This Day In Texas History - May 26

[joe817]

1837 - The executor of William Barret Travis's estate placed a notice offering fifty dollars for the return of an escaped slave named Joe in the Telegraph and Texas Register. Joe, born about 1813, was one of the few survivors of the battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836, in which his master was killed. Accounts of Joe's departure from the Alamo differ, but he later joined Susanna W. Dickinson on the way to Gen. Sam Houston's camp at Gonzales. Joe was brought before the Texas Cabinet and questioned about events at the Alamo. He was then returned to Travis's estate near Columbia, where he remained until April 21, the first anniversary of the battle of San Jacinto. On that day, accompanied by an unidentified Mexican man and taking two fully equipped horses with him, he escaped. Presumably Joe's escape was successful, for the notice in the Telegraph and Texas Register ran three months before it was discontinued. Joe was last reported in Austin in 1875.

1853 - John Wesley (Wes) Hardin, outlaw, son of James G. and Elizabeth Hardin, was born in Bonham, Texas, on May 26, 1853. Hardin's violent career started in 1867 with a schoolyard squabble in which he stabbed another youth. At fifteen, in Polk County, he shot and killed a black man as a result of a chance meeting and an argument. With the Reconstruction government looking for him, he fled to his brother's house, twenty-five miles north of Sumpter, Texas, where in the fall of 1868 he claimed to have killed three Union soldiers who sought to arrest him. Within a year, he killed another soldier at Richard Bottom. In 1871 Hardin went as a cowboy up the Chisholm Trail. He killed seven people en route and three in Abilene, Kansas. After allegedly backing down city marshall Wild Bill Hickok, who may have dubbed him "Little Arkansas," Hardin returned to Gonzales County, Texas, where he got into difficulty with Governor Edmund J. Davis's State Police. Hardin then settled down long enough to marry Jane Bowen. Out of that marriage came a son and two daughters. Hardin added at least four names to his death list before surrendering to the sheriff of Cherokee County in September 1872. He broke jail in October and began stock raising but was drawn into the Sutton-Taylor Feud in 1873–74. He aligned himself with Jim Taylor of the anti-Reconstruction forces and killed the opposition leader, Jack Helm, a former State Police captain. In May 1874 he started two herds of cattle up the trail; while visiting in Comanche he killed Charles Webb, deputy sheriff of Brown County. In 1895 he went to El Paso to appear for the defense in a murder trial and to establish a law practice. Despite efforts to lead a decent life, he was soon in trouble. He took as his lover the wife of one of his clients, Martin Morose, and when Morose found out about the affair, Hardin hired a number of law officials to assassinate him. On August 19, 1895, Constable John Selman, one of the hired killers, shot Hardin in the Acme Saloon, possibly because he was not paid for the murder of Morose. Hardin died instantly and was buried in Concordia Cemetery, El Paso. Many people who knew him or his family regarded him as a man more sinned against than sinning. The fact that he had more than thirty notches on his gun, however, is evidence that no more dangerous gunman ever operated in Texas.

1900 - The famous Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers is dissolved.

1907 - Marion Michael Morrison was born in Winterset, Iowa. He went on to fame as an actor who adopted the stage name "John Wayne." Well, he's not a Texan. But a lot of Texans claim him. The rugged, tough, handsome actor became a symbol of the American individualist and the leading performer in Western movies for two generations. Born in the Midwest, young Marion's family relocated to Glendale, Calif., when he was 6 years old. A high school football star, he had hoped to attend the U.S. Naval Academy but was rejected by Annapolis. Instead, he earned a football scholarship at the University of Southern California. It was his football coach who got him his first job in Hollywood — as a prop assistant. He worked his way up to roles as an extra and then a major role in John Ford's 1930 movie The Big Trail. After nine years of struggles, Ford hired him to play Ringo Kid in Stagecoach and a star was born. Among his other famous movies: Red River, Fort Apache, Rio Bravo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Alamo and True Grit. Thousands of Texas boys grew up wanting to be an American hero like John Wayne. {and this Texas boy was one of them}

1933 - Country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers, nicknamed "the Singing Brakeman," died in New York City at the age of thirty-five. Rodgers, born in Mississippi in 1897, worked as a brakeman on railroads throughout the South and learned songs from black railroad workers, who also taught him to play the banjo and the guitar. A severe case of tuberculosis, contracted in 1924, forced Rodgers to retire from the railroad. In 1927 he signed a contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company, and his records catapulted him to almost immediate fame. He recorded 111 songs altogether and sold twenty million records between 1927 and 1933. To seek relief from tuberculosis, Rodgers moved to the Hill Country and in 1929 built a $50,000 mansion in Kerrville, but left there to live in a modest home in San Antonio in 1932. Among the many performers who either knew or were influenced by Rodgers are Mance Lipscomb, Freddie King, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Tommy Duncan, Kenneth Threadgill, and Bill Neely.

1965 - Former Texas A&M football coach Homer Norton died. In 1939, Norton led the Aggies to a perfect 10-0 regular season, then beat Tulane in the Sugar Bowl to win A&M's only National Championship. For the next 8 years, Norton's Aggies would fail to beat Texas even once.

1977 – The United States and Mexico established the Rio Grande as the international border from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico.

[airborned]

I enjoy the history posts. I learn something new from every one.

[joe817]

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoy them.