'Austin has done almost nothing': Time to thank the Tonkawa for saving the capital of Texas

Michael Barnes
Austin American Statesman
May 7, 2024

Envision Texas without Austin.

Jokes aside, our state would be a different place, right?

Yet it almost happened.

In March 1842, just three years after the city was founded, President Sam Houston declared martial law and ordered that all families in the Austin vicinity, an area vulnerable to Comanche or Mexican attacks, to "leave as soon as possible for a safer section of the country." During the next three months, Austin population dropped from approximately 800 to 200.

Houston subsequently convened the Republic of Texas Congress farther east at Washington-on-the-Brazos, and sent the militia to seize the fledgling nation's archives from Austin.

His gambit failed.

One hero from that episode is fairly well remembered: Innkeeper Angelina Eberly fired a cannon in the dead of night to alert townspeople to the seizure. A posse caught up with Houston's militia at a fort north of Round Rock and returned the archives. Rightly, a statue of a furious Eberly stands at a prominent spot on Congress Avenue.

Where are monuments, however, to the other saviors of Austin from that period? While most of the settlers abandoned the city, their friends and allies, the Indigenous Tonkawa set up camp on Little Shoal Creek, just west of Republic Square Park, which protected the city's western flank from Comanche raids.

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While bolstering the city's population and trade for some two years, they interacted easily with the Texians who remained behind, as memoirs from that period attest.

Late last year the Tonkawa, who were forcibly expelled from Texas in the 1880s, 40 years after the Archives War, returned to reclaim a sacred spot, Red Mountain, in Milam County northeast of Austin. Although now based at a reservation in northern Oklahoma, they still strongly identify with their traditional homeland, and in fact are the only federally recognized tribe with an origin story in what is now Texas.

To honor the tribe, San Marcos has raised a heroic statue to Tonkawa Chief Placido by the San Marcos River. At Pioneer Farms in Northeast Austin, replica teepees have been placed at a confirmed Tonkawa campsite. Before that, in the 1940s, a neighborhood in North Austin named one of its streets Tonkawa Trail after the historic trail there along Shoal Creek, perhaps the only Tonkawa-named location in the city today.

Time is long overdue to honor these saviors of Austin openly and conspicuously.

Tracing the Tonkawa history hereThe story of the Tonkawa's short residence in the city during 1842 and 1843 is told in a carefully resourced paper, "How the Tonkawa Tribe Came to Live in Austin," placed at the Austin History Center on Aug. 2, 2023. It was written by Bob O'Dell, producer of the upcoming documentary film "Tonkawa: They All Stay Together," due out later this year.

Herewith are 10 highlights from that research paper:

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