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Indians attack San Sabá mission
On this day in 1758, some 2,000 Comanches and allied North Texas Indians
descended on Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá, on the San Saba River near
the present site of Menard. The mission had been established the
previous year to Christianize the eastern Apaches. The attackers killed
two priests, Fray Alonso Giraldo de Terreros and Fray José de
Santiesteban Aberín, and six others, then looted and set fire to the log
stockade. In late summer 1759 Col. Diego Ortiz Parrilla, commander of
the nearby Presidio San Luis de las Amarillas, undertook a military
campaign to punish the Norteños but suffered an ignominious
defeat near the site of present-day Spanish Fort. With French firearms
and Spanish horses, the northern tribes now constituted a stronger force
than the Spaniards themselves could muster. The attack on the mission
marked the beginning of warfare in Texas between the Comanches and the
European invaders and signaled retreat for the Spanish frontier. In
1762, Mexican mining magnate Pedro Romero de Terreros, who had financed
the ill-fated mission with the stipulation that his cousin Alonso de
Terreros be placed in charge, commissioned a huge painting to honor the
memory of his martyred cousin. The Destruction of Mission San Sabá in
the Province of Texas and the Martyrdom of the Fathers Alonso Giraldo de
Terreros, Joseph Santiesteban now hangs in the Instituto Nacional de
Antropología y Historia in Mexico City.
- Links to Related Handbook of Texas Online Articles
- SANTA CRUZ DE SAN SABA MISSION
- TERREROS, ALONSO GIRALDO DE
- SANTIESTEBAN ABERIN, JOSE DE
- ORTIZ PARRILLA, DIEGO
- SAN LUIS DE LAS AMARILLAS PRESIDIO
- ORTIZ PARRILLA RED RIVER CAMPAIGN
- TERREROS, PEDRO ROMERO DE
- SAN SABA MISSION PAINTING
- COMANCHE INDIANS
- Other Texas Day by Day Articles for This Date
- Script writer and future Texan born in Chicago (1939)
- Despite ranchhands' desperate rides, Panhandle cattleman dies of smallpox (1883)
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