Mission San Sabá: The Mission That Ended Spanish Expansion in Texas

In the spring of seventeen fifty-seven, two Franciscan priests named Alonso Giraldo de Terreros and José de Santiesteban walked into the Hill Country of central Texas and began building a log palisade on the south bank of the San Sabá River. Their mission was to do what the Spanish Empire had done all across Texas for sixty years: build a mission, convert the local people to Catholicism, and extend the frontier of New Spain northward.

The people they had been sent to convert were the Lipan Apache, a nation that had spent decades raiding Spanish settlements near San Antonio and then, suddenly, asked for a mission of their own. The Spanish were skeptical but saw an opportunity. Winning the Apache to their side might check the growing power of the Comanche and the Norteño tribes pushing south from the plains, and it would blunt French influence advancing from Louisiana.

What the priests did not fully understand was that the Lipan Apache had not asked for Christianity. They had asked for Spanish military protection against the Comanche. And the Comanche, learning that their enemies had allied with the Spanish, drew the obvious conclusion.

On the morning of March sixteenth, seventeen fifty-eight, a force estimated at two thousand warriors, Comanche, Wichita, Tonkawa, and Caddo, surrounded the mission. They carried French muskets alongside their own weapons. The priests tried to placate them with gifts. The gates were forced. Father Terreros was shot and killed in the mission courtyard. Father Santiesteban died in the burning chapel, his charred and headless body found in the ruins. Only one of the three priests survived, severely wounded.

The Spanish could not leave the attack unanswered. The following year, seventeen fifty-nine, Colonel Diego Ortiz Parrilla led a punitive force of more than five hundred soldiers, militia, and allied Indian fighters north to strike the Wichita villages on the Red River. The Battle of the Twin Villages was a military disaster. The Wichita had built a fortified stockade, flew a French flag over it, and fired back with French guns. The Spanish cannons misfired. Nineteen Spanish soldiers died. Parrilla retreated.

The implications were decisive. The Comanche and their Norteño allies had demonstrated that mounted Plains warriors armed with European firearms were a military force the Spanish colonial army could not defeat in open country. The empire's northern frontier effectively stopped here, at the San Sabá River. The mission was never rebuilt. The presidio limped on until seventeen seventy, then was abandoned. And the Great Plains, from this river north to the Dakotas, remained beyond Spanish reach for the rest of the colonial era.