Dac Crossley's Western Blog

A Strange Texas Fort

The little town of Banquete, Texas, was the ancestral home of my Ashton ancestors, horse breeders who migrated there from Kentucky. My daughter Mary drove me through Banquete, a wide spot in the road at a Tex-Mex railroad crossing. “Let’s see if we can find Fort Lipantitlan,” I said.

Lipantitlan, “Lipan town,” supposedly was a State Park but it doesn’t show up on Texas maps. It sits on the site of an old Lipan Apache village north of Banquete and near the Nueces River (the “River of Nuts.”). Springtime floods forced the Nueces through a set of sloughs that became fertile ground for the Lipan vegetable patches of bean, corn and pumpkins.

In 1829 Irish immigrants formed the town of San Patricio on the north side of the river, with permission from the Mexican Government. Nervous over the growing number of immigrants, a Mexican army occupied Lipantitlan and created a fort of wood pilings held in place by a border of earthen mounds. That’s all that remains of the fort today, the earth perimeter.

Mary and I found it from USGS maps. There’s not much to see. We found a Texas historic marker there, and the mounded walls remain. The fort isn’t maintained at all. A few concrete slaps appear to be the remains of picnic tables.

During the Texas Revolution a Mexican Army under General Jose de Urrea routed a small Texican force across the Nueces in San Patricio. Urrea went onward to become the “Butcher of Goliad.”

And the Lipans? Peaceful farmers here and a contrast with the vicious Karankawas of the Texas Coast. Some melted into the local population, converted by missionaries. Some drifted down to Mexico. “Apache” was, after all, a name to be feared.

And Banquete? The site of a four-day shindig (a banquete) celebrating the completion of a road from San Patricio to Tamaulipas, Mexico, it sits lonely today.

Fort Lipantitlan? Vanishing from Texas soil. A little bit of history fades away.

Dac Crossley
January 11, 2018

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” – Edward O. Wilson.

The First Texas Farmers?

Alvar Cabeza de Vaca, the old Spanish shipwrecked explorer who trekked through early Texas, stumbled into an area long known as “La Junta de los Rios.” The Conchos River joins the Rio Grande there, and the flood plain is still a productive soil. Modern Presidio, Texas sits there today.

Cabeza de Vaca found a handsome race of farmers there, who extended him a welcome. He remarked that the farmers had “the best physiques we ever saw,” and lived in “houses that looked like houses.” After a few weeks, Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions made their way south, eventually reaching Mexico City.

The Juntanos had told the Spaniards about the large Pueblo settlements off to the north. That part of Cabeza de Vaca’s report caught the attention of Fray Augustin Rodriguez, who petitioned the Viceroy of Mexico for permission to seek the pueblos and Christianize the Juntanos. Rodriguez found that the Juntanos had escaped the diseases that had decimated so many Indian villages. However, the Juntanos had become targets to Spanish slave raiders. Their peaceful society made the Juntanos easier prey than the nomadic Indian tribes.

When the Spanish expeditions began using El Paso del Norte, they ceased to visit La Junta de los Rios. Interest in the village revived during the Apache Indian wars. At that time the Juntanos had adopted Spanish clothing, were growing wheat and practicing Christianity.

Modern Presidio, Texas, isolated though it is, deals with a modern problem – illegals – and is experiencing something of a boom.

Dac Crossley
January 3, 2018

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.” – Poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec.