Servant of the Bones

The story begins in 1758 with the killing of two priests and six other Spaniards in a little log mission on the banks of the San Sabá River. More than 2,000 American Indians attacked the Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá and burned it to the ground.

The massacre lead to a series of conflicts and finally a shaky peace between settlers and American Indians on the plains of what is now Oklahoma and Texas.

In a new book from the Texas Tech University Press “After the Massacre,” Texas Tech alumnus Robert S. Weddle details the events following the attack on the San Sabá mission.

“The attack on the San Sabá Mission signified that Spanish arms were no longer superior to the Indians,” Weddle said. “It demonstrated that the new alliance of the northern tribes had the capability of halting Spain’s northward advance.”

After the Massacre

After the burning of the San Sabá Mission, the Spaniards organized a march to retaliate against the Taovaya Indians, a cannibalistic Wichita-related tribe heading the attack. In his book, Weddle offers the only complete narrative of the march and of the battle that followed.

“The battle represented the first conflict between European settlers in Texas and the Comanches,” Weddle said. “It also brought forth the Taovayas of Wichita affiliation, recent arrivals on the Red River from southeastern Kansas and Oklahoma, who remained a thorn in the Spanish side for years to come.”

Weddle offers extensive details about the Taovaya Indians and a day-by-day account of both the attack and the battle that followed. He examines the facts available to historians and separates the truth from the fiction of this historical legend.

“There has been much confusion among historians over the route followed by the Spanish expedition,” Weddle said. “Lacking the captain of the expedition’s diary, which details it more or less precisely, they had to rely on speculation.”

The discovery of mission ruins and the addition of an original document from that time prompted Weddle to write his narrative.

Weddle based his new book largely on the diary of Juan Angel de Oyarzun, a captain on the 1759 expedition to the Taovayas’ village. The diary itself, in addition to several other documents from Spanish archives, is translated as an appendix in the back of the book.

Search for the Past

Weddle isn’t the only connection Texas Tech has with the San Sabá Mission.

Historians and archeologists began trying to locate the San Sabá Mission in the mid-1960s. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that the search turned up any real leads. The search group, lead by Kay Hindes and Mark Wolf, contacted Grant Hall, an associate professor of archeology at Texas Tech.

“Prior to going to work for Texas Tech, I had gotten to know Kay Hindes and Mark Wolf on another archaeological project,” Hall said. “In 1991, I started taking my Texas Tech field school students to San Sabá County for our summer archaeology schools.”

Following a paper trail and old rumors, the group traced the mission to a field east of Menard, Texas, along the San Sabá River. But they wanted to be certain that they found the right place.

Hall and some of his students from Texas Tech began testing the site in 1993. The owner of the land had plowed and churned up the soil deposits surrounding the mission site. However, Hall and his assistants were able to find enough evidence to prove that the site was the location of the fabled mission.

“As an archaeologist, I was thrilled to recover artifacts that verified the historical accounts of the destruction of the mission,” Hall said. “In particular, we found lead musket balls scattered around a cluster of burned post stains in the mission.”

Digging In

Texas Tech archeologists, lead by Hall, returned to the mission for a full-scale excavation in 1997. During this excavation, they found many artifacts and new facts used to complete the story of the San Sabá Mission.

“The post stains were all that was left of the little church where survivors of the attack sought refuge until they could escape to safety,” Hall said. “The musket balls were fired into the church by the Indians who made the attack. The firearms and musket balls were likely supplied to the Indians by French traders up on the Red River, and this is where many of the Indians retreated after the massacre.”

The discovery of the mission was a milestone in recreating the events that took place during the attack, Hall said.

“Standing where the church once stood, and thinking about the musketballs scattered all around, one gets a feel for how desperate the situation was for Juan Leal (a Spanish soldier stationed at the mission) and the others who were trying to survive inside on that March day,” Hall says in a reflection of the dig on the Texas Beyond History Web site. “The archeology makes it real and brings those days back to life.”

Story produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing, 806-742-2136.
Web layout by Gretchen Pressley