Sterling County, Texas: History
=== Native Americans ===
Original native Plains Indians included Comanche, Lipan Apache, Kiowa, and Kickapoo.
The region had a number of violent encounters between the Comanche, local ranchmen, and Texas Rangers. A deadly skirmish occurred in the 1870s between area ranchmen and the Comanche on the Lacy Creek on the present day Campstool Ranch. “The Fight at Live Oak Mott” is an account of the events as written by W.K. Kellis, in the Sterling City News-Record, and later published in Frontier Times by J. Marvin Hunter. In 1879, the last significant battle between the Texas Rangers and the Comanche occurred on the "U" Ranch, at the time the ranch was owned by Earnest and Holland. The Comanches, led by the Quahada chief named Black Horse, left Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on May 29 with a group of 19 braves in a search for buffalo, and by June 29, they had yet to find any buffalo, so they killed a horse on the "U" Ranch, near the headwaters of the Concho River in Howard County, and an ensuing battle with the Texas Rangers soon followed. (I claim that this entire "raid" was probably not by Comanches—possibly by Apaches—but most likely non-Indian horse thieves. It was a cover-up of the mysterious killing of a Texas Ranger. And for the first time in Ranger history several of them were fired for cowardice. --Doyle Phillips)
Although the county was part of the 1842 Fisher–Miller Land Grant, no resulting settlement happened in the area.
Fur traders, Texas Rangers, and federal troops passed through the area between 1800 and 1860. Settlers began arriving after the American Civil War, after the demise of the buffalo herds and the departure of Indian tribes. Indian fighter and buffalo hunter W. S. Sterling settled in the area around 1858. Two decades later, Sterling became a U.S. Marshal in Arizona and was killed in an Apache ambush near Fort Apache. Fellow buffalo hunter S. J. Wiley also settled in the county about the same time as Sterling. According to legend, Frank and Jesse James hid out on Sterling Creek in the 1870s to raise horses and hunt buffalo. Camp Elizabeth began as a Texas Ranger camp circa 1853. It became an outpost hospital facility of Fort Concho in 1874–1886. …