The mountain and town were named in honor of Santa Anna, a Comanche chief who was friendly to Texans and held power here in the eighteen forties. In 1846 he visited President Polk in Washington during U.S. negotiations to annex Texas, and he also signed peace treaties, kept until his death of cholera in 1849, that allowed the German Emigration Company to settle lands north of the Llano River. Comanches used the Santa Anna peaks as signal points, and early surveyors, travelers, explorers, and settlers used them as guide points. In 1857 nearby United States Cavalry at Camp Colorado kept lookouts here. During the Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, Frontier Rangers camped at the foot of the mountain with sentries on the height watching the pass on the military road from San Antonio northeastward to Fort Belknap, a strategic outpost guarding Texas from invasion by Indians and Federal troops. During the 1870s thousands of longhorns went through the gap over the Western Cattle Trail, and in 1879 the Gap had a store and post office to supply the cattle drives. When Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe built here in 1886, settlers moved from the gap to the railroad and started the present town. Quarries in the mountain yield fine sands for the manufacturing of glass.