Native American History

Easton, MA

Long before European settlers arrived, this route was an Indian trail threading between the waters of Massachusetts Bay and Narragansett Bay. Colonists later adopted it as a post road and named it the Old Bay Road, making it the first highway in what became Easton. Today the corridor is recognized as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places, preserving a path whose use spans from Native footpaths to colonial travel.

Electra, TX

This North Texas road took its name from the buffalo hides and bones that moved along it, and it tells the grim story of the American bison's near-extinction. As long as the herds survived, the Plains Indians held the land; authorities encouraged the hunting precisely to break that hold. Hundreds of wagons hauled hides to market over this road before 1878, and after the herds were gone, struggling settlers gathered and sold the leftover bones to Wichita Falls and Henrietta into the 1890s, earning grocery and seed money in hard years.

Plainview, TX

This marker commemorates the trail broken in 1871 by General Ranald Slidell MacKenzie and his 4th U.S. Cavalry as they campaigned across the West Texas plains against roving bands of Indians. Larry Chittenden's mournful verse, quoted on the marker, conjures the wagon trains, soldiers, and lonely prairie graves that once followed its course. Erected in 1936 for the Texas Centennial, it fixes the fading route in public memory.

Austin, TX

Long a corridor for Indigenous peoples and crossed by the El Camino Real de los Tejas, this bend of the Colorado River became the site of Jesse Cornelius Tannehill's ambitious 1838–1839 townsite of Montopolis—its name stitched from Latin "mount" and Greek "city." Tannehill moved his family and an enslaved African American family to a headright of over 4,000 acres and laid out the town before Austin was even chosen as the Republic of Texas capital, and there is evidence Montopolis was itself in the running for that honor. The venture collapsed within two years, but the name endured, and the Montopolis neighborhood thrives today.

San Antonio, TX

Early in the eighteenth century, the Pajalache Indians helped build this acequia, a hand-dug irrigation canal that carried San Antonio River water from La Villita down to Mission Concepcion. So wide and deep was the channel that, by tradition, padres and Native people paddled canoes between the two places. Part of the Spanish colonial mission system's remarkable network of gravity-fed waterways, the acequia sustained the fields that fed a young frontier community.

El Paso, TX

Where the Rio Grande cuts between the mountains at El Paso lies the Pass of the North, the northernmost Rocky Mountain gap that stays free of snow year-round. Indigenous peoples traveled it for centuries before Spanish explorers arrived, and Juan de Oñate drove the first cattle into what is now the United States through it in 1598. In the 1849 gold rush and after, stage lines and railroads all funneled through this natural gateway.

Fredericksburg, TX

Long before wagon wheels cut its ruts, the Pinta Trail began as a path worn by nomadic Plains peoples across the Texas Hill Country, linking San Antonio de Béxar with the San Sabá River country near present Menard. Spanish and Mexican expeditions borrowed its general course, and in 1845 German immigrant surveyors improved part of it into a wagon road. After the 1849 California gold rush, U.S. military companies pressed it into service scouting new routes west, until the railroads of the late 19th and early 20th centuries made the old trace obsolete.

Barksdale, TX

This marker recalls the Coalson family's hard years on the Edwards Plateau frontier. Native raiders attacked Nick Coalson's goat camp in June 1877, killing ten-year-old Arthur and wounding his brother, and a year later a second raid claimed his wife Alice, a daughter, and an infant stepson — losses that Texas Rangers under Captains Dolan and Roberts pursued but could not avenge.

Round Rock, TX

This table-shaped stone in the middle of Brushy Creek long guided Native travelers and early settlers to an important low-water wagon crossing, where century-old wheel ruts can still be seen in the creek bed. The rocky ford drew a settlement whose "Brushy Creek" post office opened in 1851; at postmaster Thomas C. Oatts's urging it was renamed "Round Rock" in 1854 for the very stone. The town kept the name when it moved to meet the railroad a mile east in 1877.

Royalton, VT

On October 16, 1780, a large raiding party of Native fighters led by a British officer swept down the White River valley during the Revolutionary War, burning the frontier settlement of Royalton and neighboring towns, killing several settlers and carrying off more than two dozen captives. It was one of the last major raids on the Vermont frontier and long remembered in the region's founding lore.

Kermit, TX

This hundred-mile belt of shifting dunes, some rising more than 70 feet, sweeps across Winkler and neighboring counties into New Mexico. Long known to Native peoples who camped and hunted here and to Spanish explorers who crossed it, the sands were mapped by the U.S. government in 1849 for the gold seekers and settlers heading west. Shallow water beneath the dunes nourished willows, cottonwoods, and the plum thickets that fed early travelers, even as the heavy sands formed a natural barrier to their wagons.

Wilson County, TX

In the mid-1700s, Franciscan missionaries from San Antonio regularly rode out to a ranch chapel near the settlement of Las Islitas, today's Graytown. The little chapel served a mingled congregation of Canary Islanders and their descendants, Mexicans, Native people, and other settlers scattered across the Cibolo country. It was one of the ranch and outpost chapels through which Spanish colonial faith and community radiated beyond the walls of the great missions.

Windthorst, TX

Named for rock formations resembling teepees and once an Indian ceremonial ground, the Stone Houses gave their name to a sharp frontier clash on November 10, 1837. Lieutenant A. Van Benthousen and 18 Rangers, tracking stolen horses, were attacked nearby by a much larger Keechi force; ten Rangers and many warriors fell in a three-hour fight before the survivors escaped on foot. In 1874 the area's first permanent home was built close by the formations.

Sunbury, PA · est. 1929

Fort Augusta, guarding the forks of the Susquehanna at Sunbury, was first chosen as a rendezvous for the Sullivan campaign. From here Lt. Col. Adam Hubley's regiment — the one unit quartered at the fort — marched to join the offensive against the Six Nations in 1779. The old fort thus became one of several launching points feeding troops into the larger expedition.

Delaware Township, PA · est. 1929

Jacob Freeland raised a mill on this ground in 1773 and, as war reached the frontier, stockaded it in 1778 for defense. On July 28, 1779, British-allied Tories and Seneca warriors attacked and destroyed the fort, and the inscription records that 108 settlers were killed or taken prisoner. The assault came at the height of the brutal frontier fighting that Sullivan's expedition was meant to answer.

San Angelo, TX

After the Civil War, Congress authorized six regiments of Black soldiers, and in 1867 the Tenth Cavalry organized under Colonel Benjamin Grierson. Reassigned west to escape discrimination at Fort Leavenworth, the regiment reached Fort Concho in 1875, where its troopers endured grueling scouting and mapping expeditions across the high plains. They played a key role in the 1880 defeat of the Mescalero Apache leader Victorio before moving on to Fort Davis and, in later generations, service around the world.

Graham, TX

This West Texas valley carries the name of the Tonkawa nation, who called themselves "the most human of people" and were settled here on a state-authorized reservation in 1855 before being removed to Indian Territory in 1859. After the Civil War and the opening of the old reserve to settlers in 1873, pioneer families built livestock farms, a dirt-floored log schoolhouse, and rival Baptist and Methodist congregations. A schoolmistress once took a gray plow pony as part of her pay, and by the mid-20th century consolidation folded the little community's schools into nearby Graham.

Concord, NC

The Trading Path was a colonial overland route that took shape in the 1600s, carrying traders and goods south from the Virginia settlements toward the Catawba and Waxhaw peoples of the Carolina Piedmont. Much of it followed far older Indigenous trails. This artery of deerskins, cloth, and manufactured wares helped open the backcountry to European settlement, and it passed near this spot.

Waxhaw, NC

Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Trading Path ran from Petersburg, Virginia, deep into the Carolina backcountry to reach the Waxhaw people. Traders drove packhorses along the route, exchanging European goods for deerskins and building the earliest commercial ties between colony and Native nations. The path passed nearby, threading through country that would soon fill with settlers.

Charlotte, NC

The Trading Path, dating from the 1600s, linked Petersburg, Virginia, to the Catawba people of the Carolina Piedmont. Along it moved traders, packhorses, and the goods that bound Native nations to distant colonial markets. Following routes long used by Indigenous travelers, the path passed nearby and helped funnel settlers into the region.

Liberty, TX

The Trinity River is the longest river lying wholly within Texas, known to Native peoples as the Arkikosa and Daycoa and named La Santísima Trinidad by Spanish explorer Alonso De León in 1690. Steamboats began working it in 1838, feeding a lively southeast-Texas trade — even a riverside meat-packing plant shipping to the West Indies — while Alabama-Coushatta boatmen carried Confederate supplies during the Civil War. In the 20th century, navigation and flood-control efforts culminated in the 1955 creation of the Trinity River Authority.

Trinidad, TX

Fed by its West, Elm, and East forks, the Trinity River has drawn people to its valley for thousands of years — the prehistoric Malakoff Man carved stone heads found nearby attest to habitation in the distant past, and Indian villages lined its banks when Europeans arrived. French explorer La Salle called it the River of Canoes in 1687, and the Spaniard Alonso de León gave it the name "Trinity" in 1690. Its fertile floodplain lured Republic-era settlers, and steamboats carried cotton, cattle, and lumber toward Galveston until the railroads arrived and ended the riverboat era, giving rise to towns like Trinidad.

Washoe County, NV

In the spring of 1860, Northern Paiute warriors defending their homeland fought two pitched battles near Pyramid Lake. On May 12 they routed a hastily raised volunteer army from Virginia City in a skillful ambush along the Truckee River. Three weeks later, a larger force of volunteers and regular U.S. troops met the Numu again; several hundred warriors fought a fierce delaying action, buying time for their families to escape before withdrawing. Their war leader Numaga sought peace, yet took up arms to protect his people.

Canyon County, ID

This marker recounts the Ward Massacre of August 20, 1854, when nearly all of Alexander Ward's twenty-member, Oregon-bound party was killed in an attack near the Boise River; only two young boys survived. The killings shocked emigrants and prompted a military response that reshaped travel through the region.

Johnson City, TX

Tennessee-born Thomas C. Felps came to Texas as a boy and to the Blanco County frontier in 1856, making his living freighting and serving with the county's rangers during the Civil War. In 1863 he married Eliza White, an Ohio native. In the summer of 1869, while Thomas recovered from a fever at her parents' home, the young couple was killed by a band of Indians along Cypress Creek, leaving two orphaned children to be raised by Eliza's family.

Corsicana, TX

Born in Virginia in 1800, Thomas Ingles Smith soldiered in the War of 1812 under his father before coming to Texas in 1836 to join the Republic's army. He was wounded at the Battle of the Salado in 1842 and figured in the "Archive War" when Austin residents blocked his Rangers from removing the Republic's records. A frontier Ranger, Indian scout, and treaty commissioner, he lent his name to Fort Smith and helped found Corsicana before his death in 1848.

Leming, TX

Born in Missouri in 1824 and raised in Bastrop County, Thomas Ransdell Brite came of age amid the conflicts of early Texas. He volunteered against Mexican incursions in the 1842 Vasquez, Woll, and Somervell campaigns, served in the Mexican War under Captain McCulloch in 1846, and joined the Texas Rangers in 1855 to counter frontier raids. Settling in what became Atascosa County, he was elected its first tax assessor-collector and later county treasurer before his death in 1859.

Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1947

During Colonel Daniel Brodhead's 1779 expedition against the Seneca, an advance party clashed here with thirty or forty Native warriors in a brief but sharp skirmish. It was the only fighting of the entire campaign and, by the marker's reckoning, the sole Revolutionary War engagement in northwestern Pennsylvania. The rest of Brodhead's march met little resistance as it moved through the Allegheny country.

Bernalillo County, NM

Tijeras Canyon slices between the Sandía and Manzano Mountains, and travelers have followed it for thousands of years as the natural gateway between the Rio Grande Valley and the plains to the east. Native peoples used the pass long before Spanish colonists arrived and named it Cañon de Carnué. Successive generations of foot, horse, wagon, rail, and highway traffic have all funneled through this same corridor.

Wellsboro, PA · est. 1982

Organized in 1804 from Lycoming County, Tioga County drew its name from an Indigenous word meaning the forks of a stream, carried by the Tioga River. Wellsboro, laid out in 1806, became the county seat. Along Pine Creek the land drops into a deep gorge known as Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon.

Austin, TX

This marker remembers rangers killed in the dangerous early years of the Republic. John Williams and Howell Haggett died in a May 1836 encounter with Indians while detailed from Captain John J. Tumlinson's company to protect the Hornsby settlement's families returning from the panicked flight known as the "Runaway Scrape." Pioneer ranger William Atkinson fell in a similar clash in 1845. The State of Texas placed the monument in 1936.

Austin, TX

Josephus Hornsby, son of pioneer Reuben Hornsby, grew up on the exposed Colorado River frontier east of Austin, settling in 1832. As a young Ranger he fought in the Indian and Mexican clashes of the Republic era — the Flores and Brush fights, Plum Creek in 1840, and the Vasquez and Woll campaigns — and in 1842 rescued two captives from an Indian raid in Austin.

Mason vicinity, TX

In late December 1864, the family of George W. Todd, Mason County's first clerk, was attacked here while traveling to Mason. A twelve-year-old Black servant girl was killed, thirteen-year-old Alice Todd was carried off, and Todd's wife Dizenia was gravely wounded, dying about three weeks later. Alice's half-brother James Smith returned from the Civil War and searched for months, but she was never found.

Burkeville, TX

For centuries the great curve of the Sabine River known as Toledo Bend was a crossroads of the East Texas borderlands—a landmark for Spanish explorers and missionaries, and later a contested edge of the Neutral Territory disputed by the United States and Spain in the early 1800s. Just off El Camino Real, the King's Highway, it drew steamboat landings, ferries, and Anglo-American settlers who knew it as Bevil's Crossing and then Hadden's Ferry. In time it even became a cradle of the region's pecan industry before its modern life as a resort lake.

Iowa Park, TX

Son of the noted rancher Burk Burnett, Tom L. Burnett was raised on the famous 6666 Ranch and became a leading cattleman in his own right, running the Triangle Ranch and range land across several North Texas counties. A civic leader and philanthropist, he was known for his friendship with Native people, including the celebrated Comanche chief Quanah Parker, and for his backing of area rodeos, which earned him the nickname the "Rodeo King." He died at his residence on this site in 1938.

Victoria, TX

News of a French colony on the Gulf Coast sent New Spain scrambling, launching eleven expeditions to hunt down and destroy La Salle's ill-fated settlement, which Governor Alonso de León found deserted in 1689. Over the following decades the Spanish planted Presidio La Bahía and Mission Espíritu Santo in the region, and by 1725 missionaries settled at this spot—later called Tonkawa Bank—for its reliable spring water, stone, and timber. The repeated moves of mission and presidio along the Guadalupe and Garcitas Creek trace the restless, difficult birth of Spanish colonial Texas.

Newcastle, TX

During the Civil War the Tonkawa people allied themselves with Texans, serving as scouts along the frontier defense line from the Red River to the Rio Grande and watching for both hostile raiders and Federal incursion. Commanders prized their skill so highly they sometimes fed the scouts at personal expense. The Tonkawa paid dearly for that loyalty: in October 1862 a devastating attack on their camp near present Anadarko killed 137 of about 300 people, and the survivors were later resettled near Fort Griffin before removal to Oklahoma in 1884.

Lander County, NV

High in the Toquima Range, this basalt cave holds walls and ceilings covered with pictographs in abstract and geometric designs painted in white, red, yellow, and black. Scholars believe the images—possibly ceremonial markers, visionary records, or art—were painted by the ancestors of the Western Shoshone who historically occupied the region. Today a protective enclosure shields the ancient paintings from vandalism while allowing visitors to view them.

Waco, TX

Established in 1844 during the days of the Republic of Texas, Torrey's Trading Post No. 2 sat on a bluff above Trading House Creek as a meeting ground between settlers and Native nations. Here President Sam Houston delivered his celebrated peace talks to assembled chiefs, and the post served as a "listening post" that helped keep an uneasy frontier calm. Run by George Barnard for the Torrey brothers, it was later moved to the growing town of Waco.

Whitney, TX

Named for a chief of the Hainai (a Caddoan people), Towash was one of Hill County's first settlements. A grist mill and carding machine built by S. C. Dyer in 1850 turned it into a trade center that boasted 15 businesses by 1879, until the railroad passed it by and sent it into decline. Its ruins now lie beneath the waters of Lake Whitney.

Antelope, TX

Antelope took its name from the springs where pronghorn watered and where the Kiowa once camped. Platted in 1875 along the Henrietta–Graham mail route, it grew into a bustling supply stop for cattle drives heading north, boasting a spa built around its mineral wells, a hotel, school, and 400 residents by 1887. Ranching and later oil kept the community alive well into the twentieth century.

Bedias, TX

Long before Anglo settlers arrived, the Bidai people—an agricultural nation regarded as the region's oldest inhabitants—gave their name to the Bedias creeks and, eventually, the town. The first white settlement here rose in 1835 under Thomas P. Plaster, and in 1903 the coming of an International & Great Northern Railroad branch pulled the population toward a 'New' Bedias, though residents fought to keep the old name rather than honor a railroad official. The area is also famous for its 'Bediasite' tektites, glassy stones the Indians called 'jewels of the moon,' and as the one-time home of Sarah Dodson, credited with sewing the first Lone Star flag.

Buffalo Gap, TX

Buffalo Gap takes its name from the pass in the Callahan Divide that funneled the great herds — buffalo that fed the Apache and Comanche and later drew white hunters around 1874, whose dugouts became the town's first homes. Named county seat in 1878 and sitting on the Western Cattle Trail, it briefly flourished, only to be eclipsed in 1883 when the railroad crowned nearby Abilene as county seat. Its rise and decline mirror dozens of small Texas towns that lived and died by the trail and the rail.

Lexington, TX

Settled in 1837 during the days of the Republic of Texas, Lexington took its name from the Massachusetts town where the American Revolution began. The Tonkawa were the area's first inhabitants; the first Anglo settler, surveyor and teacher James Shaw, arrived on a land grant earned for service at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto. Early cotton faltered, but the town revived in 1890 when the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad reached it.

Quihi, TX

Quihi was surveyed in 1844 by Henry Castro, the pioneering empresario whose colony brought European immigrants to the Texas hill country. Ten families led by Castro's agent Louis Huth settled here in early 1845, on land at the very edge of the frontier. Life was perilous—many of the settlers were killed in raids before 1860—and the state marked the town's founding during the 1936 centennial.

Quitaque, TX

In the Quitaque area, New Mexican traders called Comancheros ventured deep into Comanche country to barter flour and goods, a trade that began in the 1700s and peaked from 1864 to 1868. In those years Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches drove stolen horses and cattle up from Texas to exchange for guns and supplies. José Tafoya ran wagons and pack mules until the U.S. Army caught him in 1874 and pressed him into service as a frontier scout.

Vermilion County, IL

Erected in 1927 by the Woman's Club of Ridge Farm, this monument marks the site of an 1809 treaty negotiated by territorial governor William Henry Harrison with regional Native nations. In treaties of this era, the U.S. secured vast tracts of Indigenous land in the Indiana and Illinois country, fueling white settlement and deepening tensions that soon erupted into frontier war.

Akron, OH

In 1785, just two years after the Revolution secured American independence, the young United States moved quickly to open the Ohio Country to settlement. At Fort McIntosh on the Pennsylvania frontier, commissioners from the Confederation Congress pressed leaders of the Chippewa, Delaware, Ottawa, and Wyandot to accept a boundary line that surrendered much of present-day Ohio. The treaty was controversial from the start: many Native nations regarded the terms as coerced and the signatories as unauthorized to cede communal land, and the disputed line helped fuel the frontier conflicts of the following decade.

Mashpee, MA

In the heart of Mashpee, ancestral homeland of the Wampanoag people, this spot marks the resting place of a giant trout from tribal legend. As the story goes, the great fish burrowed inland from the sea to Santuit Pond, and the channel it carved became the Santuit River that flows there still. Such origin tales, passed down through generations of Wampanoag storytellers, explain the living landscape of Cape Cod as the work of powerful beings from the deep past.

Washoe County, NV

The flats along the Truckee River were home to Native peoples for thousands of years, who fished with blinds and left petroglyphs on the surrounding boulders. After John C. Frémont recorded the river in 1844, it became a lifeline and a hazard for California-bound emigrants—among them the Stephens-Murphy-Townsend party that crossed Donner Pass and the ill-fated Donner party, trapped by Sierra snows in 1846. The Central Pacific followed the river's course in 1868, and its route later matured through the Lincoln and Victory highways into U.S. 40 and Interstate 80.

Bryson City, NC

Tsali was a Cherokee man who resisted the forced removal of his people in 1838, escaping into the mountains from the U.S. troops rounding up the Cherokee for the Trail of Tears. He was captured and executed nearby. His act of defiance became legend, later dramatized in the outdoor drama Unto These Hills.

Centerville vicinity, TX

This East Texas burial ground grew up around the graves of early landowners the Tubb family and the pioneer Leathers family, whose first interment dates to 1849. Oral tradition holds that Joel Leathers, who could speak several Indian dialects, was sent to the area by General Sam Houston — a hint of the frontier's uneasy meeting of settlers and Native peoples. Later headstones mark veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, so the cemetery reads like a layered record of the communities of Malvern, Nineveh, and Oakwood.

Las Vegas, NV

Tule Springs is one of the rare North American sites offering evidence of human presence stretching back many thousands of years, when this now-arid basin held sagebrush flats, yellow-pine forests, and abundant springs. Those waters drew Ice Age megafauna — ground sloths, mammoths, prehistoric horses, camels, and the first Nevada record of the extinct giant condor — and the early hunters who pursued them. Later desert-culture peoples lived here for millennia, subsisting on plants and small game, while the site's remarkably complete Pleistocene geology records it all.

Pine Grove Township, PA · est. 1949

The Tulpehocken Path was a key overland route through the Blue Mountain, threading the "Gaps of the Swatara" toward the Iroquois council fire at Onondaga in New York. In 1743 the celebrated interpreter Conrad Weiser passed here alongside naturalist John Bartram and mapmaker Lewis Evans, carrying peace messages from Virginia to the Six Nations to defuse frontier tensions. Their journey was part of the delicate diplomacy that kept an uneasy peace between colonists and the powerful Iroquois Confederacy.

Jackson Township, PA · est. 1950

This ridge carried the Tulpehocken Path, a leg of the "Indian Ambassadors Road" used by Iroquois chiefs traveling from Onondaga, their council fire near present-day Syracuse, to Philadelphia. Carrying wampum belts of peace from the "Fire that Never Dies," they journeyed to treat with colonial officials in the tense diplomacy of the 1700s. Shickellamy, the Oneida overseer of the Susquehanna, often walked this route.

Jordan Township, PA · est. 1950

Near Mahantango Gap stood the Double Eagle, a resting place along the Native trail that ran from Shamokin, at the forks of the Susquehanna where Sunbury now stands, eastward to Conrad Weiser's home in the Tulpehocken Valley and on to Philadelphia. This path was a corridor of trade and diplomacy in colonial Pennsylvania. Along it moved the messengers and negotiators who bound the Iroquois and the colony together.

Hegins Township, PA · est. 1950

Running the ridge between Deep and Pine Creeks, the Tulpehocken Path tied Shamokin—the Susquehanna town of the Oneida overseer Shickellamy, now Sunbury—to the fertile Tulpehocken Valley to the southeast. In the mid-1700s it was a diplomatic artery, walked by Iroquois ambassadors carrying wampum and by Moravian and other Christian missionaries seeking Native converts. Along such paths the uneasy business of colonial-era alliance and negotiation moved on foot.

Heidelberg Township, PA · est. 1951

Long before highways, a network of Indian paths threaded through the Pennsylvania mountains, and the Tulpehocken Path was among the most important. It ran from Shamokin on the Susquehanna, over the ridges by way of Pine Grove, down to the Tulpehocken Valley where the interpreter Conrad Weiser made his home. Along it, chiefs of the Six Nations carried belts of wampum — the diplomatic currency of the Iroquois — on missions to "Brother Onas," the Native name for the Penn family, at Philadelphia.

Bethel Township, PA · est. 1952

This ridge once carried the Tulpehocken Path, a Native trail linking the Iroquois town of Shamokin—at present-day Sunbury—with the fertile Tulpehocken Valley to the southeast. Along it traveled Indian ambassadors journeying to treat with "Brother Onas," the Iroquois name for William Penn and the proprietors who followed him. The path was a channel of the careful diplomacy that governed Pennsylvania's early relations with the Six Nations.

Columbus, TX

John and Elizabeth Tumlinson brought their seven children to Texas as members of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, settling on the Colorado River. John was elected the district's first alcalde and, in May 1823, helped organize the first official Texas Ranger company to defend settlers — only to be killed in an Indian attack two months later. His descendants carried the family legacy forward, with more than a dozen serving as Rangers and frontier lawmen across the following century.