Senior Sleuth of Old-World Spanish
Nonagenarian archaeologist discovers La Salle’s fort.
Categories: Old West Saviors
By: Jana Bommersbach 03/01/2008
At 93 years of age, nobody would blame Dr. Kathleen Gilmore for resting on her laurels, especially when she’s already made history by unraveling some of the mysteries of Texas’ past.
Nobody, that is, except Dr. Gilmore herself, who loves her laurels in archaeology but isn’t done yet. “People my age look back a lot,” she says. “I have things to look forward to.”
If her future is like her past, she’s going to leave her mark, yet again, on early Texas history from the days when this was the “New World.”
Dr. Gilmore is famous for her discovery of the site of the French post created by the explorer La Salle in 1685. For centuries, its location had been a mystery, but Dr. Gilmore located it by analyzing the site’s French ceramics. “They were made right, were from the right time period and the only way they could have gotten there was through a French colony,” she says. “Even then, there were people who didn’t believe it. But then they found the cannon balls [that were unquestionably French] and there was no doubt, so I was vindicated.”
La Salle’s Fort St. Louis had been built near Victoria, Texas, southeast of modern-day San Antonio. He was trying to find the mouth of the Mississippi River because he intended to claim and colonize the Mississippi Basin for France—naming it “Louisiana” in honor of Louis XIV. Then he wanted to invade and conquer the Spanish provinces of Mexico. Unfortunately, La Salle’s navigation was far off, and he ended up in what’s now Texas, where he was killed by his own men.
This French threat of encroachment “lit a fire” under Spain into an aggressive colonization of the Southwest, where Spain established dozens of presidios and missions to give itself the upper hand, Dr. Gilmore notes.
After finding LaSalle’s fort, she repeated her detective work and located a number of lost Spanish colonial forts, including Mission Rosario, near Goliad.
Her expertise in the Spanish colonial period is the focus of her future work, and history is lucky this is a woman who doesn’t give up.
A Late Career
Kathleen Gilmore didn’t start out wanting to be an archaeologist. She earned a bachelor’s degree to be a geologist in the 1930s from the University of Oklahoma. But she discovered women weren’t welcome in that field.
“I could have had a PhD in geology and couldn’t have found a job,” says Dr. Gilmore, laughing now about what wasn’t a laughing matter then, in the middle of the Depression when she was trying to help support her parents and siblings.
She took a job as a secretary for a geologist in Houston, but when WWII came, she found herself in the field. “A lot of the men were away and the work needed to be done, so I did actual geology work,” she says.
Then she met her husband Bob and moved to Dallas where she raised four children. At 49, when her children were grown, she enrolled in the archaeology program at Southern Methodist University. “I started my career late in life and for a long time I wouldn’t tell anyone my age, because now I was facing age discrimination as well as sex discrimination,” she says.
But her skill pushed her forward and now she’d like her accomplishments to inspire others. “I’d like to feel I encouraged women to start a career late in life.”
She’s pleased that today, many women are geologists and anthropologists. Many give her credit, like Jim Bruseth, director of the Texas Historical Commission, who told The Dallas Morning News, “She blazed the way for many other women to move into this field.”
Anthropology had interested her since she was a child—she was taken with the lost civilizations of the Mayans and “thought it was very romantic.”
Did it turn out as romantically as she dreamed? “In a different way,” she says with a laugh. “I found there was a lot of hard work involved. You had to shovel and trowel and measure. The romantic edge was taken off, but it held a great fascination for me and still does.”
Her newest fascination centers on remaining mysteries of the Spanish Colonial period.
Last December, she went on a fact-finding visit to Seville, Spain, to examine documents and correspondence that have been uncovered between those early Texas presidios and the Spanish royalty. She had been anxious to hold the hand-copied documents that are now more than 400 years old.
“We’re hoping to find lots and lots of things,” she said. “We’d like to know the specific location of presidios and the activities of the soldiers. Some of the mission sites have never been found.”
But that isn’t the end to her curiosity. She’s planning to co-author a book on Spanish Capt. Felipe Rabago y Keran, who ran a Texas presidio in the mid-1700s.
Dr. Gilmore acknowledges she’s had a rich career that is still in the making: “I have absolutely no regrets. I have tons of stories and hope to pile up some more!”
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