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Author Topic: At 92, Dallas Archaeologist Continues to Explore Early Texas history  (Read 73 times)
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Bart
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« on: September 09, 2007, 03:15:05 PM »

This lady's work mght be a source for researchers of early regional history.

Bart

At 92, Dallas archaeologist continues to explore Texas history
 
VICTORIA, Texas -- Archaeologist Kathleen Gilmore has unlocked some of the most elusive mysteries of Texas history.

   She spent decades hunting down the location of the French explorer la Salle's lost fort before discovering it near the Gulf Coast. She also excavated a number of Spanish colonial forts in Texas, including Mission Rosario, near Goliad.

   At age 92, the Preston Hollow resident will visit Spain in December to study a recently discovered cache of documents sent from early Texas missions.

   But her greatest accomplishment may have been digging the way for other women to follow in her footsteps.

   "Kathleen is one of our most unique Texas archaeologists," said Jim Bruseth, director of the Texas Historical Commission. "She blazed the way for many other women to move into this field."

   Jeff Durst, an archaeologist with the Texas Historical Commission, added: "She's got an incredible amount of spirit and spunk for her age."

   Time's passage hasn't slowed Gilmore. In addition to traveling to Spain, she is writing a paper about Texas presiidios. In late July, she journeyed back to the site of La Salle's fort near Victoria with a French film crew making a documentary about the French in America.

   "I have always loved archaeology since I was a child and read about the lost civilizations of the Mayans," she said. "There was something very romantic about it."

   Gilmore grew up in Tulsa and in the 1930s attended the University of Oklahoma, where she studied geology, believing that it would be easier to help support her family during the Depression. Instead, the only work she could find was as a secretary for a geologist in Houston.

   "That's the way it was at the time, and me and a lot of women were forced to accept that," she said.

   In the early 1940s, Gilmore married her husband, Bob, and moved to Dallas, where they had four children. She didn't go back to school until she was 49, enrolling in the archaeology program at Southern Methodist University.

   "The first 25 years of my life were the times, and the second 25 were for my children," she said.

   Over the intervening years, Gilmore became the first female president of the Society for Historical Archaeology and was an adjunct professor at the University of North Texas for 15 years.

   She also was the first archaeologist to prove the location of La Salle's Fort St. Louis, according to the Texas Historical Commission.

   Traveling on muddy Garcitas Creek, it's easy for travelers to feel that they have stepped into La Salle's era. Thick foliage lines the shores, alligators sun themselves on sandbars, and grazing land stretches into the distance unencumbered by telephone lines or other signs of modern civilization. La Salle's camp, an isolated field of prickly plants and weeds, is a half-hour boat ride from the nearest ramp.

   Fort St. Louis lasted from 1685 to 1689 before its last inhabitants were killed by Indians, according to the Texas Historical Commission. By the camp's end, La Salle had been murdered by some of his men while trying to make his way to French settlements in Canada.

   Gilmore's search for the fort began in the early 1970s when she helped analyze some ceramic fragments found in a field near Victoria. The shards turned out to be from the Saintonge area of France.

   "I thought we might be on to something, but it took a couple of decades to prove it for sure," she said.

   Thousands of items, including jars, musket balls, fragments of wine glasses, and coins, were removed from the site, but it wasn't until eight cannons buried by the French colonists were discovered in the mid-1990s that the site was confirmed as Fort St. Louis.

   On the morning the French film crew traveled to the site, Gilmore decided to wait at the Museum of the Coastal Bend at Victoria College, where many of the items she helped excavate are located. Rains had swollen the creek, and the site was a morass of thick mud.

   Jean Dulon, one of the French filmmakers, could have been the ghost of La Salle. He was dressed in a billowy shirt, a colonial-style hat and moccasins.

   "We thought the best way to interest the French audience about American and French history was to act as if I was a voyager of the 18th century," he said. The crew has been traveling the United States, making stops in Missouri, Texas and Louisiana, retracing the routes of early French traders.

   "One of the great what-ifs of Texas history is, 'What would our state be like today if the French had been successful with their colony?'" Bruseth said, laughing.

   Gilmore spent 2 1/2 years in the late '90s visiting the site daily and exhaustively excavating and researching artifacts.

  From her December trip to Spain, Gilmore hopes to paint a further portrait of the early settlers who called Texas home. "There is an old saying that history repeats itself," she said. "There is always tragedy and happiness, and we'd never get anywhere without the failure and success of the people who went before us."

   The explorer Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, was born in 1643 in France. As an adult, he sailed for Canada, where he set up a fur trading outpost.

   By 1677, he had grown bored with life. He went back to France and asked King Louis XIV to give him authorization to explore the New World and build as many forts as he saw fit.

   On April 9, 1682, La Salle claimed the Mississippi River basin in the name of France and named it Louisiana. He then formulated another project to build forts along the mouth of the Mississippi and to invade and conquer Spanish provinces in Mexico.

   That project did not go as planned. La Salle missed the mouth of the Mississippi and landed at Matagorda Bay, Texas, nearly 500 miles away. He made several attempts to correct his navigational error but was never able to lead his group to the Mississippi. He established Fort St. Louis in present-day Victoria County. He later was killed by his own men near Navasota, Texas.

http://www.kristv.com/Global/story.asp?S=7044892&nav=Bsmh
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« Reply #1 on: September 09, 2007, 03:49:50 PM »


Fort St. Louis Archeological Project senior advisors, Curtis Tunnell and Kathleen Gilmore, discuss excavation with crew member Mike Fulghum

Lost and Found�The Rediscovery of Mission Santa Cruz de San Sab�


Dr. Kathleen Gilmore was able to determine from Spanish records that the mission was 1.5 leagues from the presidio. It was near a place where the San Saba River took a sharp turn to the north. There was a lot of arable land around the mission, and it had three sources of water nearby. The site we found met all of these requirements. At 3.95 miles from the presidio, the distance between this site and the presidio was exactly a league-and-a-half. A spring, the river, and Harris Hollow (pictured) served as the three sources of water. The river takes a bend to the north right by the site, and there are two river fords in the vicinity. Broad flood plains on the south side of the river provided the rich farmland sought out by the priests when they selected a site for the mission.


Sherds of Spanish olive jar and green-glazed wares. These broken pieces of pottery represent types that are diagnostic of the Spanish colonial era in Texas. One of the large green-colored sherds is the one that Kay Hindes found the day the site was discovered in 1993

Historians and archeologists began trying to relocate Mission San Sab� in the mid-1960s with the work of Kathleen Gilmore and Dessamae Lorrain. Continued efforts into the early 1990s had no better luck. A few years later things took a different turn when a San Antonio architect, Mark Wolf, began tracing his genealogy. Much to his surprise, he learned he was a direct descendant of Juan Leal, a Spanish soldier who had been stationed at the ill-fated mission to assist the priests. When the Indians attacked the mission in 1758, Leal organized the defense of the survivors holding out in the church at the mission. He set up a small cannon on some boxes and periodically fired it out the door to keep the Indians at bay. When night fell, Leal and the other survivors were able to sneak out of the burning mission and make their way to the safety of the presidio four miles to the west. Leal later moved to San Antonio, where he lived out the rest of his life as a prominent citizen in that community.


This brass bell, privately owned, was found in a field near the mission. It likely was one of the items taken from the mission by the Indians after the attack

Intrigued by his connection to the story, Wolf asked Kay Hindes, historian and archeologist from Jourdanton, if she would take him out to Menard and show him the mission. She told him that the location of the mission was unknown despite repeated attempts to find it. Undaunted, Wolf enlisted Hindes' help to find the mission. They started with a survey report authored by Shawn Carlson, a Texas A&M archeologist who had led the last effort to find Mission San Saba. Carlson, following the research of Kathleen Gilmore, had narrowed the search to an area along the south side of the San Saba River east of Menard. Carlson recommended that future searches for the mission incorporate remote sensing techniques such as aerial photography.

Wolf persuaded a friend who owned a small plane to help out. They flew over the San Saba River valley east of Menard and took photographs with different types of film (color, black-and-white, and infrared). Mark Wolf got his photos developed and began looking them over for any sign of the mission. He noticed a couple of promising outlines on the ground, linear soil discolorations that he thought could be the remnants of the outer wall or stockade of the mission.


The team that rediscovered the location of Mission San Saba: historian and historical archeologist Kay Hindes, archeologist Grant Hall, and architect Mark Wolf, whose interest in his genealogy sparked the discovery. Photo by Mark Mamawal, Texas Tech University

In the spring of 1993, Wolf and Hindes contacted me (Grant Hall). They asked if I would bring my Texas Tech archeology field school students over to Menard that summer to test one of the locations that looked promising in the aerial photographs. My students and I were joined by Kathleen Gilmore and Shawn Carlson, both of whom still had a keen interest in helping locate the site. Unfortunately, the anomalies in the photographs we investigated during the summer of 1993 all turned out to be false leads.

While Wolf was looking at aerial photos and we were testing sites, Kay Hindes had been doing research at the Center for American History at UT Austin. There she found a pamphlet entitled "The Rise and Fall of Mission San Saba. " It was written by John Warren Hunter, editor of the Menard newspaper and was published in 1905. Historians had dismissed the Hunter account as a fanciful and indiscriminate "tacky little pamphlet." But Hindes read it anyway and noticed that Hunter stated the mission was on "the old Hockensmith place," and that you could still go out there and pick up lots of relics. Following up on this lead, Hindes went to the deed records in Menard and found that there had been only one Hockensmith family living in Menard County back in 1905. The "old Hockensmith place" had been out east of Menard along the San Saba River. Hindes traced the deed records and learned that this land was now owned by Otis and Dionitia Lyckman of Menard.

Over Labor Day Weekend in 1993, Kay Hindes, Mark and Kim Wolf , and I were in Menard to test another location that Mark had seen in his aerial photos. On the way out to this location we passed the Lyckman's land. We noticed that Menard County Judge Lyckman had just plowed the alfalfa field right by the highway. Kay remarked: "That's where John Warren Hunter says the mission is located." I replied: "Well, since Judge Lyckman has just plowed that field, we ought to go in there and take a look. The ground visibility will never be better than it is now." Kay got Lyckman's permission for us to enter his land.

Soon we were walking across the freshly plowed field, which would normally have been densely blanketed with alfalfa. As we approached what we now know is the actual mission location, I started seeing some fired clay daub. I remarked that this was what we would expect to find as a result of the burning that occurred when the mission was destroyed. Shortly after that, Kay Hindes picked up an artifact. She looked at it for a second and said: "This is what we are looking for!" She had found a piece of Spanish pottery�a thick fragment of a green-glazed olive jar. Looking over this area of the field more carefully, we quickly found about 30 more pieces of pottery and quite a bit of burned bone. We were elated and reasonably certain we had found the mission. But we also knew we needed more definitive proof.
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« Reply #2 on: September 09, 2007, 07:58:40 PM »

Hello All,

Thank you very much Bart and Administration. A wonderful story all around. Mr. R. Denny, a gentleman who blogs regularly on elements of Texas history, has put together a very nice summary of the San Saba site, its physical layout (the spatial relationships between the Spanish presido, the San Saba Mission [Franciscan] and a significant ore deposit nearby).  Of interest is that the military, religious, political, and economic goals of the expedition were pursued simultaneously by the Spanish.

The Mr. Denney also traces the development of the local Lost Mine legend as it began the process of accretion and became attached to the San Saba site.  In this case, while the San Saba site became associated with the Lost Mine legend, the archaeological and archival primary sources so far are reported to indicate that the authority and impetus that undertook the exploitation of the ore deposit appears to have been secular and not religious.  Also worth noting: the indications of the role warfare played in destroying and dispersing the San Saba mission artifacts.

Certainly there should be no obstacle standing in the way of achieving a similar research result by employing a methodical approach to the problem of the Sonoran and Pimeria Alta Jesuit missions.

Very Best Regards,

Lubby

Mr. Denney's article:

The Facts: A Pivotal Mission in Texas History

Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba was founded among the Lipan Apache Indians by Franciscan Missionaries in 1757.  Presidio San Luis de las Amarillas (popularly known as San Sab� Presidio) was established in April 1757 as a support for the Santa Cruz de San Sab� Mission. The presidio and its accompanying mission were the first place that the Spanish in Texas came into conflict with the Comanche Indians and found that Plains Indians, mounted on Spanish horses and armed with French guns, constituted a fighting force superior to that of the Spanish colonials.  In January and February of 1758 small raids and theft of the presidial horse herd by northern Indians, enemies of the mission Apaches, gave warnings of an impending attack.  On March 16, 1758 approximately 2,000 Comanche and their allies attacked the mission and burned it to the ground.  Though the mission was gone, the presidio remained as a northern most post against the Comanche.  It was not until 1772 that a royal decree officially abandoned the fort on the San Sab� River.  The retreat of Spain from the San Saba Presidio back to a line of missions along the the Rio Grande (with the exception of San Antonio) signaled the beginning of the end of Spain's attempt to move farther northwest into Texas and hence this mission and presidio are seem by scholars as pivotal in Texas history [Weddle][Jackson and Foster].

The Legends

The mystique of this site did not end with Spanish abandonment however.  The presidio was to become the source of legends of a lost Spanish silver mine among Texans nearly a hundred years later.  The initial 1753 expedition seeking a site for an Apache mission (later to become Santa Cruz de San Saba Mission) led to the discovery of Los Almagres Mine in what is now Llano County.  Lt. Juan Galv�n - expedition leader - heard from Indians of a cerro de almagre, a hill of red ocher, indicating the presence of mineral-bearing ores. Upon Galv�n's return to San Antonio, several men from that settlement were guided to the hill by Apache Indians in August 1753. No valuable ore was found, but interest in the hill containing gossan refused to die. Governor Jacinto de Barrios y J�uregui, fearful that the use of Apache guides by unauthorized prospectors would arouse the Comanches, decided to send an official expedition. To lead it, he chose Bernardo de Miranda y Flores, who left San Antonio with twenty-three soldiers and citizens on February 17, 1756.  After locating the cerro de almagre (now known as the Riley Mountains, a quarter league from Honey Creek), Miranda's men opened a shaft and found "a tremendous stratum of ore."  So abundant were the ore veins, Miranda reported, that he guaranteed "a mine to each of the inhabitants of the province of Texas." Following Miranda's return to San Antonio on March 10, Barrios sent a three-pound ore sample to the viceroy in Mexico City for assay, but the sample was deemed too small for accurate analysis.  Later, after San Saba Presidio was established, its' captain Diego Ortiz Parrilla, seeking permission to move his garrison to Los Almagres to work the mine, obtained ore samples and smelted them at the presidio. He calculated a yield of 1� ounces of silver from seventy-five pounds of ore. After destruction of the San Sab� Mission Ortiz Parrilla was reassigned and the mine was never officially opened. Parrilla's interest, combined with Miranda's report, gave birth to an enduring legend. The slag heap the Spaniards left on the bank of the San Saba River when the presidio was abandoned a decade later fired the imagination of later treasure seekers, who supposed the mine to be in that area.

Interest in the mines continued to surface from time to time throughout the Spanish colonial period. Fray Diego Jim�nez and Capt. Felipe de R�bago y Ter�n, Ortiz Parrilla's successor at San Sab�, proposed reestablishing the San Sab� Mission on the Llano River, so that the mineral veins might be worked. The Bar�n de Ripperd�, as governor, sent an expedition to examine the mines in 1778; ore samples were extracted. In 1788-79 a French sojourner, Alexandre Dupont, extracted ore samples from the site and took them to Mexico for assay. He never returned. On the heels of his last visit, six prospectors from San Antonio were attacked at Los Almagres by Apaches. All but one were slain. Indian hostilities thereafter put a damper on such activity.
 
Stephen F. Austin, on his first trip to Texas, heard from Erasmo Segu�n that there was a rich silver mine on the San Saba River and a gold mine on the Llano. Hearing again in Mexico City of the unworked ore deposit called Los Almagres he sent soldiers to inspect it. They probably went to the wrong place. In 1829 the mythical "lost" silver mine of San Sab� began appearing on Austin's maps. A year later, Henry S. Tanner borrowed Austin's designation for his own famous Texas map. Its wide distribution resulted in "a rash of maps showing silver mines near the old Spanish fort." Austin, doubtless realizing the value of the legend in attracting immigrants, repeated it in an 1831 promotional pamphlet. For years afterward it was mentioned in nearly every book about Texas.
James and Rezin Bowie, on their sallies into the Hill Country, reinforced the legend. Los Almagres was transformed into the "lost San Saba mine," then the "lost Bowie mine." After 1895 some prankster (presumably) appended the word mine to the Bowie name on the presidio's stone gatepost at Menard. Today, the legend is the focus of an annual Menard festival called Jim Bowie Days, which, like Austin's pamphlet, has a promotional intent. The fact is that the Los Almagres mine that inspired the legend was at another location more than seventy miles away.

[Dobie] is a must read for anyone interested in the legends surrounding the old presidio.

TerraServer

In the photo below, the green circles shows the location of present day Menard, TX.  The ruins of the presidio are located west of town and north of the San Saba river.  It's located on the city's golf course; see small yellow circle.  The ruins are not in good condition, which is a real shame given the importance of this site in Texas history and folklore [Dobie].  The mission is located east of town and south of the river.  The larger yellow circle indicates the general area of the mission.  No ruins are readily visable from the road of the mission.  The blue line shows the San Saba river and direction of flow east.  Red arrow indicates ford in the river where Comanches crossed to attack the mission [Weddle].

Robert S. Weddle, The San Saba Mission: Spanish Pivot in Texas, University of Texas Press, 1964

J. Frank Dobie, Coronado's Children: Tales of Lost Mines and Buried Treasures of the Southwest, University of Texas Press, 1978

Jack Jackson & William Foster, Imaginary Kingdom: Texas as Seen by the Rivera and Rubi Military Expeditions 1727 and 1767, Texas State Historical Association, 1995

http://rdenney.bizland.com/TexasHistory/San%20Saba/san_saba_presidio_and_mission.htm





* sansaba.jpg (41.34 KB, 600x400 - viewed 12 times.)
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