah Wilbarger here after he was scalped and left for dead in 1833. Hornsby and his sons rode as Rangers and Indian fighters, and Captain John J. Tumlinson's company was organized on this very ground in 1836.

Frankston, TX

During the years of the Republic of Texas, conflict between settlers and Native peoples flared repeatedly across the eastern frontier. On October 16, 1838, General Thomas J. Rusk led about 200 Texans in an attack on a band of Native Americans and allied Mexicans near this spot, dispersing them in what became known as the Kickapoo battle. The clash was one of many in the Republic's campaigns to push Indigenous nations from the settlement line.

Snyder, TX

After the Civil War, the U.S. Army pushed to secure the West Texas frontier, and Colonel Ranald S. MacKenzie became the central figure in the campaigns against the Comanche and their allies. From forts like Griffin and Concho he blazed supply routes across the Plains toward Palo Duro Canyon, where in 1874 his troops broke the power of the Southern Plains tribes. The trail crossing near Snyder was so well known that the town's 1881 townsite abstracts referenced 'The MacKenzie Trail' as a landmark.

Palestine, TX

In 1837, during the era of the Republic of Texas, frontier guides Daniel McLean and John Sheridan were killed here while shielding settlers from an attack. According to the marker, the two held off their attackers long enough for the settlers to escape, losing their own lives in the process. The site memorializes a violent episode of the early Anglo-Texan frontier.

Harper, TX

In 1863 the family of pioneer preacher Matthew Taylor built a cabin near the source of the Pedernales River, deep in the contested Texas hill country. In August 1864 a band of Kiowas attacked, killing Eli McDonald and a young woman and carrying off several women and children, who were taken as far as Oklahoma before being ransomed. Others survived by taking refuge in the cabin or hiding in a nearby cave.

Douglass, TX

Franciscan missionaries founded Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción here in 1716 as Spain sought to convert and settle the Indigenous peoples of East Texas. French incursions from Louisiana forced its temporary abandonment in 1719, and though the Marquis of Aguayo restored it in 1721, the mission was ultimately relocated—first to the Colorado River and then, in 1731, to the San Antonio River.

Nacogdoches, TX

Founded in 1716 by the pioneering Franciscan Antonio Margil de Jesus, this Spanish mission aimed to convert and gather the Nacogdoches Indians of East Texas. Threatened by French incursions from Louisiana, it was briefly abandoned in 1719, restored by the Marquis of Aguayo in 1721, and finally given up in 1773. Its deserted buildings became the nucleus around which Antonio Gil y Barbo re-founded the town of Nacogdoches in 1779.

San Gabriel, TX

In 1749 Franciscan missionaries planted this mission on the San Gabriel River, part of a short-lived cluster of Spanish missions meant to draw the Coco, Mayeye, Orcoquiza, Karankawa and other peoples into colonial life. Violence—including the killing of Padre José Ganzábal—unraveled the effort, and by 1755 the friars and their would-be converts had scattered, the mission relocating to the San Marcos River. It rose again in 1762 far to the west on the Sabinal, this time aimed at the Lipan Apaches, keeping the name Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria.

Montell, TX

Franciscan missionaries first founded Mission Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria in 1749 on the San Gabriel River, hoping to convert the Coco, Mayeye, Karankawa, Orcoquiza, and other Native peoples. Repeatedly relocated, it was reestablished on the San Marcos River in 1755 and moved to this Nueces River site in 1762 to reach the Lipan Apaches before being abandoned in 1769. Its restless history reflects the fragile reach of Spain's mission frontier.

Goliad, TX

Founded by Spanish Franciscans in 1722 beside the ruins of La Salle's French fort on Garcitas Creek, this mission was relocated twice before settling near Goliad in 1749 to serve the Karankawa, Aranama, and other coastal peoples. Part of Spain's northern frontier system, it paired with the nearby presidio to convert and control Indigenous communities and to counter French claims on the Gulf. It was secularized in 1794 as Spain wound down its mission enterprise in Texas.

Rio Grande City, TX

This site marks a Spanish mission established in 1749 as part of José de Escandón's ambitious colonization of the lower Rio Grande country. As a visita — a mission chapel served periodically rather than by a resident priest — it was one node in a chain meant to settle the region and draw its Indigenous peoples into Spanish colonial and Catholic life. Escandón's project laid the groundwork for the ranching settlements that still define the borderlands.

Alto, TX

Franciscan missionaries first founded Mission San Francisco de los Tejas in 1690 to convert the Neches and other Native peoples of East Texas. Reestablished in 1716 and briefly abandoned after a French incursion from Louisiana in 1719, it was relocated here in 1721 by the Marquis de Aguayo, then moved again until it finally settled on the San Antonio River in 1731 as San Francisco de la Espada. A 1936 state marker records its wandering history.

San Gabriel, TX

Franciscan missionaries founded Mission San Ildefonso here in 1749, one of a cluster of Spanish missions meant to draw the Coco, Mayeye, Orcoquiza, Karankawa, and other peoples into Catholic and colonial life. The killing of Padre Jose Ganzabal and the turmoil surrounding it prompted the friars and the Native people to depart, and the mission moved to the San Marcos River in 1755. It was later reestablished on the Nueces River in 1762 to reach the Lipan Apaches under a new name.

Camp Wood, TX

In 1762, Franciscan missionaries established Mission San Lorenzo de la Santa Cruz on this ground to minister to the Lipan Apache, part of Spain's broader effort to draw Native peoples into mission life on its northern frontier. Like many such ventures among independent Plains and mountain nations, it proved short-lived and was abandoned in 1769. Its brief existence marks one of Spain's northernmost attempts to plant a mission among the Lipan.

Throckmorton, TX

Established in 1854, the Comanche Indian Reserve on the Brazos was a federal experiment to settle Comanche people on farmland under government oversight. Here, in April 1856, Colonel Robert E. Lee — then commanding nearby Camp Cooper — held a peace parley with Chief Catumseh. Within a few years the reserve failed, and its residents were removed to Indian Territory in 1859.

Bayside, TX

Copano took its name from the Native people of this coast and served as an important Texas port from the early 1700s into the 1870s. Colonists bound for the interior came ashore here, and in 1835 it sheltered the winter quarters of the army of the Texas Revolution. The town is gone now, its marker moved from the original site on Copano Bay in 1978.

Port Lavaca, TX

Around 1831 pioneer Victoria merchant John Joseph Linn located a warehouse on this stretch of the Texas coast, and a small port settlement grew up around it. On August 8, 1840, a massive Comanche raiding party swept down to the Gulf and burned Linnville to the ground, part of the famous Great Raid of 1840. The town was never rebuilt, and the State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Perryton, TX

C. E. Jones opened this trading post in 1874 along the Jones and Plummer Trail, the freight and cattle route running from Dodge City, Kansas, down to Mobeetie in the Texas Panhandle. At first it dealt food and cloth to Native peoples in exchange for hides; as ranching took hold, it became a supply stop for cattlemen hauling goods up from Dodge City. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Pottsboro, TX

Around 1837, on the eve of Texas independence, Holland Coffee opened a trading post here on the Red River to deal with the Indigenous peoples of the region and the western plains. Captives held among the tribes were sometimes ransomed and freed at this spot, and in 1843 the controversial Snively Expedition set out from nearby to raid the Santa Fe trade. The post was abandoned after Coffee's death in 1846.

Graham, TX

Young County's early history swung with the fortunes of the frontier: organized in 1856 at Belknap, it saw its records flee to Jacksboro amid renewed Indian conflict during the Civil War before being reorganized around Graham in 1874. In 1884 workers quarried native sandstone east of town to raise a two-story courthouse laid out as a Greek cross, built by Swedish-born mason N. J. Rosenquist. Razed in 1932, the building survives only in a single preserved archway rescued during 1936 street work.

Bertram, TX

Strickling grew up in the 1850s as a rural crossroads on the Central Texas frontier, named for Martha Webster Strickling, who settled here in 1853. As a child she had survived the infamous Webster Massacre near Leander and months of Indian captivity—a harrowing frontier ordeal. With a post office established in 1857, the town became a mail terminal and stage stop where lumber and buffalo hides moved through, supporting a school, churches, a doctor, and stores until the railroad bypassed it in 1882.

Waco, TX

Here once stood a village of the Waco people, who made a treaty with empresario Stephen F. Austin in 1824 during the years of Mexican Texas. Pressed by conflict with other tribes, they gradually dispersed by the late 1830s, and when George B. Erath laid out a new town in 1849 it took their name. A 2014 addition corrected the original 1936 centennial marker, noting that it was the Cherokees, not the Comanches, who had besieged them.

Arlington, TX

In the spring of 1838, Captains Robert Sloan and Nathaniel T. Journey led some ninety northeast Texas frontiersmen on a punitive raid against Indians who had struck their homes in present-day Fannin County. The trail carried them into what is now Tarrant County, where they attacked a small Native village. The episode was among the earliest recorded Anglo-American incursions into north Texas, part of the violent process that opened the region to white settlement.

Middleburg, PA · est. 1982

Established in 1855 from Union County, Snyder County honors Simon Snyder, the Selinsgrove miller's son who served three terms as Pennsylvania governor early in the 19th century. Long before statehood, this stretch of the Susquehanna frontier was the scene of the 1755 Penns Creek Massacre, an attack on settlers that helped ignite frontier warfare in the region. Middleburg, the county seat, was laid out in 1800 as the countryside filled with farms.

Socorro, TX

In 1683, in the wake of the Pueblo Revolt that drove Spanish colonists and their Native allies out of New Mexico, Franciscan missionaries founded the mission and pueblo of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción here along the Rio Grande. It became a refuge for Piro, Tano, and Jemez people who had fled south, resettled in one of the oldest continuously occupied communities in Texas. The mission anchored a string of Spanish outposts that would shape the El Paso valley for centuries.

Socorro, TX

When the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove Spanish colonists and their Piro Indian allies out of New Mexico, the refugees resettled downriver and named their new home Socorro after the community they had left. Their first adobe church rose in 1691; the present structure was begun after a destructive 1829 flood and finished in 1840 — the same flood that shifted the Rio Grande and, once the river became the U.S.–Mexico border, placed Socorro in the United States. Governed in turn by Franciscans, diocesan priests, and Jesuits, the mission has witnessed Spanish, Mexican, and American rule.

Earth, TX

On the treeless High Plains of West Texas, water meant survival, and this spring long served as an Indian camp and watering place. In 1876 buffalo hunters George and John Causey and Frank Lloyd raised the first sod house here—giving the site its name—in what became the region's first permanent settlement. A cattle camp followed in 1882 before the great Capitol Syndicate, which built the Texas Capitol in exchange for three million acres, absorbed the land.

Brady vicinity, TX

This waterhole on an old military road served U.S. soldiers — including troops under Robert E. Lee — who patrolled for raiders in the 1850s, as well as westbound emigrants camping before the Civil War. The marker records a grim toll: in 1850 a party of eighteen men, women, and children was attacked here, their wagons burned and horses stolen. Long before, the same reliable water had drawn Native peoples to what was noted as an ancient Indian campground.

Glen Rose, TX

This county honors Alexander Somervell, a Maryland-born veteran of San Jacinto who served as the Republic of Texas secretary of war and led the 1842 Somervell Expedition against Mexican incursions. The region, long home to the Waco and other Native peoples, saw its first Anglo settler in Charles Barnard in 1848, and raised its first cotton crop and tannery during the Civil War. Carved from the south end of Hood County in 1875, the new county made Glen Rose — founded as Barnard's Mill — its seat.

Sour Lake, TX

Sour Lake was an early health resort whose waters, long used by Native peoples, drew Texans including Gen. Sam Houston to its baths. During the Civil War, one spring's high sulphuric-acid content was used to prime telegraph batteries—vital work when the Confederate line ran only from Shreveport to Marshall to Houston and on to Galveston and Orange. In February 1865 a 20-word telegram from Shreveport to Houston cost $36.