The long-lost mission of Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo, one of the earliest outposts of Europe’s colonial frontier in Texas, has been rediscovered.
An archaeology team from Texas Tech University, in collaboration with Texas Historical Commission archaeologists, found the site in Jackson County, Texas, on a private ranch near the Presidio la Bahía and Fort St. Louis. The mission was established in the 1680s by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, a French explorer and trader instrumental in the French colonization of North America and, by more incidental means, the United States’s claim to Texas. Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo was among the most highly successful efforts to convert the native Karankawa tribe. However, the venture ultimately was his undoing: He was killed during an expedition to locate the mouth of the Mississippi, while the Karankawa destroyed the colony, leaving its members dead, scattered, or abducted.
Spain occupied the site during its missionary campaign in North America. Still, the settlement was short-lived, and the entire mission was lost when Spain began withdrawing from the eastern frontier in the 1700s amid territorial shifts between France, Spain, and Britain. Lost but not forgotten, as successive generations of archaeologists searched for the mission site that concluded La Salle’s story.
Tamra Walter, assistant professor of archaeology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, led the team that finally found it. “There was a lot of help, and people had been trying to find the site for so long,” Walter told Phys.Org. “We couldn’t have done this without the collaboration from so many people.
Her team, which includes students from Texas Tech, is preparing the site for a magnetic survey to determine its exact boundaries and for an excavation of any remaining artifacts.
“There are missions that are about the same age, but the problem is they had been occupied for almost 100 years,” Walter said. “Earlier occupations are obscured by the later ones. At this mission, activity dates from about 1721 or 1722 to 1725 or 1726. We have a snapshot of what it was like to live on the Spanish frontier of Texas at that very moment.”
