LOST SPANISH MISSION
The Santa Cruz de San Sabá Mission, built in 1757, is the only Spanish mission in Texas destroyed by Native Americans. The destruction was so complete that it took 235 years for archeologists to finally confirm the site on the banks of the San Sabá River about 120 miles northwest of San Antonio. Franciscan padres […]
Campaign to Open the West
After the Civil War, views differed about what should be done about the Southern Plains Indian’s often-vicious determination to keep their hunting grounds free of white settlement. The Texas government wanted to see the Indians exterminated, while the federal government planned to move them to two reservations established in Indian Territory (present Oklahoma). Two turbulent […]
The Battle of Plum Creek
Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, maintained a harsh anti-Indian policy. Like many of the folks that elected him, Lamar claimed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. In January 1840, three Comanche chiefs entered San Antonio seeking a peace agreement that would recognize the borders of Comancheria—their […]
Buffalo Days
The buffalo represented big business in Texas for about four years beginning in 1874. The new southern transcontinental railroad made it possible to ship hides to eastern markets, and a New York brokerage house recognized an international demand for the hides. As in all booms, there were entrepreneurs ready to meet the demands and turn […]
Tales of Fort Leaton
The Chihuahuan Desert hugging the Rio Grande in far West Texas was a killing field for Spanish explorers, Apaches, Comanches, white scalp hunters, and freighters daring to travel between San Antonio and Ciudad Chihuahua. Apache and Comanche raids into Mexico—killing hundreds, stealing thousands of livestock, and capturing women and children—resulted by 1835 in the Mexican […]
Texas’ First Historian
In 1527, six years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had not planned to become a historian when he set sail as the second in command of the Pánfilo de Narváez 600-man expedition. After desertions in Santa Domingo and a terrible hurricane in Cuba, the Spaniards spent the winter re-outfitting […]
The Mystery of Millie Durkin
She was eighteen months old on October 13, 1864, when a Kiowa warrior entered a blazing ranch house and found Millie Durkin crawling out from under a bed after the raiding party had killed her mother and baby brother. Over the next eighteen years Millie’s grandmother, Elizabeth Carter Clifton led a determined search for the […]
Treasures of the Lower Pecos
Travelers heading northwest on US 90 out of Del Rio parallel the Rio Grande through arid canyon lands carved by the intersecting Pecos and Devils rivers, one of the most significant archeological regions in North America. Tucked into overhanging limestone ledges and deeply recessed caves are rock shelters where evidence of human habitation dates back […]
He Came to Texas Seeking Revenge
It’s hard to know what’s truth and what’s myth about the adventures of William Alexander Anderson Wallace. He was a nineteen-year-old working in his father’s Virginia fruit orchard in 1835 when he heard that his brother and a cousin had been killed in the Goliad Massacre during the Texas War for Independence from Mexico. That […]
Politics and Salt Did Not Mix
Travelers driving east from El Paso may find it difficult to imagine the longtime controversies that took place in the shadow of the majestic Guadalupe Peak rising from the desert floor. The tallest mountain in Texas soars 8,751 feet above its western flank where an ancient salt flat sprawled across 2,000 acres. The salt and […]