Little Salt Creek Indian Fight

The roundup crew's day-long siege belongs to Salt Creek Prairie, the stretch on either side of Salt Creek once called the most dangerous prairie in Texas. The Butterfield mail road crossed it, and Comanche and Kiowa war parties struck south across it from the Fort Sill country. About twenty-one graves were dug there for victims of attacks in the early 1870s. Britt Johnson was killed at the Turtle Hole in 1871, Henry Warren's teamsters died on the prairie that May, and in 1874 a company of Texas Rangers camped for two months on Flat Top Mountain.

What the plaque says

Little Salt Creek Indian Fight Duel between a cattle roundup crew and Indians, on May 16, 1869. Cowboys attacked at their work were Shapley Carter, Bill Crow, and Henry Harrison, all of Palo Pinto County; crew captain Ira E. Graves, J. W. Gray, W. C. Kutch, and Jason McClain, of Jack County; George and John Lemley and Rube Seachrist, Young County; Dick, the cook from Tarrant County. All day the crew held at bay 57 Comanches, who left that night. Nine cowboys were wounded--Carter, Crow, and John Lemley died. Texans never forgot the unprovoked attack. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Belknap — 14 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.
• Royal Theater — 18 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.

More markers nearby

• Site of Cottonwood Spring — 2.9 mi
• The Confluence of the Brazos, Trinity, and Red River Watersheds — 6.4 mi
• Townsite of Old Farmer — 6.4 mi
• St. Luke Lutheran Church of Olney — 6.5 mi