Jack County Museum

06/17/2026

A great Jacksboro tradition!

06/14/2026

06/14/2026

Today is National Flag Day. Across Texas, you’ll often see six flags displayed, but the six flags at the San Jacinto Monument stand apart. Rather than the traditional six flags of Texas history, the Monument features six banners that symbolize pivotal moments from the fight for Texas independence: the Come and Take It Flag, Austin’s Flag, Dodson’s Lone Star Flag, the 1824 Flag, the Bloody Arm Flag, and the Liberty Flag.

In November 1835, the provisional Texas government sent Stephen F. Austin to the United States to gather support for the Revolution. While in New Orleans in January, he wrote to Gail Borden proposing a symbolic national flag that reflected Texas’s Anglo-American roots, Mexican ties, and identity through a single star. The design also marked Austin’s shift from advocating reform within Mexico to promoting full independence.

Although the flag was never produced, his original sketch is preserved at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Discover more about the stories behind these historic flags on our blog: https://thc.texas.gov/blog/flags-texas-revolution-0

06/14/2026

Learn more and sponsor the mission today!

www.wreathsacrossamerica.org

06/13/2026

Today we check our phones to know what season we're in.

For generations, Indigenous communities looked somewhere else.

The land.

The return of birds.

The blooming of certain plants.

The movement of fish.

The behavior of animals.

These observations formed sophisticated seasonal calendars that helped guide hunting, farming, travel, and ceremonies.

Nature wasn't background scenery.

It was information.

The environment constantly provided signals to those who knew how to read them.

Modern science calls it observation.

Indigenous communities called it experience.

“TIME WAS MEASURED
BY THE LAND.”

06/13/2026

The Continental Army was established on June 14, 1775, more than a year before the Declaration of Independence was signed.

06/13/2026

06/13/2026

Most textbooks gave them a paragraph. They deserved a chapter.
At the height of their power in the mid 1800s the Comanche controlled approximately 250,000 square miles of the southern Plains, a territory larger than the state of Texas itself. They called it Numu Sookobitut. Comanche land. Historians would later call it Comancheria, and the most decorated history book written about it, published by Yale University Press and winner of the Bancroft Prize, the highest honor in American historical scholarship, called it what it actually was. An empire.
It stretched from the Arkansas River in present day Colorado all the way south to the Balcones Escarpment just north of San Antonio. It covered significant portions of what is now Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, and Colorado, and its raiding reach extended deep into Mexico. The Spanish outposts in Texas during the late 1700s existed largely because Comanche leaders allowed them to. Spanish governors negotiated with Comanche chiefs as diplomatic equals because they had no other choice.
The Comanche language was becoming the regional lingua franca across a vast stretch of the Southwest. Hispanic settlers in Taos were learning to speak it.
It is important to say this clearly. The Comanche were never a single unified nation under one government or one leader. They operated as independent bands sharing a common language, culture, and homeland. The word empire is a historian's framework for understanding the scale of their power, not a Comanche self description. But the power itself was real, documented, and for more than a century largely unchallenged.
They came originally from Wyoming, following the horse south onto the southern Plains in the early 1700s. Within a generation they had transformed themselves into the most formidable mounted warriors on the continent, pushing the Apache out of Texas, forcing Spain to the negotiating table, and holding the United States Army at bay for decades.
Most textbooks gave them a paragraph. They deserved this.
Drop a Texas flag if the Comanche Empire is a bigger story than you were ever taught.

06/13/2026

Thank you to Gail Prunty Bialas, daughter of Lost Battalion veteran Luther Prunty, for sharing stories from her father about the camaraderie between the Australian POWs and the Jack County boys. According to Luther as told by Gail, “There were many similarities between Texas and Australia and we were all cowboys at heart”. Thank you to Edifly Productions for capturing this touching story on video. Enjoy!