JACKSON COUNTY, TEXAS—According to a statement released by Texas Tech University, a team of archaeologists from Texas Tech University and the Texas Historical Commission have discovered the site of Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo on private land in southeastern Texas.

 

The colony was founded in the 1680s by French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was soon killed by his own men. Christian missionaries from Spain then settled at the site but abandoned it in the 1720s. Team leader Tamra Walter of Texas Tech University said that the discovery not only completes the story of La Salle, but offers a glimpse of life at a Spanish mission between about 1721 and 1726.

“There are missions that are about the same age, but the problem is they had been occupied for almost 100 years,” she said. “We have a snapshot of what it was like to live on the Spanish frontier of Texas at that very moment.”

The team is planning a magnetic survey of the site to locate its boundaries and an excavation. For more on the archaeology of Texas, go to "Letter from Texas: Home on the Range."

The view from Macy’s helicopter as he takes off from ranch headquarters features the far-off turbines and vast modern farms of the Texas Panhandle. As he pilots his craft over the 300-foot-tall cliffs known as the Caprock Escarpment that divide the level plains of the Llano Estacado from the rugged rolling plains below, he begins to point out sections of the ranch that formed the backdrop to events that played out long before the area became a reliable engine of the modern Texas economy.

As he speeds the helicopter along the perimeter of the former U-Lazy-S Ranch, he explains that this rugged landscape conceals a network of sites and artifacts left behind by Native Americans, buffalo hunters, and early cowboys, whose stories are the raw material that forged the most iconic imagery of the American West. With Macy’s support, a team of archaeologists from the Lubbock Lake Landmark, a unit of the Museum of Texas Tech University, is now surveying and unearthing the remains these people left behind. “What we have here is a unique opportunity to explore the history of a single cattle ranch,” says archaeologist Eileen Johnson, director of the Lubbock Lake Landmark. “But it also helps us understand the larger narrative of how people lived here in the southern High Plains.”

Since 2005, the team, led by archaeologist Stance Hurst, has surveyed hundreds of acres on the Macy Ranch and the other ranches that make up the former U-Lazy-S. Among the many sites they have found are Apache and Comanche encampments, shelters where buffalo hunters took refuge during harsh winters, and even a camp made by nineteenth-century Square and Compass cowboys. “You can’t look at any one of these historical eras in isolation,” says Hurst. “We have a chance to see how they work together, how waves of different people occupied this landscape.”