THE
LEGEND OF JOSIAH WILBARGER
©Lee Paul
If ever a man needed a miracle to survive, it was Josiah Wilbarger.
For sheer, hair-raising horror, nothing can compare to the story of Josiah Wilbarger, one of the "luckiest" men ever to have lived on the Texas frontier. He survived his own scalping through the mysterious appearance of his sister and the strange dreams of a woman friend. To this day, his story remains one of the most incredible legends in western history.
In August 1833, while scouting out headrights with four friends for Stephen Austin’s colonial expansion in the vicinity of present-day Austin, Wilbarger and his scouting party were surprised by a band of Comanches on foot. Two men were killed, and two men escaped. Josiah, however, fared neither fate. The Comanches scalped Wilbarger, stripped him of his clothing, and left him for dead. There, in the remote wilderness, in the dead of night, in terrible agony, bleeding from many wounds and freezing from the cold, waiting for help he was not sure would come, he saw his sister Margaret. Her presence gave him comfort, and she promised to send help.
Miles away, Sarah Hornsby had dreams. She awoke not once, but several times throughout the night with dreams that Josiah Wilbarger was alive and desperately needed help. So vivid were her dreams, that at first light, she aroused all the men and insisted they search for Wilbarger. Thus began the strange legend of Josiah Wilbarger, a rugged frontiersman who survived his scalping and lived only because of his extraordinary vision and the inexplicable dreams of a pioneer woman.
Josiah Wilbarger, the oldest of eight children, was born in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in September 1801. When he was twenty-two, the Wilbarger family moved to Pike County, Missouri, where Josiah met one of Stephen Austin’s agents recruiting members for a second colony on the upper Colorado River in Texas. He married Margaret Baker in September 1827, signed on as a teacher for the colony, and arrived in Texas that December, living first in Matagorda on the Gulf Coast and then in La Grange.
Life as a teacher, however, was too tame for his liking. By the time his first child, John, was born in November 1829, Josiah was a scout on the frontier. His job was to survey upriver for the advancement of the colonies.
Josiah finally located his own headright at the mouth of Wilbarger Creek in March 1830. It was a beautiful patch of earth along a bend in the Colorado River about ten miles above present-day Bastrop. As the first and only settler that far out on the frontier, he built a log stockade against Indian attack before bringing Margaret and John there to live. His nearest neighbors were seventy-five miles downriver. The Comanches, who saw Margaret Wilbarger coolly molding bullets and reloading guns during one of their attacks, called her the "Brave Squaw."
In July 1832, Reuben and Sarah Hornsby moved into the neighborhood with their seven boys and one girl. Hornsby was a farmer from Rome, Georgia, born in January 1793, and his "pioneer fever" caused him to chose a site about six miles further upriver from Wilbarger’s stockade. Reuben and the boys quickly built a double-log cabin on Hornsby’s Bend, which Sarah promptly turned into an inn of Christian hospitality for young men who brought news from the States and who could also provided additional protection. Since the Wilbargers and the Hornsbys were the only two families on the fringe of the frontier, they became close friends and allies against Indian attack.
The following year, in August 1833, Josiah stopped at Hornsby’s Bend to join a surveying party of four men scouting for headrights to the northwest. Two men, Thomas Christian and Strother, were already Austin colony settlers, while the other two men, Haynie and Standifer, were recent arrivals from Missouri looking for their own land. About mid-morning, they flushed a lone Indian on horseback and promptly gave chase. Although the group tracked the enemy north up Walnut Creek, the Comanche easily escaped into the thick brush.
The men backtracked the Indian along the Pecan Springs branch, in present-day East Austin, and decided to eat their noon fare in a heavy stand of oak trees. Wilbarger, Christian, and Strother, being more comfortable on the Texas frontier, unsaddled their mounts and hobbled them to graze. But Haynie and Standifer were newcomers, and they were cautious. With Indians on their minds, these two men kept their horses saddled and staked for a quick getaway in the manner of all cowboys on the trail.
While the men ate, the calm in the shady grove was suddenly shattered by war hoops, gunfire, and arrows. Strother fell immediately with a mortal wound, and Christian went down with a rifle ball which broke his thigh. With an arrow through the calf of one leg and a rifle ball in his hip, Wilbarger risked the attacking Indians to rescue Christian and drag him behind some rocks. In the process, he got an arrow in his good leg.
Haynie and Standifer, seeing their friends down, made a mad dash for their saddled ponies, while the Indians captured the hobbled ones. The two fleeing men looked back when they heard Josiah yell for them to wait, and saw him running in their direction, but the wounded man took a rifle ball in the back of the neck and pitched forward. Blood gushed from under his chin where the projectile exited, and Wilbarger was immediately surrounded by what the fleeing men thought were "at least fifty" knife-wielding Comanches. Behind Wilbarger, the Comanches were already at work scalping Christian and Strother.
Haynie and Standifer rode hard for the nearest cabin, the home of Reuben and Sarah Hornsby. They told the horrified occupants that all three men were scalped and dead. Reuben Hornsby immediately dispatched one of his sons downriver to summon reinforcements in case the Comanches should attack at Hornsby’s Bend. The reinforcements were expected to arrive in the morning. If the Indians did not attack, a small rescue party would search for and bury the three dead men.
When the Comanches saw the hole and blood under Josiah’s chin, they assumed he was as dead as the other two white men, whose throats they had just cut. But Josiah did not die. The rifle ball that passed through his neck temporarily paralyzed him. He felt no pain, and he could not move, but he remained conscious of everything. He knew the Comanches would strip him of his clothes. He also knew they would scalp him. He thought he would soon die.
The Indians quickly pulled all Wilbarger’s clothing from his body, leaving only one sock. By twisting a section of hair in his fingers, cutting around the twisted hair with the sharp tip of his knife, and jerking the scalp off with a sickening pop, one warrior proceeded to cut and tear seven pieces of scalp from Josiah’s head, each one about the size of a silver dollar.. Josiah said later that the ripping noise "sounded like the pealing of loud, distant thunder." When the Comanche scalper was through, Josiah mercifully passed out.
The sun was nearly down when he regained consciousness and the understanding that he could now move. Along with a terrible thirst came an agonizing pain---and the horrible realization that green blowflies were already at work on the exposed flesh on his head. The eggs of the blowflies are quick to hatch, and he could feel the maggots moving about over his skull. He tried to get up, but the wounds in his legs made that impossible, so he slowly dragged his still bleeding body down to the spring, a distance of three hundred yards, where he quenched his thirst and then lay in the cool water to soothe his raging fever. When his body was numb, he carefully rinsed his head, covered it with his sock, and lay back on the bank, totally exhausted. Each time the pain in his head increased in intensity, he laboriously crawled back into the creek and dipped it in the water.
By nightfall, Josiah knew he had to do something. After eating a few snails he found along the bank and taking one last, long drink, he began to crawl to the Hornsbys, a distance of about six miles. He traveled almost half a mile before he gave out. Propping himself against the thick trunk of an oak tree, he passed out.
Sometime around midnight, the naked man awoke with a feeling of intense cold. At first, all he noticed were the brilliant stars overhead and the night noises of distant coyotes barking at the moon. Close by, he heard an owl, and since Comanches were known for their imitating owl calls, he painfully turned his blood-soaked head to search the darkness for any sign of the enemy approaching. That’s when he saw her. Standing not more than two feet away was his sister, Margaret Clifton, only how could that be? Margaret lived more than seven hundred miles away at Florissant, near St. Louis, Missouri, and she had never set foot in Texas in her life.
But Margaret was real, and she spoke gently to Josiah, "You’re too weak to go on. You lie here and rest and help will come to you before another day is over." She then drifted off in the direction of the Hornsby house. Josiah called after her, begging her to stay with him until help arrived, but she disappeared. He could do nothing but wait.
Shortly thereafter, Sarah Hornsby awoke from a deep sleep with the strong conviction that Josiah Wilbarger was still alive. She shook her sleeping husband, and excitedly told him of her dream. "Wilbarger is not dead," she insisted. "I saw him. He sits naked under a large oak tree, bleeding, and with a bloody sock on his head, but not dead. I saw him plainly."
Sarah’s voice was loud with conviction, and it woke the sleeping Haynie and Standifer in the next room. Together, they tried to help Reuben calm his agitated wife, telling her that the Indians never left anyone alive. "He’s dead, Sarah. The Indians scalped him. It’s just a dream. Your nerves are overwrought."
Reuben was finally able to calm Sarah and get her back to sleep, but the peace didn’t last long. She awoke again and again with the conviction that Wilbarger was alive. Around three o-clock, she sprang from her bed. "I saw him!" she insisted, and no amount of talk could convince her that a man scalped by the Indians must be dead.
Sarah aroused everyone---Reuben, Haynie, Standifer, her sons---and insisted that they had to go right then and search for Josiah before the wounded man really did die. But Reuben was practical. They must wait, he soothed her, until daylight when they could see.
Daybreak comes early at that time of year, and while they waited, Sarah made breakfast. Before the meal was finished, the reinforcements arrived. With no signs of an impending Indian attack, the rescue party cautiously began the journey to the battle site. Before leaving, however, Sarah gave the men three sheets, two for burying Christian and Strother---and "one to wrap around Wilbarger when you find him alive."
When the rescue party reached the campsite where the Comanches had attacked the day before, they easily found the two naked, mutilated corpses of Strother and Christian. Blood was everywhere, but there was no sign of Wilbarger. The men left two sheets over the bodies of their dead friends and searched the brush for Josiah. In the next few hours, they uncovered a dead Comanche wrapped in a buffalo hide and stashed in a thicket. The warrior had been shot through the head. Nearby they found a scalp hanging from a tree. As the search progressed into the afternoon, Joseph Rogers finally spotted a sunburned, blood-caked figure propped against a tree. Mistaking him for an Indian, Rogers raised his rifle to shoot.
"Don’t shoot. It is Wilbarger," Josiah managed to gasp, and he weakly tried to rise up to meet his friends.
Wilbarger was alive, just as Sarah Hornsby had insisted, but he was in deplorable condition, horribly wounded. The searchers wrapped him carefully in the sheet and gently lifted him into the saddle of Rogers’s horse with Hornsby’s sixteen-year-old son, William, holding him from behind. When they reached the Hornsby cabin, Sarah was waiting for them with a warm bed, warm water to cleanse his wounds, wheat bread poultices, and bear’s oil to dress his head. "I knew he was alive," was all she said, as she busied herself tending his wounds.
The unexplainable story of Wilbarger’s survival attributed to his vision and Sarah Hornsby’s dreams quickly circulated through the colony within a few days. Wilbarger was very definite in saying that the vision of his sister faded from his sight in the direction of the Hornsby home. As near as anyone could figure, Sarah Hornsby had her first dream of the wounded man shortly after Wilbarger heard his sister’s voice. More than six weeks later, Josiah received a letter that brought news of his sister, Margaret. She had died the day before his ordeal had begun and had spent her first night in the grave in Missouri even as he sat clinging to life, propped up against the oak tree in Texas.
Josiah eventually recovered from his scalping, although the skin never grew entirely over a small place in the middle of the old scalp. His wife made many skull caps from her silk wedding dress to protect his wound, skull caps he wore continuously, even at the dinner table, taking them off only at night when he put on a night cap. When he ventured outside, he also wore soft, fur caps over the skull caps. Once in 1838, he ran into Big Foot Wallace in the warm cabin of a settler named Woods, about twelve miles above La Grange. Josiah had on one of his strange-looking fur caps, and when he removed it, his skull cap also came off, exposing the raw-looking, scarred flesh. The surprised Wallace, upon seeing the horrible scalp wound, broke the social code of the day by asking, "What is the matter with your head?" "I’ve been scalped," replied Josiah, unoffended, and told Big Foot the story.
In spite of the best efforts of his doctor, Josiah’s skull bone eventually became diseased, leaving the brain exposed. Although he had to take care when he ventured outside to protect his skull from the heat and cold, he was back farming by 1836 and contributed to the Revolutionary cause by supplying meat and provisions to the Texas army. He also built one of the first grist mills in Bastrop County and partially completed a belted and pulley-type generator motor.
Josiah Wilbarger’s death was hastened from a freak accident when he hit his head on a low beam in the doorway of his cotton gin house. Inflammation set in what was left of the scalp bone, and his doctor could only try to ease the pain and suffering. After requesting that a locust tree be planted at his grave, Wilbarger’s last words were, "That is as far as I can go..." He died at his home in Bastrop on April 11, 1845, and was buried in Fairview Cemetery. He was forty-three years old. He was survived by his wife and five children. Margaret Wilbarger eventually married Talbert C. Chambers and lived to old age. Upon her death, she was buried beside Josiah.
Five years after his father’s death, John Wilbarger died at the hands of the Indians. While still a teenager, he joined a company of Texas Rangers under Colonel John S. "Rip" Ford. In August 1850, after a leave to visit his mother and family at Bastrop, he and two other Rangers named Neal and Sullivan were ambushed on the open prairie near San Patricio. The three men were on their way to rejoin the company patrolling between San Antonio and the Rio Grande. Neal and Sullivan died in the first volley, but John managed to ride for two miles before his horse died. On foot, armed only with a gun and two six-shooters, John killed several Indians before being literally cut to pieces. When his mutilated body was found, pools of dried blood lay everywhere. John was buried on the spot, but years later, his brother, Harvey, removed the remains and had them reburied near his father’s grave in Fairview Cemetery.
Six miles east of Austin on Farm-to-Market Road 969, is a sign pointing to the Hornsby family cemetery. The first two graves in the cemetery were filled by two young soldiers detailed by the Texas army to protect the settlers. They were caught in the open hoeing corn when Indians attacked, and Sarah could only watch helplessly from the cabin as the men were butchered. She and her sons buried the bodies under cover of darkness. In 1845, her son Daniel and another youth, while fishing in the river, were ambushed and killed by Comanches. Sarah again dug graves by moonlight. She died at her Hornsby’s Bend home of old age on April 20, 1862. Reuben died in 1879.
Adjacent to the 165-year-old cemetery is a monument marking the old home site. It says the home was famous for Christian hospitality: "Here Josiah Wilbarger recovered after being scalped in 1833." And at the corner of 51st Street and Old Manor Road in Austin is a granite monument erected by Wilbarger’s descendants, marking the site where he was scalped.
Josiah Wilbarger’s last home, built in Bastrop in 1842, still stands and is occupied by his descendants. In 1858, Wilbarger County was created and named for Josiah and his brother Mathias. On April 21, 1932, the remains of Margaret and Josiah Wilbarger were reinterred in the State Cemetery at Austin.
The story of Wilbarger’s scalping and of the dream that saved his life is one of the best documented legends in Texas.