Tarrant rallied a volunteer militia of 69 men, including Captain John B. Denton, who would be the Texans’ only fatality and who would also go on to have a North Texas county bear his name.

[1] [2] [3] Texans used the occurrence of increased Native American raids on Anglo settlements in the Red River counties as justification for the massacre, which was a part of the larger pattern in the Republic of Texas, under the leadership of President Mirabeau B. Lamar, to wage an “exterminating war” on Native peoples, calling for “their total extinction or total expulsion.” [4] The Village Creek area is a stem of the West Fork Trinity River.

Members of several tribes, including Muscogees/Creeks, Seminoles, Wacos, Kickapoos, Wichitas, Shawnees, Nadacos/Anadarkoes, Caddos, Cherokees, and Tonkawas, many of whom had fled or been forcibly displaced from their native homelands by prior waves of white settlement (see Indian Removal), inhabited a series of villages along the banks of Village Creek, which provided them with a dense, forested shelter between white-dominated lands in the eastern part of Texas and Comanchería in the west.

[8][9][10] During the morning hours of May 24, 1841, the militia force encroached the Village Creek area from the south in the vicinity of Cross Timber, Texas.

After capturing a native inhabitant who provided locations of the area villages, Captains Denton, Stout, and Bourland led scouting units north toward the West Fork Trinity River.