Presidio de San Luis de las Amarillas was founded in April 1757 to protect Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá, which was established at the same time for the conversion of the Eastern Apaches, while both outposts were also meant to strengthen Spain’s presence in the region and help deter possible French claims. The Mission stood about three miles downstream from the Presidio on the south bank of the San Sabá River, and both were first built of logs. Although Apaches frequented the Mission, they never entered it to stay, and by befriending them the Spaniards also gained their enemies. On March 16, 1758, allied northern tribes, principally Comanche and Wichita, about 2,000 strong, destroyed the Mission, killed two of its three priests and at least six other Spaniards, and drove back a small relief force sent from the Presidio. The attack was the first armed conflict between Europeans and Comanches in Texas and the first time Spaniards there faced large numbers of Indians armed with firearms acquired through trade with the French. The Mission was never rebuilt. More than a year later, Presidio commander Colonel Diego Ortiz Parrilla led 600 Spanish militiamen and Indian auxiliaries in a punitive campaign against those responsible, but he was repulsed with heavy losses at the Taovaya village on the Red River near present-day Spanish Fort and was later relieved of command. His successor, Captain Felipe de Rábago y Terán, replaced the log stockade with a stone compound measuring about 300 to 360 feet long, with walls 6 to 20 feet high, more than 50 rooms, and corner towers for defense. Numerous attacks against the Presidio and area residents continued in the following years, and Rábago held the post until June 1768, when he abandoned it without authority. Manuel Antonio de Oca briefly reoccupied it in 1770, after which it was permanently abandoned. In the next century, as Anglo settlers arrived, the buildings sometimes served as temporary shelter and refuge during Indian raids, and the compound walls were used to hold longhorn cattle descended from those left by the Spaniards for drives up the Western Trail to Kansas railheads. Traces of the Spaniards’ irrigation ditch remain visible on the south side of the San Saba River; it may have been used to float stones on rafts for construction, and in 1879 it was opened to carry water to Otto Kordzik’s gristmill above present Menard. A painting made about 1763 of the destruction of Mission San Sabá and the martyrdom of Fathers Alonso Giraldo de Torreros and Joseph Santiesteban, commissioned by the Romero de Terreros family and allegedly based on the account of the only surviving priest, Father Miguel Molina, is considered one of the oldest works of the Spanish Colonial period in Texas. A conceptual painting of the Presidio was executed by John Warren Hunter in 1927, and a partial reconstruction of the Presidio was carried out through a WPA grant as a Texas Centennial project begun in 1936, including a chapel, adjacent rooms, part of the walls, and one tower.