Thia Day In Texas History - April 24

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1678 - Pedro de Aguirre was born. He was a captain in the Spanish army and escorted an expedition into Texas that named the San Antonio de Padua river.

1807 - Manuel María de Salcedo was appointed governor of Texas by the Council of the Indies on April 24, 1807, took his oath of office in Cádiz, and arrived in Texas in the summer of 1808. During his administration the chief problem in Texas was the constant illegal influx of foreigners. His efforts to remove American squatters in the Neutral Ground were futile, and he advised the Spanish government that, to be retained, Texas must be settled with Spaniards from Louisiana or Mexico. Salcedo advocated the establishment of new trading houses to placate the Indians and more troops to guard the frontier.

In the spring of 1810 he made an inspection tour of East Texas and, contrary to instructions from the commandant general, was lenient in his treatment of foreigners and urged the settlers to secure title to their lands. He was recalled to San Antonio during the Mexican War of Independence and was captured on January 22, 1811, when the Casas Revolt broke out; he was, however, restored as governor later the same year. When the Gutiérrez-Magee expedition captured Nacogdoches and La Bahía in 1812, Salcedo and Simón de Herrera besieged La Bahía unsuccessfully until February 1813, when they retreated to San Antonio. Salcedo's forces were defeated in the battle of Rosillo on March 29, 1813, and on April 1 he and his staff surrendered as prisoners of war.

1842 - The Austin, a sloop-of-war and flagship of the Texas Navy first known as the Texas, returned to New Orleans for refitting. From there, despite the fact that Commodore Moore, his ship, and his crew had been declared pirates by Sam Houston, she sailed for the Yucatán on April 15, 1843, hoping to engage the powerful new Mexican steam warship Moctezuma and to break up a rumored amphibious assault on Galveston Island.

1843 - By April 24 about 150 men had assembled, and on that day the The Snively expedition, which the members designated as the Battalion of Invincibles, was organized into three companies with Snively unanimously chosen as the commandant. The Snively expedition was one of a series of forays in which Texas and Mexico engaged during the early period of the republic. To retaliate for indignities heaped upon the Texans resulting from the Texan Santa Fe expedition, the Mier expedition, and Gen. Adrián Woll's raid on San Antonio, Jacob Snively, on January 28, 1843, petitioned the government of the republic for permission to organize and fit out an expedition for the purpose of intercepting and capturing the property of Mexican traders who might pass through territory claimed by Texas on the Santa Fe Trail.

1851 - On April 24, 1851, a stone marker was placed on the Rio Grande at 32º22' N as part of the The Bartlett-García Conde Compromise of 1850. It was intended to resolve a dispute over the southern boundary of New Mexico resulting from errors in the map used by the negotiators of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Instead, the compromise became a partisan political issue, and the question of New Mexico's southern boundary was not finally settled until the Gadsden Purchase in 1853.

1867 - At the battleground of San Jacinto, the first recorded baseball game ever played in Texas saw the Houston Stonewalls (led by first baseman Wakely Williamson) whip up on the Galveston Robert E Lees by the score of 35-2. In 1888, the Texas League was formed, and soon thereafter baseball became America's pastime.

1911 - The Magnolia Petroleum Company was founded as an unincorporated joint-stock association. It was a consolidation of several earlier companies, the first of which, the J. S. Cullinan Company, began operating a refinery at Corsicana in 1898. In 1909 both the Navarro Refining Company, successor to the Cullinan Company, and the Security Oil Company were purchased by the John Sealy Company, which in 1911 became the Magnolia Petroleum Company, with Sealy as president. In 1931, Magnolia became an affiliate of Socony-Vacuum Oil Company. The Magnolia Petroleum Company merged with Socony Mobil Oil Company in 1959. Its operations became part of Mobil Oil Company.

1929 - A tornado hits Slocum in Anderson County, killing 20.

1931 - O. P. DeWalt, president of the Houston NAACP, was assassinated. The 1910 graduate of Prairie View College worked as a real estate agent and school principal before opening the Lincoln Theater, the first exclusively black theater in Houston. He was heralded for standing up to the Ku Klux Klan, which was growing again. He fought against the exclusionary white primaries of the Democratic party and pushed for the establishment of a branch of the National Urban League in Houston. Funeral services were held first in Houston and then in Livingston, where he was born and is buried.

1942 - A war bond quota of more than $18 million is set for Texas

1988 - Miguel Pedraza, Sr., died at his home in Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, near El Paso. Pedraza, born in 1904, was part Tigua and part Piro. For years ethnologists had thought the Tiguas were extinct. The Compromise of 1850 had separated them from fellow Tiguas in New Mexico, thus cutting them off from government support. When other Pueblo Indians were granted reservations in 1864 the Tiguas were excluded because Texas was part of the Confederacy. Thanks in large part to Pedraza's efforts, the state finally recognized the Tiguas in 1967. The next year Pedraza delivered a dramatic appeal to the United States Congress. His successful fight was the first time in half a century that any leader had won national recognition for an Indian group. His efforts were reinforced nearly twenty years later, in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Ysleta del Sur Restoration Act, making the Tiguas eligible for various federal benefits.