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Archaeology News
At 92, Dallas archaeologist continues to explore Texas
10-03-07 - North America — , Texas
Archaeologist Kathleen Gilmore has unlocked some of the most elusive mysteries of Texas history.
She spent decades hunting down the location of the French explorer La Salle's lost fort before discovering it near the Gulf Coast. She also excavated a number of Spanish colonial forts in Texas, including Mission Rosario, near Goliad
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At age 92, the Preston Hollow resident will visit Spain in December to study a recently discovered cache of documents sent from early Texas missions.
But her greatest accomplishment may have been digging the way for other women to follow in her footsteps.
"Kathleen is one of our most unique Texas archaeologists," said Jim Bruseth, director of the Texas Historical Commission. "She blazed the way for many other women to move into this field."
Jeff Durst, an archaeologist with the Texas Historical Commission, added: "She's got an incredible amount of spirit and spunk for her age."
Time's passage hasn't slowed Gilmore. In addition to traveling to Spain, she is writing a paper about Texas presidios. In late July, she journeyed back to the site of La Salle's fort near Victoria with a French film crew making a documentary about the French in America.
"I have always loved archaeology since I was a child and read about the lost civilizations of the Mayans," she said. "There was something very romantic about it."
Gilmore grew up in Tulsa and in the 1930s attended the University of Oklahoma, where she studied geology, believing that it would be easier to help support her family during the Depression.
Instead, the only work she could find was as a secretary for a geologist in Houston.
"That's the way it was at the time, and me and a lot of women were forced to accept that," she said.
In the early 1940s, Gilmore married her husband, Bob, and moved to Dallas, where they had four children. She didn't go back to school until she was 49, enrolling in the archaeology program at Southern Methodist University.
"The first 25 years of my life were the times, and the second 25 were for my children," she said.
Over the intervening years, Gilmore became the first female president of the Society for Historical Archaeology and was an adjunct professor at the University of North Texas for 15 years.
She also was the first archaeologist to prove the location of La Salle's Fort St. Louis, according to the Texas Historical Commission.
Traveling on muddy Garcitas Creek, it's easy for travelers to feel that they have stepped into La Salle's era. Thick foliage lines the shores, alligators sun themselves on sandbars, and grazing land stretches into the distance unencumbered by telephone lines or other signs of modern civilization.
La Salle's camp, an isolated field of prickly plants and weeds, is a half-hour boat ride from the nearest ramp.
Fort St. Louis lasted from 1685 to 1689 before its last inhabitants were killed by Indians, according to the Texas Historical Commission. By the camp's end, La Salle had been murdered by some of his men while trying to make his way to French settlements in Canada.
Gilmore's search for the fort began in the early 1970s when she helped analyze some ceramic fragments found in a field near Victoria. The shards turned out to be from the Saintonge area of France.
"I thought we might be on to something, but it took a couple of decades to prove it for sure," she said.
Thousands of items, including jars, musket balls, fragments of wine glasses, and coins, were removed from the site, but it wasn't until eight cannons buried by the French colonists were discovered in the mid-1990s that the site was confirmed as Fort St. Louis.
On the morning the French film crew traveled to the site, Gilmore decided to wait at the Museum of the Coastal Bend at Victoria College, where many of the items she helped excavate are located. Rains had swollen the creek, and the site was a morass of thick mud.
Jean Dulon, one of the French filmmakers, could have been the ghost of La Salle. He was dressed in a billowy shirt, a colonial-style hat and moccasins.
"We thought the best way to interest the French audience about American and French history was to act as if I was a voyager of the 18th century," he said.
The crew has been traveling the United States, making stops in Missouri, Texas and Louisiana, retracing the routes of early French traders.
"One of the great what-ifs of Texas history is, 'What would our state be like today if the French had been successful with their colony?'" Bruseth said, laughing.
Gilmore spent 2 years in the late '90s visiting the site daily and exhaustively excavating and researching artifacts.
From her December trip to Spain, Gilmore hopes to paint a further portrait of the early settlers who called Texas home.... "
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