Vicinity of Indian Fight

The man who wrote this fight down lived close to the ground he described. John M. Elkins spent the summer of 1870 in one of the old government buildings at Camp Colorado in Coleman County, tying a horse inside against thieves. His recollections were printed in Beaumont in 1908 as Life on the Texas Frontier and reissued in Amarillo in 1929 as Indian Fighting on the Texas Frontier. Captain J. M. Swisher's company ranged Coleman County in 1871, once following a party driving about 35 horses for six or seven days.

What the plaque says

Vicinity of Indian Fight On New Year's Day, 1871, Indian raiders who had stolen horses in Coleman County were pursued and overtaken here by 18 Texas Rangers and cowboys. Leaders of the group were Captain James. M. Swisher and rancher Sam Gholson. The Indians took refuge in the heights west of Mountain Pass. The ensuing battle lasted all day, and at nightfall the raiders left the horses and fled. Of the fewer than one dozen Indians, one was killed, several wounded. One cowboy was wounded and another, J. M. Elkins, recorded the battle in his book, "Indian Fighting on the Texas Frontier." (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 11 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Abilene State Park — 12 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.
• Frontier Texas! — 15 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 24 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.

More markers nearby

• Castle Peak — steps away
• Mulberry Canyon — 5.7 mi
• Cornelia Clark Fort — 5.7 mi
• Butterfield Mail and Stage Line — 6.8 mi