Old Texas Ranger Trail

The land holding the pass was surveyed again and again in the 1840s and 1850s, and Peggy Tobin suggests the sought-after Hyde Survey, astride the road, may have been meant for a toll gate, though no such venture is recorded. After Union and then Confederate troops left Camp Verde, local minutemen and vigilantes guarded the pass through the Civil War and Reconstruction, stopping contraband carriers and rustlers. Then cattle bound for Kansas on the Western Trail poured through. The old trail became the wagon road from Bandera to Kerrville, was paved about 1940 and is now State Highway 173.

What the plaque says

Old Texas Ranger Trail This winding, 100-mile trail from San Antonio to Kerrville was, during the 19th century, a strategic patrol road traveled by Texas Rangers to protect the surrounding area from hostile Indian attacks. During uneasy pioneer days roads such as this, regularly scouted by Rangers, helped promote early white settlement by strengthening frontier defense. Because Bandera was located midway on the trail and because Bandera Pass, 10 miles north, frequently harbored Indian ambushers, the town became a focal point for Ranger activities along the road. Perhaps the best-known battle to occur on the old route happened in Bandera Pass in the spring of 1841. At that time a company of 40 Texas Rangers, under intrepid Indian fighter Capt. "Jack" Hays, was on a scouting mission in the Guadalupe Mountains. Halfway through the pass, they were suddenly attacked by several hundred wild Comanches who lay hidden in the brush and behind boulders in the narrow gorge. A bloody fight ensued, much of it hand-to-hand combat with Bowie knives; but after their chief was slain, the Indians withdrew and finally escaped. Thus the Rangers and this trail helped remove the Indian menace and open the frontier across Texas. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Times Museum — steps away
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.
• Treue der Union Monument — 19 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Schreiner Mansion — 22 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.

More markers nearby

• Captain Jack Phillips — steps away
• Mormon Settlers in Bandera County — steps away
• Camp Montel, C.S.A. — steps away
• Great Western Cattle Trail — steps away