This Day In Texas History - April 5

[joe817]

1709 – Pedro de Aguirre travelled from San Juan Bautista to the Colorado River to escort two missionaries to meet the Tejas Indians, but turned back before reaching them.

1836 - Santa Anna reached Atascosito Pass on the Colorado. Mexican General Adrián Woll assigned a battalion to construct rafts to ferry across the remainder of the army, which was arriving under Gen. Vicente Filisola, second in command of the Mexican forces. Santa Anna then proceeded with a division to San Felipe.

1836 - 1836, Gen. Sam Houston ordered Ira Ingram, then commissioned as a major, to return to East Texas and the United States to recruit volunteers for the Texas army. He was a member of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred.

1861 - Federal troops evacuated Fort Quitman on April 5, 1861. During the Civil War the post was intermittently garrisoned by Confederate and Union detachments and quickly fell into disrepair. Capt. Henry Carroll and Company F, Ninth United States Cavalry, reoccupied the crumbling adobe buildings on January 1, 1868, and on February 25 orders from headquarters of the District of Texas reestablished the fort. Over the next decade companies and detachments of black soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry and the Twenty-fifth United States Infantry guarded the mails and scouted for hostile Indians.

1874 - Houston business tycoon Jesse Jones is born in Tennessee.

1885 - A fire destroyed the Missouri Pacific Hospital, the first in Fort Worth. The precursor of St. Joseph Hospital was founded in 1883 for railroad workers. In early 1885 Mother St. Pierrette Cinquin, mother superior of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word of San Antonio, agreed to have her order take charge of the hospital's nursing program. The hospital burned only a few months after the sisters arrived. The Missouri Pacific Railroad rebuilt it and continued to operate it until moving all patients to Sedalia, Missouri, in 1889. The railroad then sold the hospital to the sisters for $15,000. The institution was renamed St. Joseph's Infirmary and dedicated on May 12, 1889. Its name was changed to St. Joseph Hospital in 1930.

1896 - In El Paso, U.S. deputy marshal George A. Scarborough shot constable John Selman, a celebrated gunman and gambler who had just left the Wigwam Saloon. Selman died the next day on the operating table. Scarborough was acquitted of murder but was forced to resign his position as deputy marshal. Selman, perhaps best known as the man who killed John Wesley Hardin in 1895, had himself been a notorious figure since the 1870s. Four years to the day after Selman's death, Scarborough died at his home in Deming, New Mexico, following a gun battle with rustlers in Arizona.

1905 - James Stephen Hogg, the first native governor of Texas in one of his last public addresses was at the banquet in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt at Dallas, when two of the finest leaders of their parties met and exchanged respects. On March 3, 1906, Hogg died in the home of his partner, Frank Jones, at Houston. He was buried in Austin.

1907 - The legislature approved Governor Thomas M. Campbell's request to operate the Texas State Railroad as a common carrier and to extend the line from Maydelle to Palestine. It originated as an industrial railroad serving the iron foundry operated by the Texas prison system on the penitentiary grounds near Rusk. In 1896 the first five miles of track was built west from North Rusk to haul wood and iron ore to the smelter known as the "Old Alcalde" that had been built by the State in 1884. In 1903 the prison smelter was expanded and the railroad was extended five miles to the community of Maydelle.

1917 - The first planes landed at Kelly Field, San Antonio. The site was selected in 1916 to expand the facilities of the fledgling Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps. It was initially called Aviation Camp, then Kelly Field, and finally Kelly Air Force Base. During World War I almost all American combat aviators earned their wings at Kelly, which expanded dramatically. In 1928 the movie Wings was filmed at the base. World War II brought further changes, and the base became a major logistical center for the separate United States Air Force in the postwar period. In 1993 came news that the base was to be closed. At the time, Kelly was the oldest continuously operating flying base in the United States, and was the largest employer in San Antonio.

1944 - The Ninetieth Infantry Division, known as the "Tough 'Ombres," "Texas' Own," or the "Alamo" division landed in England. It saw action on D-Day (June 6) in Normandy. Later it participated in campaigns in Normandy, Northern France, the Ardennes, the Rhineland, and Central Europe. Tentative casualty figures compiled late in 1945 reported 2,963 killed, 14,009 wounded, 1,052 missing, and 442 captured.

1962 - One day after his accountant was found dead, Billie Sol Estes was Indicted on this date in 1962 on fifty-seven counts of fraud in swindling investors out of and the government out of $24 million of investments and grain subsidies.

1963 - Menton Joseph Murray, Sr sponsored the Padre Island National Seashore bill, signed by Governor John Connally on this day.

1976 - Following years of seclusion in Panama, Canada, London and Acapulco, Howard Hughes died on a plane en route from his residence in Mexico to a hospital in Houston.

1991 - John Tower, United States senator from Texas, died, along with his daughter Marian, in a commuter plane crash near New Brunswick, Georgia. Tower was born in Houston on September 29, 1925. As the first Republican senator elected in Texas since 1870, he was seen by many as heralding the arrival of two-party politics in Texas. He was reelected to the Senate in 1966, 1972, and 1978. Upon assuming his Senate seat, Tower was assigned to two major committees: Labor and Public Welfare, and Banking and Currency. In his twenty-four year Senate career, Tower influenced a variety of domestic and foreign policy issues. As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he worked to strengthen and modernize the nation's defenses. He was widely respected for his skills at guiding legislation through Congress.

[puma guy]

Thanks so much for your continuing posts of these historical events that were such part of our rich history and heritage. I know it takes much time and effort to glean this information and post it here for us to enjoy and learn about Texas' past.

[Sidro]

Before John Tower entered into politics he was a professor at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, Tx.

[ELB]

WWII Kelly Airfield was not only a pilot training base, but trained aircraft mechanics as well. My father arrived there in 1942 after basic training, and this changed his vocation for life from farming to military aircraft maintenance, right up to inspecting the fuel and oxygen tanks for the Apollo command module and LEM.

I asked him once how he came to be an aircraft mechanic when he enlisted after Pearl Harbor. He said he wanted to be a paratrooper, but they told him he was too small. Then he was asked what he did as a civilian, and when he replied farmer, asked him if he knew how to work on tractors. Of course he did. Boom, aircraft mechanic school for him!

His sojourn at Kelly no doubt had something to do one of his sons making a career out of the USAF.

Thanks Joe817 for putting up these posts.

[joe817]

Thanks for the kind words puma guy. I agree, we Texans have a rich and colorful history. It fascinates me to no end to read about little known or forgotten facts/people/events that helped shape Texas into what it is today.

Sidro, I didn't know that! Thanks. My grandfather lived right across the street from Midwestern University on Midwestern Parkway. The big white one south of the tennis courts. I think the college president lives there now.

Most welcome ELB. And thanks for the story! Another of "Our Greatest Generation" tale.

Tomorrow's post has a very interesting piece of history, going back to the seeds of the cause of the Texas Revolution, and the fight for independence.

[n5wd]

The Billie Sol Estes saga was kind of interesting. It seems Billie Sol had figured out the art of the Shell Game, and was using fertilizer tank trailers, a familiar sight to anyone in West Texas, as collateral for various loans and federal programs.

After his conviction, his wife and daughters moved back near Estes's family home in Clyde. I was classmates with one of his daughters at a junior high school in Abilene. I believe the daughter's name was Pamela.

Also, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the rumors say, was almost dropped from the Democrat ticket by John F Kennedy due to his close ties to Mr. Estes. They apparently had a lot of business dealings together.