Don Martin De Leon

Native people who crossed his range knew him as Capitán Vacas Muchas, Captain Plenty of Cows, because he often fed them beef. By about 1816 his herds numbered some 5,000 head, and he drove cattle to New Orleans in several years, including 1823. His five-league ranch on Garcitas Creek, 22,140 acres in what is now southeastern Victoria County, probably included the site of La Salle's Fort St. Louis. He died in the cholera epidemic of 1833 while planning a church, leaving a widow, four sons, six daughters and an estate worth more than half a million dollars.

What the plaque says

Don Martin De Leon Founder of Victoria. Empresario of colonial grant from Mexico in 1824. Spanish cavalier, Indian fighter. First cattle baron of Texas. Born in Burgos, Tamaulipas, Mexico in 1765. Died in Victoria in 1833. RIP 1936

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• De León Plaza — 0.8 mi
  The central plaza of Guadalupe Victoria, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, founded by Martín De León in 1824 and taken from his family after 1836.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 1.6 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.
• Fannin Battleground State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The open prairie east of Goliad where Fannin's retreating column formed a square short of the Coleto Creek timber on March 19, 1836, and surrendered the next day.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 25 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Dona Patricia De La Garza De Leon — steps away
• Silvestre De Leon — steps away
• Fernando De Leon — steps away
• Darwin M. Stapp — steps away