DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. There's a little creek running through Menard County that most folks today call Celery Creek — quiet name, sounds almost peaceful. But the Spaniards who built and manned the Presidio de San Saba knew it by a different name entirely: Arroyo de Juan Lorenzo.
That presidio stood from 1757 to 1770, and the men there had a complicated relationship with this particular stretch of water. On one hand, they pulled the very stone to build the presidio right out of the bluffs along its banks. Quarried it themselves, hauled it up, shaped their walls from it.
So in a very real sense, the creek gave them their fortress. On the other hand — and here's where the story takes its turn — those same deep, steep banks that made the creek such a fine place to cut stone? They also made it a natural corridor for hostile Indians moving unseen.
The banks were deep enough, and the cover thick enough, that enemies could work their way right up to striking distance without ever being spotted. The presidio sat half a mile to the southwest. Half a mile.
Close enough that a force moving along that creek bed in silence could be on top of you before the alarm was ever raised. The same earth that built those walls was also the earth that hid the danger. Celery Creek, they call it now.
But the Spaniards had reason to remember it differently.
What the marker says
Name used by Spaniards of Presidio de San Saba (in existence from 1757 to 1770) for this stream now called Celery Creek. Stone to build Presidio was quarried from bluffs along the creek, and deep banks let hostile Indians approach undiscovered, to attack the Presidio, half a mile to the southwest.