Battle Creek Burial Ground

The Handbook of Texas calls it the Battle Creek Fight, or Surveyors' Fight, and says historians still disagree on the numbers. About twenty-five white surveyors, among them William Fenner Henderson and Walter Paye Lane, were mapping land for bounty and headright grants when a force of roughly 300 Native men, including many Kickapoo along with Waco, Tehuacana and Caddo fighters, told them to leave and then attacked. After a day of fighting about eighteen surveyors and thirty Native men were dead. Men from Old Franklin later returned and buried the surveyors.

What the plaque says

Battle Creek Burial Ground 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)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 17 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 21 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Petroleum Industry Park — 21 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Hill County Courthouse — 24 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.

More markers nearby

• Former Site of Liberty Hill Settlement — 1.0 mi
• Town of Dawson — 1.5 mi
• Braniff International Flight 352 — 2.5 mi
• Dr. George Washington Hill — 3.6 mi