The little town of Bandera Texas has played an enormous role in keeping alive the uniquely American traditions of the Texas cowboy. Here is its story.

Perhaps more than any other Hill Country town, Bandera Texas exudes the image of the “Wild, Wild West.” The ruggedly beautiful landscape, the rustic architecture and the enthusiastic presentation of Bandera as the “Cowboy Capital of the World” let visitors know, as soon as they get to town, that this place is unique.

This unique quality is not new; the nearly-impenetrable area around Bandera Pass was one of the principal strongholds of the Apache tribes, and they fought furiously to protect their territory. The early settlers in Bandera County were subjected to frequent raids; many lost their lives and many more lost their livestock during the town’s first four decades. The hardships made the survivors strong and self-reliant; today’s town is their legacy.

There are several possible explanations for Bandera’s name. One old story says that it was a General Bandera who led Spanish troops in the first big battle at Bandera Pass (around 1733). Another legend says that a “bandera” (Spanish for flag) was placed in the pass as a boundary marker between the Spanish and the Apaches (if that is true, the bandera was unsuccessful; both sides traveled back and forth, and the pass was the scene of many battles).

In 1843, a band of about 40 Texas Rangers led by Colonel Jack Hays was ambushed in Bandera Pass by several hundred Comanche warriors. Though the Rangers were saved by their new Colt revolvers (which fired much more rapidly than what the Comanches were used to), five Rangers lost their lives and the Comanches withdrew only after their chief was killed in the battle.

The first “settlers” in Bandera County were three families who camped next to the Medina River in the spring of 1852 to make shingles from the majestic cypresses that grew along the river’s banks. They were soon followed by Amasa Clark, John James, Charles de Montel and a few others.

Amasa Clark was born in 1828 (in New York state) to a family who traced its ancestry back to the Mayflower. He joined the army and fought in the Mexican War, then came to Bandera in 1852 when some Delaware Indians told him of the good land along the Medina River. He met with the original three families and went into business with them, selling shingles in San Antonio. The roads were rugged and treacherous, and the trip took seven or eight days in good weather (up to three weeks in the rain). San Antonio’s population was only 2,000 in 1850, but it was growing rapidly, and there was great demand for shingles.

laid out by surveyor John James (who also platted the towns of In 1853, the town was Castroville, Boerne, D’Hanis and Quihi) and his partner Charles de Montel. James had grown up in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, but had come to Texas at age 17, where he became one of the best and most prolific surveyors in history, accumulating a fortune in land certificates for his services. De Montel was a German immigrant who fought with Sam Houston (it was Houston who shortened the young soldier’s name from Scheidemontel) in the battles for Texan independence.

James and de Montel built a sawmill and a commissary store in their fledgling town, and set out to find more settlers.

In 1854, the Mormon group (about 250 people, in all) led by Lyman Wight (who had already helped tame three other counties in the Hill Country) built a camp on the land south of Bandera Texas, now covered by Medina Lake. They built furniture for sale in San Antonio, but some (most notably George Hay, who served for years as Justice of the Peace) settled in Bandera when Wight died in 1858.

In 1855, 16 Polish families arrived in Bandera. They were each given town lots and farmland (5 to 20 acres per family, according to Amasa Clark’s memoirs) and put to work in the sawmill. Under the leadership of Father Leopold Moczgemba, the Polish settlers organized St. Stanislaus parish and built a Catholic Church.

In 1856, Amasa Clark and two others were attacked, beaten and robbed after selling their load of shingles in San Antonio; both the other men died from the beating, and Clark suffered a fractured skull. He recovered from the injury, but decided to change jobs.

Also in 1856, Camp Verde was established just north of Bandera Pass, and the prevailing sense of security brought many more settlers to Bandera County. Amasa Clark took a job caring for the camels in the famous experiment at Camp Verde by then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.

That same year, a German immigrant named August Klappenbach built the first store building and post office in Bandera Texas. Shortly thereafter the first school and hotel were built. Bandera County was officially organized in 1857; the 1860 census counted 399 residents, and subsistence farming accounted for only 1,461 acres of its 798 square miles.

In 1858, a young army scout named Jose Policarpo “Polly” Rodriguez came upon Privilege Creek, six miles northeast of Bandera, while chasing a herd of escaped camels from Camp Verde. Rodriguez was from an aristocratic Mexican family; he had served as an apprentice gunsmith and surveyor before Colonel Jack Hays hired him to blaze a trail (now Route 90) from San Antonio to El Paso in 1849 (he first met Amasa Clark that year). Polly bought 360 acres of the land that he had “discovered” at Privilege Creek, and built his own little town there, also called Polly.

In 1859, Amasa Clark married Eliza Jane Wright, of Llano. The first of their ten children was born in 1860. In 1861, county tax assessor and collector John Thomas McMurray was killed by Indians.

Because of Bandera’s isolation and the few slaves in the county, the Civil War had a relatively 10 pt effect. However, the withdrawal of the U.S. Army from Camp Verde emboldened the Indians, and attacks became more frequent again through the 1860s. A frontier battalion was organized at Camp Verde in the beginning of the war, and Confederate soldiers were stationed there in 1863. That summer, a group of eight men and a boy from Williamson County came through Bandera, on their way to Mexico to avoid the war. Twenty-five men from Camp Verde, under Major W. J. Alexander, pursued the 10 pt group and captured them ten miles south of Hondo. On the return trip, a disagreement sprang up between some of the men who wanted to try the prisoners at Camp Verde and others who wanted to hang them on the spot.

Seven of the men were hanged near Julian Creek, just four miles east of Bandera Texas, and another was shot to death. The boy was not found, but horrified Bandera residents buried the eight bodies and three years later a grand jury indicted Major Alexander. Even though the names of the killers were known, they managed to disappear in the confusion at the end of the war, and no one was ever arrested for the crime.

Photo Courtesy 1881 Old West Photography

Photo Courtesy 1881 Old West Photography

J. Marvin Hunter’s Pioneer History of Bandera County recounts the story of Tom Click, an early pioneer. One day in 1866, Click “dashed up to the ranch of John A. Jones on Myrtle Creek.” He had been ambushed by a party of Indians while coming through Bandera Pass. Although an arrow had stuck him in the back, he was able to spur his horse on to reach the Jones Ranch three miles away. The pursuing Indians turned back when he approached the ranch. The doctor told Click that the arrow had been poisoned with rattlesnake venom, and administered strychnine to counteract it. The flesh around the wound rotted away, and Click almost died

The first courthouse (the old building still holds offices for justices of the peace) was built in 1868. That same year, a 15-year-old boy was killed by Indians when he went hunting for bees about four miles southwest of Bandera. The stricken parents traded their ranch to Amasa Clark for a yoke of oxen and a six-shooter (value about $35), and left the area for good. The Clark family settled there, and planted an orchard (the Elm Dale Nursery)

In 1869, another German immigrant, named Charles F. Schmidtke, came to Bandera and purchased a 10 pt store. He soon formed a partnership with George Hay, and formed Schmidtke & Hay, which operated a store, post office, mill and cotton gin in Bandera. Schmidtke was a miller by trade, and made improvements on the mill that attracted customers from miles around. Farmers from Hondo and New Fountain would bring loads of wheat to be ground, and sometimes waited in line several days for service!

Bandera Texas still was largely isolated from the outside world; Amasa Clark described the once-a-week mail service in his memoirs, and recalls reading the Galveston newspaper a little at a time, to make it last until the next Wednesday. A stagecoach brought the mail to Comfort from San Antonio in 1872; a Bandera man would go on horseback to pick up mail for Bandera each Wednesday.

The population of the county was still only 649 when the 1870 census was taken, but there were already 4,740 cattle, and the forces were at work which would make Bandera the staging point for huge cattle drives along the “Western Trail.” The first of maybe six million cattle traveled the Western Trail to Dodge City, Kansas in 1874, and the economy of Bandera boomed for the next twenty years.

It was during this cattle-drive era that Bandera first began to build the reputation that has earned it the title, “Cowboy Capital of the World.” Farm boys became cowboys, ranchers built holding pens and signed on as trail bosses and storekeepers contracted as outfitters. Charles de Montel Jr., the son of Bandera’s co-founder, made several trips up the trail, and recalled years later seeing “things that the so-called cowboy of today never sees: stampedes, round-ups, night-herding, thunderstorms, swollen streams, etc.” It was the stuff legends are made of, and Bandera was at the center of American mythology.

The last person to be killed by Indians in Bandera County was Deputy Sheriff Jack Phillips, in 1876. As civilization took over the wild Bandera landscape, sheep and goats (easier to feed than cattle in the sparse vegetation of Bandera County) began to supplant the cattle that had brought fame to the little town. A severe drought hit the county in 1879. In 1880, according to census records, Bandera County was home to 2,158 people, 32,974 sheep and 9,471 cattle. That year, the county produced 296,578 pounds of wool. Bandera’s first newspaper, the Bugle, was published in 1880.

In 1882, Policarpo Rodriguez became a Methodist preacher, and built a stone chapel in his little town of Polly, which peaked at 300 residents in the mid-1890s. The chapel and the cemetery are all that remain today. In 1885, Amasa Clark was re-married at 59 years of age (his first wife, Eliza, had died) to 26-year-old Lucy Wedgeworth, who bore him eight more children. Polly Rodriguez, who also lost his first wife, married a sixteen-year-old at age 73. She bore him four more children in his old age; he already had great grandchildren when his last child, Juanita, was born. Clark and Rodriguez both wrote their memoirs, which are available to readers at the Bandera County Library.

According to the Pictorial History of Bandera County (edited by Dr. M.J. Schumacher), Bandera Texas had about 600 residents in the mid-1880s. “Two hotels accommodated visitors from all over the region as they attended to business at the county seat or made use of the saw-and-gristmills or the cotton gins. Two mills were water-powered. A steam-powered mill had been moved from Pipe Creek. The town had nine stores, including a lumberyard. There were two blacksmiths, two carpenters, a saddler, three druggists, three house builders, and two butchers. There were four lawyers and five doctors. Churches in town included Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic and Christian. William Hudspeth edited the Bandera Enterprise. The rival newspaper was the Bandera Bugle, edited by John Guthrie, a Scottish immigrant who also dealt in real estate.”

In 1890, Bandera was at the height of its prosperity, and an ornate new courthouse was built. Around that time, H.H. Carmichael began to build a fine new home in the nearby town of Medina. An Indian raid so disturbed Carmichael’s wife that he changed his plans, and built instead in the relative safety of Bandera. His home is now a bed-and-breakfast, the “Mansion in Bandera.”

The boom had ended before the last cattle drive in 1893, and a national economic panic that year sent several of Bandera’s original businesses into bankruptcy. Bandera County’s population peaked in 1900, at 5,332, and declined slightly for the next three decades.

A dam was built on the Medina River southeast of Bandera in 1911, and by 1913 Medina Lake had covered several historic sites, including the old Mormon Camp. A fire destroyed several buildings downtown in 1915; a volunteer fire department was formed the next day. That same year, businessman Lee Risinger opened the first auto dealership in Bandera. Mary McGroarty opened the OST (Old Spanish Trail) Café in 1921.

The Great Depression hit Bandera hard during the 1930s, and more people moved away. But there were signs, even in those hard times, of better days to come. J. Marvin Hunter had come to town in the 1920s with a deep appreciation for Bandera’s colorful history. He founded the Frontier Times magazine (which attracted readers around the country) in 1923, and encouraged old-timers to record their adventures for posterity. (Amasa Clark was one of those old-timers; Bandera’s first permanent settler lived to be 101 years old, and through Hunter’s efforts was accorded many honors in the last years of his life.) In 1933, Hunter used the proceeds of book sales to build the Frontier Times Museum as a “Monument to Pioneer Days.” Cora and Ed Buck had begun taking summer boarders at their ranch on Julian Creek in 1920, and by the time the San Antonio highway was completed in 1936, Bandera Texas was well-known as a tourist destination. By 1948, there were 17 dude ranches and a special newspaper, the Dude Wrangler, devoted to the booming new business. Dude ranch owners proclaimed Bandera the “Cowboy Capital of the World,” and the title has been a self-fulfilling prophecy ever since. That year, also, Bandera Texas held its first “Stompede,” a huge festival described as “the Cowboy’s National Holiday.”

Local rancher Ed Mansfield, first president of the Bandera Ranchmen and Farmers Association, established Mansfield Park and held Bandera’s first large “advertised” rodeo in 1924. Mansfield Park became the training ground for many future rodeo champions, further enhancing Bandera’s “cowboy” reputation. Western movies were filmed here, and several famous riders, ropers and gunslingers performed in Bandera.

Photo Courtesy 1881 Old West Photography

Photo Courtesy 1881 Old West Photography

Some of the early guests at the dude ranches were servicemen from San Antonio, who came to Bandera for some R&R. Needless to say, there were some rowdy times. By 1963, there were so many complaints that the “Stompede” was discontinued, and servicemen were banned from the town!

Today, Bandera Texas celebrates the cowboy way of life in a slightly more mellow fashion, but there’s always something going on at the local honky-tonks, and traffic consists of horses and motorcycles as often as cars and trucks. Artists and musicians mingle with ranchers and tourists to provide the atmosphere that keeps Bandera unique even in modern times. And while the town’s population has held steady at around 1,000 for many years, the population of the county has boomed. The hills that once held hidden dangers now provide a taste of Hill Country paradise, and the old west legend draws thousands whose “heroes have always been cowboys.”

By John Hallowell

John Hallowell is the past editor of several Hill Country publications. He has been exploring the Texas Hill Country for almost 20 years.