Yegua Creek

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. This is Yegua Creek, Burleson County, and it's got a story that stretches back a good ways. Way back to 1690, when the Spanish came through and gave this sixty-two-mile Brazos River tributary a name, San Francisco.

Dignified name. Formal. The kind of name that sounds like it was written in a ledger somewhere and never spoken out loud again.

Because it wasn't. By 1822, Stephen F. Austin, the man folks called the Father of Texas, was drawing his maps, and on his map he wrote something different.

He wrote Yegua. Spanish for mare. Now why would a man mark a creek that way?

The marker tells you plain: mustang mares and foals were grazing among the Indians on those timbered banks. That's what Austin saw, or what he knew. A creek full of wildness, shaded trees, and horses running free.

A few years on, in 1826, a colonist named John P. Coles built a mill on that same stream. People were putting down roots.

Then came 1837, and Texas President Sam Houston signed a measure making the Yegua a county boundary. A creek that started as San Francisco, got renamed for mares, got a mill, and then became a line on the map of a brand new republic. But Yegua Creek had a temper.

Floods devastated the area, time and again, for well over a century. The creek gave, and the creek took. That went on until 1967, when Lake Somerville finally harnessed Yegua's waters.

Today that lake and that creek serve crops, wildlife, and vacationers. From Spanish missionaries to Sam Houston to a summer afternoon on the water, sixty-two miles of creek has carried a whole lot of Texas history on its current.

What the marker says

In 1690 the Spanish gave the name "San Francisco" to this 62-mile Brazos River tributary; but on an 1822 map, Stephen F. Austin, "Father of Texas", marked it "Yegua", Spanish for "mare". Mustang mares and foals then grazed among the Indians on the timbered creek. In 1826, colonist John P. Coles built a mill on the stream. A measure signed in 1837 by Texas President Sam Houston made the Yegua a county boundary. Floods often devastated the area until Lake Somerville harnessed Yegua's waters in 1967. Now a recreation area, the lake and creek benefit crops, wild life, and vacationers. (1976)