A. H. Fortenberry

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it: and I'll do my best to do it justice. Sometime in the 1850s, a man named A. H.

Fortenberry (folks called him Sevier) packed up his life in Arkansas and headed west with his second wife Jane, née Odell, into what the marker doesn't hesitate to call the wilderness. This part of Texas was raw country back then, and Sevier Fortenberry came to it as a farmer and stock raiser, the kind of man who works the land with one eye on the horizon. And that horizon had teeth.

Indian raids were a real and present danger to the settlements out here in Wise County, and Fortenberry wasn't the sort to sit behind a locked door. He joined his neighbors in warding off those raids, standing alongside the people who made up this fragile edge of Texas civilization. Now here's where the story turns, and it turns hard.

October 30th, 1868. Sevier Fortenberry set out to join a defensive posse; his neighbors riding to meet a threat, the same thing he'd done before, the same call he'd answered more than once. But three-quarters of a mile northwest of where this marker stands, he was intercepted.

He was killed by Indians before he ever reached the men he was riding to join. He was buried in Pollard Cemetery, over in Denton County. And then the marker offers one final, quiet, heavy thought: it is believed that Sevier Fortenberry was the last fatality in the Indian Wars in this vicinity.

The last one. Not a beginning, not a turning point; the last. There's a particular weight to being the final name on a list that nobody wanted to start in the first place.

Sevier Fortenberry rode out to protect his community one more time, and that ride is where his story ends; three-quarters of a mile from where you're standin' right now.

What the marker says

In the 1850s, A. H. ("Sevier") Fortenberry and his second wife Jane (Odell) moved from Arkansas to the wilderness then existing in this section of Texas. Living as a farmer and stock raiser, Fortenberry joined neighbors in warding off Indian raids which endangered the settlements. On October 30, 1868, at a site 3/4 of a mile northwest of this marker, he was intercepted and killed by Indians while trying to join a defensive posse. He was buried in the Pollard Cemetery, Denton County. It is thought that he was the last fatality in the Indian Wars in this vicinity. (1977)