Native American History

Firestone, CO

Two hundred feet east of this point once stood Fort Junction, a sod enclosure thrown up in 1864 by settlers of the Boulder and St. Vrain valleys. In a year of rising conflict on the Colorado plains, frontier families gathered behind its earthen walls, garrisoned by local Home Guards, seeking protection amid the wars between settlers and the Plains nations. The fort was one of many hastily built refuges along the edge of Anglo-American settlement.

Waterford, PA · est. 1946

This ground guarded the portage route linking Lake Erie to the Ohio Valley, and three successive forts rose here as empires contested the region. The French built the first in 1753 to secure their road south, abandoning it as their fortunes collapsed in 1759. A British fort followed in 1760 but was burned during Pontiac's uprising in 1763, and finally an American fort went up in 1794 to shield settlers moving west.

Banquete, TX

A Spanish fort rose near a Lipan Apache village on this site in 1728, the settlement bearing an Aztec-derived name. Regarrisoned by Mexican troops around 1831 to discourage Anglo-American colonization, the earthen post became a flashpoint of the Texas Revolution: Texan forces captured it in November 1835 and turned back a counterattack the next day. It saw fighting again in 1842 before being abandoned to ruin.

Dublin Township, PA · est. 1924

In 1756, as war between Britain and France spilled across the Pennsylvania frontier, the colony raised a chain of provincial forts to shield its exposed backcountry settlements. Fort Littleton was one of these strongpoints, ordered up under Governor Robert Hunter Morris and planted on this knoll to guard a vital road through the mountains. In the fear-filled years of the French and Indian War, such stockades were refuge and rallying point for settlers who lived within reach of raiding parties.

Peters Township, PA · est. 1947

Built by the provincial government in 1756, Fort Loudon guarded the frontier during the French and Indian War and in 1758 served as a staging point for Gen. John Forbes's expedition that captured Fort Duquesne. In 1765 the fort became a flashpoint of a different kind when frontiersmen led by James Smith — the "Black Boys" — forced a British garrison to withdraw, an early act of armed colonial defiance. The site thus spans both the imperial war and the friction that would build toward revolution.

Biddeford, ME

This Daughters of the American Revolution monument marks the site of Fort Mary, a garrison that stood at Winter Harbor in Biddeford beginning around 1700. Small wooden forts like this guarded Maine's exposed frontier through the long series of colonial wars among English settlers, the French, and their Native allies. For generations the fort offered refuge to a coastal community repeatedly caught in the crossfire of empire.

Mason, TX

When Texas seceded, Fort Mason and the newly established Camp Llano became links in a Confederate line of frontier posts, spaced a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Occupied first by the First Regiment Texas Mounted Rifles and then the Frontier Regiment, these troops guarded scattered settlers against raids while the war raged elsewhere. Locals took shelter at Fort Mason, and even a lone mail carrier crept between the posts by night, dodging raiders to keep the mail moving.

Cross Plains, TX

Between 1851 and 1861, the U.S. 2nd Cavalry and its supply trains moved along this route linking Fort Mason to Camp Cooper during the army's antebellum campaigns against the Plains Indians. Among the officers who traveled the road were men soon to become giants of the Civil War, including Robert E. Lee and George H. Thomas, the future 'Rock of Chickamauga.'

Bloomsburg, PA · est. 1948

After frontier raids destroyed nearby Fort Jenkins in 1780, the noted borderland fighter Moses Van Campen stockaded the McClure house early in 1781 to shelter settlers along the north bank of the Susquehanna. The improvised fort stood in what is now Bloomsburg, part of a chain of refuges thrown up as the Revolution's frontier war ground on. Such places were less military garrisons than desperate havens for families caught between armies and raiding parties.

Hamilton Township, PA · est. 1947

In the tense years of the French and Indian War, Pennsylvania's Cumberland Valley settlers threw up log stockades like Fort McCord to shelter their families when frontier violence flared. Named for the settler John McCord, this refuge was overwhelmed and burned on April 1, 1756, in a raid that left 27 people dead or dragged into captivity. Such attacks were part of the wider war between Britain and France, in which allied Native nations struck deep into the exposed backcountry.

Hamilton Township, PA · est. 1914

On April 1, 1756, Fort McCord — one of the small stockaded refuges thrown up along Pennsylvania's Cumberland Valley frontier during the French and Indian War — was overrun, and twenty-seven settlers were killed or carried off. A militia party that gave chase was itself ambushed days later at Sideling Hill, where many of the pursuers fell. The marker names the women, children, and provincial soldiers lost, preserving a roll of the dead from one of the war's bloodiest weeks on the backcountry.

Humboldt County, NV

Established in 1865 as Quinn River Camp #33, this post was renamed Fort McDermitt for a district commander killed while fighting Native peoples. A cluster of adobe, stone, and frame buildings around a central square, it guarded the road linking Virginia City, the Quinn River Valley, and Oregon. Its troops took part in the Modoc War and in campaigns against the Bannock and Shoshone, and after twenty-four years—the longest active service of any Nevada army fort—it became an American Indian reservation school in 1889.

Beaver, PA · est. 1946

Built in 1778 during the Revolution, Fort McIntosh was the first military post the young United States raised north of the Ohio River, a foothold in contested Indian country. In 1785 it hosted the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, one of the early agreements by which the new republic pressed Native nations to cede lands in the Northwest Territory, and it also served as a base for surveying that opening frontier. The garrison was abandoned around 1790-91 as the line of settlement moved on.

Saint Joseph, MI

In November 1679 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, built a fort near the mouth of the St. Joseph River—then called the Miami—as a supply base for his ambitious push into the western Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. Fort Miami was among the earliest European outposts in what is now Michigan, a toehold in a vast Native homeland that La Salle hoped would open a French empire across the interior of the continent.

Marlin, TX

In the anxious first years of Texas independence, this spot served as the capital of Robertson's Colony, briefly called Sarahville de Viesca before it was renamed Milam late in 1835. As Anglo settlers pushed into the Brazos country, a ranging company threw up a fort here to guard families against raids. It stood as one of the frontier outposts that marked the contested boundary between newcomers and the Native peoples whose lands they were entering.

Muncy Township, PA · est. 2017

During the American Revolution, the West Branch Susquehanna Valley was a violent frontier, and Fort Muncy stood as the principal defensive post north of Sunbury. Built to shield settlers from raids, it was overrun by British forces and their Native allies in 1778, rebuilt and destroyed again in 1779, and raised a third time because its position was too important to abandon. From here scouting parties ranged out to guard a settler frontier caught in the wider war for independence.

Cooks Point, TX

Fort Oldham was raised in 1836–37 by pioneers who sheltered with William Oldham, an infantry major in the Texas War for Independence. In seasons of Native raids dozens lived within its walls, and by 1838 it had a post office and stood on the Independence–Tenoxtitlan Road; Oldham himself later rode with the Somervell and Mier Expeditions, was captured by Mexican forces, and escaped to make his way home.

Groesbeck, TX

Built in 1834 by the Parker family — leaders of the first Predestinarian Baptist body to reach Texas — this private stockade sheltered several allied families on the Central Texas frontier. On May 18, 1836, a Comanche raid killed several of the men and carried off captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. She grew up among the Comanche, married Chief Peta Nocona, and bore Quanah Parker, who would become the last chief of the Comanche.

Marathon, TX

Established in 1880 in the rugged Big Bend country, Fort Peña Colorada guarded the water and passes near Marathon against raids across the Mexican border. Apaches struck the post in 1881 during the last years of the Indian Wars in far West Texas. With the frontier considered pacified, the fort was abandoned in 1893.

Anson, TX

When Texas seceded, Confederate and state troops took over abandoned Fort Phantom Hill as an outpost guarding the frontier against Indian raids while the state's men were away at war. In 1862 the defense line was pulled back thirty miles east, but patrols kept ranging out—often on their own horses, guns, and provisions—to protect settlements and watch for Union incursion. The marker honors Texans who held a 2,000-mile line of coast and frontier with the few men the Confederacy could spare.

Erie, PA · est. 1946

Guarding the Lake Erie end of the strategic portage to the Ohio Valley, Fort Presque Isle changed hands as European empires fought for the continent. The French built it under Marin in 1753 and abandoned it in 1759; a British fort raised by Colonel Bouquet in 1760 fell to Pontiac's warriors in 1763. From here the French Road ran inland to Fort LeBoeuf, a chain of posts binding the lake to the Ohio country.

Jacksboro, TX

Established by the U.S. War Department in November 1867, Fort Richardson stood as the northernmost of a chain of posts guarding the Texas frontier against raids in the years after the Civil War. It was named for General Israel B. Richardson, mortally wounded at Antietam in 1862. As settlement pushed westward the fort's purpose faded, and it was abandoned in 1878; what stands here was partially reconstructed in 1936.

Jacksboro, TX

Built by the U.S. Army in 1867, Fort Richardson anchored the northernmost line of federal posts guarding Texas settlers during the Indian Wars that followed the Civil War. The site had already known travelers as a stop on the Butterfield Overland stage route in the years before secession. Garrisoned troops rode from here on patrols across a contested frontier until the post was abandoned in 1879 as the fighting moved west.

Jacksboro, TX

Part of Fort Richardson, built in 1867 to shield North Texas settlers, this post hospital witnessed a pivotal moment in frontier justice. In May 1871 General William Tecumseh Sherman was inspecting the fort when word came of the Warren Wagon Train massacre 24 miles away. The accused, tracked to Fort Sill, were brought to Jacksboro for trial — the first time Native men were tried in a white civilian court in North Texas.

Northeast Madison Township, PA · est. 1947

In 1755, as the French and Indian War set the Pennsylvania frontier ablaze, settlers in the Sherman's Valley threw up a fortified stronghold on George Robinson's land. Fort Robinson was one of a chain of rough private and provincial forts where scattered farm families could shelter when war parties swept through. For several harrowing years it served as a place of refuge on an exposed and dangerous frontier.

Morganton, NC

In 1567 the Spanish captain Juan Pardo built Fort San Juan at Joara, a major native town, planting one of the earliest European outposts in the interior of what is now the United States—decades before Jamestown. The garrison lasted barely a year before the surrounding Indians destroyed it in 1568, ending Spain's bid to hold the Carolina backcountry.

Shirleysburg, PA · est. 1947

Built in 1755–56 by the frontier trader and Indian agent George Croghan, Fort Shirley began as a stockade and grew into a key link in the chain of forts guarding Pennsylvania's frontier west of the Susquehanna River during the French and Indian War. In 1756 it served as the base for Colonel John Armstrong's expedition against the Delaware village of Kittanning. Its role reflected the desperate effort to defend backcountry settlers from raids during that conflict.

Shirleysburg, PA · est. 1926

This knoll carried Fort Shirley, one of the frontier forts raised in 1756 during the French and Indian War, built by the noted Indian trader and agent George Croghan on the site of his earlier trading post at Aughwick. Two years before, in 1754, Croghan's post here hosted a council in which interpreter Conrad Weiser met the Iroquois "Half King" Tanacharison and chiefs of the Shawnee and Delaware. The place thus joined the twin frontier worlds of diplomacy and defense.

Inez, TX

In 1685 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, planted the first European settlement in Texas near here, only to have it collapse under hardship and attacks by the Karankawa people; a Spanish expedition under Alonso de León burned its ruins in 1689. On the same ground the Spanish later raised Presidio La Bahía to guard Mission Espíritu Santo, part of a mission-presidio system that moved twice more before settling at Goliad in 1749. The site witnessed the collision of French ambition, Spanish empire, and Native power on the Gulf coast.

Huntingdon, PA · est. 1955

Fort Standing Stone once guarded this bend of the Juniata River where Stone Creek joins it, throwing up a stockade against raids on the exposed frontier. In July 1778, at the height of the Revolutionary War, Continental troops and militia were ordered here as part of a broader plan to defend the backcountry from attacks. The old fort stood a short distance south of this marker; the settlement it protected grew into Huntingdon.

Ft. Stockton, TX

After Federal troops abandoned it at the start of the Civil War, Fort Stockton was occupied by the 2nd Regiment Texas Mounted Rifles as part of the Confederacy's far-western defense line and its bid to reach the Pacific through the Arizona–New Mexico campaign of 1861–62. Comanche and Apache activity centered on the area, and California Union troops came to dominate the region from 1862 to 1865. The post also drew Union sympathizers and others hoping to escape the war.

Athens, PA · est. 1947

On August 18, 1779, General John Sullivan raised a fort on the high ground between the Chemung and Susquehanna rivers, commanding both waterways at once. With a supporting camp on the flats below, the post became the launching point for Sullivan's expedition into central New York — a scorched-earth campaign that broke the military power of the Tory and Iroquois alliance allied with Britain. The fort's brief life belied its role in one of the Revolution's most consequential frontier operations.

Franklin, PA

By 1760 the British had won the struggle for the Ohio Country, and they raised Fort Venango where French Creek meets the Allegheny River—a strategic river junction the French had earlier fortified. Its garrison held the frontier only briefly. In 1763, as Pontiac's War swept the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, Native warriors overwhelmed the post and burned it, one of a string of British forts that fell in that coordinated uprising.

St. Thomas Township, PA · est. 1947

General Edward Braddock's crushing defeat near the Monongahela in 1755 tore open the Pennsylvania frontier, and settlers answered by building a chain of small stockaded forts as places of refuge. Fort Wadell was one link in that improvised line, standing ready when raiding parties struck the scattered farms of the Cumberland Valley. These were homemade defenses, thrown together by the very families they protected.

Savoy, TX

Built in 1836 by Arkansas Indian trader Abel Warren to guard his trading post, Fort Warren was among the earliest settlements in Fannin County, its bois d'arc walls anchored by two-story corner guardhouses. Kiowa, Tonkawa, Caddo, Wichita, and other peoples came to exchange furs for knives, paint, and trade goods, and during the Civil War the post served as a supply center funneling provisions to Confederate troops and Indian refugees in the Territory to the north.

Scott Township, PA · est. 1948

In 1778 the frontier scout Moses Van Campen raised a stockade fort along Fishing Creek to shield local families from the raids that swept this valley during the Revolution. Attacked at least once, it served as one of the refuges that let settlement cling to the Susquehanna country through years of border warfare. Van Campen became a legendary figure in the region, remembered for his exploits as a scout and Indian fighter.

Defiance, OH

In the autumn of 1812, with the young United States again at war with Britain, Gen. William Henry Harrison ordered this fort thrown up at the confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee rivers in what was then contested frontier. Fort Winchester never saw a great battle; instead it did the quieter, essential work of war — stockpiling supplies, drilling troops, and marshaling men before they pushed north to the fighting at Fort Meigs. By 1815 the war had ended and the garrison marched away, but the fort's footprint lingered: the streets of Defiance, Ohio grew up along the lines it had traced.

Mifflinburg, PA · est. 1947

A mill has stood near this spot since 1771, when Fought's Mill first turned grain for the settlers of Buffalo Valley. During the Revolution, the sturdy mill doubled as a place of refuge when frontier raids threatened the scattered farms of the region. It was also here, on November 3, 1776, that Buffalo Valley held its first election under Pennsylvania's new revolutionary state constitution.

Fort Worth, TX

In the late 1840s the U.S. Army sought a new post on the Trinity River to guard the line between settlers and the Plains tribes. General William J. Worth planned it but died of cholera before it was built, leaving Major Ripley Arnold to scout and establish the fort in 1849 near Marrow Bone Springs with the help of local figures like Middleton Tate Johnson. Arnold named the post for Worth, the recently fallen Mexican War hero, and the barracks rose where the Tarrant County Courthouse now stands.

Nacogdoches, TX

Franciscan missionaries were central to Spain's effort to hold Tejas. In 1690, Father Damian Massanet and Captain Alonso de Leon led an entrada that raised the region's first mission, San Francisco de los Tejas, but disease, harsh weather, and deteriorating relations with the Caddo forced its abandonment by 1693. A second expedition under Espinosa and Ramon in 1716 built a presidio and six missions, only to be abandoned in 1719 amid French harassment; a final effort under the Marquis de Aguayo resettled the missions with 500 in tow. Though the friars never truly converted the Caddo, their expeditions legitimized Spanish presence in East Texas.

Frankstown Township, PA · est. 1947

Long before European towns rose here, this was the site of Assunepachla, a Delaware and Shawnee village standing before 1748. By 1734 the trader Frank Stevens had established a fur post at the spot, drawing on the Indian trade that laced the region. The Kittanning Path, a major Indian route across the Allegheny ridges, ran through here, making Frankstown a crossroads of trade and travel.

Morris Township, PA · est. 1949

Long before roads followed these valleys, Native travelers laid out the Frankstown Path, a major overland route threading the ridges of central Pennsylvania along the Frankstown Branch of the Juniata River. Where it met the older Warriors Path near Water Street, the very bed of the river served as a natural gateway through Tussey Mountain. These trails were the interstate highways of their day, carrying people, goods, and diplomacy across the Appalachian barrier.

Santa Cruz County, AZ

In April 1539, the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza passed through the San Rafael Valley, becoming by this marker's account the first European to enter what is now Arizona. Sent north from Mexico by the Spanish viceroy, he traveled ahead of the great expeditions in search of the fabled wealthy cities of Cíbola. His reports, however exaggerated, helped spur the Coronado expedition that followed the next year.

North Beaver Township, PA · est. 1922

This stone marks Friedensstadt, or "City of Peace," a mission village of Christian Delaware Indians founded here in the early 1770s under the guidance of Moravian missionaries. Many of its people had followed the same faith from earlier settlements at Wyalusing and along the Allegheny, moving repeatedly to stay clear of the mounting violence of the frontier. The community's long westward journey eventually carried it to the Moravian missions of Gnadenhütten and Schoenbrunn in the Tuscarawas Valley of Ohio.

Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1948

In 1763 the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger founded Friedenshuetten at the Native town of Wyalusing along the Susquehanna. The mission became a model for later Moravian efforts among Indigenous peoples, blending Christian worship with communal village life until it was abandoned in 1772. That year, pastors Ettwein and Roth led roughly two hundred converts westward to a new mission, Friedensstadt, near the Ohio country — part of the long, often tragic displacement of Native communities.

North Beaver Township, PA · est. 1948

In 1770 the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger led a band of Christian Delaware (Lenape) converts down from the upper Allegheny to found Friedensstadt — 'City of Peace' — on the Beaver River. Arriving on the eastern bank on May 3, the community soon shifted to the west side, seeking a stable home for a mission that tried to carve out a place of refuge for Native Christians amid the pressures of the frontier. It was one of a chain of Moravian Indian towns whose fortunes rose and fell with the turbulence of the era.

North Beaver Township, PA · est. 1948

By April 1773 the Christian Delaware of Friedensstadt, guided by the missionary John Heckewelder, abandoned their Beaver River town and resettled on the Muskingum River in what is now Ohio. There tragedy overtook them: on March 8, 1782, Pennsylvania militiamen murdered scores of these peaceful, unarmed converts at Gnadenhütten in one of the darkest atrocities of the Revolutionary frontier. The marker traces the thread from this quiet Pennsylvania mission to that infamous massacre.

Pearsall, TX

Though Spanish explorers passed through this brushy South Texas country as early as 1690, Frio County was not organized until after the Civil War. The county seat shifted from Frio City to Pearsall when the International & Great Northern Railroad arrived in 1883, and in 1876 a Texas Ranger camp under Major John B. Jones guarded settlers against raids. The legendary frontiersman "Big Foot" Wallace spent his last years here.

Pearsall, TX

Long home to the Pachal Indians, this South Texas country was first crossed by Spanish explorer Alonso de León in 1690 as he searched for La Salle's ill-fated Fort St. Louis. By 1720 the route through the region had become part of a King's Highway linking Saltillo to East Texas—the same road along which Santa Anna marched toward the Alamo in 1836. Frio County, named for its "cold" river, was created in 1858 and organized in 1871, its seat later moving to Pearsall in 1883.

Frio Town, TX

Frio Town rose in 1871 as the first seat of Frio County, gaining a courthouse and settlers' homes, until the International and Great Northern Railroad bypassed it in 1881 and the county seat moved to rail-served Pearsall. Its cemetery, with burials beginning in 1873, is one of the community's last physical traces. The graves tell a stark frontier story — pioneers like the Slaughters lie here, along with settlers killed in Indian raids, including six men buried in a single row after an 1876 attack, and many infants lost to harsh conditions.

Albany, TX

After the Civil War the U.S. Army built Fort Griffin above the Clear Fork of the Brazos in 1867, and a raucous town called "The Flat" sprang up below it. A stop on the buffalo-hide trade and the Western cattle trail, it drew merchants and soldiers alongside gamblers and gunfighters—Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Lottie Deno, and Big Nose Kate among them. When Albany won the county seat and the railroad, the town faded, though remnants lingered into the mid-20th century.

Cherokee County, TX

A natural gap in a ridge near the headwaters of Gum Creek long guided travelers, including the Kickapoo, before the Fry family settled the creek in the 1840s. A small industrial hamlet grew up around Joseph Fry's grist mill and blacksmith shop and Rhome Ragsdale's brickyard, kiln, and cotton gin, and when the Texas & New Orleans Railway laid its line along the old trail in 1902, the depot became a shipping point for produce, lumber, and oilfield supplies. The community even hosted a traveling tent show each winter in the 1920s before fading away.

El Paso, TX

This deep cut through the Franklin Mountains has funneled people, goods, and animals between river valley and desert basin for centuries, and long served Native Americans as a source of seasonal water, plants, and game. It takes its name from Texas Ranger and U.S. Deputy Marshal Charles Fusselman, killed here in an 1890 gunfight while pursuing cattle rustlers. The outlaw leader, Geronimo Parra, eluded capture for a decade before being tried and hanged in El Paso in 1900.

Jacksboro, TX

G. D. Cross, born in Arkansas in 1855, rode with a Texas Ranger company in the mid-1870s during the violent frontier campaigns that pushed Native peoples out of North Texas. He later settled into ordinary life as a merchant and farmer, raising thirteen children with his wife Mary. In his memory of those ranging days, he built a picnic table on the very ground where his unit had once camped, turning a former military bivouac into a gathering place for family reunions.

Gainesville, TX

Founded in 1850 and named for General Edmund P. Gaines, whose troops had backed the young Republic of Texas in 1836, Gainesville sat on the edge of the frontier in Cooke County. It served as a Confederate military supply headquarters during the Civil War and long stood as a bulwark against raids, while growing into a hub of agriculture, industry, and oil — and home to the famed Gainesville Community Circus.

Santa Fe County, NM

When Spanish explorers reached the Galisteo Basin in 1540, they found a cluster of Tano-speaking Pueblo villages farming this high, dry country. The Galisteo Tano were among the leaders of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that drove the Spanish from New Mexico; after the reconquest, surviving families were resettled at Galisteo Pueblo in 1706, only to be worn down by drought and famine.

Lakehills, TX

This native-stone hacienda was built as a fortified ranch house by Peter Gallagher (1812–1878), an Irish-Texan engineer, merchant, ranger, and diarist of the ill-fated Texan-Santa Fe Expedition. Its walls were pierced with rifle slits for defense against frontier raids. In 1927 it was bought by H. V. McNutt and became the headquarters of one of Texas's early guest ranches.

Springfield Township, PA · est. 1925

This spot marks a stage of the notorious "Walking Purchase" of 1737, when Pennsylvania's proprietors held the Lenape to a land deal measured by how far a man could walk in a day and a half. Rather than an honest stroll, Edward Marshall and his companions were trained runners who followed cleared paths at a punishing pace, seizing far more territory than the Delaware had expected to give. From the Old Durham Road they pressed northwest through the country that became Bethlehem and the Lehigh Gap.

Galveston, TX

Few places have packed so much Texas history onto one strip of sand as Galveston Island. Shipwrecked Spaniards met the Karankawa here in 1528, the pirate Jean Lafitte made it his headquarters, it served briefly as capital of the Republic in 1836, and it changed hands in the Civil War before the catastrophic hurricane of 1900 killed thousands and remade the city behind a great seawall.

Greene Township, PA · est. 1947

During the Revolutionary War, the far western reaches of Pennsylvania remained a dangerous frontier where settlers built fortified refuges against raids. Garard's Fort served as one such haven, garrisoned in 1777 by a small detachment of Virginia militia during the border disputes and warfare that gripped the Ohio Country. The marker also records the tragedy of May 12, 1782, when Native warriors attacked the family of Baptist minister John Corbly on their way to worship, killing his wife and three of his children.