William Kelso had been a Texas Ranger, and he should have known better. That was the thought that would hang over the disaster near Kerrville for years afterward—that a former Ranger, of all men, ought to have been more cautious, and that with a little caution the whole terrible affair might have been averted. But in 1857, Kelso was not on a Ranger campaign. He was a settler, one of seven young men who had taken up the pursuit of a band of Comanches that had raided into Kerr County and ridden back up the Guadalupe River Valley.

It was unclear whether anyone had been killed or captured in the raid, or how many horses the Indians had stolen. Perhaps only a few animals had been taken, and no captives at all. That uncertainty would prove fatal. Kelso gathered six other men, all inexperienced in Indian warfare, and they mounted their horses and set out after the raiders.

Their names were Spence Goss, Jack Harage, Tom Wary, Dan Murf, Tom McAdams, and a man named N. Price. They trailed the Comanches for twenty-five miles above Kerrville, and then they stopped. The men had found a bee tree, and the decision was made to cut it down and harvest the honey.

Whether they reasoned that the Indians had only stolen a few horses and were not worth chasing, or whether the prospect of honey simply outweighed the pursuit, the settlers gave up the trail and went into camp near the tree. They did not know that the Comanches had stopped too. Unknown to them, the Indians were on a bluff near the river, watching the white men. They saw the settlers leave the bee tree and saw them make camp for the night.

This would only be ascertained later, when searchers found the place where the Indians had congregated on the bluff and followed their trail to the very spot where the unfortunate young men had bedded down. The camp was in a thicket, and the horses were staked out in the open glades around it. The night was cold, and a bright fire was kept burning for some time, plainly showing the Indians exactly where the camp lay. The party’s guns had been stacked around a tree several yards from the fire.

About daybreak, Tom Wary and Dan Murf rose and rekindled the fire. Then, taking their guns, they went out to hunt a deer. The rest of the men also got up and stood or sat around the fire to warm themselves. At that moment the Indians, who had crept close during the night, rushed in.

Before the settlers were aware of their presence, the Comanches had seized the stacked guns and opened the attack. Some of the men carried revolvers and defended themselves as best they could. Kelso shot an Indian down, and the man fell near the fire. But the onslaught was so furious and the settlers so badly shot up at once that they scattered into the brush, each man trying to save himself.

Murf and Wary heard the firing at the camp and knew its meaning at once. They ran back to help their comrades. Murf ran almost among the Indians, stopped in an open place, and discharged his gun at them. Almost at the same instant he received a ball in the breast.

He fell dead on the spot. The shot had come from one of the settlers’ own guns—a gun the Comanches had taken from the stack. Wary was struck in the breast with an arrow. After firing his gun, he escaped into the brush.

Spence Goss was sitting by the fire with his feet drawn up close to his body, facing the Indians. An Indian fired at him with a short Mexican gun carrying a large ball and three buckshot. The charge struck Goss in the right leg below the knee, broke the bone, and went out through the thigh. With a powerful effort he dragged himself away into a thicket and lay down.

Kelso was shot crosswise through the small of the back with an arrow. He jerked it out, shot an Indian down, and made his escape into the brush. Tom McAdams was shot in the neck through the windpipe with an arrow, but managed to get away. N.

Price had been standing with his back to the Indians and was hit in the shoulders with a load of buckshot from one of their own guns. He too escaped into a thicket. Jack Harage was sitting by the fire with his shoes off, warming his feet. He carried only a small single-barreled pistol, a derringer.

He sprang away in flight without being hit. He was the first man to reach the settlements, but his bare feet were so bruised and lacerated by the rocks of the Texas hill country that before they healed, the bottoms of his feet came off. The Indians got all of the horses except those belonging to Murf and Wary. When the two men had started on their deer hunt, they turned their horses loose to graze until they returned.

The animals took fright during the battle, ran away, and made their way back to Kerrville on their own. Some time after the fight, when the Indians were gone, Kelso, Wary, and McAdams got together and started for home on foot. Their progress was slow. Kelso could scarcely walk.

McAdams was constantly sick and vomiting, caused by swallowing blood from the wound in his neck. Wary was also badly wounded; the arrow had made such a deep wound in his breast that as he breathed, the air escaped through the aperture with a whistling noise. It took them several days to reach Kerrville. Goss and Price had both escaped into the same thicket, but neither was aware of the other’s presence.

Both were weak from loss of blood. Both fainted—or, as they expressed it, went to sleep—and lay there for several hours. When Goss came to himself, he called for his companions and was answered by Price nearby. The two got together and went about a mile, Goss dragging one leg after him.

There they found a small cave and spent the night in it. The next morning, Price proposed that since he was able to walk, he would try to make his way to the settlement and send relief back to Goss. He started out. He never reached there.

He died ten miles from where he had left his companion. Meanwhile, searching parties were out looking for Goss and Price, not expecting to find either alive. Goss remained at his cave for eighteen days, vainly hoping, as each sun ran its course and went down in the west, that before another setting sun help would come. He did not know that his unfortunate companion lay dead ten miles away, where he had sunk down exhausted to rise no more.

No one else knew where Goss was either. The searching parties had gone round and round his position. During the day he would crawl around in the dense thickets and eat grapes and haws, and lie in the cave at night. A small spring branch nearby furnished him water.

He had his pistol but would not shoot anything for fear of attracting a band of Indians. After eighteen days, Goss gave up all hope of anyone coming to him. He started toward the settlements, using a forked stick to help him along. After traveling several days in this way, he was found one day sitting down, leaning against a tree, by Judge Patton, who was out on a bear hunt.

Patton helped him reach the camp of a man named Miller, eight miles above Kerrville. In the meantime, a party of searchers had found Goss’s trail and could easily follow it by the holes he had made in the ground with his stick. They found him at Miller’s camp and conveyed him from there to the house of his brother-in-law, Joshua D. Brown.

Brown was the founder of Kerrville, which he had named after James Kerr, a relative of the Browns. Kerr himself had fought in the War of 1812 and at the Battle of San Jacinto, but he never made it to Kerr County, dying in 1850 on his farm in Jackson County. Even so, his name was carried on the town and the county, an honor he had earned as one of the most important figures in the founding of Texas. Murf was buried where he fell, in a shallow grave well covered with rocks.

Shortly afterward, a runaway slave came along, disinterred the remains, stripped the body, and appropriated the clothing for his own use. He then placed the body back, but wolves dragged it out again. Hunters found the remains and brought the skeleton to Kerrville, where it was buried in the cemetery. Two years later, hunters also found the bones of Price.

His boots, with bones still in them, were brought to town, along with a daybook and twenty-five cents in money in a purse. From these, the remains were identified. When Kelso drew the arrow from his wound during the fight and threw it down, he failed to notice, in the excitement of the moment, that the spike had failed to come with the shaft. For twenty years the wound would not heal.

Finally, by a surgical operation, the iron arrowhead was discovered and removed, and the wound then healed. The man who gave these particulars to the writer, a Mr. Daniel Adulus Ree, was living near Kerrville at the time and had helped search for Goss and Price. Ree came to Texas in 1852 from the western district of Tennessee.

He first settled in Dimmit County, then came to Bandera in 1854, where he built the first house there out of poles, to put corn in. People had no houses at first but lived in camps. He moved from there into the Guadalupe Valley. In 1856, when Kerr County organized, Ree was elected county clerk and helped lay off the town of Kerrville, which was the county seat.

Ree also gave the following Kerr County history. In 1859, a settler named Roland Nichols lived five miles above Kerrville. One evening he went out about a mile from home to kill a turkey. When he failed to come back at night, the family became alarmed and the neighbors were notified.

Ree responded, but nothing could be done until morning. In company with the others, the trail of Mr. Nichols was followed up a draw to a point about half a mile from the house. Here it turned abruptly in another direction, and the plain trail of numerous Indian tracks on both sides of it told the tale of the missing man.

Nearly a mile from there, his body was found beside a tree. He had halted there and put the tree between him and the Indians. The tracks showed that he had circled around it repeatedly while they tried to kill him. The bark was raked from the tree all around, where he had held to it with both hands in a vain endeavor to keep the trunk between him and his foes.

He had one arrow in the breast, and one arrow and one bullet in the body. The bullet and arrow had first struck the left arm about halfway between the elbow and shoulder and then penetrated the body not more than half an inch apart. Going back to the spot where the Indian sign was first discovered, it was evident that here was where the unfortunate settler had received the arrow in the breast from ambush. The prints of his knees were in the sandy soil, where he had come down either to fire his rifle or from the shock of the wound.

If from the latter, he had dropped his gun without firing, but recovered and run to the spot where his body was found. His gun was discovered after a search, covered up in sand where the Indians had left it. It was still loaded. In 1860, a Mr.

Samuel Lane lived two miles above Comfort on the Guadalupe River. In the fall of that year, he started on horseback up the river to visit a man named John Connor, who lived near where Center Point is now, above the mill on the north side of the river. Lane was not armed and was riding along eating pecans when the Indians rushed upon him from a thicket near the road and shot one arrow into his breast. He left the road and ran his horse toward a pecan tree several hundred yards away.

Before he reached it, the Indians shot several arrows into his back, forced him from his horse, and dispatched him. When he failed to come home the next day, the family became uneasy and sent a runner up to Connor’s to see if he was there. Finding no trace of him, the messenger went on to Kerrville and made the facts known there. District Court was in session, with Judge Stribbling on the bench, but the court was adjourned, and judge, jury, and lawyers all went to search for the missing man.

Ree was one of the searching party and said they did not find him until the following day, making the third since he was killed. In one hand, Lane had a turkey wing gripped, which he was carrying to Mrs. Connor. In the other hand were pieces of pecans, and holes and pecan kernels were between his teeth.

Ree and his brother-in-law, Judge Starky, along with Foster Cox, a man named Dwit, Bernie, and several others, took the trail of the Indians, which led a west course through the mountains over a very rough country. They came to one place where the Indians had camped, killed a cow, and eaten her. While riding around the camp, Judge Starky let his gun go off accidentally and killed Foster Cox’s horse. Further on, the Indians had gone down such a steep, rocky mountain that they had lanced their horses to make them go down, as was evident from the amount of blood along the way.

The white men could not get their own horses to go down, so they left them with a guard and continued the pursuit on foot. In Hondo Canyon, they found the dead body of a Frenchman whom the Indians had killed. The pursuit was kept up to Sabinal Canyon and then abandoned. They would have caught the Indians at the place where they went down the steep bluff if night had not been at hand.

The blood from the horses was fresh, not having yet congealed on the rocks. No doubt the Indians had seen the trailers coming, and that was why they forced their horses down such an unreasonable place. Here they entered a cedar break, and with darkness coming on, all trailing had to cease until morning. That gave the Indians a long start again.

Joshua D. Brown, the man who took in the wounded Spence Goss, had come to Texas at approximately age twenty-one, before October 1, 1837, following his father Edward and stepmother Anastasia Warland Brown to Sabine County, where they had immigrated in 1831. He and his father and third wife and children all moved to Gonzales. An unconditional certificate number 90 was issued by the Board of Land Commissioners of Gonzales County to Joshua D.

Brown for 640 acres, dated November 8, 1837, and issued July 5, 1844, witnessed by R. E. Brown and Wm. Phillips.

Joshua was close to the Kerr family. They were together in DeWitt County, and later Rufus Brown came to the Center Point area of Kerr County in 1856. As a patriot, Brown endured the hardships and perils of war by participating in military service for Texas independence from 1839 through 1842. He served as a minute man responding to and defending against Indian raids, and performed military duty against Mexico for the Republic of Texas, serving in the Cherokee expedition under General Rusk in 1839.

He was a private soldier in the company of mounted volunteers commanded by Captain Adam Zumwalt in an expedition of the Wall campaign in 1842, and he was in the battle fought against the Mexican invading army on Salado Creek in Bexar County near San Antonio, on or about the 11th of September 1842, during the Dawson Massacre. Joshua was also in the Somervell campaign, known as the Mier expedition, in 1842, under the command of Captain Isaac N. Mitchell, who was married to James Kerr’s daughter, serving in the regiment of Colonel James R. Cook, and returned after having crossed the Rio Grande at Laredo.

He was in Colonel Ben McCulloch’s spy company in 1846. After his military duties were over, Brown left Gonzales to learn a new trade. He moved west to what is now part of Kendall County, north of Waring, Texas, on Curry’s Creek. The site, known as Brownsboro or Brownsburg settlements, was approximately four miles from what is now Comfort on the Guadalupe River.

After a few months of learning to make cypress shingles out of the bald cypress trees, he decided to move up the river to make his own shingle camp. He went west to the headwaters of the Guadalupe River and found abundant cypress trees and a large spring to build his camp. In 1846, he and nine other shingle makers established the first known business in the area, a shingle-making camp near what is now downtown Kerrville. The camp worked peacefully and provided some safety to others living in the area.

It was said that half the men stood guard while the others worked. When the ox wagon was full of shingles, they would take them to San Antonio or Austin to trade for supplies, a journey requiring about four days. Shingle making was a new industry, and there were good markets in Gonzales and San Antonio. One thousand shingle bundles were packed and sold for five to eight dollars per bundle.

During this time there was little or no money in circulation, and everything a man had to sell was traded for something he needed. When Indians became overly troublesome, these men returned to the Kendall County settlements or to their former homes in Gonzales, but they came back to Kerrville in 1848. After returning to Gonzales, Joshua’s father, Edward, died in December 1846, and Joshua was the executor of his estate. He married his first wife, Eleanor Smith, on July 20, 1846, and they had a daughter, Mary Louisa Brown, on December 21, 1847.

Eleanor died in Gonzales on July 8, 1848. On May 20, 1849, Joshua married Sarah Jane Goss, daughter of Reverend John Frederick Goss and Mary Lee Polydore, originally from North Carolina, and they had seven children. Joshua sold his property in Gonzales and moved his family permanently to what he called Kerrville, named in honor of his cousin and friend Major James Kerr, veteran of the War of 1812 and the Battle of San Jacinto. Kerr was the first Anglo-American to settle on the Guadalupe River at Gonzales, before Texas was a republic, and he had followed Stephen F.

Austin to Texas from Missouri. Major Kerr had served as a lieutenant in the War of 1812 and as surveyor general of the Green DeWitt colony, whose grant was awarded by the Mexican government on April 15, 1825, to settle four hundred colonists on the Guadalupe River, and also of the De León colony. He represented Jackson County in the House of the Third Congress and introduced anti-dueling legislation as well as a bill to make Austin the state capital. He died in Jackson County on December 23, 1850, on his farm seven miles north of Edna on Kerr’s Creek, and was buried in the Kerr Cemetery.

Engraved on the vault over his site were the words: “Sacred to the memory of Dr. James Kerr. Born in Boyle County, Kentucky, September 24th, 1790. Immigrated to Missouri in 1808, then to Texas in the year 1825.

Having participated in most of the trying scenes of the struggle for Texas liberty, he died in Jackson County on December 23rd, 1850. ”

These were the people who chose to live on the very frontier of American civilization at a time when the Comanche still routinely committed depredations against the settlements. William Kelso lived for twenty years with an arrow tip stuck inside his body. Jack Harage walked barefoot through the rough Texas hill country, and the bottoms of his feet fell off.

Nothing more is known of him beyond this story.