DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker tells it like this, and I'm just the one passing it along. Now, two and a half miles east of here rises Packsaddle Mountain — and that name alone ought to make you sit up a little straighter. Because that mountain carries a story, and the date on it is August 4, 1873.
Eight men. Eight. Captain J.
R. Moss, Stephen B. Moss, William B.
Moss, Eli Lloyd, Arch Martin, Pink Ayers, E. D. Harrington, and Robert Brown.
Eight men who rode up onto that mountain and squared off against a band of Indians that numbered three times their own count. You do that arithmetic in your head — eight against twenty-four, give or take — and you start to appreciate what kind of day that was on Packsaddle Mountain. Those eight men routed them.
That's the word the marker uses, and it's the right one. Routed. Not held on.
Not survived. Routed a force thrice their number on that rocky ground in the August heat of 1873. And here's what gives the whole thing a long shadow: that was the last Indian battle in this region.
The last one. Whatever had defined life on this land for generations — the raids, the resistance, the violence running in both directions across this hill country — it came to its end on that mountain on that summer day. Packsaddle Mountain still stands two and a half miles east.
It doesn't move. It doesn't forget. August 4, 1873 — eight men, three times their number, and the last battle of its kind in this part of Texas.
What the marker says
Two and one half miles east on the Packsaddle Mountain, in a battle fought August 4, 1873, Captain J. R. Moss, Stephen B. Moss, William B. Moss, Eli Lloyd, Arch Martin, Pink Ayers, E. D. Harrington and Robert Brown routed a band of Indians thrice their number. The last Indian battle in this region.