This Day In Texas History - March 10

[joe817]

1756 - Bernardo de Miranda y Flores, lieutenant governor of Texas, returned to San Antonio after his expedition to Los Almagres Mine in present-day Llano County. He announced the discovery of “a tremendous stratum of ore,” and he proclaimed the promise of “a mine to each of the inhabitants of the province of Texas.” Diego Ortiz Parrilla, presidio captain at San Sabá, soon obtained more samples in an attempt to convince authorities that he should move his garrison to Los Almagres Mine. Those plans died with the destruction of the Apache mission and presidio in 1758. By the 1830s Stephen F. Austin depicted the legendary “lost” silver mine on maps. James Bowie was among the fortune hunters who tried to find the mother lode. Finally in the early 1900s, after examining Miranda’s journal, historian Herbert E. Bolton found the site near Honey Creek in Llano County. Even though geologists classified the mine as unproductive, romantic tales of Hill Country riches continued to abound.

1836 - Sam Carson arrives late to sign the Declaration of Independence. A week later he loses by six votes becoming the president of Texas. David G. Burnet was elected.

1836 - Sam Houston abandoned Gonzales and retreated eastward to avoid the advancing Mexican army. The exodus of settlers in the area was called the Runaway Scrape.

1836 - Joseph Bonnell, an army officer during the Texas Revolution, son of Charles Bonnell and Mary Brehault Bonnell, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 4, 1802. Joseph entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, and graduated on July 1, 1825, in the thirty-seven-man West Point Class of 1825. On April 23, 1831, Lieutenant Bonnell, stationed with the Third Infantry Regiment at Fort Jesup, Louisiana, married Anna Elizabeth Noble in Adams County, Mississippi. He brought his bride to Fort Jesup, which is near Natchitoches and the U.S. border with Mexican Texas. In 1835 Bonnell distinguished himself as an official witness to the Caddo Indian Treaty of 1835. He discovered wrongdoing by the U.S. agent and provided a deposition on behalf of the Caddo Indians, which ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1850 in United States v. Brooks.

At the outset of the Texas Revolution, Maj. Gen. Sam Houston, commander-in-chief of the armed forces in Texas, selected Bonnell to be his aide-de-camp. This appointment was approved by the Governor and General Council of Texas. Joseph Bonnell was commissioned as a captain in the List of Officers in the Regular Army of Texas which was issued March 10, 1836. Thus Bonnell holds a unique distinction in Texas history as the only individual who was a regular army officer in both the United States Army and the Texas Army at the same time.

1842 - President Sam Houston declared a national emergency and ordered the archives removed to Houston, but the people of Austin refused to let the records be taken. When Houston issued a second order on December 10, the struggle known as the Archive War resulted. Mexico's refused to recognize the independence of Texas after the Treaties of Velasco, and invaded Texas again.

1848 - The U.S. Senate ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and annexed most of California, New Mexico and Arizona to the U.S. The war from 1846 to 1848 sprang partly from the annexation of Texas to the U.S. American troops gradually took over more and more of Mexico in hopes of forcing Mexico to relinquish its claims to territory north of the Rio Grande and to sell California at a price desired by the U.S. American troops captured Mexico City in September of 1847, felling the government and leading to the resignation of Pres. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

1862 - In January 1862 George H. Sweet, a newspaperman from San Antonio, began organizing a cavalry regiment. Having secured a commission and authority to organize his own regiment, Sweet formed ten companies from Bexar, Wise, Dallas, Johnson, Tarrant, Limestone, Denton, Red River, Van Zandt, and Johnson counties. Sweet had little trouble raising his regiment, which was composed of "middle-aged men and boys," according to one member, and each had to supply his own horse and equipment. They practiced their cavalry drill on courthouse squares and prairies around the Lone Star State and, armed with Bowie knives and armament of every kind, presented a most unmilitary appearance. Finally, on March 10, 1862, the Fifteenth Texas Cavalry was mustered into service at McKinney in Collin County.

1890 - the John Sealy Training School for Nurses, the first formal nursing school in Texas, opened with eighteen students in Galveston's two-month-old John Sealy Hospital.

1898 – A group of Eagle Lake business men and planters chartered the Cane Belt Railroad, which was needed to transport sugar cane and other crops to market.

1902 - The process of rebuilding continues in Galveston after 18 months of cleanup following the most destructive storm ever to come ashore in the United States. Plans are now being implimented to raise the level of the city by up to 15 feet and adding an enormous breaker along the beach that will hopefully absorb the force of any future storms. Construction on this new "Sea Wall" will begin later this year.

1922 - The Sealy and Smith Foundation for the John Sealy Hospital was chartered under the laws of Texas as a charitable corporation. The corporation was formed by Galveston entrepreneur John Hutchings Sealy and his sister, Jennie Sealy Smith.

1925 - Asa Elmer (Ace) Reid, Jr., cowboy cartoonist, son of Asa E. Reid, Sr., and Callie Bishop, was born on March 10, 1925, at Lelia Lake, in Donley County, Texas. Millions of devoted readers and fans identified with such timeless and seemingly simple humor. Reid, described by one critic as a "Texas pen-and-ink Will Rogers," died on November 10, 1991.

[joe817]

RUNAWAY SCRAPE. The term Runaway Scrape was the name Texans applied to the flight from their homes when Antonio López de Santa Anna began his attempted conquest of Texas in February 1836. The first communities to be affected were those in the south central portions of Texas around San Patricio, Refugio, and San Antonio. The people began to leave that area as early as January 14, 1836, when the Mexicans were reported gathering on the Rio Grande. When Sam Houston arrived in Gonzales on March 11 and was informed of the fall of the Alamo, he decided upon retreat to the Colorado River and ordered all inhabitants to accompany him. Couriers were dispatched from Gonzales to carry the news of the fall of the Alamo, and when they received that news, people all over Texas began to leave everything and make their way to safety. Houston's retreat marked the beginning of the Runaway Scrape on a really large scale.

Washington-on-the-Brazos was deserted by March 17, and about April 1 Richmond was evacuated, as were the settlements on both sides of the Brazos River. The further retreat of Houston toward the Sabine left all of the settlements between the Colorado and the Brazos unprotected, and the settlers in that area at once began making their way toward Louisiana or Galveston Island. The section of East Texas around Nacogdoches and San Augustine was abandoned a little prior to April 13. The flight was marked by lack of preparation and by panic caused by fear both of the Mexican Army and of the Indians. The people used any means of transportation or none at all. Added to the discomforts of travel were all kinds of diseases, intensified by cold, rain, and hunger. Many persons died and were buried where they fell. The flight continued until news came of the victory in the battle of San Jacinto. At first no credence was put in this news because so many false rumors had been circulated, but gradually the refugees began to reverse their steps and turn back toward home, many toward homes that no longer existed.