This Day In Texas History - July 10

[joe817]

1783 - Domingo Cabello y Robles, Spanish governor of Texas, issued a bando, or ordinance, imposing strict guidelines for the roundup, branding, and export of unbranded cattle.

1821 - On this date in 1821, the death of Moses Austin reaches his son, Stephen. Stephen F Austin will follow through on his father's dream of bringing settlers to Texas.

1824 - On this date in 1824, the founder of the King Ranch, Richard King is born. At at early age, he was indentured to a jeweler, but left at age 10, bound for Alabama. There he grew and learn to pilot riverboats along Alabama's rivers. Fighting in the Seminole War in Florida (1842) he met his lifelong friend and later business partner, Mifflin Kennedy. Together they moved to Texas and ran a steamboat business along the Rio Grande. By the 1850s, he turned his fortunes into land purchases, and through his attorneys, acquired much of the land south of Corpus Christi, including the 53,000 acre Santa Gertrudis grant. By 1885, at the time of his death, King had acquired 614,000 acres, 100,000 head of cattle. The King Ranch continued to grow following his death, to over a million acres, managed in part by his widow, Henrietta. Today the 825,000-acre King Ranch covers nearly 1,300 square miles, an area larger than the entire state of Rhode Island, on four separate Divisions of land known as Santa Gertrudis, Laureles, Norias, and Encino. [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/apk01 ]

1844 - William Bollaert, writer, chemist, geographer, and ethnologist, left Texas. Bollaert was born in England in 1807. At age eighteen he sailed for Peru, where he worked as an assayer in the silver-mining province of Tarapacá. After living in Portugal and Spain for a number of years, Bollaert journeyed to the Republic of Texas at the behest of his friend William Kennedy, who was subsequently appointed British consul at Galveston. He reached the coastal town in 1842. During the next two years he traveled extensively throughout Texas and wrote not only a formal report for the British Admiralty but also a very detailed journal, which he hoped to use as material for a book. In 1956 editors W. Eugene Hollon and Ruth Lapham Butler published his original "Texas Manuscript," consisting of six diaries and two volumes of journals, under the title William Bollaert's Texas . It remains one of the most important sources of information on the Republic of Texas and its people.

1900 - The state of Texas granted a charter to the Rosenberg Library Association of Galveston. The Rosenberg Library, successor to the Galveston Mercantile Library, which was founded in 1871, is the oldest public library in Texas in continuous operation. With funding provided through a bequest from Henry Rosenberg, the Rosenberg Library Association was organized in 1900 as a private corporation to give free library service to all Galvestonians. In 1903 Frank C. Patten was appointed to supervise the completion of the library, which opened in June 1904. A year later the Rosenberg absorbed the collections of the Galveston Public Library, thus formalizing its new role as the public library for the city of Galveston.

1931 - The Red River Bridge controversy between Texas and Oklahoma (sometimes called the Red River War) occurred in July 1931 over the opening of a newly completed free bridge, built jointly by the two states, across the Red River between Denison, Texas, and Durant, Oklahoma. On July 3, 1931, the Red River Bridge Company, a private firm operating an old toll bridge that paralleled the free span, filed a petition in the United States district court in Houston asking for an injunction preventing the Texas Highway Commission from opening the bridge. A temporary injunction was issued on July 10, 1931, and Texas governor Ross S. Sterling ordered barricades erected across the Texas approaches to the new bridge. Oklahoma highway crews crossed the bridge and demolished the barricades. Governor Sterling responded by ordering a detachment of three Texas Rangers o rebuild the barricades and protect Texas Highway Department employees charged with enforcing the injunction.
[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/mgr02 ]

1938 - Houston born aviator, movie producer, and billionaire Howard Hughes and a four-man crew left New York on July 10, 1938, and cut Lindbergh's record in half in his flight to Paris. He personally piloted the plane on the flight. Hughes landed in New York on July 14, 1938, having circled the globe in three days, nineteen hours, and seventeen minutes. He was honored with parades all over America. Houston briefly renamed its airport (now William P. Hobby Airport) in his honor.