This Day In Texas History - June 22

[joe817]

1824 - The battle of Jones Creek was fought between colonists of the lower Brazos River and Karankawa Indians on June 22, 1824. After several Indian raids in which some immigrants were killed, Stephen F. Austin commissioned Randal Jones and a company of twenty-three other settlers to organize a retaliation. According to Jones, the problem began at a store belonging to James (Brit) Bailey, when braves demanded to purchase ammunition. Fighting broke out, and the Indians fled to their encampment with Jones and the settlers in pursuit. The next morning the settlers attacked thirty Indians camped on the bank of what later became Jones Creek in southern Brazoria County. Both sides had many casualties; the settlers returned home, and the Indians retreated across the San Bernard River but continued to trouble the settlers. The creek has since then borne Jones's name. A Texas Historical Commission marker located on State Highway 36 commemorates the battle.

1832 - The expedition of José Antonio Mexía during the summer of 1832 had two purposes: the carrying into execution of the Plan of Vera Cruz against Anastacio Bustamante and absolutism in Mexico, and the preservation of Texas in the Mexican union. Mexía sailed from Tampico on June 22, 1832, with 300 soldiers on five ships. He was hospitably received at Brazoria, where on July 17 a meeting of the townspeople explained to him the causes of the Anahuac Disturbances and the battle of Velasco and asserted that the Turtle Bayou Resolutions were in conformity with the Plan of Vera Cruz. All matters of consequence were satisfactorily settled during his six-day stay at Brazoria. When Mexía reached Galveston on July 24, he met the vessels bearing the troops from Anahuac who had also embraced Santa Anna's cause. Mexía decided that Texas affairs were progressing satisfactorily for Santa Anna and returned to Tampico, where he arrived on July 28.

1835 - James B. Miller, early Texas physician and public official, joined others pledging to offer armed resistance to the Mexican customs officials in Anahuac. By July 16, however, Miller wrote Domingo de Ugartechea, military commandant of Coahuila and Texas, about his role in the Anahuac Disturbances, assuring him that he had "taken the most prompt and energetic measures to put down the excitement"; he wrote, " am happy to inform you that this department is perfectly tranquil, and I pledge myself that it shall remain so." Miller became an active member of the "peace party," which considered a declaration of independence premature.

Even so, when the battle of Gonzales ended any chance of reconciliation, he served under Stephen F. Austin in October 1835, aided in the organization of the Texas army, and, once it was adopted, supported the Texas Declaration of Independence. Miller was a senator in the Fifth Congress of the republic, 1840–41. He was a secretary of the treasury under Sam Houston in 1843 as well as chief justice of Fort Bend County. He was a delegate to the Convention of 1845 but was defeated as candidate for governor in 1845 and 1847. In 1851 he was appointed one of the commissioners to investigate fraudulent land titles west of the Nueces River. Throughout his political career he continued his medical practice and was well-known as a physician. He died in 1854.

1870 - White Horse (Tsen-tainte), a Kiowa chief during the second half of the nineteenth century, was noted among the tribe for his daring. In the summer of 1867 White Horse joined a large party of Comanches and Kiowas on a revenge raid against the Navajos, who were then living in exile on the reservation near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. On the Canadian River near the Texas-New Mexico line, White Horse and some of his followers killed and scalped a Navajo warrior. Although White Horse participated in the council at Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas, he soon cast his lot with the war faction and gained considerable notoriety during the early 1870s for his raids on Texas settlements.

He and his followers made a raid on Fort Sill on June 12, 1870, following the annual tribal Sun Dance, and stole seventy-three mules from the post quartermaster. On June 22 they attacked a party of cattle drovers on the trail a few miles south of the fort. White Horse killed and scalped two men before a detachment of troops came to the Texans' relief. Whites considered him the "most dangerous man" among the Kiowas. After the 1872 councils and the release of Satanta and Big Tree from prison on parole, White Horse was peaceful for a time but remained with the war faction. Because of the atrocities he had committed, he was among those singled out by Kicking Bird for incarceration at St. Augustine, Florida. In 1878 he was returned with the others to the reservation near Fort Sill, where he spent his remaining years peacefully with his family.

1886 - J. Frank Norfleet was a rancher and cowboy extraordinaire. In 1886 Dudley H. and John W. Snyder hired him to help drive 5,000 cattle from Central Texas to the High Plains in the vicinity of present Muleshoe. Since Norfleet was the only one who volunteered to look after this herd, the Snyders cut out a mount of some fourteen horses for him and he was left alone with the cattle on June 22, 1886. Norfleet remained under the Snyders' employ until 1889, when Isaac L. Ellwood hired him as foreman of the newly acquired Spade Ranch in Lamb and Hockley counties.

1901 - Gregorio Cortez, who became a folk hero among Mexican Americans in the early 1900s for evading the Texas Rangers during their search for him on murder charges, was a tenant farmer and vaquero, was finally captured when Jesús González, one of his acquaintances, located him and led a posse to him on June 22, 1901, ten days after the encounter between Cortez and Karnes county sheriff W. T. "Brack" Morris. Some Tejanos later labeled González a traitor to his people and ostracized him. The posses searching for Cortez involved hundreds of men, including the Texas Rangers. A train on the International-Great Northern Railroad route to Laredo was used to bring in new posses and fresh horses.

1905 - The Beaumont and Great Northern Railroad was chartered on June 22, 1905, to connect Trinity in Trinity County with Livingston, thirty-seven miles to the southeast in Polk County. In 1908 the B&GN was sold to R. C. Duff to become part of his proposed line from Waco to Port Arthur. Shortly thereafter, Duff repurchased the line and sold it to the Missouri, Kansas and Texas (Katy). In 1913 the Katy asked the Texas legislature for authority to consolidate the B&GN. Permission was granted over the governor's veto, and the attorney general secured an injunction against the consolidation. The controversy was settled in 1914, when the Katy leased the B&GN for ninety-nine years and agreed to expend $6 million to extend the line from Weldon to Waco.

1917 - Robert David (Davey) O'Brien, All-American football player at Texas Christian University, was born in Dallas, Texas, on June 22, 1917. He enrolled at TCU in 1935, studied geology, and sat on the bench behind Sammy Baugh until 1937, when Baugh went on to the National Football League. In O'Brien's first season as starting quarterback, TCU fell to a mediocre 4-4-3 record, but O'Brien was named to the All-Southwest Conferences first team. In 1938 he led the Horned Frogs to their first undefeated season, including a 15-7 victory over Carnegie Tech in the Sugar Bowl, and the only national championship in school history. He was named to thirteen All-American teams and became the only college football player to win the Heisman, Maxwell, and Walter Camp trophies in the same year.

When he went to New York to accept the Heisman Trophy, Fort Worth boosters hired a stagecoach to carry him to the Downtown Athletic Club. After graduating from TCU O'Brien signed a $10,000 contract with the Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL. In his rookie season with the Eagles he passed for 1,324 yards in eleven games, breaking Baugh's NFL record, and was named the quarterback on the All-Pro team. The Eagles gave him a $2,000 raise, but he retired after the 1940 season to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was assigned to the bureau's field office in Springfield, Missouri, after completing his training.

Later he was a firearms instructor at Quantico, Virginia, and spent the last five years of his FBI career in Dallas. He died of cancer on November 18, 1977. A month later the Fort Worth Club presented the first Davey O'Brien Award, to honor the best college football player in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and New Mexico. In 1981 officials of the newly established Davey O'Brien Educational and Charitable Trust decided to change the award to honor the best college football quarterback in the nation. O'Brien was named to the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame in 1955