This Day In Texas History - February 2

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1620 - María Coronel took religious vows in a Franciscan order of nuns who wore an outer cloak of coarse blue cloth over the traditional brown habit. As a nun, now known as María de Jesús de Agreda, she had numerous mystic experiences (more than 500) in which she thought she visited a distant, unknown land. Franciscan authorities determined that the land was eastern New Mexico and far western Texas. Sister María supposedly contacted several Indian cultures, including the Jumanos, and told the natives to seek instruction from the Spanish. Shortly thereafter, some fifty Jumano Indians appeared at the Franciscan convent of old Isleta, south of present Albuquerque, in July 1629 and said that they had been sent to find religious teachers. They already demonstrated rudimentary knowledge of Christianity, and when asked who had instructed them replied, "the Woman in Blue." A subsequent expedition to the Jumanos, led by Fray Juan de Salas, encountered a large band of Indians in Southwest Texas. The Indians claimed that they had been advised by the Woman in Blue of approaching Christian missionaries. In the 1840s a mysterious woman in blue reportedly traveled the Sabine River valley aiding malaria victims, and her apparition was reported as recently as World War II.

1802 - Blas María Herrera was born in San Antonio. He was known as the "Paul Revere" of the Texas Revolution. He warned Texian forces of the advance of Santa Anna’s troops.

1830 - Business partners John Stryker and James Wiley Magoffin arrived at Matamoros in the sloop Washington. They made port carrying a newly designed cotton gin and several hundred bags of upland cotton seed and set out distributing free seed to landowners in the Rio Grande Valley. Stryker, an agriculturalist, was appointed consul for the port of Goliad (later the port of Matagorda) by President Andrew Jackson in 1835. He bought a league of land in Victoria, where he was living at the time of his death in 1844. His efforts in cotton seed distribution and the introduction of the cotton gin enabled the profitable cotton culture of the Rio Grande Valley. Years later those same cotton fields provided the pathway for the dreaded boll weevil’s entry into the United States.

1836 - James Bowie wrote Governor Smith, urging that Bexar be held because it was a strategic "frontier picqet guard." Bowie also wrote to Smith that he and Neill(James Clinton Neill commanded the Bexar garrison) had resolved to "die in these ditches" before they would surrender the post. The letter confirmed Smith's understanding of controlling factors. He had concluded that Bexar must not go undefended.

1836 - Hugh McDonald Frazer, was elected captain of the Refugio Militia, and recruited a company of some thirty or thirty-five men, which operated as an auxiliary of Fannin's regiment at Goliad, scouting and guarding supply trains.

1848 - The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by Mexico officially ending the Mexican War and giving the American Southwest to the United States. In addition, the Rio Grande River would be officially recognized as an international boundary.

1856 - The Texas legislature granted Dallas a town charter. Dr. Samuel Pryor, elected the first mayor, headed a town government consisting of six aldermen, a treasurer-recorder, and a constable.

1874 - The Ursuline Sisters started their academy in Dallas. The Ursulines, founded in Italy in 1535, came to Quebec in 1639, New Orleans in 1727, Galveston in 1847, and San Antonio in 1851. Their academies welcome girls of all denominations without regard for race, color, or national or ethnic origin. The original school in Dallas, in a four-room building on Bryan Street, opened with seven students. The academy, now located in Preston Hollow, is the oldest continuously operated Catholic school in Dallas.

1947 - Actress and model, Farrah Fawcett was born in Corpus Christi.