DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker at Battle Creek Burial Ground tells it, and I'll do my best to honor every word. Picture this: it's October 8, 1838, and a surveying party of twenty-five Texans is out doing what surveyors do — measuring land, minding their instruments, maybe feeling pretty good about the day. Then they run into about three hundred Kickapoo Indians on a buffalo hunt.
Now, I want you to hold that number in your head for a moment. Twenty-five. Three hundred.
The Kickapoo gave them a warning. Leave. That's about as clear as a message gets.
The Texans did not heed it. And on that October day, the ambush came. Of twenty-five men, only seven survived.
Four of those seven were wounded. You do the arithmetic on what that means for the rest, and it lands heavy. But here's the part that stays with me — the part that gives this ground its name and its weight.
After the escape, those survivors came back. Wounded or not, they came back to this creek, and they buried their comrades together in a common grave. No fanfare recorded, no names carved in the marker, just the act itself: men returning to do right by the men they couldn't save.
That grave is still here in Navarro County, and the ground remembers what the surveyors found out too late.
What the marker says
A surveying party of 25 Texans ran into about 300 Kickapoo Indians on a buffalo hunt; failing to heed warning to leave, the Texans were ambushed on October 8, 1838. Only seven survived, and four of these were wounded. After the escape, they came back to bury their comrades in a common grave. (1966)