Bandera Pass

Capt. Jose de Urrutia found the pass in 1739 while campaigning against the Apaches who had threatened Bexar, and it probably became the quick, if risky, route between Bexar and the San Saba mission. A map of about 1815 to 1819 marks Puerta de la Bandera with an Apache village just north of it, at the end of an Old Comanche Trail from Nacogdoches. Stephen F. Austin's 1829 map named the creek below the pass for it, and London maps from 1841 on show it. In 1849 Lt. W. H. C. Whiting's army reconnaissance crossed it.

What the plaque says

Bandera Pass Celebrated Indian pass known from the earliest days of Spanish settlement. Identified with many a frontier fight and many a hostile inroad. Old Ranger trail from the Medina to the Guadalupe River and the United States Army route between frontier posts followed this route through the mountains.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Times Museum — 9.3 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.
• Schreiner Mansion — 13 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.
• Treue der Union Monument — 14 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 24 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.

More markers nearby

• Site of Camp Verde — 2.3 mi
• Penateka Comanches — 2.4 mi
• Camps Verde, C.S.A. — 2.4 mi
• Center Point Cemetery — 6.6 mi