Early Trails in Bee County

The plaque lists the roads; the county's own records show what used them. Bee County counted 33,376 cattle in 1860, among 910 residents, 79 of them enslaved, mostly cowherds and drovers. During the Civil War ranchers sent herds toward the Mississippi and into Mexico, and cowmen formed home guards at Papalote and Beeville. After the war drives followed the Chisholm Trail until about 1877, then the Western Trail. Sheep climbed from 1,860 in 1870 to 61,130 in 1880, then fell away; fewer than 1,000 were left by 1910.

What the plaque says

Early Trails in Bee County From pack trails and wagon roads that marked this area at least 300 years, have developed such modern roads as U.S. Highway 181. The old trails of Indians, wild cattle and mustang horses formed highways for 17th, 18th and 19th century expeditions coming from Mexico to claim sovereignty for Spain over land of Texas. When pioneers established land grants in this section, they also found Indian trails useful, placing towns along them. Beeville, the county seat, was situated at the natural intersection of San Patricio-Helena Road with Goliad-Laredo Road. About 20 miles south, the Matamoros-Goliad road ("Camino Real" to old-timbers) was probably the most historic road in this area. In the years 1861-1865 the "cotton road"--called "lifeline of the southern Confederacy"--crossed Bee County. A later route of great value was a cattle trail that channeled thousands of Longhorns from the Rio Grande to the Red River and up the Dodge City Trail or the Chisholm Trail to northern markets. In this area were also La Para (or Grapevine) Road; the Indianola-Papalote Road; and a road to now vanished St. Mary's, a port on Copano Bay, off the Gulf of Mexico. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 26 mi
  A rebuilt stone house beside La Bahía marking where Ignacio Seguín Zaragoza, the general of the Battle of Puebla and Cinco de Mayo, was born in 1829.
• Presidio La Bahía — 27 mi
  A Spanish fort on its third site since 1749, held in turn by filibusters, insurgents and Fannin's Fort Defiance, rebuilt in stone in the 1960s around a chapel that never fell.
• Goliad State Park and Historic Site — 27 mi
  Mission Espíritu Santo on the San Antonio River, a mission ranch whose herds seeded Texas cattle country, rebuilt from ruin by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 27 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

• Captain A.C. Jones — steps away
• Benjamin Dudley Tarlton Dougherty — 2.1 mi
• Normanna — 2.2 mi
• First Presbyterian Church of Beeville — 5.5 mi