1756 - Lt. Gov. Bernardo de Miranda y Flores of Spanish Texas set out from San Antonio to search for mineral deposits and discovered the Los Almagres silver mine in Llano.
1836 - The Texas forces at San Patricio are annihilated by Mexican General Jose Urrea's soldiers. The main force on Santa Anna's army continues North to San Antonio where within days, they will prepare to do battle with Jim Bowie, Colonel Travis, David Crockett and a force of just over 150 at the Alamo.
1839 - The Brazos Courier, published in Brazoria by R. L. Weir from February 17, 1839, until December 1840, was a five-column, four-page newspaper that resembled in appearance the People, a paper printed at Brazoria in 1838. The Courier was published weekly on Tuesday and sold for five dollars a year. Advertisements occupied most of the paper until April 1840, when it began publication of the laws of the Republic of Texas.
1867 - Jessie Andrews was born. She was the first woman to graduate from the University of Texas in 1886. She was also the school's first female teacher in 1888.
1909 - After more than 22 years in Federal Custody, Geronimo, former leader of the Apache Indian Nation, died on this date in 1909 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma - still a prisoner of war.
1913 - The Comstock caught fire off the mouth of the Brazos River. The hydraulic hopper dredge General C. B. Comstock was built for the United States Army Corps of Engineers in 1895. The vessel traveled to Galveston on her own keel in the summer of 1895 and spent most of her career there. After being driven ashore by the Galveston hurricane of 1900, she could not be freed until a channel fifty feet wide and eight feet deep was dug to release her. She caught fire and burned to the water line. The crew was quickly rescued by fishermen from Quintana and the life-saving crew from Surfside, but the Comstock was a total loss. The wreck was relocated during jetty construction in June 1987 and investigated and identified in 1988. The artifacts are in a collection at Corpus Christi Museum.
1917 - Wilma (Dolly) Vinsant Shea, flight nurse, was born on February 17, 1917, to a pioneer San Benito couple, Dr. William J. and Nell Vinsant. Her mother was a former nurse. She graduated from San Benito High School and Brownsville Junior College and received her nurse certification from John Sealy Hospital in Galveston. Her career as flight nurse began with a crew on Braniff Airways. She enlisted in the United States Army Nurse Corps on September 1, 1942, and qualified shortly thereafter for the Air Evacuation Nurse Corps. The five-foot, 100-pound candidate completed rigorous training, such as jumping, with heavy pack and fully clothed, into water twenty feet deep and gaining shore unaided. She graduated on February 18, 1943, with the first flight-nurse class of the United States Army Air Forces at Bowman Field, Kentucky.
During the next two years she was stationed in England. On flights she had sole charge of the injured who were being evacuated from battle zones, including heavy combat regions near Munich and Frankfurt. Sometimes she flew with wounded evacuees from London to New York without a doctor or medical technician on board. After she had completed her hazardous-flight quota, the maximum number allowed under United States Military regulations, her commander reluctantly acceded to her request "to make one more trip." She was killed on April 14, 1945, when her evacuation plane, ferrying wounded Americans to hospitals behind the front line, was shot down over Germany. According to the United States Army and Navy Register, she was one of three women in the Army Nurse Corps known to have been killed by direct enemy action and the only one from Texas. She was buried in the United States Military Cemetery at Margraten, Netherlands. Her awards include the Air Medal, Red Cross Medal, a Special Citation from President Harry Truman, and a posthumous Purple Heart.
1929 - The League of United Latin American Citizens, originally called the United Latin American Citizens, was founded at Salón Obreros y Obreras in Corpus Christi, Texas. LULAC is the oldest and largest continually active Latino political association in the United States and was the first nationwide Mexican-American civil-rights organization.
1930 - The El Paso Museum of Art was chartered under its original name, El Paso International Museum.
2009 - Representative Brandon Creighton of Conroe, filed HCR 50, reasserting the sovereignty of Texas under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Nine other states including Oklahoma and Washington have already passed similar resolutions in the past few weeks. Most of the issue stems from the federal government's distribution of funds to the states with strings (mandates) attached, or simply mandates with no money at all. These federal mandates became a big portion of President Obama's economic stimulous package which became law earlier in the week.
Many state governors are refusing these federal funds because of the federal mandates which are attached to them. In reponse to the governors, President Obama threatened to force the variious state legislatures to go over their governor's head, and require the governors to accept the funds transfers. Throughout the country, resentment to increasing federal control of the economy and states has been increasing. On February 10th, Newsweek published a full page cover with the headline "We Are All Socialists Now". This month, eight states have passed legislation trying to reverse that claim with a huge slap in the face to the federal government ... "Oh, No We're NOT!" [
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