Battle of Plum Creek

For the Penateka Comanches, now part of the Comanche Nation, the Council House killings were a betrayal: they held that ambassadors were immune from acts of war. With most of their chiefs dead, they followed Buffalo Hump on the largest of all southern Comanche raids, perhaps 1,000 people including families, with 400 to 500 warriors, Kiowas and Mexican guides. At Victoria on August 6 they were first mistaken for friendly Lipans. At Linnville on August 8 residents fled to boats and a schooner in the bay and watched the town burn.

What the plaque says

Battle of Plum Creek The harsh anti-Indian policies of President Mirabeau B. Lamar and Mexican efforts to weaken the Republic of Texas stirred Indian hostilities. Hatred increased after the Council House Fight in San Antonio, March 19, 1840, where 12 Comanche chief were killed. After regrouping and making plans for revenge, 600 Comanches and Kiowas, including women and children, moved across central Texas in early August. They raided Victoria and Linnville (120 mi. SE), a prosperous seaport. About 200 Texans met at Good's Crossing on Plum Creek under Major-General Felix Huston (1800-1857) to stop the Indians. Adorned with their plunder from Linnville, the war party stretched for miles across the prairie. The Battle of Plum Creek, August 12, 1840, began on Comanche Flats (5.5 mi. SE) and proceeded to Kelley springs (2.5 mi. SW), with skirmishes as far as present San Marcos and Kyle. Mathew Caldwell (1798-1842), for whom Caldwell County was named, was injured in the Council House fight but took part in this battle. Volunteers under Edward Burleson (1793-1851) included 13 Tonkawa Indians, marked as Texan allies by white armbands. Texan casualties were light while the Indians lost over 80 chiefs and warriors. This battle ended the Comanche penetration of settled portions of Texas. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 0.2 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 16 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 21 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Bastrop State Park — 28 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.

More markers nearby

• Dr. D. Port Smythe — 0.2 mi
• Caldwell County — 0.2 mi
• Susanna Dickinson Hannig - Messenger of the Alamo — 0.4 mi
• Bethel Primitive Baptist Church — 8.5 mi