Occasionally I feel compelled to spread the love, branch out from my home base with the BMWDFW motorcycle riding club (MOA Charter #26) near the western side of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and ride with some of our motorcycling friends from the east side of the DFW Metroplex. A news item in the October 2025 issue of BMW Owners News, “Lone Star BMW Riders Rev Up Ride Program To Over 100 Rides Annually,” touts the Lone Star BMW Rider Club’s phenomenal recovery from the pandemic’s socializing restrictions. In addition to my membership in BMWDFW, I’m also a long-time member of the North Dallas-based Lone Star BMW Riders Club (MOA Charter #252). Though I must wade through the deep end of the traffic snarls that surround the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to reach the gathering point for the club’s group rides, I’ve often plied my way through said traffic and participated in many of those 100 annual rides.
I think most North Texas BMW motorcycle riders know of K Avenue running north-south from Dallas through Plano, as it is home to European Cycle Sports and BMW Motorcycles of North Dallas. Since the Lone Star BMW club is more or less based in Plano, many of the 100+ rides started at the Quick Trip gas station just up the street from European Cycle Sports and near K Avenue. Braving Dallas traffic and reaching the QT safe and sound, the club’s members usually mill around the parking lot, sip coffee and socialize while waiting for the ride leader’s short pre-ride safety briefing. Their minds at ease during this pause, I wonder if any my co-riders know that 180 years ago, the very ground on which they stand was a very dangerous place to live, work and play.
Movies, books and tall tales of the Old West seem to be engrained in American culture—maybe because they are based on recent rather than ancient history. Much of why I love these Texas Wild West tales is that they took place on the ground I walk on and ride through almost daily. At one time northern Plano and K Avenue were such a historically dangerous place.
In 1840-1842, just two blocks from where our present-day motorcycle rides often start, Jeremiah Muncey moved his family, along with neighbor McBain Jameson, to the bottom land along Rowlett Creek and started a homestead cabin. One afternoon, while hunting near Muncey’s spot on the creek, neighbors William Rice and Leonard Searcy came to the cabin and found the savagely slain bodies of Muncey, his wife and a small child and their neighbor, Jameson. Two of the older Muncey boys, along with the Rice and Searcy sons, were also out hunting and exploring Rowlett Creek and were now missing. Recognizing signs of a Crow or maybe a Kiowa raid at the cabin, Rice and Searcy frantically began to search for their own sons. Young Searcy had escaped the attack and was found safe about 10 miles away, but the younger Rice had been killed. The two Muncey boys were never found, but two skulls presumed to be the remains of the boys were later found along the trail where the attackers had retreated to the west.
The location where the Muncey Massacre took place is now inside Plano’s Oak Point Park, Nature Preserve and the Bluebonnet hike and bike trail, near the western edge of the upscale Timber Brook Estates community. The Plano Historical Commission erected a plaque recognizing the incident along the Bluebonnet Trail and placed a grave marker at the actual Muncey burial site on the opposite bank of Rowlett Creek.
You can’t ride your motorcycle through the park, but the plaque is easy to find after a good hike around the bicycle trail. Locating the grave marker on the south side of the creek takes a little bushwhacking through waist-high brush and crossing the creek. The solitary burial mark isn’t in a designated cemetery; it sits alone under the trees along the Rowlett Creek. The official State of Texas Historical Marker for the massacre is a couple of miles away on the Spring Creek campus of Collin County Community College Spring Creek, near the original location of the village of Throckmorton.
Thankfully for our recreational rider’s peace of mind, the Muncey Massacre was the last hostile raid in Collin County.