In 1832 there were only a few cabins along the Colorado River between present day Bastrop and Austin. They were part of Stephen Austin’s new colony and were outside what was considered the safe edge of the frontier. The unsafe side was inhabited by Comanches. Josiah Wilbarger owned one of those cabins and in 1833 he joined a party of four other men scouting for homestead land and pushing the boundaries of Westward expansion.
About four miles east of present-day Austin the men stopped to rest and water their horses at Walnut Creek. They were attacked by a large contingent of Indians and one of the settlers was killed in the first minutes of battle. Wilbarger had both legs pierced by arrows and a flesh wound in his hip. Another would-be settler was mortally wounded as they struggled towards their horses. Two of the men reached their horses and looked back to see Josiah Wilbarger take a rifle ball in the back of the neck that exited his chin.
The two survivors spurred their mounts out of rifle range and looked back to see their companions being stripped and scalped. It was the first massacre by the hands of Indians in what is now called Travis County, and the beginning of a bloody era.
Wilbarger was momentarily paralyzed, but conscious when the Comanche scalped him. He was such a bloody mess that the Indian took him for dead, and did not bother to slit his throat. He later said he felt no pain as his scalp was ripped away, but the sound was like distant thunder.
He regained consciousness during the night and clawed his way to the creek to drink, then began to drag himself towards home. Exhausted, Josiah leaned against a scrawny post oak and wavered in and out of consciousness throughout the night. He saw an apparition of his sister standing before him, telling him to be strong, friends were coming to his rescue. Josiah had no way of knowing that his sister had died the day before, in Missouri.
The two survivors of the attack made their way to the homestead of Reuben Hornsby, Wilbarger’s closest neighbor, and related the events of the massacre. They declared the other members of their party to be dead, and it was decided a group of men would recover the bodies the next day. That night Mrs. Hornsby had a dream in which she saw Wilbarger scalped and bleeding, but alive. She woke her husband and told him of the dream and he told her to go back to sleep. Dreams were only dreams. She persisted to the point that the men left early and found Josiah alive under the tree. They carried him back, dressed his wounds and nursed him back to a semi-healthy condition. Skin never grew back over the top of his head and the bone of his exposed skull began to exfoliate, eventually exposing the brain. That made it necessary to continuously wear a head cover which served its purpose until the day he bumped his head on the beam of a low doorway to his gin cellar. Josiah Wilbarger lived 11 years after being scalped. Almost two hundred years after his death, he still lives as a footnote in Texas history.
(Jim McJunkin has been a photographer for over 50 years and has been involved in a number of art and photography shows around the country. He has work in the permanent collection at the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, Illinois, and has authored several photography related books. Jim and his wife Beth have lived in Wimberley for 20 years. [email protected] )
