The Republic of Texas paid its soldiers in land it had not yet surveyed. Bounty and headright certificates were in men's pockets, and someone had to go out and lay the land off on the ground.¹ In 1838 a party of surveyors left Franklin, in Robertson County, under a Captain Neil, with William F. Henderson as surveyor, and rode north into the country around Richland Creek.²

They found about three hundred Kickapoo already there, men, women and children, come down to lay in dried buffalo meat for the winter.³ Walter P. Lane, one of the party, wrote that from the hills “you could see a thousand buffalo at a sight.”⁴ Many of the Kickapoo spoke English. For three days the two camps sat side by side. The surveyors ran their lines by day and came back each evening for water.⁵

The Kickapoo knew what the chain meant. Lane wrote that they understood “the white people would soon settle there and break up their hunting grounds,” and that they “begged us feelingly to go.”⁶ On the third morning their chief said a party of Ionies was coming to kill the surveyors, that the killing would be laid on his people, and that he would not fight the Ionies because his tribe had a treaty with them.⁷ The surveyors stayed.

The attack came that morning, at a corner they had marked the evening before. The party got into the head of a prairie ravine with banks four or five feet high and a few cottonwoods along it. Men climbed the cottonwoods to fire down into it. Nearly every horse was shot.⁸ There was no water all day. Near midnight, under a full moon, the survivors broke out toward the timber on Richland Creek. Captain Neil was killed going out.⁹

Lane, Henderson and a man named Button hid through the next day, then walked about twenty-five miles to Tehuacana Springs, where a Kickapoo camp fed them a soup of dried buffalo meat, corn and pumpkin.¹⁰ Another survivor, John Violet, lived on green haws and plums until he got there.¹¹ A party from Franklin came back to bury the dead. They found the bones in the ravine, stripped by wolves, and eighty piles of green brush with blood under each. The surveyors were buried together in one grave beside the ravine.¹²

Who attacked is not settled. The Kickapoo chief blamed the Ionies. Lane believed it was the Kickapoo themselves, and later writers add Waco, Tawakoni and Caddo.¹³ The surveyors' names are cut in stone. The names of the Native men who died are not written down anywhere.

The ground is just west of Dawson, off State Highway 31. A marble shaft put up by Euclid Cox's family in the 1880s carries the names of the dead and of the men who escaped, and a state marker from 1966 stands beside it.¹⁴ Within a generation the tribes were gone from this country: the Kickapoo to Mexico and Indian Territory after 1839, and the Wichita and Caddo peoples to a reserve on the Brazos and then, in 1859, across the Red River.¹⁵

The marker and the monument both say October 8, 1838.¹⁶ Lane, writing in 1885, said September 8.¹⁷ A letter written that November and Cox's own probate papers put it at the start of September, and the full moon Lane remembered fell on September 4 that year.¹⁸ The record leans to early September. The stone says October.