DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker out here on Squaw Creek tells this story, and I'm going to tell it to you the way it deserves to be told. Now settle in, because this one starts long before anybody ever broke ground in Gillespie County. It starts on a road heading west.
About 1856, a family by the name of Nixon loaded up and left Arkansas with California on their minds. Francis Marion Nixon, his wife Catherine Elliot, and everything they owned, pointed toward the setting sun. They were crossing the North Texas Plains when the land itself stepped in and changed their plans.
No water. No forage for the livestock. The kind of problem that doesn't negotiate.
So the family had to detour — swing south, away from the route they'd intended, down into a part of the country that could actually sustain them and their animals. That detour brought them to this corner of Gillespie County. And somewhere along the way, they made camp on a hill near the Mason and Gillespie County line.
That hill, from that point on, was referred to as Nixon Point. Whether they meant to leave their name on the landscape or not, they did. The family that had been heading to California settled right here in the 1860s.
California never got them. Texas did. Now Francis Marion and Catherine's son, Andrew Jackson Nixon — A.J. to the record books — built a home in this vicinity with his wife Lurana Wooten.
Together they had fourteen children. Fourteen. And that household, that one family, became the nucleus of the community of Squaw Creek.
The children grew, and they married, and those marriages pulled in new names — Baethge, Ratto, Strackbein, Mund, Faught, and Gibson — all folding into the extended Nixon family line, generation by generation, name by name. In 1872, A.J. Nixon conveyed 110 acres to his brother-in-law, Henry Strackbeing, and the grounds of Squaw Creek Cemetery were part of that conveyance.
The land changed hands, but the purpose it would serve was already taking shape. The first recorded interment here is that of Elizabeth Gibson, in 1873. The first legal mention of the cemetery comes later, in a deed executed by Adolph Strackbein in 1914.
Of the approximately sixty people buried in this ground, most are members of that extended Nixon family — the descendants of a couple who never made it to California. Among the interments are veterans of the American Civil War and World War I. Men who answered calls that had nothing to do with this quiet creek and everything to do with who they were.
A family that took a detour in 1856 ended up rooted so deep in this ground that it became the ground where they rest. That's the story the marker carries, and now you're carrying it too.
What the marker says
On their way west from Arkansas to California about 1856, the family of Francis Marion Nixon and his wife, Catherine Elliot, was forced to detour south from the North Texas Plains to this area to obtain water and forage for their livestock. After first camping on a hill near the Mason/Gillespie County line, thereafter referred to as Nixon Point, they settled in this section of Gillespie County during the 1860s. The Nixon's son, Andrew Jackson Nixon, and his wife, Lurana Wooten, built their home in this vicinity and with their fourteen children formed the nucleus of the community of Squaw Creek. Marriages by their descendants added the names Baethge, Ratto, Strackbein, Mund, Faught, and Gibson to the extended Nixon family line. The Squaw Creek Cemetery grounds were a part of a 110-acre conveyance from A. J. Nixon to his brother-in-law, Henry Strackbeing, in 1872. The first recorded interment is that of Elizabeth Gibson in 1873. The first legal mention of the cemetery occurs in a deed executed by Adolph Strackbein in 1914. Of the approximately 60 interments here, most are members of the extended Nixon family. The burials include those of American Civil War and World War I veterans.