1835 Attack at Sandies Water Hole

The raid the plaque describes belongs to Comanche history as much as the colony's. For the Comanches, who called themselves Nermernuh, the People, horses were both the measure of wealth and a prized trade good, and raids supplied that trade. A fragile peace that several chiefs made with Mexican officials in the late 1820s came apart after two leading peace chiefs died in the early 1830s, and Mexican officials then encouraged other nations to attack them. Relations with the Texans soured as surveyors began marking land the Comanches held as their hunting ground.

What the plaque says

1835 Attack at Sandies Water Hole 1835 ATTACK AT SANDIES WATER HOLE NATIVE AMERICAN RAIDS WERE A MAJOR CONCERN OF DEWITT'S COLONY, WHICH SETTLED IN THIS AREA AFTER ITS 1825 ESTABLISHMENT. TO PROTECT THE COLONISTS, GREEN DeWITT BUILT A FORT IN GONZALES AND REQUESTED TROOPS AND A CANNON FROM MEXICAN AUTHORITIES. IN 1835, A PARTY OF THIRTEEN FRENCH AND MEXICAN TRADERS, EN ROUTE FROM NATCHITOCHES, LOUISIANA TO MEXICO, CAMPED AT SANDIES WATER HOLE (1 mi. E). A LARGE GROUP OF WHAT IS BELIEVED TO BE COMANCHE ATTACKED THE PARTY. THE ENGAGEMENT LASTED SEVERAL HOURS, RESULTING IN THE DEATH OF ALL THIRTEEN MEN. THE COLONISTS DID NOT RECEIVE FURTHER PROTECTION FROM THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT, AND ATTACKS CONTINUED AT SANDIES WATER HOLE INTO TEXAS STATEHOOD. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palmetto State Park — 18 mi
  Dwarf palmettos, bogs and a spring-fed oxbow on the San Marcos River, with CCC stonework from the 1930s, a swamp an hour from Austin and San Antonio.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 20 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 31 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 33 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.

More markers nearby

• Gonzales-San Antonio Road — steps away
• Leesville School — 2.0 mi
• Sandies-Dewville Community — 3.5 mi
• Dewville United Methodist Church — 3.6 mi