Welcome to Leapon Apocalypse. Episode 6, San Sabah. I'm Brandon Seal.

In 1755, Spanish friars picked a particularly beautiful and defensible spot in northern

Kualaweila for the site of the mission that had been promised to their new Lipan Apache

allies. Actually, more likely, the Lipanes allowed the friars to establish a mission at a spot where

Apaches had already been living for some time.

The site sat in Arroyo along the San Rodrigo River, where water swirls up from the rocky bottom

and flows with striking clarity through limestone canyons and then

disappears back into the rocks in tiny vortexes, little whirlwinds like the great whirlwind

that had carried the Lippane's Apache ancestors down through the plains.

That's my theory anyway, for why this site came to be known as El Remolino, Whirlwind in Spanish,

sometimes translated as Circle House

from the Lipane's own language. Over the next few months, some 2,000 Lipanes came in to settle

around this new mission, digging irrigation ditches, planting crops, and even erecting a chapel.

Then, six months later, the Lippanes burned it all down.

The Spanish friars were confused and not a little bit pissed off by this, but no more confused and

pissed off than the Lepanis had been by two previous attempts by the Spanish to repurpose existing

missions, missions to other Native Texans, in satisfaction of their promise to

establish a Lipan Apache mission. First, the Spanish had offered them a failing mission in East

Texas near modern-day Rockdale, on the wrong side of the Colorado River, which was an informal

borderline between Lipan and Catalan-speaking Tejas worlds. Then, in 1654, the Spanish tried to convince the Lipanes that the missions around San Juan

Baltista, on the Rio Grande, would be sufficient.

But these missions were already occupied and dedicated to other peoples, more specifically,

...