Native American History

Gainesville, TX

Though Cooke County voted against secession, it became a Confederate military hub, raising nine units and living under constant threat of Federal or Indian attack along the Red River frontier. Colonel William C. Young led men to seize Indian Territory forts in 1861, and residents forted homes, made cloth and munitions, and fed the war effort with cattle, grain, and salt. Organized in 1863, the Second Frontier Regiment—"Bourland's Border Regiment" under Col. James Bourland—patrolled the border alongside Confederate Cherokee and Seminole troops and Gen. Stand Watie's brigade.

Gila County, AZ

Built between 1927 and 1928 and dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge himself in 1930, Coolidge Dam impounded the Gila River to create San Carlos Lake. The reservoir drowned the old San Carlos Apache settlement, whose people were relocated north to New San Carlos; when the water runs low, the foundations and a concrete marker over the old burial ground still emerge. It stands as both an engineering feat and a monument to displacement.

Oil City, PA · est. 2017

Cornplanter (1738–1836) was a Seneca war leader turned diplomat who fought for the British during the Revolution, then chose to bind the Iroquois Confederacy to the fragile new United States. In the tense years that followed, he mediated between Native nations and encroaching settlers, seeking peace even as he grew disillusioned when treaties failed to treat his people fairly. In 1796 Pennsylvania granted him and his heirs three tracts of land, including one near present-day Oil City.

Lubbock, TX

Opened in 1965, Coronado High School takes its name from Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, the Spanish conquistador who in 1541 crossed the Llano Estacado in search of the fabled golden city of Quivira. Guided by a Plains Indian the Spanish called "The Turk," Coronado's expedition wandered for days through West Texas, perhaps passing near present-day Lubbock. The school's name ties a modern city to the first Europeans to traverse its high plains.

Sandoval County, NM

These are the ancient ruins of Kuaua Pueblo, an ancestral Puebloan village of the Tiwa people that thrived along the Rio Grande for centuries before European arrival. In the winter of 1540-41 the Spanish expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado passed through this stretch of river, giving the modern historic site its name. Excavations here uncovered rare painted kiva murals among the most significant found in the Southwest.

Floydada, TX

Between 1540 and 1542, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led a vast expedition—more than a thousand people and thousands of animals—north from Mexico chasing rumors of golden cities. Their exact path across the southern plains has long puzzled historians, since surviving accounts are brief and contradictory. In the spring of 1541 the company camped in a wide canyon, and chain mail, crossbow points, and other European artifacts later unearthed around Blanco Canyon helped archaeologists confirm that Coronado passed this way.

Ysleta, TX

Established in 1682, Corpus Christi de la Ysleta is remembered as the first mission and pueblo in Texas, founded by Spanish governor Antonio de Otermín and Franciscan Fray Francisco Ayeta. It was built for the Tigua people—Pueblo refugees who had fled south during the great Pueblo Revolt of 1680—and maintained by Franciscan missionaries in the decades that followed.

Gatesville, TX

Coryell County was carved from Bell County in 1854 and named for James Coryell, a Tennessee-born frontiersman whose short life packed in a search for the fabled San Saba silver mines and service as a Texas Ranger. Coryell was killed by Native raiders near Fort Milam in 1837, during the perilous era of the Republic of Texas. The county seat began at Fort Gates before settling permanently at Gatesville.

Dublin, TX

On the banks of Cottonwood Creek just outside Dublin lies a cemetery born of a cotton-farming settlement founded in 1854 by Alexander H. and Sarah Holland Dobkins. James C. Bellamy donated land in 1857 for a school and public burial ground, and the graveyard's story is threaded with the dangers of the frontier—two people killed in a Comanche attack were reburied here decades later when railroad work forced the move. Shaded by post oak and pecan, it holds veterans of every war from the Civil War through Vietnam. The cemetery and the Cottonwood Baptist Church are all that remain of the community.

Van Horn, TX

David B. Culberson (1830–1900), a Georgia native who came to Texas in 1856, opposed secession yet helped raise the 18th Texas Infantry and rose to command it before broken health ended his field service after Vicksburg. As Adjutant and Inspector General of Texas in 1863–64 he was responsible for defending the frontier against both Union incursion and the Indian raids that intensified during the war, when Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, and Kickapoo bands plundered a thinly guarded borderland. Culberson County was named in his honor as a memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy.

Hondo, TX

In January 1866 the Texas Hill Country was still contested ground between settlers and Native Americans resisting the loss of their hunting grounds. Three young men from near D'Hanis — August Rothe, George Miller, and twelve-year-old Hubert Weynand — camped on Hondo Creek to gather stray livestock when they were attacked. Miller was killed, Weynand was captured and never seen again, and Rothe escaped to tell the story, later recorded by frontier chronicler A.J. Sowell.

Needmore, TX

On the vast, dry expanse of the Staked Plains, this brackish salt lake was a rare and welcome source of water for Comanche bands, buffalo hunters, and cattle drives alike. Artifacts along its shore mark it as a favored Comanche camp, and after the 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls broke Comanche resistance, hide hunters swept the region and all but exterminated the southern buffalo herd. From the 1880s the lake watered stock on the immense XIT Ranch and, later, cattle bound for the railroad at Bovina and the markets to the north.

Crockett, TX

Founded in 1837 and named for David Crockett, who had passed through on his way to the Alamo the year before, Crockett grew into a hub of the young Republic of Texas frontier. Its fortified log courthouse sheltered settlers during conflicts with Native peoples, and by the Civil War the town hosted a camp of instruction. As a telegraph and stagecoach station, it tied the surrounding farming and timber country into the wider South.

Fredericksburg, TX

Long an Indian signal point rising 1,915 feet, this limestone hill was recorded in 1847 by German geologist Ferdinand Roemer, who arrived as German colonists settled the Fredericksburg area. Settler John Christian Durst, finding an old timber cross on its summit, named it Kreuzberg, or Cross Mountain. Its Easter fires recall both a German folk tradition and the 1847 Meusebach treaty that made peace with the Comanche nation.

Grand Prairie, TX

The Eastern Cross Timbers is a narrow ribbon of sandy woodland dividing the Blackland and Grand Prairies, and for centuries its springs, salt licks, grass, and game made it a natural gathering place. Wichita people of Caddoan stock roamed here in the 1700s, while Kiowa and Comanche wintered and traded along routes that carried southern flint northward; French traders arrived by 1720 and Spanish expeditions passed through toward their missions. Anglo-American settlement in the 1840s brought conflict, culminating in the 1841 Battle of Village Creek, after which the tribes withdrew westward.

Salt Flat, TX

Named for the birds that flocked to its water, Crow Springs was an oasis in the far West Texas desert used by Indigenous peoples for centuries. The Butterfield Overland Mail built a stage relay station here in 1858, though the route soon shifted south toward Fort Davis, and during the Apache wars of the early 1880s Texas Rangers and Buffalo Soldiers of the U.S. 10th Cavalry camped at the springs to keep New Mexico's Apaches from joining the leaders Victorio and Nana. Today the springs have gone dry, the station has crumbled to dust, and the crows are gone.

Hochheim, TX

Stretching forty-five miles along the Guadalupe River, the Cuero I Archeological District was defined in the early 1970s to study and preserve sites threatened by a proposed reservoir. Excavations in 1972-73 uncovered 352 significant sites spanning some 9,000 years of human occupation — from the camps of prehistoric nomads to those of historic Tonkawas and Comanches. Later sites mark the arrival of Anglo-American settlers under Green DeWitt's colony in the 1820s and 1830s.

Cumby, TX

Named for a grove of black jack trees atop the highest point in the county—once beside an Indian camping ground and trail—this settlement grew from a frontier crossroads into a thriving trading center. A post office opened in a settler's home in 1848, and by 1860 the town had stores, physicians, blacksmiths, and a log schoolhouse. Renamed in 1896 for a Confederate veteran and legislator, the town later faded as improved highways drew commerce elsewhere.

Comanche, TX

James and Susannah Cunningham arrived in the Republic of Texas about 1839–40 and put down roots in Comanche County in 1855, becoming a leading family that took part in frontier defense against Indian raids. In 1889 the couple and their twelve children held a first reunion; the gatherings grew into an annual summer tradition, with neighboring land later bought to keep them going. The marker commemorates a family celebration that has endured for generations.

Damascus Township, PA · est. 1947

In 1755, settlers from Connecticut led by Moses Thomas and Daniel Skinner planted the first colony on the upper Delaware, on lands the Native peoples called Cushetunk. Their arrival reflected Connecticut's sweeping and contested claims to lands stretching west across Pennsylvania. During the Revolution the little settlement was overrun — seized in 1778 by a force of Indians and Loyalist Tories — a casualty of the brutal frontier warfare that swept the Delaware and Susquehanna valleys.

Wheeler, TX

The banks of Sweetwater Creek lay in the heart of the Comancheria, where Plains peoples wintered in country rich with buffalo. In the winter campaign of 1868-69, George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Cavalry and Kansas volunteers to recover two Anglo women captured from Kansas settlements. Rather than open fire on a large Cheyenne village and risk the captives' lives, Custer detained several chiefs, opened tense negotiations with the Cheyenne leadership, and by ultimatum won the women's release in March 1869.

Cypress, TX

The Cypress region of northwest Harris County took shape after Attakapas and Akokisa peoples gave way to Anglo settlers like the Burnetts and Simmonses in the 1830s, with Matthew Burnett running an inn and serving as first postmaster at Big Cypress. German immigrants seeking land and religious freedom arrived in the late 1840s, and the Houston and Texas Central Railway reaching Cypress Top in 1856 turned scattered farms into a thriving depot community of stores, hotels, and dance halls.

Wills Point, TX

This route began as a trail blazed by Caddoan peoples and later followed by French traders. By the mid-1830s it had become a principal road bringing emigrants and cargo into North Texas from the river port of Shreveport, and Van Zandt County's first courthouse rose along it in 1848. Used heavily for Civil War troop movements, the road carried ox teams and settlers into the 1900s.

Tionesta, PA · est. 1947

Along the Allegheny River in what is now Forest County stood one of a cluster of Native refuge towns visited by the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger in the 1760s. Known by the Munsee word for "muskrat," the town was later called Damascus, and at the time it was home to a Seneca sentinel chief who watched over this stretch of the river. The site belongs to a fraught moment when displaced Delaware, Munsee, and other Native peoples gathered in the upper Ohio country amid the pressures of colonial expansion and missionary activity.

Exeter Township, PA · est. 1957

Daniel Boone, born here in the Oley Valley in 1734, spent his first sixteen years on the family homestead before the Boones pushed south and west into the Carolina and Kentucky backcountry. Long before he became the legendary blazer of the Wilderness Road and a symbol of American frontier daring, he was a Pennsylvania farm boy hunting the woods of Berks County. The homestead a few miles north is preserved today as a state historic site.

Amity Township, PA · est. 1957

This plaque honors Daniel Boone (1734-1820), the famed pioneer and scout who was born just a few miles away in the Oley Valley and spent his earliest years there. The area's rolling Berks County farmland was Boone's first world before the family migrated south, launching the life of wandering and trailblazing that made him a household name. The nearby birthplace survives as a state historic shrine.

Frankfort, KY

Daniel Boone was already a legend in his own lifetime, and this monument in Frankfort marks the final resting place a grateful Kentucky claimed for him and his wife Rebecca. Born in Pennsylvania in 1734, Boone blazed the Wilderness Trail, founded Fort Boonesborough in 1775, and helped open the trans-Appalachian frontier to settlement even as he served as surveyor, legislator, and sheriff. Though he lost his vast Kentucky land claims and moved on to Missouri, the Commonwealth brought his remains home in 1845 and raised this tribute in 1860.

Frankfort, KY

Daniel Boone (1734–1820) was the frontier's most famous pathfinder: he entered eastern Kentucky in 1767, explored the Bluegrass, and in 1775 blazed the Wilderness Trail through the Cumberland Gap and raised Fort Boonesborough, which he helped defend against attack in 1778. Late in life he moved on to Missouri, still chasing the edge of the wilderness. In 1845 he and his wife Rebecca were reinterred here at Frankfort Cemetery, overlooking the river country he opened.

Weches, TX

Daniel McLean and his brother-in-law John Sheridan were among the earliest Anglo settlers of this part of East Texas. McLean first came in 1813 with the Gutiérrez-Magee expedition seeking to free Mexico from Spain, then returned to claim land when Stephen F. Austin opened Texas to colonists in the 1820s. Both men were killed by Indians in 1837 while chasing stolen horses, and Mrs. Sheridan recovered their bodies with a boy's help so each could be buried on his own land.

Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1947

About 1744, frontier founder Daniel Brodhead raised a building here for Moravian missionaries, part of the remarkable Moravian effort to carry their faith to settlers and Native peoples along the Pennsylvania frontier. The mission stood barely a decade: in 1755, as the French and Indian War set the backcountry aflame, it was destroyed in the raiding that emptied the region. Its site lay beside what is now the cemetery.

Green Township, NJ

Long before European settlers reached the upper Delaware Valley, Munsee-speaking Lenape people known as the Minisink lived in villages scattered across these hills and river flats. The Dark Moon Site preserves the remnants of one such small settlement dating to the Late Woodland period, roughly six centuries ago — an era when Native communities here farmed maize, beans, and squash and returned to favored village sites season after season.

Dare County, NC

Near here stood Dasemunkepeuc, an Algonquian village on the mainland across from Roanoke Island at the time of the English voyages of the 1580s. It was the home of Wingina, a Native leader who was slain by a colonist in 1586 amid the mounting tensions of first contact. The village was abandoned in 1587 as English and Algonquian relations collapsed.

Carson City, NV

Louisa Keyser — known as Datsolalee — was a Washoe weaver whose spherical degikup willow baskets, decorated with bracken fern and redbud, elevated a thousands-of-years-old utilitarian craft into internationally celebrated fine art. Working under the patronage of the Cohn family from 1895 until her death in 1925, she produced more than 120 documented major baskets now prized in museums nationwide. Her success came as the Washoe were recovering from the mid-19th-century loss of their homelands, and it inspired renewed basketry across the tribe.

Selma, TX

William Davenport, Virginia-born and Kentucky-raised, settled south of Cibolo Creek in 1851, and when his first wife died the next year he buried her near their home, founding this community graveyard. A rancher, militia captain, and Mason, he helped establish Selma's first school in 1859 and a combined schoolhouse-church-Masonic hall in 1872; his second wife's father was a War of 1812 veteran also buried here, and burials continued until 1934.

Lower Mount Bethel Township, PA · est. 1947

In 1744, the young Presbyterian missionary David Brainerd lived in a log house in this corner of the Forks of the Delaware, laboring to bring Christianity to the region's Native peoples. Racked by the illness that would kill him at 29, Brainerd poured his hopes and torments into a diary that, published after his death by Jonathan Edwards, became one of the most widely read spiritual journals in American history. His brief, feverish ministry left a mark on frontier Pennsylvania far larger than his short life would suggest.

Harrison Township, PA · est. 1947

In October 1767, the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger made his way through this unbroken wilderness on a journey from Bethlehem toward the Delaware communities of the west. A tireless figure of colonial Pennsylvania, Zeisberger spent decades living among Native peoples and learning their languages. His passage through these primeval forests marked one of the first recorded European crossings of the region.

Allegany Township, PA · est. 1947

In October 1767, Moravian missionary David Zeisberger traveled through this remote stretch of forest, bound from Bethlehem toward the Delaware communities to the west. Renowned for living among Native peoples and mastering their languages, Zeisberger devoted his life to missions on the frontier. His route through this untouched country was among the earliest recorded European journeys across the region.

Coudersport, PA · est. 1916

On an October night in 1767, the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger camped near this spot, guided by two Delaware companions, Anthony and Papunhank, as he journeyed from Bethlehem toward the Allegheny. The trip opened the way for the Moravian missions that would take root among the Delaware across western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Tradition holds him the first European to travel the primeval forests of the upper Allegheny.

Jasper, TX

This cemetery lies within the 1280-acre grant given to Elizabeth Davis in 1841; believed to be of Indian heritage, she had brought her three children from Georgia to Jasper County in 1836. Local tradition holds that a sick Indian child she took in was the first buried here, though the oldest marked grave is that of Elizabeth Davis Kelly, who died in 1873. Once a family plot, the ground opened to the wider community as sawmills and logging arrived, and it now holds more than 370 graves, including citizens of the Republic of Texas and Civil War veterans.

Douglas County, NV

Known to the Washoe as De-ek Wadapush, Cave Rock has been a sacred place for thousands of years, a site where medicine people meditated and prayed and a landmark woven through the tribe's legends and traditional life beside da ow — Lake Tahoe. In the settlement era it also served the newcomers: quarried granite blocks still brace the old Lake Bigler Toll Road on its face, and highway tunnels were bored through the rock in 1931 and again in 1957. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property.

Comstock, TX

This narrow canyon guarded one of the most feared stretches of the San Antonio–El Paso road, the overland lifeline that carried Forty-Niners and freighters toward California after the Gold Rush. Named by 1849 after a deadly ambush on Dr. Lyon's wagon train, it became notorious for raids and killings; freighter August Santleben later tallied nearly 400 deaths along the wider frontier road. The Army built Camp Hudson on the Devils River in 1857 to protect travelers, yet the pass was still considered dangerous into the early 1880s.

Bryson City, NC

In the winter of 1864, the mountains of far western North Carolina were a contested frontier of the Civil War. Near Deep Creek, Union forces struck Thomas's Legion — a Confederate command that famously included Cherokee soldiers from the nearby Qualla Boundary. The blow here helped erode Cherokee support for the Confederate cause in the southern Appalachians.

Boyd, TX

Settled around 1854 by pioneers Sam Woody and Tom McCarroll and soon joined by neighbors from East Texas, Deep Creek grew into a farming community raising cotton, corn, and cattle, with a Baptist church that doubled as a schoolhouse. Its cemetery holds Civil War veterans and the grave of Sally Bowman, killed in an 1868 Indian raid — a reminder of frontier peril. Generations later the community even inspired a nationally performed ballet, "Winter at Deep Creek."

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Long before Mount Pleasant existed, Caddo Indians camped around the mineral springs here, where waters were said to flow red, white, and blue. Benjamin Gooch built the area's first home in the 1830s, and by 1895 the springs had become a health and recreation resort, crowned from 1909 to 1916 by the lavish Dellwood Hotel. A favorite spot for Confederate reunions and political rallies, the site later burned and was acquired by the city in 1951 as Dellwood Park.

Denton, TX

Denton County was carved from Fannin County in April 1846 and organized that July, both town and county named for John B. Denton — a pioneer preacher, lawyer, and Indian fighter who died in 1841. The county seat wandered from Pinckneyville to Alton before settling permanently at Denton in 1850. The marker records the restless early years of a North Texas frontier county finding its footing.

Boise, ID

The Oregon Trail did not appear from nowhere — it followed routes long traveled by Native peoples, which emigrant wagons then adopted through the mid-19th century and beyond. As Western mining booms erupted, new roads pushed out from camps toward supply hubs like Boise and Salt Lake City. Freight wagons and stagecoaches worked these old emigrant paths until railroads finally displaced most of them.

Lyon County, NV

This rugged reef of rock was one of the most famous landmarks of Nevada Territory, guarding the narrow gorge through which thousands of prospectors streamed toward the Comstock Lode. Nearby in June 1850, John Orr and Nicholas Kelly found the first gold nugget ever unearthed in Gold Canyon, opening a decade of placer mining. During the brief Paiute War of 1860, Silver City's residents built a stone battlement and even a wooden cannon atop the eastern summit for defense.

Devine, TX

The earliest graves in this Medina County cemetery belong to settlers killed by Native American raiders in the early 1870s, including seventeen-year-old Isaac Galbreath, whose father — a Texas Ranger and Mexican War veteran — also rests here. The town of Devine grew up in 1881 when the International and Great Northern Railroad reached the area, and landowner P.C. Hattox deeded the original acreage for the cemetery in 1891. A cemetery association has cared for the grounds ever since.

Eureka County, NV

Long a gathering ground for Shoshone and Paiute people, Diamond Valley was first mapped by Captain John C. Frémont in 1845 as he charted routes for western migration. Colonel J.H. Simpson surveyed a path through here in 1859 that immediately became the Pony Express and Overland Telegraph route, while freight toll roads served the lead and silver camps booming in the 1860s. A limited livestock and dairy industry followed, and in 1957 a tapped underground lake brought irrigation water to the valley.

Dickens, TX

Fed by upland aquifers draining through porous sandstone at the head of a canyon ravine, Dickens Springs has drawn people to its water since the earliest human occupation of the Rolling Plains. Nomadic peoples camped here for millennia, leaving a wealth of stone tools later studied by Texas Tech archaeologists, before pioneer settlers arrived in the 1880s and a town promoter turned the springs into a beloved public park.

Plainview, TX

On the West Texas plains near Running Water Draw, a teenager's 1941 find led archaeologists to a bone bed where ancient hunters had killed scores of giant bison thousands of years ago. Excavations in the 1940s uncovered stone dart points among the remains of an extinct bison twice the size of modern species, and the distinctive point was named for this site. Radiocarbon dating places the kill some 8,000 to 9,000 years in the past, a window into the lives of Paleo-Indian hunters of the Great Plains.

Barksdale, TX

Dixie Settlement took its name from Camp Dixie, a Texas Ranger post along the military road to Fort Inge, and grew up in a hard frontier where Indian raids were still a living danger. Its first settler was the widowed midwife Jerusha Sanchez, followed by pioneer families and by Lewis Barksdale, a veteran of the Republic of Texas wars who claimed a land grant here in 1876. When a post office opened in 1882 under Barksdale's name, the old name Dixie quietly disappeared.

Mason vicinity, TX

Dizenia Peters Todd came to Texas as a child in the 1830s and, with her husband George W. Todd's family, was among the earliest settlers and officials of Mason County in the 1850s. She was killed in an Indian raid near this site around January 1865, a period when frontier defenses had thinned during the Civil War, and was buried with a young Black servant in adjacent unmarked graves.

Independence Township, PA · est. 1947

Around 1773 John Doddridge raised a cluster of stockaded cabins on this frontier, strong enough to shelter neighboring families when danger threatened. Through the Revolutionary years such fortified homesteads were the settlers' refuge from raids along the western border. The place is also remembered as the boyhood home of Dr. Joseph Doddridge, later a noted chronicler of frontier life.

Brackettville, TX

In 1833 the English-born empresario John Charles Beales — holder of a staggering land grant across present-day Texas and New Mexico — led fifty-nine colonists to this spot to found a town named for his Mexican wife. Drought and Comanche raids battered the fragile settlement, and when the colonists fled south during the Texas Revolution in 1836, most of one party was killed on the road. The town never recovered.

San Marcos, TX

In 1807, at the request of Spanish Texas's governor, the Army captain and rancher Felipe Roque de la Portilla led more than fifty settlers to found San Marcos de Neve where El Camino Real crossed the San Marcos River. The colony issued town lots and built homes around a plaza, but floods, missing supplies, and raids by Comanches and Tonkawas broke it; by 1812 Portilla led his people back toward the Rio Grande. He remained a prominent frontier leader, later helping establish another Texas colony.

Lufkin vicinity, TX

Long before highways, the Bedias Trail carried Indians, explorers, traders, and missionaries from Bedias camps on the lower Trinity River to the Spanish missions near Nacogdoches. In 1746 Don Joaquin de Orobio y Basterra, captain of the presidio at La Bahia, led reconnaissance along the route and lent his name to this crossing of the Angelina River. Italian-born trader Vicente Michili later ran a large ranch nearby, and in time railroads and major roads traced the old trail's path, making it a backbone of Angelina County's growth.

San Antonio, TX

José Miguel de Arciniega entered the Spanish military as a teenager in 1810 and, after Mexico won its independence in 1821, rose through San Antonio's civic ranks as alcalde and political chief. He served as a land commissioner for Stephen F. Austin's colonies and, after the Texas Revolution, continued in judicial and border-security roles. Fluent in Spanish, French, English, and several Native languages, he remained a leader through every change of government Texas endured.

Marathon, TX

This spot in the Big Bend country was a natural water hole used since prehistoric times, its ancient importance recorded in the artifacts left behind and later by the Indians and Spaniards who traveled the roads up from northern Mexico. When Maravillas Creek cut the old pool away, rancher George Miller dug two wells around 1900 and topped them with twin windmills, giving "Double Mills" its name. It became a vital campsite for cattle drives, ore wagons, and U.S. troops on border patrol.

Allouez Township, MI

Douglass Houghton was Michigan's first state geologist, whose surveys in the 1830s and early 1840s documented the vast copper deposits of the Keweenaw Peninsula and helped ignite the nation's first great mining rush. His career was cut short in 1845 when he drowned in a Lake Superior storm off Eagle River, near where this memorial stands. The city of Houghton and Houghton County bear his name.