Search found 1 match

by joe817
Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:04 am
Forum: Off-Topic
Topic: This Day In Texas History - September 10
Replies: 0
Views: 375

This Day In Texas History - September 10

1835 - Charles H. Sims, Indian agent for the Republic of Texas, was born in either 1801 or 1809 and came to Nacogdoches in 1829. On September 10, 1835, he received eleven leagues in Bowie County.

He was a member of the Nacogdoches Committee of Public Safety during the Texas Revolution, and Sam Houston appointed him an agent to the Cherokee Indians to investigate conditions among them and to keep them pacified during the hostilities with the Mexican government. Houston appointed Sims assistant quartermaster in August 1836, and he served as Indian agent during Houston's first term as president.

1836 - On September 10, 1836, Elisha Clapp was elected captain of a company of mounted rangers at his home at Mustang Prairie. Sam Houston, as commander in chief of the Texas army, ordered his company to "range from any point on the Brazos to Mr. Hall's Trading House on the Trinity" to intercept parties of raiding Indians. Clapp organized an expedition against the Ionie Indians, who, according to one settler, "have been committing some depredations in the horse stealing way" on the frontier.

1869 - Hope Thompson, a former slave who became a wealthy landowner in Dallas after the Civil War, was born in South Carolina about 1826. She married Isaac Thompson sometime in the 1850s and they had at least one child, a daughter named Ellen, born about 1857. On September 10, 1869, Isaac and Hope Thompson purchased property in what is now downtown Dallas.

Hope Thompson, then a washerwoman, borrowed the purchase price of fifty dollars from banker William Henry Gaston and repaid the loan by doing Gaston's laundry. The property the Thompsons bought was on Elm near its intersection with Live Oak, two blocks north of Commerce Street, one block north of Main, and a block south of what became Pacific Street, after the Texas and Pacific Railway built into Dallas along that road in 1873.

Beginning in 1870, before her husband's leavetaking, and extending to 1891, Hope Thompson was involved in a number of transactions that involved the Elm street property or parts of it. From the 1870s until at least the mid-1880s she was also involved in a number of lawsuits over the property, but she succeeded in retaining title to it.

1874 - The Buffalo Wallow Fight was one of the most unusual engagements in the Red River War. On September 10, 1874, Col. Nelson A. Miles, whose command was running short of rations, sent two scouts, Billy Dixon and Amos Chapman,and four enlisted men, from his camp on McClellan Creek with dispatches concerning the delay of Capt. Wyllys Lyman's supply train, then under siege by Indians on the upper Washita River.The six-man contingent set out on the trail to Camp Supply in Indian Territory.

On the morning of September 12, as they approached the divide between Gageby Creek and the Washita River in Hemphill County, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by about 125 Comanche and Kiowa warriors, some of whom had come from the siege of the wagon train. Since retreating Indians had burned off the prairie grass only days before, there was no shelter close by; Dixon and his companions thus decided to dismount and make a desperate stand.

As the day wore on, the five men suffered terribly from hunger, thirst, and wounds; but their expert marksmanship continued to hold back the Indians, who could not even capture one of the soldier's guns. At nightfall the Indians disappeared.Not until nearly midnight, however, did aid arrive and the beleaguered men receive food and medical attention. George Smith's body was wrapped in an army blanket and buried in the wallow, and the disabled survivors were taken to Camp Supply for treatment.

Amos Chapman's leg was subsequently amputated above the knee, and Woodhall and Harrington recovered and continued their military service. After "severely censuring" Price(the relief column commander) for his failure to render further aid to the survivors, Colonel Miles recommended that they be given the Medal of Honor for bravery under adverse circumstances. The Buffalo Wallow Fight was widely publicized as a heroic engagement; Richard Irving Dodge presented a somewhat inaccurate narrative of the episode in his book Our Wild Indians (1882).

While nearly all accounts of the battle, including Dixon's, claimed that the six men killed as many as two dozen warriors, Amos Chapman, who spent his later years in Seiling, Oklahoma, once told George Bent that no Indian actually fell to their guns. Some years later, the medals of Chapman and Dixon were revoked by Congress since they had served the army as civilian scouts. Dixon, however, refused to surrender what he felt he had justly earned. His medal is now on display at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon.[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/btb03 ]

1899 - Roland W. Baird, Sr., an executive of Mrs. Baird's Bakeries, was born on September 10, 1899, at Ripley, Tennessee. The family moved to Fort Worth, Texas, in 1901. By 1908 Mrs. Baird had begun baking bread for her neighbors, with young Roland standing on a box at the kitchen table to knead the dough. After their father's death in 1911, all four sons helped support the family by selling their mother's bread in the neighborhood.

In 1918 the Bairds built their first baking plant, in Fort Worth. In 1928 Baird moved his family to Dallas, where he built a modern bakery. In 1938 the Bairds built a third plant in Houston, which was followed in 1949 by a fourth bakery in Abilene. By then Mrs. Baird's Bakeries was the largest independent bakery operation in the United States. The Bairds originated the practice of twisting equal parts of dough to form each loaf of bread, thus improving the loaf. Roland originated the company's slogan, "Stays Fresh Longer," and designed the wrapper.

1923 - From 1923 to 1950 Hillsboro Junior College, one of the earliest municipal junior colleges in Texas, operated in the same building as Hillsboro High School, in Hillsboro. The Hillsboro public school system had planned for separate buildings, but the high school had burned down on April 6, 1922, so the funds for the two schools were combined, and a three-story building on the site of the old high school building was erected. The junior college operated on the third floor.

It opened with six faculty members and fifty-two students on September 10, 1923. The Harold B. Simpson History Complex was established in 1963. The complex includes the Texas Heritage Museum (formerly the Confederate Research Center), the Hill College Press, and the Texas Heritage Museum. The Texas Heritage Museum has a library of more than 5,000 volumes on the Civil War, plus another 3,000 on World War I and II The press makes Hill College the only junior college in Texas that publishes full-length books. The Texas Heritage Museum houses one of the finest weaponry libraries in the Southwest. Col. Harold B. Simpson was the founding director of the complex.

1966 - John Hill Westbrook, the first black student to play varsity football in the Southwest Conference, son of Robert Alexander and Etta Mae (McCracken) Westbrook, Sr., was born in Groesbeck, Texas, on November 13, 1947. As a fourth-generation preacher ordained at the age of fifteen, he grew up in a series of parsonages, including one at Elgin, where he attended Booker T. Washington High School.

He ran track, played basketball and football, and was salutatorian of his class. In 1965 Westbrook enrolled at Baylor University and tried out for the freshman football team as a running back. Despite racially motivated harsh treatment from some teammates and coaches, he earned an athletic scholarship. On September 10, 1966, in the fourth quarter of a game against Syracuse, Westbrook became the first black to play football in the Southwest Conference.

Return to “This Day In Texas History - September 10”