Josiah Wilbarger was scalped in August 1833 a few miles east of where Austin would be founded, survived a night alone with his wounds, and was rescued because of a dream. He was riding with four other men from Reuben Hornsby's settlement on the Colorado: Thomas Christian, William Strother, and two newcomers from Missouri named Standifer and Haynie. They stopped to eat about half a mile up the branch above Pecan Spring, within sight of the later road from Austin to Manor. Indians on foot opened fire from the brush. Strother was mortally wounded, Christian's thigh was broken, and Standifer and Haynie rode for help. A ball through Wilbarger's neck dropped him, conscious, and he was stripped and scalped.
He later said the scalp tearing away sounded like distant thunder. Christian and Strother were killed. Wilbarger came to in the evening, lay in a pool to ease his thirst, ate snails, and crawled about six hundred yards to a post oak. His brother's account says he saw there the spirit of his sister Margaret, who had died the day before in Missouri, telling him friends would come. At Hornsby's, the two survivors reported all three dead, but Sarah Hornsby woke twice in the night insisting she had seen Wilbarger alive, naked and scalped, and had the men out at daybreak.
They found him under the tree with one sock pulled over his skull. He lived about eleven more years, the wound never fully closing, and died near Bastrop in 1844. A granite monument placed in 1936 near the old Manor road at East 51st Street was moved to Bartholomew Park in 1985, and in 2024 to the Wilbarger family plot in Fairview Cemetery at Bastrop.
Getting there
30.2997, -97.6894
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