An 1885 U.S.G.S. map of the lower Concho River locates a road crossing the river just upstream from the archaeological site. The hard bottom crossing has probably been there for millennia. The flood plain below the painted rock wall is a large flat area that was once covered with pecan trees, and there is a spring that flowed prior to the aquifers being drained by modern technology. Someone at some point in time thousands of years ago traveling the same path as the road did, and crossing the same hard bottom on the Concho, recognized the rock wall as the abode of the sun, designating it as such in their own writing, and starting a tradition that would last up until modern times. We do not know who those early people were, but we definitely do know who some of the later painters were.
Any attempt at interpretation of the rock art has to begin with a determination of who created it. As Carolyn Boyd (2016) demonstrated in The White Shaman Mural, knowing that the artists in the Lower Pecos were Southern Uto-Aztecan, and probably proto-Corachol-Aztecan, speakers provides a necessary foundation for interpretation. This is because Uto-Aztecan speakers seem to all belong to a similar ideological universe that dates back to an Archaic time prior to the split between Northern and Southern Uto-Aztecan around 4,000 years ago. As Boyd (2016) demonstrated using examples from the sixteenth-century Nahua, the late nineteenth-century Huichol, and the 2,000-year-old artists of the Lower Pecos, this ideological universe seems to have followed the speakers of Uto-Aztecan languages and remained surprisingly intact even up until recent times. Recognizing the iconographical, numerological, and mythological cognates of this ideological universe provided the key to understanding the meaning of the White Shaman mural. That same approach is what has been incorporated at Paint Rock. Our principal task was to try to identify the potential artists and then try to understand the ideological universe in which the rock art was created.
Of the historical tribes we know were at Paint Rock, the majority of people who have been historically identified as Jumanos were probably an amalgamation of disparate groups some of whom spoke Southern Uto-Aztecan languages and many of whom are believed to have spoken a wide variety of other languages: there is the language that modern linguists call Tanoan (which may be distantly related to Uto-Aztecan); the Apache language is from the Athapaskan language tree; the Wichita and Caddo tribes all speak languages from the Caddoan family; and the Comanches speak a Numic language, which is of Northern Uto-Aztecan descent. Those are the major language families of the area. Many smaller tribes in the Trans-Pecos, some of whom may have been generically labeled as Jumanos by the Spanish, were possibly of Chichimec affiliation and may have also spoken various other languages. The non-Jumano Indian guides for the Spanish who came from south of the Rio Grande probably all spoke native Southern Uto-Aztecan languages, but seem to have been chosen because they were highly multi-lingual. Some of those exogenous guides for the Spanish, and possibly also the Indian guides who later served as scouts in the U.S. Army, may have been responsible for some of the more recent etchings at Paint Rock. Artists related to proto-Corachol-Aztecan speakers from the Lower Pecos also seem to have been at Paint Rock around 2,000 years ago (and probably earlier). That means that at least some of the earliest rock art at Paint Rock can be classified as Pecos River style. But the vast majority of the surviving rock art appears to have been created within the Late Prehistoric and Historic eras due to the frequent appearance of bows and arrows and horses, and the nearly complete absence of atlatls.
This is a brief history, assimilated from the available documentary evidence, of what we know about the historical groups that may have influenced the rock art at Paint Rock.
The first recorded use by the Spanish of the term “Jumano” to refer to a group of Native Americans was in 1581 (Hickerson 1995:xv), and for the next 200 years they were reportedly found over an extremely large area from Arizona in the west to the Trinity River of Texas in the east. Cabeza de Vaca had encountered them in his travels westward around La Junta, where the Rio Conchos of northern Mexico joins the Rio Grande, near the present-day Texas town of Presidio (Bolton 1911:68). Maria Wade (2003:74, 217) says it was likely the Spanish explorer Castaño de Sosa encountered them in 1590 in central Texas in the Concho River drainage. Juan Salas visited them on the Concho River at around the present-day location of San Angelo in 1629 and then again in1632 (Clemens 1994:22). Diego del Castillo and Hernan Martin made it to the same location in 1650, and soon thereafter the Jumanos were reportedly found again in the same area by Diego de Guadalajara in 1654. In early 1684, Juan Dominguez Mendoza led a party of soldiers and friars back to the Concho River where they once again recorded encountering the Jumanos. But that is almost all that we know about them. Once a largely populated and widely spread tribe, by the late 1700’s they were all gone. No archival evidence exists of anyone calling themselves Jumanos after that time.
Based on the Spanish-compiled documentary evidence, there is no doubt that there was a group of Native Americans who represented themselves to the Spanish as “Jumanos.” What we don’t know is how much of a generic term this became. Were smaller groups labeled as Jumanos by the Spanish just because they lived in the same region, even though they spoke different languages? Certainly, there were such groups, but to what extent we will never know. We also will never know to what extent Paint Rock was a pilgrimage site, accessible to all of these smaller groups, and to what extent they may have been allowed to put their artwork there. To this end, we have tried to identify the earlier rock art by styles and the later rock art by cultural affiliation.
The (exclusively Spanish) archival evidence supports the conclusion that the Jumanos were the predominant Indian group around Paint Rock from some unknown (probably Archaic) time in the past until the early 1700’s when the Apache started making significant incursions into the area. In 1731 the Jumanos were still occupying the Concho River “but in coalition with the Lipan (and others), and the Apache were now powerfully and forcefully entrenched in the area” (Wade 2003:175).
Those Jumanos who weren’t displaced may have been partially assimilated into the Apache. However, beset by the Caddo to the northeast and the terrifying “Norteños” to the northwest, the Apache presence at Paint Rock, if they ever really did fully control the area, was violent and short. In 1749, the Apache reached a peace treaty with the community of San Antonio de Béjar (Chipman1992:157), and in 1750, they petitioned the Spanish for help against marauding bands from the north, resulting in their assignment to a mission built on the San Sabá River approximately forty miles south of Paint Rock (Wade 2003:183). That famously came to an end in 1758 (see, e.g., Gilmore 1967), as did the Apache presence in central Texas. By 1760, the new invaders had established their foothold and would become the dominating force on the South Plains for the next 100 years.
Scholars researching the Comanches have available to them several well-researched treatises and articles, and a vast amount of archival material. As a subject matter, the Comanches have proved to be far more intriguing to historians than the Jumanos. The reasons for this probably are because the Jumanos essentially faded from the historical record in the late 1700’s whereas the Comanches have left an indelible impression on the Anglo-American psyche. On the east coast of the United States and in Congress after the Civil War, there was a fair amount of sympathy for the Plains Indians – but not in Texas. The Comanches hated the Texans, and the feeling was mutual. Both sides were guilty of what we today would consider to be unimaginable atrocities. But history is written by the winners, and so it is with the history of the Comanches. With a single exception, what is missing from the historical record is the world view of the Comanches as would have been told by the Comanches themselves of their life on the frontier, which would have included such things as the significance of their rock art. The one exception to this is a little-regarded book written by an Anglo that advocates the Comanche point of view. Of the thousands of pages of scholarly books that have been written on the Comanches, it is the only one to discuss their rock art, and, incredibly, it does so in the context of Paint Rock. For purposes of the present study, that fact alone makes it invaluable.
J. Emmor Harston was born on November 16, 1864, in the frontier town of Jacksboro, in north-central Texas near the Oklahoma border. His father, J.D. Harston, moved his Indian trading post to Fort Sill in 1871, where young Emmor’s playmates were mostly Comanches. He became fluent in the Comanche language at a young age and was able to communicate with the elder Comanches who had been forced onto the reservation at Fort Sill, and who apparently took a liking to the young Anglo kid, even taking him on a bison hunt with them.
In his adult life, Harston became a geologist and civil engineer, but spent many of his evenings writing about the Comanches and the stories that had been told to him in his youth. He died in 1955 after a long life without publishing his notes. After his death, his wife, Lucile, gathered his writings and took them to A.T. Jackson, an archaeologist at the University of Texas who had become friends with Harston later in his life. Jackson was already aware of the significance of Harston’s notes and assimilated them into a book entitled Comanche Land which was published by the Naylor Company in San Antonio in 1963. This book met almost immediate resistance for its historical inaccuracies (see, e.g., Field 1963) and, though unsaid, probably also because it sought to empathize with the Comanches.
From our vantage point today more than fifty years later, it is difficult to understand the politics surrounding the publication of this book. When the eminent historian T. R. Fehrenbach published Comanches: The Destruction of a People in 1974, he did not quote from or mention Harston in any fashion even though they were both prominent historians from San Antonio and had to have known many of the same people. In his later treatise, The Comanches: A History 1706-1875 published in 1999, Thomas W. Kavanagh only mentions Harston in passing.
The major difference seems to be that all of the later books written on the Comanches were based on research obtained from historical archives, including the extremely well-researched Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen, published in 2008 (he doesn’t mention Harston either). Harston, on the other hand, obtained much of his information from speaking directly to the Comanches who participated in some of the actual events discussed. In essence, Harston was an ethnographer whereas everyone else was a historian. Kavanagh also compiled oral histories in his book Comanche Ethnography: Field Notes of E. Adamson Hoebel, Waldo R. Wedel, Gustav G. Carlson, and Robert H. Lowie (2008), but it was an assimilation of notes from a group of ethnographers who met with eighteen Comanche elders in 1933, over fifty years after Harston had been told his oral histories. Harston is really the first, and only, ethnographer to the actual Comanches who fought on the Texas frontier between 1850 and 1875. He is also the only person writing about the Comanches who mentions Paint Rock. The reason for this goes to the essence of the difference between an ethnography and a history. The ethnographies recorded by Harston that were disparaged or ignored by subsequent writers are actually very relevant and not so easily dismissed for their inaccuracies.
Harston (1963:32) initially enters the fray about who can best plot the path of Cabeza de Vaca. Other historians (e.g., Hickerson 1995:9) have Cabeza de Vaca headed up the Concho River past the site of Paint Rock. For the record, there is no physical evidence of this at Paint Rock. Unlike at El Moro, no evidence created by Cabeza de Vaca or any of the other early Spanish explorers has ever been positively identified at Paint Rock, although some of those early Spaniards almost certainly passed by there. On the other hand, the Indians themselves may have recorded evidence of early Spanish influence in their rock art, but that will be dealt with in a later chapter.
Where Harston (1963:32) mainly runs afoul of other historians is with his claim that Cabeza de Vaca’s use of the term “Com-on-ses” (a term that had been used by the Caddos who accompanied de Vaca) to describe a group of Indians that they had encountered was “the first attempt to record the name Com-monn-ses, (the Shoshoni pronunciation of the nickname ‘Comanche’).” Cabeza de Vaca had mentioned that these Indians spoke a different language than the Indians that accompanied him and that the same group extended all of the way until he crossed the Rio Grande. Later historians found his claim (Harston 1963:32) that “All of them were Comanches and belonged to the Fish Eaters tribe” lacking of even remote credibility. Kavanagh (1999) said the earliest reference in Spanish documents to the Comanches was in 1706, and that was in northern New Mexico. Hämäläinen (2008), after an extensive research of the available documents, theorized a southerly migration of the Comanches that would have put them at Paint Rock at the earliest in roughly the year 1750. Compare this to Harston’s claim that there were Comanches communicating with Cabeza de Vaca in the 1530’s and Harston’s problem becomes very evident.
Harston’s (1963:2) second major error in this regard is his belief that there was “evidence that the Comanches – under their real name of Tejas or Teichas – were here in four well-organized tribes, occupying the whole of Comanche Land when the first Spaniards came to America.” The problem here is that much of the land from central Texas to the Trans-Pecos claimed as ancestral “Comanche Land” by Harston was actually occupied by the Jumanos and several smaller groups. Furthermore, Hickerson (1994:110), Kavanagh (1999), and Hämäläinen (2008) all found that archival references to the “Tejas” were actually to members of the east Texas Caddoan confederacy. And in his translated diaries from the latter seventeenth century, Juan Bautista Chapa (1997) clearly identifies Caddoan groups as “Tejas,” leaving very little doubt as to that issue. The most likely scenario is that Harston read the histories that were available to him at the time and concluded that the historical references by the Spanish to “Tejas” Indians were to the “Teichas,” who were Comanche. The indisputable evidence now is that Harston was clearly wrong in that regard.
But rather than dismissing Harston’s claims outright, one should address the question of whether the oral histories related to Harston in the latter half of the nineteenth century can be reconciled with the known archival histories. In this respect, it is known that the Comanches captured young children and women from other tribes and adopted them into the Comanche groups where for all practical purposes they became Comanches. The same thing happened with remnant Native populations that had been decimated by warfare and disease. For their protection and continued existence, they were also assimilated into the Comanche lifeway and culture. It is entirely possible, then, that some Comanche oral histories actually originated with other groups that later became Comanche. When Harston tells a detailed story about what one of his informant’s grandmother had told to that informant many years previous, the story could very easily have been true. That an oral history had originated in another culture and was passed on to Harston as being Comanche doesn’t mean that it was inaccurate. In fact, several of the stories that Harston claims happened to the Comanches have a historical basis to them, although in reality they may have happened to the Wichitas, Coahuiltecos, Jumanos, or some other tribe, and not to the actual Comanches. How this relates to the rock art at Paint Rock involves the Comanches and their view of the Mission San Jose, which today is a major tourist attraction in the City of San Antonio.
Harston (1963:55-56) claims he researched the archival records concerning the Mission San Jose y San Miguel de Aguayo to try to verify the stories that had been told to him by Comanche elders about the abuses committed by the early Spanish at that mission. He says that the first contact between the Spanish and the Comanches, apparently prior to 1720, was in east Texas and involved “Chief Sata Tejas, of the Dog Eaters tribe of Comanches, (who) had a large camp on the west side of the Neches River” (Harston 1963:57). When the Spanish needed help building the Mission San Jose in 1716, Harston (1963:62) claims the Spanish raided a nearby Comanche village for slave labor.
One of the main problems with Harston’s timeline, though, is regarding the early Texas missions. The town of San Antonio de Béjar wasn’t founded until 1718, and its first mission, San Antonio de Valero (which would later be known to history as the Alamo), was founded in 1719. In the same year, the Spanish established six missions and a presidio in east Texas among the Caddos. The Mission San Jose was founded in 1720 on the east side of the San Antonio River and was moved to its present location on the west bank of the river sometime around 1727. Maria Wade (2003:168-169) comments that the Spanish Aguayo expedition of 1720-1722 which was sent to east Texas in response to a perceived threat from the French passed through San Antonio and “saw many Natives in the area.” But, from the descriptions of them and their lifestyles, they were not Comanches.
Donald Chipman (1992:135) has the Comanches entering the very northwest panhandle of Texas in the early 1720’s “where they initiated a long but successful war against the Apaches.” This war had the effect of driving the Apache south where they ran into hostilities with the Spanish and various smaller local tribes. Harston’s (1965:63) claim that the Spanish with their Apache allies were continuously punishing the Comanches during the 1720’s and 1730’s lacks credibility on two counts. First, the Spanish were not allied with the Apache, but were instead in almost constant conflict with (and fear of) them during this time period. And second, there is simply no documentary evidence that the Comanches were that far south in the early 1700’s, and the Spanish documented virtually everything.
The Spanish were certainly aware of the Comanche threat to the north and were alarmed enough to begin arming the Lipan (Apache) as a buffer against them in the 1740’s (Hämäläinen 2008:57). Kavanagh (1996:79), however, says the earliest actual documentary evidence of the Comanches in Texas was when a raiding party passed through San Antonio in 1743 looking for Apache (see, also, Morfi 1935, 2:294). By 1750, the Apache were asking for protection from the Spanish against the Comanches and were wanting a mission and presidio on the San Sabá River as a defensive line, which implies that the Comanches were probably already in control of the Concho River area.
This timeline is important to a discussion of the rock art at Paint Rock because drawn at Paint Rock is a prominent pictograph that accurately depicts the Mission San Jose in San Antonio, which, on a straight line, is a good 200 miles distant. The church at the Mission San Jose, of which this is a picture, was not completed in the form depicted until 1782, which means this pictograph had to have been painted sometime after that date. This pictograph was most likely painted by Native Americans because the crosses are Indian crosses and not ones that would have been drawn by non-Native Christians. If this is true, then the time line heavily favors it having been painted by Comanches. The fact that the Mission San Jose plays such a prominent role in Harston’s ethnography of the Comanches (but not in any of the other histories) reinforces the idea of it being of Comanche origin.
Several historians, such as Hickerson (1995), have suggested that Cabeza de Vaca may have passed Paint Rock traveling down the Concho River around 1535. This is highly disputed today. It is also extremely doubtful that Coronado or any Spanish members of his party made it to the Concho River.
The first documented encounter of the Spanish with the Concho River was probably in 1590 when Castaño de Sosa found the Jumanos there. This was at the headwaters of the Concho, and he probably did not get downstream far enough to see the site of Paint Rock, although it’s quite possible that some of his scouts may have.
The next recorded opportunity was in 1629 when Fr. Juan Salas went to visit the Jumanos, which may also have been at the headwaters of the Concho. He returned in 1632 with Fr. Diego Ortega and some soldiers to meet the Jumanos again on the Concho. Salas returned to New Mexico but Ortega stayed another 6 months in an attempt to establish a mission with the Jumanos. Very little is known about what Ortega did, but it is doubtful he would have progressed eastward (downstream) of present-day San Angelo, there being a large Jumano village at that approximate location.
By 1650, Spanish traders were making the long and arduous trip from New Mexico to the Concho and may have been doing so since around 1635 (Hickerson 1995:110). If so, despite the fact that the Spanish had a reputation for being meticulous record keepers, these excursions were being done illegally and were not being recorded by designated scribes. Also in 1650, probably as a result of fanciful stories told by the illegal traders, Diego del Castillo and Hernan Martin travelled to the Concho from New Mexico to try to establish a trading post at the Concho’s confluence with the Colorado, and to try to make contact with the Caddos to the east (Hickerson 1995:110). While this might have seemed a good idea to someone at some point in time, distances were too far, difficulties proliferated as reality set in, and the venture was abandoned after about 6 months (Wade 2003:74).
Not long afterwards, in 1654, Diego de Guadalajara took 30 soldiers and about 200 Christianized Native Americans on an expedition back into the Concho looking for pearls (Wade 2003:74). There are pearls in the clams found in the Concho River, and the Spanish considered them to be of high quality, but they only exist in about one out of every hundred clams, so the return did not justify the huge investment required to collect them. The more interesting circumstance of this entrada, for our purposes, was that one of the men accompanying Diego de Guadalajara was a young man named Juan Dominguez Mendoza who, thirty years later, would return to the Concho.
In 1684, Mendoza led a party of seventeen Spanish soldiers and three Franciscan friars back to the Concho River. The friars were intent on converting the Jumanos. The soldiers were, of course, along for protection. After studying the diaries of individuals involved with this entrada, Wade (2003:110) projects this group to have made it far down the Concho River to the vicinity of Paint Rock before turning due south to the San Sabá River. This would prove to be the last attempt by the Spanish to reach the Concho River from the west. The next attempts would originate from Texas through the presidio established on the San Sabá River. The first of these would be over seventy years later.
The Spanish had a long and ultimately unsuccessful history in Texas of trying to convert the Native Americans to Christianity and to turn highly mobile hunters into sedentary farmers. Whereas the initial encounters of the Spanish with the Jumanos in west Texas and Caddo in far east Texas had been somewhat civil, the dealings with the Apache were not. From the 1720’s the Spanish had treated the Apache ambivalently. The missionaries had long sought to save their souls through conversion to Christianity whereas the soldiers and settlers preferred to wipe the tribe off the face of the earth. For some reason not entirely clear (but probably involving money), the authorities in Mexico City sided with the priests. The missions in east Texas with the Caddo survived for twenty years, but the supply lines were too long and the missions became too costly to protect and maintain. By 1750, they had all been removed to San Antonio. But the Spanish authorities in Mexico City calculated that what had not worked in the east would surely work in the west. It didn’t.
By 1755, the Comanches from the north were pushing the Apache southward into the Spanish settlements. Much to the surprise of the Spanish, the Apache, seeking an alliance against the Comanches, apologized for their past atrocities and agreed to be converted and live at a mission if only the Spanish would build that mission on the San Sabá River, which could then act as a buffer against the Comanches who were already occupying the land along the Concho River a mere forty miles to the north. Against overwhelmingly wise counsel to the contrary, the construction of the mission and presidio was authorized in 1756 and placed under the command of the redoubtable Col. Diego Ortiz Parrilla who, surprisingly considering his past, turned out to be a very competent commander. At least, he did the best with what he had.
Parrilla, when presented with the idea of locating the mission on the San Sabá, pointed out the obvious: the supply lines are too long; messages sent from there to Mexico City would take over six months for a response; staffing the presidio would require a minimum of 150 soldiers who could still be easily wiped out by 2,000 hostile Indians; there would be no way to reinforce the garrison in an emergency; the friars were impossible to deal with; the Apache would continuously steal cattle and horses; and there was absolutely nothing to gain strategically by trying to protect the unreliable Apache. Better to just let the Apache and Comanches practice genocide against each other. His prophetic logic, as it turned out, fell on deaf ears and the mission was built near the present-day town of Menard, Texas. The presidio, which was supposed to protect the mission, was built three miles upstream (at the request of the priests, not the soldiers). Disaster came at the hands of the Comanches and their northern allies in March of 1758. The mission was annihilated. The presidio could have been also except for the Comanches’ extreme reluctance to suffer significant casualties as a by-product of victory. Even though they were superb warriors, this one tendency would prove to be their ultimate downfall in future conflict with Anglo Americans.
In August of 1759, Parrilla headed north out of the presidio on a campaign of revenge against the Comanches. With him were 360 soldiers and 176 Indian allies, mostly Apache. Weddle (1964:118) says they crossed the Concho River at the hard bottom crossing “near the Painted Rocks (present town of Paint Rock).” The expedition was not a success. Parrilla was replaced for political reasons by the much less competent Felipe de Rábago y Terán in 1760. In an attempt to determine the strength of the Comanches, Rábago then led an expedition the entire length of the Concho River. Both of these ventures took Spaniards within eyesight of Paint Rock.
By late 1770, the entire failed San Sabá enterprise had been abandoned. The Spanish had pretty much concluded that the presidio was too far out on the Texas frontier to be practical. It had become a financial drain and was constantly being harassed by the Comanches. Essentially, everything Parrilla had predicted had come true. What’s left of the presidio remains today as a municipal park about one mile west of the City of Menard on U.S. 190.
An inquiry into Spanish influence is relevant to the rock art at Paint Rock for at least two reasons. The first is that there is evidence at Paint Rock of Native American interaction with the Spanish. As explained, the drawing of the Mission San Jose has to have been painted after around 1782 when the mission was put in the final form that we see today. Its accurate depiction reflects the contact of the artist with that mission. The saga of the Mission San Sabá may be reflected in a separate panel. And the drawing in black ink of a cross and a Spanish priest was a Native American depiction of those figures.
The second important aspect of studying the Spanish entradas and later interactions with the Native Americans is a result of the Spanish being fairly meticulous scribes. They tell us the names of the Native American groups they encountered. Whereas the French had been trading with the Comanches probably since the late 1600’s and almost certainly made their way past Paint Rock at some point, they didn’t keep any written records. So it is only from the Spanish that we have information of Native American tribes who had access to Paint Rock as well as when they may have been there. Although there is very good evidence that the Comanches drove the Apache out of the area by at least 1750 and probably earlier, we also have evidence from the Spanish that there were other tribes affiliated with the Comanches who also may have had access to Paint Rock after 1750. Most prominent among these were their allies, the Wichita tribes known as the Tawakoni, Iscani, and Taovaya. They all spoke Caddoan languages and shared a heritage with the Caddo of east Texas.
By the latter 1700’s the Comanches were gaining control of northwest, central, and large parts of west Texas. Their prowess at guerilla warfare and promoting fear was widely respected by both Native and non-Native Americans, and was so effective that the Spanish made no headway expanding their frontier. Their three hundred years of futility and frustration in Texas came to a bitter end on July 21, 1821 when the flag of Castile y León was lowered for the last time at San Antonio. However, shortly before he left, the Spanish Governor Antonio María Martínez awarded a land grant to a Missourian named Moses Austin to settle three hundred families in Texas. The logic behind this was that it was better for the Anglos (who had no idea what they were getting into) to be the buffer between San Antonio and the Comanches than Spanish settlers. In retrospect, this was not a very good idea. As it turned out for the Mexicans who succeeded to ownership of Texas, the only thing worse than the Comanches were the Anglos. And they had better weapons.
For well into the nineteenth century, the Concho River and Paint Rock area were under the control of the Comanches and their allies. Then, in 1846, Texas became a state in the Union and the struggle between the Comanches and the waves of new Anglo immigrants turned increasingly gruesome.
We know from the graffiti at Paint Rock that Anglos were appearing on the horizon at least by 1848. A large portion of the land west of the Colorado River had been sold by the State of Texas to land developers with the stipulation that it had to be surveyed, divided into plots, and sold to European immigrants who were coming to Texas by the thousands. There were other stipulations too, like protecting the new landowners from hostile Indians, but those stipulations could be easily ignored. The land developers essentially did nothing except sell the land mostly to Germans, who then, believing they owned fine farmland, got on a boat and headed for Texas.
One of the first German immigrants was Otfried Hans, Freiherr von Meusebach who had arrived in Texas in 1845 only to discover that he and 7,000 other Germans had essentially been swindled. Left with no assistance, many starved to death or died from exposure the first winter. Those who could do so made the long trek to New Braunfels, which quickly became overpopulated. Freiher von Meusebach, who by then had become John O. Meusebach, and 120 other German settlers pressed on north and westward where they encountered the Pedernales River. At a very pleasant location in 1846 they stopped and established the community of Fredericksburg, which in a short period of time became fairly prosperous. One of the Germans who followed Meusebach to Fredericksburg was a young man named Charles Henry Nimitz who had been born in Germany in 1826 and had managed to survive his first few extremely difficult years in his new country. In one of the more amazing ironies of American history, his grandson, Chester William Nimitz, born in the tiny frontier backwater of Fredericksburg, Texas in 1885, would go on to be arguably the greatest admiral this nation has ever produced.
In 1847, Meusebach, knowing that he would never be able to protect his fledgling community from hostiles, met with a group of legendary Comanche chiefs (Santana, Buffalo Hump, and Old Owl) and convinced them that he was German, not Texan (he spoke to them in German to prove his point), and that he would not try to kill them if they would agree to leave his community alone. Against all odds, this treaty is the only one made by white men with the Comanches that was honored by both sides for many years.
The initial result of this treaty was that surveyors, who up until that time had suffered a very high mortality rate, were provided some degree of reassurance. In the early 1850’s, German surveyors were sent into the Concho River area to claim the land that Meusebach and his fellow Germans had actually purchased. Some of the earliest graffiti at Paint Rock is probably attributable to these surveyors or the Texas Rangers that were guarding them.
But even though it had been surveyed, the Paint Rock area was too far west on the frontier to be a safe place for Anglo settlement in the 1850’s. It wasn’t until Richard Franklin Tankersley moved his wife, six kids, and 700 head of cattle to the springs at the head of the South Concho River in 1864 that the first Anglo-American ranch was established. Like Meusebach before him, Tankersley knew he had to take affirmative action with the Comanches to convince them to leave him alone. Incredibly, his family survived. George and Sylvinia DeLong were the second family to set up homestead on the Concho at Lipan Springs in late 1865. DeLong was later instrumental in the campaign for a U.S. Army fort to be established on the Concho.
Some of the graffiti at Paint Rock is dated to the four years of the Civil War, 1861-1865. The Germans who settled the Texas Hill Country during the 1840’s and 1850’s tended to be anti-slavery and pro-Union. This was in sharp contrast to the neighboring Anglo population that heavily favored secession and war. This led to bitter conflict that was a microcosm of what was taking place nationally on a much grander scale, and didn’t come to an end in 1865 with General Lee’s surrender. In fact, the murders, lynchings, and recriminations didn’t really end until the 1880’s. Several of the names in the graffiti at Paint Rock played important roles in the history of this time period. Since the federal government was no longer occupying the frontier forts, Indian raids became an increasingly significant problem, and the Texas legislature authorized the formation of militia units to patrol the frontier. Faced with the choices of joining these units, or being drafted and going off to fight against the Union, or getting lynched, many draft-age Germans chose to stay close to home and fight on the frontier, although it meant fighting for the Confederacy. Their names also appear at Paint Rock.
And then there are those Germans who tried to make their way to Union lines or into Mexico. One group was caught by a band of Confederate vigilantes in 1862 at the famed Battle of the Nueces. Some of the Germans escaped from the battle only to be caught later and hanged for treason. After the war, a father of one of the slain men gathered their bones and buried them under a monument to the Union that today sits at a municipal park in Comfort, just south of Interstate 10. Listed on that monument is the name of August Luckenbach, whose name appears twice at Paint Rock.
His brother, Jacob Luckenbach, whose name also appears at Paint Rock, was instrumental in having some of the vigilantes arrested and thrown into jail in Fredericksburg. When they learned that the detainees had been granted a writ of habeas corpus by a court in Austin, he formed what essentially amounted to a lynch mob, broke into the jail, and shot at the prisoners. Because black powder creates such a huge amount of smoke, no one could see anything, and several of the prisoners survived. Jacob was reportedly arrested after that incident but there is no existing record of what became of that arrest.
Somewhat of a legendary figure in Texas, Jacob Luckenbach was rumored to have crossed the Atlantic three times before he was 20 years old, first arriving in Texas in 1835 just in time to fight in the Texas revolution. He then went back to Germany and brought his two brothers over with him. Born in 1817, he survived the very dangerous Atlantic crossings, survived the Texas revolution, fought Indians and outlaws for 40 years on the Texas frontier, escaped persecution by Confederate vigilantes during and after the Civil War, and died of old age in 1911 at the age of 94. And he would have slipped into relative obscurity had it not been for two facts. First, his highly educated daughter-in-law (who had graduated from Brown University) was appointed postmaster for his rural community and had to name the post office something, so she called it “Luckenbach, Texas.” And second, in 1977, a popular country-western singer by the name of Waylon Jennings proclaimed in his new song The Basics of Love that “in Luckenbach, Texas, there ain’t nobody feeling no pain.” And now, over 100 years after his death, Jacob Luckenbach lends his name to one of the more famous country-western songs of all time.
After the end of the Civil War in 1865, cattle became big business. John Chisum operated a ranch slightly downstream from Paint Rock, and in 1866, Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight drove a herd of cattle over the trail that would bear their names. By 1869, more than 350,000 cattle would travel the trail. The increase in activity infringed on Comanche sovereignty and conflict was inevitable. In fact, Loving was killed by Comanches in 1867 whereas Goodnight, in his later years, became very close friends with the famous Comanche chief Quanah Parker (whose name is rumored to be at Paint Rock). In his biography, Goodnight claimed that he gathered the last surviving bison from the plains and put them on his ranch in north Texas because Quanah had asked him to do so. Quanah had been worried that his grandchildren would never know what a bison looked like. For those of us spiritual grandchildren of Quanah Parker who still love watching the last great American bison herd in Yellowstone National Park, there is today a sign at the southern entrance that says we have Charlie Goodnight to thank for saving that herd.
Fort McKavett to the south of Paint Rock had been garrisoned in 1853, as was Fort Chadbourne to the north, but they did not prove effective at preventing quick-hitting Comanche raids. The U. S. Second Cavalry under the command of Robert E. Lee set up a camp at Paint Rock in 1856 trying to intercept Comanche raiders, but they never encountered any. The effective techniques used by the U.S. Army against the Indians of the plains after the Civil War had not been perfected at that time. After the Civil War, Fort Concho was established thirty miles upstream from Paint Rock in 1867. But it wasn’t until the U.S. Fourth Cavalry was sent to Fort Concho in 1869 and put under the command of Ranald Mackenzie, probably the most effective Indian fighter who ever served in the U.S. Army, that the days of the Comanches on the southern plains became numbered. Even still, the winter of 1870-1871 was the bloodiest period in the entire history of the Texas frontier. Riding north out of Fort Concho in 1871, General William Sherman (of Civil War fame) observed the remnants of wagon trains and ranches that had been destroyed by the Comanches, and a ground littered with the bones of dead animals. By sheer luck, he avoided a Comanche ambush, the brunt of which fell on the group of black teamsters who were following him. He found their mutilated corpses on his return.
By 1873, new settlers were pushing the frontier westward, and, for various reasons, the Indian policy of the American government was not preventing conflict with the Comanches. The Texas Rangers had been reconstituted in 1870 in response to the increasing confrontations, but the final solution, such as it was, lay in the hands of the Fourth Cavalry and the incomparable Ranald Mackenzie.
Mackenzie had graduated from West Point in 1862 and had immediately been thrown into the fray, originally as an engineer and later as a general. He had been wounded six times in the Civil War, including getting shot through both shoulders, suffering a deep thigh wound when the horse he was riding was blown in half, and taking a .50 caliber slug to his right hand that later earned him the Comanche nickname of “Bad Hand.” He was wounded a seventh time in the Indian wars when an arrow went through his leg pinning it to the side of his horse (which became the inspiration for a rather gruesome scene in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove).
Mackenzie had made mistakes early on in fighting with the Indians, but unlike Custer, he learned from his mistakes and from studying the tactics of the Comanches themselves. Like the Comanches, he did not believe in taking casualties. His strategy was to surprise attack, grab women and children prisoners, take all the spare horses, then return to Fort Concho and wait for the Comanche warriors to come retrieve their families. They always did. He would then ship them off under guard to Fort Sill. That, as opposed to genocide, was the brilliant strategy that eventually defeated the Comanches on the southern plains.
In 1872, one of Mackenzie’s sergeants named William Wilson (whose name appears in the 4th Cavalry graffiti panel at Paint Rock) and a small group of soldiers encountered some Comancheros who had been trading with the Comanches. Wilson knew the importance of capturing alive at least one of the Comancheros because they would know how to find the Comanches, and in a running battle risked his life on several occasions to get his man without killing him. It would win Wilson the first of two Congressional Medals of Honor, and it would prove fatal to the Comanches, because Mackenzie now knew how to find their main camp.
In September of 1874, Mackenzie led his troops down a very steep and narrow path in a surprise attack on a large Indian encampment in Palo Duro Canyon. Mackenzie’s troops only suffered one casualty and may have inflicted fewer than ten casualties against a combined force of several hundred Native Americans. Mackenzie burned everything he could grab, including their winter food supply, shot 1200 horses, took a few prisoners, and left. And that was it; that was the famous battle of Palo Duro Canyon that decisively defeated the Comanches. After the Red River war of 1874 and their subsequent surrender at Fort Sill in the first half of 1875, the greatest light horse soldiers the world had ever seen were no longer a threat to Anglo settlement. On the Texas frontier, it was like opening the flood gates.
In 1875, Mackenzie took over command at Fort Sill in Oklahoma Territory and was replaced at Fort Concho with another Civil War veteran named Benjamin Grierson. Interestingly, Hollywood thought on separate occasions that both Mackenzie and Grierson, as well as John Chisum, all deserved the honor of being portrayed by John Wayne.
Grierson had been assigned the Tenth Cavalry, a unit of black cavalrymen, some of whom were ex-slaves and soldiers who had fought for the Union in the Civil War. Grierson had personally selected the recruits for the Tenth Cavalry and had turned them into a highly skilled fighting force. In the war on the northern plains the Native Americans had come to respect their abilities and gave them the name by which they would forever be remembered – “buffalo soldiers.” Some of their names also appear at Paint Rock.
During the period of Reconstruction in Texas, two important feuds arose that affected Mason County to the southeast of Paint Rock (Concho County). The first of these was the Mason County War (also called the Hoodoo War), which was an extension of the German/Anglo conflict from the Civil War. The second was the Sutton-Taylor feud, which was more centrally located around Gonzalez County, but which actually began in Mason County. The names of several of the major participants in these feuds appear in the graffiti at Paint Rock.
San Angelo, thirty miles west of Paint Rock, had grown up after 1867 with Fort Concho on the other side of the river, catering to the needs of the soldiers. The first store was built by W.S. Beck in 1872 and by 1880 the census had the population of San Angelo at more than 1300 persons. A wild place at first, San Angelo began to attract families, and to build schools and churches. The train tracks came in 1888. For entertainment, people in San Angelo could go hunting and fishing, but for women who did not enjoy that sort of thing, Clemens (1994:70) says that “there were excursions to places like Twin Mountains or the ‘painted rocks.’ . . . The ‘painted rocks’ expedition required two or three days.” But this was not a common practice until later in time. There are dozens of female names in the graffiti at Paint Rock, but the earliest dated one is from 1881, over thirty years after the first dated male name. That in itself is an emphatic exclamation point about where Paint Rock stood on the Texas frontier.
Much closer, the town of Paint Rock, named for the archaeological site, was established in 1879 when Concho County was organized and county commissioners went looking for a site to be its new county seat. By 1884, the town of Paint Rock was heavily invested in commerce of beef and sheep products, but it never had the demographics that San Angelo did. Today, the population of Paint Rock is less than 300 whereas the population of San Angelo is over 100,000.
In 1880, the new county tax collector put up for sale all of the properties that had been sold to the Germans as part of the Miller-Fisher grant, but on which taxes had never been paid. Several of these tracts were purchased by D. E. Sims, including the one containing the archaeological site. His granddaughter, Kay Campbell (1927-2024), inherited the land on which the site is located. Her son, Bill Campbell, and grandchildren are today the driving force behind the preservation of that site.
