Battle of Village Creek
Texas
On May twenty-fourth, eighteen forty-one, General Edward H. Tarrant led sixty-nine Texas militia volunteers along the banks of Village Creek, a tributary of the Trinity River in what is now eastern Tarrant County. They were attacking a cluster of American Indian villages, home to Caddo, Cherokee, and Tonkawa peoples who had resisted the relentless westward press of Anglo settlement.
A surprise assault turned into a running gunfight through the trees. Captain John B. Denton, the man Denton County is named for, was the only Texan killed; at least twelve Native men died.
Tarrant returned the following July with four hundred men but found the villages empty. A treaty in September of eighteen forty-three removed the tribes to a reservation on the upper Brazos. The battle effectively cleared the path for Fort Worth's founding eight years later.
