DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker tells this story, and I'll do my best to give it the weight it deserves. August of 1833. A party of five men moving through this stretch of Texas — and what happened near this very spot is the kind of thing that doesn't let go of a place.
Their names were Thomas Christian, William Strother, Josiah Wilbarger, and two others whose names the marker does not record — the ones who got away. Five men. One August.
And then the world changed for most of them. Indians attacked the party here. Thomas Christian was killed.
William Strother was killed. And Josiah Wilbarger — well, Wilbarger's fate was something else again. He was scalped.
He survived that, at least for a time. But the wounds he carried out of that August day eventually took him too. He died of them.
The other two escaped. That is all we know of them — that they were there, and then they were not, and they lived to tell it. Three names on this marker.
Three men who did not make it home whole from a morning in August 1833. The land remembers, even when we don't stop long enough to listen.
What the marker says
In Memory of Thomas Christian, William Strother and Josiah Wilbarger, members of a party of five who were attacked near here by Indians in August, 1833. Christian and Strother were killed, Wilbarger was scalped and eventually died of his wounds. The other two escaped.