This Day In Texas History - April 3

[joe817]

1708 - The Ramón expedition arrived back at San Juan Bautista. The expedition included thirty-one soldiers and citizens, 150 horses and twenty pack mules. Diego Ramón was sent on the excursion by Coahuila governor Alarcón to punish raiding Indians, to gather neophytes for the smallpox-ravaged Rio Grande missions, and to explore the region. The group had left Mission San Juan Bautista on the trip March 9, 1707.

1817 - Bigfoot Wallace was born in Lexington, Virginia. He arrived in Texas during the Texas Revolution, fought Gen. Adrián Woll's invading Mexican army near San Antonio in 1842, and then volunteered for the Somervell and Mier expeditions. Some of his most graphic memories were of his experiences in Perote Prison. As soon as he was released, he joined the Texas Rangers under Jack Hays and fought with the rangers in the Mexican War. In the 1850s Captain Wallace commanded a ranger company of his own, fighting border bandits as well as Indians. He spent his later years in Frio County, near a hamlet named Bigfoot. There he was known as a mellow and convivial soul who liked to sit in a roomy rawhide-bottomed chair in the shade of his shanty and tell over the stories of his career.

1836 - The Bravo(A Mexican brig of war), fighting without her rudder, was run aground and wrecked by a broadside from the Texas Navy schooner-of-war Invincible. Invincible. Later that same day Jeremiah Brown(captain of the Invincible) captured the American-owned brig Pocket, out of New Orleans, en route from Matamoros to Santa Anna's army in Texas with a contraband cargo of flour, rice, lard, biscuit, and 300 kegs of powder. Brown arrived on April 8 with his prize at Galveston, and there he learned from captured documents that Santa Anna had plans to capture all Texas ports and to station 1,000 men on Galveston Island. Thus forewarned, the Texas government hastily fortified the island. The provisions captured aboard the Pocket ultimately were consigned to Sam Houston's army.

1846 - Collin county was demarked from Fannin County and named for Collin McKinney, one of the first settlers of the county and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The original county seat was Buckner. Because this town Buckner was not within three miles of the center of the county, however, McKinney became the county seat in 1848. Like the county, McKinney was named for Collin McKinney.

1855 - To handle news of a wider scope, James Pearson Newcomb began a weekly paper called the San Antonio Herald with the help of J. M. West.

1862 - John McCloskey was born. He was a baseball player and founder of the Texas League. He was elected to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1962.

1888 - Historian and author Walter Prescott Webb was born on a farm in Panola County, Texas. The arid West Texas environment profoundly influenced the young Webb, as reflected in his later writing about the Great Plains. During his tenure as director of the Texas State Historical Association (1939-46), he expanded the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, founded the Junior Historians of Texas, and launched a project to compile an encyclopedia of Texas, published in 1952 as the original Handbook of Texas.

1894 - Arthur "Dooley" Wilson was born in Tyler. As an actor, his most famous roll was that of "Sam" in the 1942 film Casablanca.

1921- 5,000 residents of Sweetwater and surrounding Nolan County threatened to form a new state if the Legislature continued to ignore their demands for reapportionment by population (Redistricting), as required by the state Constitution.

1929 - Amarillo Junior College, now known as Amarillo College, was established. The school was completed in September of that year as the first junior college in Texas.

1944 - The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Smith v. Allwright ruled the so-called "white primary" unconstitutional. The case originated in 1940, when Houston dentist Lonnie E. Smith attempted to vote in the Democratic primary in his Harris County precinct. As an African American, he was denied a ballot under the white primary rules of the time. Smith, with the assistance of attorneys supplied by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (including the future United States Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall), filed suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas in 1942. Smith petitioned for redress for the denial of his rights under the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Seventeenth amendments by the precinct election judge, S. E. Allwright. Following an unfavorable ruling in the district court, Smith's attorneys lodged appeals that ultimately reached the Supreme Court. That court reversed the prior decisions against Smith by a margin of eight to one. The Smith decision did not end all attempts to limit black political participation but did virtually end the white primary in Texas. The number of African Americans registered to vote in Texas increased from 30,000 in 1940 to 100,000 in 1947.