This Day In Texas History - June 1

[joe817]

1690 - On this date in 1690, Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, was formally consecrated. Located deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas, the mission is Texas' first Spanish mission.

1836 - Santa Anna boarded the Texas Navy schooner "Invincible" in Galveston to be taken to Vera Cruz as terms of a treaty signed at San Jacinto. Santa Anna is gracious to his Texas hosts, and grateful for the kindness shown him. Unrest in Mexico placed doubts that a treaty signed by Santa Anna would have any weight at home. Instead, he was sent to Washington D.C. to lobby for recognition of Texas by the United States. He did not get to Mexico until the following year.

1844 - Capt. John Coffee Hays left his headquarters at San Antonio on or about June 1, 1844, with fourteen men of his ranger company to scout the hills to the north and west for a Comanche war party led by Yellow Wolf, which had recently been raiding into Bexar County. The party rode as far as the Pedernales River without encountering hostiles and turned back, following the Pinta Trail to its crossing of the Guadalupe River in the area of present Kendall County. The rangers were ambushed by a war party of an estimated 200 Comanche's. The ensuing fight is known as the Walker's Creek fight. The rangers repulsed two counterattacks on their flanks, after which the Indians fled the field and were pursued for three miles under heavy fire from the rangers' revolvers. This fight is considered to be the first in which revolvers were used in combat, and a Comanche who had taken part in the battle later complained that the rangers "had a shot for every finger on the hand." According to Josiah W. Wilbarger, it is the Walker's Creek fight that is depicted on the cylinder of the 1847 Walker Dragoon model Colt revolver.
[ for a fascinating read: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/onli" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ... /btw2.html ]

1864 - Celebrated Confederate partisan Adam Rankin (Stovepipe) Johnson was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. Johnson was born in Henderson, Kentucky, and moved to Texas in 1854. There he gained a reputation as the surveyor of much virgin territory in West Texas, as an Indian fighter, and as a stage driver for the Butterfield Overland Mail. With the outbreak of the Civil War Johnson returned to Kentucky and enlisted as a scout under Nathan Bedford Forrest. His subsequent exploits as commander of the Texas Partisan Rangers within the federal lines in Kentucky earned him a colonel's commission in August 1862 and a promotion to brigadier general in 1864.

1868 - Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, commander of the Fifth Military District (Texas and Louisiana) under Congressional Reconstruction, called an election to be held in each Texas county seat between February 10 and 14, 1868, to determine whether a constitutional convention should be held and to elect delegates to such a convention. The convention assembled at Austin on June 1, 1868. The ninety delegates consisted of eighty whites and ten blacks. Six of the ninety had been members of the Constitutional Convention of 1866. The purpose of the convention was simply to write a constitution, but it was apparent from the beginning that the delegates wished to address broader issues. The convention soon became a contest between different factions pursuing their own agendas.

1881 - Just 4 years after the first telephone was installed in Galveston, The Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company opened a telephone exchange in Dallas, providing telephone service to approximately 40 new subscribers. Three months later, Fort Worth began telephone service, followed by Waco. By the end of 1882, dozens of Texas cities had their own telephone exchanges.

1881 - Carey Wentworth Styles, newspaperman, went to work for the Galveston Daily News. He later became managing editor of the Fort Worth Gazette; in 1883 he purchased the Fort Worth Democrat but four months later sold his interest to Frank L. Twombly and C. W. Hoelzle.

1907 - The Wichita Falls and Southern Railway Company was chartered on June 1, 1907, to build 125 miles from Wichita Falls to Cisco in Eastland County. Its main purposes were to serve the coal fields at New Castle and to draw more area wheat and cotton to Wichita Falls. Principal owners were Joseph A. Kemp, Frank Kell, and Isaac H. Kempner. The capital was $150,000, and the business office was located at Wichita Falls.

1942 - Plainview Field, in Hale County just outside Plainview, was the station of the Fourth Army Air Force Glider Training Detachment for preliminary glider training. Lt. William G. Dixon was in command from the field's establishment on June 1, 1942, until its redesignation as Third Liaison Training Detachment and its removal to Lamesa on April 14, 1943.

1942 - San Jacinto Ordnance Depot received its first shipment of four cars of propellant charges. It was a World War II facility located on a 4,954-acre reservation on the Houston Ship Channel fifteen miles south of Houston. Its functions were to receive, store, and inspect all classes of ammunition (other than smoke) destined for shipment through its docks or through the New Orleans port and to receive, inspect, recondition, and store ammunition received from posts, camps, stations, and overseas theaters of operations. The depot supplied both the army and the navy; by December 31, 1945, it had received over 329,000,000 pounds of ammunition and had shipped over 208,000,000 pounds. The San Jacinto Ordnance Depot continued to ship army and navy supplies between 1945 and 1950. In 1959 the depot was declared surplus, and the United States Army Corps of Engineers took custody. In October 1964 all facilities of the San Jacinto Ordnance Depot were sold to the Houston Channel Industrial Corporation for somewhat more than ten million dollars.

1963 - Texas A&M allows women to enroll.

1969 - The Lyndon B. Johnson State Historical Park opened to the public. The park is a strip of land bounded on the north by the Pedernales River and on the south by U.S. Highway 290, 1½ miles east of Stonewall in eastern Gillespie County. It is two miles long and a half mile wide and comprises 718 acres. It commemorates the life and career of Lyndon Johnson, whose birthplace and ranch just across the river are part of the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park.

1972 - The first Kerrville Folk Festival opened in the Kerrville Municipal Auditorium. The three-day festival was the outgrowth of several Austin musical events held during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. That first festival drew 2,800 fans and featured thirteen performers. By the 1990s the festival had expanded to an eighteen-day schedule over three weekends, and attendance had grown to 25,000. By 1993 more than two dozen of the early "unknown" performers at Kerrville had earned national recording contracts.

1975 - On this date in 1975, Texas born Nolan Ryan, pitched his forth no-hitter, tieing a record set by Sandy Koufax in 1965. It would be another six years before Ryan pitched another no-hitter, closer to home with the Houston Astros. In all, Ryan surpassed Koufax's record by 3 with a total of seven career no-hitters.