by John W. Flores, Times-Review Staff

May 27, 1999

Fort Worth today is a sprawling, thriving city of half a million people, but
it may never have existed if not for Johnson County frontier scout Samuel
Bonaparte Kirkham, who found a good spot for a fort near the Trinity River.

As a young man, Kirkham accomplished many stunning feats, and he was as
loyal as he was intrepid, while he and other brave pioneers trod the Texas
plains long before so-called civilized people arrived.

For his life's work, Kirkham will be honored in a commemoration beginning at 10 a.m., Saturday, at the Prairie Springs Cemetery near Joshua.

The ceremony is being sponsored by the local chapter of the Sons of
Confederate Veterans. Kirkham, a Civil War veteran, will be honored along
with several other brothers in arms from the war.

Wilma Kirkham Reed, Mr. Kirkham's great-great granddaughter, will attend the event. She is a Cleburne native.

"In a 1904 newspaper article he was interviewed and gave some information
about his life," she said. "One time he was crossing a field where the old
football field is now, and some Indians attacked him."

She said he was wounded with an arrow.

"Sometimes, I'll look out over the field - it's a practice field now - and try to imagine the way things were in his day and time."

Johnson County historian Jack Carlton said: "Samuel was the first individual
who built a house between the Red River and Fort Graham, west of the Cross Timbers. He was the first taxpayer in Johnson County, and a chief scout to Col. Middleton T. Johnson. He was based out of Johnson Station, between Mansfield and Arlington.

Today Johnson Station is enveloped by buildings that have spring up in south Arlington in just the past 25 years.

"Kirkham lived three miles northeast of Caddo Peak, one mile from the
present day Burleson. He grew up with the Caddo Indians," Carlton said.

But Carlton, who has written many books in recent years detailing the often
violent process of settling the West, affirmed the stories: "Kirkham led Maj. Ripley Arnold to the site for a new fort, overlooking the Trinity River, that became Fort Worth.

Kirkham moved to Cleburne in 1879, and ran a rooming house located on East Henderson. He died at age 90, in 1919.

Carlton will speak about Kirkham at the ceremony Saturday. He has a new book coming out at the end of the year called "Visionaries of History," and a
full chapter is devoted to Kirkham. It's titled "A Unique Frontiersman."

Carlton said one of the most colorful stories of Kirkham's exploits was in the 1850s when he was assigned to quell a water rights feud between settlers and the Comanche Indians.

Things went bad at a sight near the present-day Buffalo Creek, near downtown Cleburne.

"In this conflict he scalped three Comanche braves, near the Chamber Street
Bridge as it stands today. And he took an arrow in the stomach, but was
saved by a friendly Caddo Indian medicine man," he said.

Kirkham later enlisted in June 1861 in the Confederate Army, when the Civil
War erupted.