This Day In Texas History - April 29

[joe817]

1554 - Three Spanish ships were wrecked by a storm off Padre Island near present-day Port Mansfield. The San Esteban, the Espíritu Santo, the Santa María de Yciar, and the San Andrés had set out from Mexico on April 9, bound for Spain. Only the San Andrés escaped the storm. Approximately 300 people were on the three wrecked vessels; of them, perhaps one-half to two-thirds drowned before reaching the beach. A small contingent, probably including Francisco del Huerto, departed for Mexico in a little boat to organize a relief expedition.

The second and larger group of survivors undertook what they thought would be a short journey back to Mexico by land. They ran afoul of the local Indians, and only one survivor, Fray Marcos de Mena, reached Pánuco. A Spanish salvage expedition arrived at the site of the wrecks within two months and managed to recover less than half of the 1,000,000 ducats the ships were carrying. After that, the remains of the three ships lay undiscovered until the late 1960s. Artifacts recovered from the San Esteban are now in the Corpus Christi Museum.

1856 - A shipload of camels arrived at the Texas port of Indianola. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had urged Congress to bring the animals from North Africa to help the army in its Indian operations. Major H. C. Wayne sailed to North Africa in the naval storeship Supply in May 1855 and returned with the first thirty-three camels in April 1856. On June 4 Wayne set off with his caravan for the frontier posts. The expedition stopped for a time at Victoria, where the animals were clipped and Mrs. Mary A. Shirkey made camel-hair socks for the president of the United States. At Camp Verde(near present-day Kerrville) experiments were conducted to test the camels' utility in chasing Indians and transporting supplies. Although more camels were imported, ultimately the experiment failed. Handlers found the animals smelly, obnoxious, and hard to control. Escaped camels roamed the desert for years and got into the folklore of the region. The camels were later set free on the dunes of the Gulf Coast.

1874 - Margaret Hunter Kinkaid was born. She founded the Kinkaid School in Houston after learning married women couldn't teach in the local public school system.

1874 - At the close of the Reconstruction era, an act was passed authorizing the governor to appoint "a suitable person to take charge of the public halls of the capitol, including the Senate chamber, hall of the House of Representatives, public library, the capitol grounds and State Cemetery, with all the public property belonging thereto, who shall be a practical horticulturist." The Department of Insurance, Statistics, and History was established under the Constitution of 1876, and in addition to his other duties, the commissioner of the new department was to have charge and control of the State Library and of all documents transferred under the law from the other departments. The Texas State Library services include preservation of historical documents, including past and current documents of the state government, aiding research workers, publication and display of valuable Texana, and a wide range of activities to help improve library facilities throughout the state and to stimulate use of available libraries.

1875 - The townspeople of Rusk celebrated the inauguration of the Rusk Transportation Company, commonly called the Rusk Tramway. The town had been bitterly disappointed when the International Railroad Company, completed from Palestine to Jacksonville in 1872, bypassed Rusk. Citizens of Rusk chartered the Rusk Transportation Company in 1874 to build a tram railway from Jacksonville to Rusk. It had a six-ton locomotive, a passenger coach, and three flat cars. But pine rails cut from neighboring forests were substituted for more expensive iron rails and warped frequently, causing regular derailments. The cars had to be lifted back on the rails by crew members and passengers.

Often freight thrown off the open cars had to be picked up. The Rusk Tramway was sold at foreclosure for $1,000 in 1879. Although the enterprise was a financial disaster to its promoters, the property rights and franchises were sold to the Kansas and Gulf Short Line Railroad Company in 1881. Parts of the old tram roadbed were used by that company in constructing its own track between Jacksonville and Rusk.

1983 - In Houston, President Reagan visited the Cenikor Foundation.

[ELB]

The camel story is interesting. I first heard about it when I was a kid and picked up a book called "Hi Jolly", about an Arab kid who comes to America as a handler for the camels. It was fiction, not history, but I found it a fascinating idea, the experiment with the camels. And btw, the kid was called "Hi Jolly" because when the US Cavalry sergeant asked him his name, the kid, a muslim who had been to Mecca, said "Hadji Ali," utterly perplexing the sarge, who wrote down what he heard.

Probably just as well the there aren't camels wandering the western US now. When I was stationed in Saudi Arabia, there were a lot of camels running loose outside the cities. They were mostly black or brown, and neither color showed up well in my headlights at night. It was quite heartstopping to be buzzing along the highway at night and suddenly come upon one or three or more crossing the road.

[n5wd]

People in the States talk about the damage a deer or elk can do to a car when the two come into accidental contact. Camels can do quite a bit more damage, as they tend to raise up on the legs just before impact, causing the mass of the bodies to come down onto the top of a car quite often.

We had them roaming the area of the highway between Adana, Turkey, and the Incirlik air base, just east of town. Of course, if you came into contact with one of the camels, you instantly bought the beast from its "owner", who swore up and down that it was his most prized possession, worth many times what was being offered in compensation. An auto-camel collision was where I first heard the term "Inshallah", on our second day in Turkey. "Inshallah", means ''If Allah wills it' , which often explained unfortunate circumstances in Turkey.