07/18/2026
Here’s a little Bandera,Tx history 🤠Medina River Ranch Resort
Going to start putting up one Hill Country town a week — the site we built for it, and what I learned about the place while building it.
Starting at home.
BANDERA
The Cowboy Capital of the World started as a cypress shingle mill on the Medina in 1853. Sixteen Polish families from Silesia came in 1855 to work it, and stayed. They built St. Stanislaus, still standing — the second oldest Polish parish in the country.
The cowboy part came later. From the mid-1870s through the early 1890s the Western Trail moved seven to ten million longhorns north out of Texas, and Bandera was a staging point on it. T***s Mansfield took his first world championship in calf roping in 1939 and won six more after that.
One thing I learned the hard way: the historical marker downtown says 1938. It's wrong. That year went to Clyde Burk out of Comanche, Oklahoma. Took me a while and five sources to be sure enough to say it out loud.
Today: around 900 people, multiple rodeos, and two different outfits staging gunfights on Saturday.
So. What'd I miss? Not rhetorical — I read all of it, and what checks out gets worked in.
(cowboycapital.ai covers Bandera, Pipe Creek, Medina, Tarpley, and Lakehills. Brody's the guide on it, if you want to poke at him.)
Bandera, Texas — Cowboy Capital of the World on the Medina River. Part of HillCountry.ai, an AI-powered discovery network for the Texas Hill Country.