DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Picture yourself standing on the Texas Gulf Coast, in a place called Lafitte's Grove, in Galveston County. The year is 1817, and a man named Jean Lafitte — and they called him a freebooter, which is about as polite a word as you're going to find for what he was — Jean Lafitte planted a fort right here and called it home.
Headquarters, they'd say. A base of operations. And what kind of operations?
Preying on shipping in the Gulf of Mexico. That was his business, and by all accounts, business was good. Now, a man like that, roosting on the Texas coast, running his schemes out into the Gulf — you'd think the story might end quietly.
It did not. In February of 1821, right here on this very ground, Lafitte's men fought the Karankawa Indians in what history would remember as the Battle of the Three Trees. That name alone ought to stop you for a moment.
The Battle of the Three Trees. There's a whole world of violence and hard country in just those five words. And then came the order — not from a rival pirate, not from some Spanish fleet, but from the United States government itself — ordering Lafitte's departure.
So in 1821, he left. And when he went, the fort didn't just sit there waitin' for the next chapter. It was burned.
Lafitte saw to that himself before he was gone. A freebooter builds something, preys on half the Gulf of Mexico, fights a battle with a name stranger than fiction, gets shown the door by Washington, and burns his own fort on the way out. That, friend, is how you make an exit.
What the marker says
Fort and settlement established here in 1817 by the freebooter Jean Lafitte who maintained headquarters here while preying on shipping in the Gulf of Mexico. The Battle of the Three Trees was fought here between Lafitte's men and Karankawa Indians, February, 1821. Fort abandoned and burned in 1821 by Lafitte after his departure was ordered by the United States government. Erected by the State of Texas 1936