Common Grave

The three boys were branding cattle at the old FitzPatrick ranch, scene of the 1864 Elm Creek raid, when about seventy-five riders came at them around ten in the morning of July 17, 1867. They got three-quarters of a mile before they were overtaken. Afterward five raiders appeared at the Hamby ranch, where Roland Johnson, John Cochran and Tom Hamby leveled their guns; the raiders drove off Hamby's horses, and the Johnson family hid again in the cave that had sheltered them in 1864. The boys were buried together, the first grave of what became Proffitt Cemetery.

What the plaque says

Common Grave Three youths slain by Indians in an Elm Creek raid, July 17, 1867: Rice Carlton, Age 19; Reuben Johnson, born 1847, son of J. Allen Johnson; Patrick Euell Proffitt, born March 7, 1848, son of Robert S. Proffitt. John Proffitt, a brother, was donor of cemetery tract. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Belknap — 7.6 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 17 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.
• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 28 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.

More markers nearby

• Proffitt Cemetery — steps away
• Indian Raid on Elm Creek, CSA — 0.5 mi
• Joseph Alfred Woolfolk — 5.7 mi
• Two Miles Southwest to Fort Belknap — 7.3 mi