TexasCHLforum.com

flechero wrote: ↑Sat Feb 09, 2019 3:24 pm Good stuff, Joe! Thanks for posting.

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.

Letters From The Past, February 9, 1836.

(Johnson was appointed adjutant and inspector general under Stephen F. Austin and Edward Burleson. In January 1836 Johnson and Dr. James Grant started to lay plans to invade Mexico at Matamoros, despite opposition from Sam Houston and Governor Henry Smith, who were powerless to intervene because the General Council had already ratified the plan. )

JOHNSON to FANNIN. Dear Fannin, [San Patricio, Feb. 9, 1836] " It is of important that you should be aware of the actual state of Matemoras more clearly than I can state in a public letter to avoid mens names being bandied about while they are still in the power of the enemy- If a force of 3 - 400 men is sent agst Matamoras, Vital Fernandez, who commands with 800 Tamaulipas troops, will immediately join you- And the whole of the frontier Towns will immediately follow- Lemas continues fine- & for the purpose of both acquiring essential informat, on & not incurring suspicion he has gone for a few days to Saltillo to visit Santa Ana will be back to Monterey in this- Time is precious & not a moment should be lost-

Fear nothing for Bexar or Goliad or any point of Texas if an attack is made on Matamoras- The enemy will be compeled to change his place of attack & we will maintain the war in his own Co[untry] & with his own means with every advantage on our side. [T]he true policy is to unite all your forces here, leaving small garrisons in Bexar & Goliad & proceed withour delay into the interior- With 150 @200 men I will engage to keep Santa Anas partizans in play from the Town of Riogrande to Reynosa, cut off any reinforcement he may wish to send to the coast & leave you thus to take possession of Matemoras & even Tampico if neces[sary] without his being able to send aid to these points- I can raise the whole country agst. him & then the interior must move so as to compel him to a retrogate movement- Your energies must be kept active to prevent reinforcements by sea & then you play a perfectly secure game. Quickness in your present movements will prove the salvation of Texas- delays at all times are dangerous but more particulatly so at this moment. All depends upon you & I feel convinced you will enter warmly upon your preparations & sp[e]edily advance By a letter recd. in Mier on the [?] ult. from a person of credit in Saltillo it appears that very serious movements in the States of Zacatecas & Guadalaxara agst. Santa Ana were likely to induce him to return incognito to the interior leaving the com[ma]nd of the Army to Genl. Felisola.- If this proves Correct, & from collateral evidence it appears probable, it will be equal to a victory to us as Felisola is an old woman- & Santa Ana will not retire unless the Wigwam is in serious uproar. [F. W. Johnson]"

1836 - William B. Harrison, commanding officer of the company known as the Tennessee Mounted Volunteers, which included David Crockett arrived at the Alamo. This company traveled to San Antonio de Béxar and then on to the Alamo by way of Washington-on-the-Brazos. Harrison died in the battle of the Alamo.

1836 - John Purdy Reynolds, Alamo defender, son of Judge David and Mary (Purdy) Reynolds, was born at Cedar Springs, Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, on March 7, 1806. He graduated from Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, in 1827 and practiced medicine in Mifflin County for seven years. Reynolds traveled to Texas in 1835 with William McDowell, and the two joined the Volunteer Auxiliary Corps of Texas on January 14, 1836, at Nacogdoches. They then went to San Antonio de Béxar as members of Capt. William B. Harrison's company, which included David Crockett. They arrived at Bexar on or about February 9, 1836. It is not known if Reynolds worked as a surgeon in the Alamo garrison. He died in the battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836.

1837 - Christopher Columbus (Lum) Slaughter, ranching pioneer, banker, and philanthropist, was born on February 9, 1837, in Sabine County, Texas, one of five children of George Webb and Sarah (Mason) Slaughter; he claimed to be the first male child born of a marriage contracted under the Republic of Texas. As a boy he worked cattle with his father and at age twelve helped drive the family's ninety-two-head herd to a ranch on the Trinity River in Freestone County, where the family moved in 1852. There, because of his expertise in herding cattle across the often swollen river, he was regularly employed by drovers bound for Shreveport with Brazos-country livestock.

Having observed the better quality of the Brazos stock, he persuaded his father to move farther west. They selected a site in Palo Pinto County, well positioned to provide beef to Fort Belknap and the nearby Indian reservations, and in 1856 the younger Slaughter drove 1,500 cattle to the new ranch. In 1859, with the outbreak of open war with Indians, he volunteered his service and was in the expedition that unexpectedly liberated Cynthia Ann Parker from a Comanche camp. With the withdrawal of federal protection during the Civil War, Slaughter continued to fight Indians as a lieutenant in the Texas Rangers; he also served under Capt. William Peveler in Young County in the Frontier Regiment, part of the effort to maintain frontier protection during the war. He sold his Texas ranching interests in 1871 and in 1873 organized C. C. Slaughter and Company, a cattle-breeding venture, which later pioneered the replacement of the poor-bred longhorn with Kentucky-bred blooded shorthorn stock. By 1882 a herd shipped to St. Louis received seven dollars per hundred pounds.

About 1877 he established one of the largest ranches in West Texas, the Long S, on the headwaters of the Colorado River and there grazed his cattle on the public domain. Desirous of becoming a "gentleman breeder," he purchased in 1897 the Goodnight Hereford herd and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair grand champion bull, Ancient Briton. In 1899 he acquired the famous Hereford bull Sir Bredwell for a record $5,000. Around 1898 Slaughter undertook a major land purchase in Cochran and Hockley counties. He bought 246,699 acres, leased more, and established the Lazy S Ranch, which he stocked with his Hereford herd and mixed breed cattle from the Long S and consigned to the management of his eldest son. In 1877 Slaughter helped organize the Northwest Texas Cattle Raisers' Association (later the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association), for which he also served a term as president (1885). He was the first president of the National Beef Producers and Butchers Association (1888), an organization formed to combat market domination by the meat-packing industry. Frequently titled the "Cattle King of Texas," Slaughter became one of the country's largest individual owners of cattle and land (over a million acres and 40,000 cattle by 1906) and was the largest individual taxpayer in Texas for years. For a time "Slaughter Country" extended from a few miles north of Big Spring 200 miles to the New Mexico border west of Lubbock. He died at his home in Dallas on January 25, 1919.

1854 - Samuel K. Lewis finally received payment for two beeves he had furnished to the Army of the Republic of Texas in November 1842. Lewis, whose place and date of birth are unknown, had moved to Texas in 1838. He was issued an unconditional grant for land in Brazoria County in 1841 and was living in or near La Grange by 1842. In that year, president Sam Houston and Congress were pursuing a policy of retrenchment and economy. Despite their efforts, by the time Texas was annexed to the United States, in 1845, the money owed Lewis was part of a $12 million public debt. Lewis, also represented Austin County in the House of Representatives of the Ninth Congress (1844-1845).

1850 - Fort Polk was abandoned. On March 6,1846 Maj. Gen. Zachary Taylor's men established a military depot near the Brazos Santiago arsenal and named it Fort Polk, in honor of the president of the United States. The fort was also known as Fort Brazos Santiago. Fort Polk was garrisoned from 1848 until 1850 by Capt. F. C. Hunt's company of the Fourth United States Artillery regiment.The location was used as a transit depot for materials for Fort Brown in 1852, and on February 21, 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, it was seized by a Confederate artillery company from Galveston. Long afterward, the United States Army Corps of Engineers straightened the channel and installed jetties in the pass, obliterating the site of both the Mexican fort at Brazos Santiago and Fort Polk. It was located on the north end of Brazos Island in what is now Cameron County, six miles north of the Rio Grande at Brazos Santiago Pass.

1851 - John Marie Durst, early East Texas merchant and patriot, sometimes called the Paul Revere of the Texas Revolution, was born on February 4, 1797, at Arkansas Post, Arkansas. In 1803 the family moved to Natchitoches, Louisiana; then in 1806 Jacob and three of his sons, including John M., went to Texas. John, only nine years of age, was taken into the home of his godfather, P. Samuel Davenport, a prominent Nacogdoches merchant who was appointed his guardian after his father's death in 1814. In his will, dated 1824, Samuel Davenport bequeathed 10,000 acres of land in western Louisiana to Durst. In November 1829 as the result of an agreement with Davenport's son Juan Benigno, Durst acquired all Davenport's land titles west of the Sabine River in exchange for Durst's land titles east of the river. In April 1834 Durst received a Mexican land grant of five leagues in Houston, Nacogdoches, and Anderson counties. By 1837 the tax roll for Nacogdoches County listed him as the owner of 36,200 acres of Texas land.

In 1835 Durst was serving as a Texas representative in the legislature of the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas. While there he learned from Mexican friends of the impending movement into Texas of the forces of Antonio López de Santa Anna. Thereupon Durst rode 960 miles to warn the people of Texas. The ride earned him his Paul Revere sobriquet. During the revolution Durst commanded a company on the east bank of the Angelina River and reported the activities of Col. Galerno Cruz below Nacogdoches. Durst died in Galveston on February 9, 1851, while attending a session of the Texas Supreme Court. He was buried in the family cemetery on his homestead near Leona in Leon County. His wife died in Leon County on September 23, 1885, and was also buried in the family cemetery. In 1936 the state of Texas erected a monument to John M. and Harriet Matilda Durst in the family cemetery in Leon County.

1861 - Gen. David E. Twiggs,in San Antonio, surrendered all United States forts and military equipment in Texas, and move them north to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

1869 - The King Ranch registered its famous "running W" brand as the official brand for the King Ranch–a mark that is still used today. The 825,000-acre King Ranch, in Nueces, Kenedy, Kleberg, and Willacy counties, had its beginning in 1852, when Richard King and Gideon K. Lewis set up a cattle camp on Santa Gertrudis Creek in South Texas. Formal purchase began in 1853, when they bought a Spanish land grant, Rincón de Santa Gertrudis, of 15,500 acres on Santa Gertrudis Creek in Nueces County. [for a fascinating read: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/onli ... /apk1.html ]

1902 - Juanita Shanks Craft was born in Round Rock, Texas. She was appointed Dallas NAACP membership chairman in 1942 and in 1946 was promoted to Texas NAACP field organizer. She and Lulu Belle White of Houston organized 182 branches of the NAACP in Texas over a period of eleven years. In 1944 Mrs. Craft became the first black woman in Dallas County to vote. Her work with the youth unit became a prototype for other NAACP youth groups throughout the country, as she challenged a series of educational barriers.

1914 - Ernest Tubb, country singer and bandleader, was born in Crisp, Texas, on February 9, 1914. He was the son of Calvin and Ellen Tubb. He was reared by other relatives in Ellis County. As a teenager, Tubb took a job in San Antonio as a soda jerk, learned the guitar on his own, and landed an unpaid job at KONO radio station. During this time he was befriended by Carrie Rodgers, widow of Jimmie Rodgers, a major influence on Tubb's singing. She helped Tubb obtain a recording contract with RCA Victor in 1936. In 1940 Tubb signed with Decca Records and began commercially promoting himself and his records through association with a flour company. He made several movies, joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1943, and remained a regular performer there for over forty years.

During his career Ernest Tubb recorded more than 250 songs and sold 30 million records. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1965 and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. He owned a record store in Nashville and was known for his generosity to unknown artists who later became famous, including Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Loretta Lynn. He was often credited with the electric amplification of instruments, which he was not the first to try, but when he did go electric he soon personified the folksy and rowdy music, known as Texas honky-tonk, that was beginning to sell records and attract people to dance halls in the 1940s. Tubb died on September 6, 1984, in Nashville, and was buried in Hermitage Memorial Gardens. He has continued to receive accolades as a country legend. "Walking the Floor Over You" received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1998. In 1999 Tubb was inducted into the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame, and in 2003 CMT ranked him number twenty-one among its forty "Greatest Men of Country Music." He is also a member of the West Texas Music Hall of Fame. His Ernest Tubb Record Shop in Nashville has remained a Mecca for both stars and fans of country music.

1939 - The saxophonist and composer Herschel Evans died of heart disease in New York City. Evans, a native of Denton, Texas, was only thirty at the time of his death, but had already established a formidable reputation in the jazz world. His cousin Eddie Durham, himself a legendary musician, convinced a young Evans to switch from alto to tenor sax. After spending some years in Kansas City, Evans returned to Texas in the 1920s. By the mid-1930s he was a featured soloist with Count Basie's big band, and his musical duels with Lester Young, as on the Basie hit "One O'Clock Jump," are considered jazz classics. Evans also recorded with Teddy Wilson and composed the hit songs "Texas Shuffle" and "Doggin' Around."

1972 - As part of its decision to close many small local offices around the country, Western Union closed the first telegraph office it had established in Texas at Marshall, which had been in operation since February 14, 1854.