In Memory of Thomas Christian, William Strother and Josiah Wilbarger

Josiah Wilbarger married Margaret Barker in Missouri in 1827, then taught at Matagorda and taught and surveyed at La Grange. He settled in a bend of the Colorado ten miles above present Bastrop and received a league in January 1832. The August 1833 attack came near Pecan Springs, about four miles east of present Austin. Reuben Hornsby found him alive the next day. He never fully recovered, but he lived about eleven more years and died near Bastrop on April 11, 1844. Wilbarger County is named for him and his brother Mathias.

What the plaque says

In Memory of Thomas Christian, William Strother and Josiah Wilbarger, members of a party of five who were attacked near here by Indians in August, 1833. Christian and Strother were killed, Wilbarger was scalped and eventually died of his wounds. The other two escaped.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LBJ Presidential Library — 2.2 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 2.8 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Harry Ransom Center — 2.9 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 2.9 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.

More markers nearby

• Annie Webb Blanton — 0.6 mi
• Elisabet Ney — 1.7 mi
• Maud Anna Berry Smith Fuller — 1.7 mi
• University Interscholastic League — 2.1 mi