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Bandera Spirits of Texas, 1107 Cypress Street, Bandera, TX (2024)

06/21/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1779, Spain came to the aid of the rebelling American colonists by formally declaring war on Great Britain.The primary role played by Texas in the conflict was to supply Spanish forces mounting an assault on British territory from Louisiana. King Carlos III commissioned Bernardo de Gálvez to conduct a campaign against the British along the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast. In order to feed his troops, Gálvez sent an emissary, Francisco García, to Texas governor Domingo Cabello y Robles requesting the delivery of Texas cattle to Spanish forces in Louisiana. Accordingly, between 1779 and 1782, 10,000 cattle were rounded up on ranches belonging to citizens and missions of Bexar and La Bahía. Rancho de la Mora was typical of these ranches, and escorts were provided from small posts like the Fuerte de Santa Cruz del Cíbolo. From Presidio La Bahía, the assembly point, Texas rancheros and their vaqueros trailed these herds to Nacogdoches, Natchitoches, and Opelousas for distribution to Gálvez's forces. Fueled in part by Texas beef, Gálvez and his men defeated the British in battles at Manchac, Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile, Pensacola, and New Providence in the Bahamas. He was busy preparing for a campaign against Jamaica when peace negotiations ended the war.

06/20/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1852 Fort Clark was established at Las Moras Springs in Kinney County. Originally named Fort Riley, the post was renamed in honor of Major John B. Clark, a deceased officer who had served in the Mexican War. Fort Clark was the southern anchor of the line of frontier forts protecting the western frontier. The land was leased from Samuel Maverick. Oscar Brackett established a supply village for the fort at Las Moras, later called Brackettville. The fort and the town are still closely identified. In 1884 Mary Maverick was paid $80,000 for the 3,965-acre tract. From 1872 until 1914 the fort was the home of the Black Seminole scouts and the Fourth United States Cavalry. Later Fort Clark was the garrison for the Tenth United State Cavalry and the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth United States Infantry regiments. These units were mounted regiments of black soldiers, known as "buffalo soldiers." From 1920 to 1941 Fort Clark was home to the Fifth Cavalry. In 1938 Col. George S. Patton was regimental commander. In June 1944, after full mechanization of the cavalry, Fort Clark, one of the last horse-cavalry posts in the country, was ordered closed. In 1971 the property was purchased by North American Towns of Texas and turned into a private recreation and retirement community.

06/19/2024

Today in in Texas history: On this day in 1865, Union general Gordon Granger read the Emancipation Proclamation (originally issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863) in Galveston, thus belatedly bringing about the freeing of 250,000 slaves in Texas. The event, now celebrated as "Juneteenth," eventually gave rise to an annual day of thanksgiving ceremonies, public entertainment, picnics, and family reunions. Some communities have set aside land, known as Emancipation Parks, for celebrations on Juneteenth. In 1979 Governor William P. Clements signed an act making the day a state holiday. The first state-sponsored Juneteenth celebration took place the next year.

06/18/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1990, a civil action was filed in United States District Court in Dallas on behalf of a German church seeking the return of a number of medieval objets d'art that had disappeared at the end of World War II. During the war, the Lutheran Church of St. Servatius in Quedlinburg, Germany, had placed the objects in a mineshaft for safekeeping, but reported their loss in June 1945. After one of the objects appeared on the market in Europe in 1987, a German investigator traced the remaining pieces to Whitewright, Texas, where a former U.S. Army lieutenant named Joe Meador had settled. In 1945 Meador had served in the occupation of Quedlinburg. Fellow soldiers reported seeing him carrying mysterious bundles out of the mine. Meador was discharged from the army in 1946; after his death in 1980, his brother and sister began trying to sell the objects. The suit was settled in 1991, when the Germans announced that they would pay the Meador family $2.75 million for the return of the treasures. In 1998, however, the Internal Revenue Service announced it was seeking more than $50 million in federal taxes, penalties, and interest from the estate. The Meadors settled the case two years later by agreeing to pay $135,000.

06/17/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1899, rain began falling on the Brazos River watershed, the beginning of the disastrous Brazos Flood. Over the next eleven days, a total of 8.9 inches fell on more than 66,000 square miles, causing the Brazos to overflow its banks and inundate 12,000 square miles. The known dead number 284, and thousands of others were left homeless. The highest recorded stage was at Hearne, where the water rose above the flood gauges.

06/14/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1937, Charles Bellinger died. Bellinger was born in Caldwell County in 1875 and worked in a Lockhart saloon as a teenager. He established his own saloon in San Antonio by 1906 and developed a reputation as an exceptional gambler. He expanded his activities to include a pool hall, a cafe, a cab company, a real estate and construction company, a theater, a barbershop, a private lending service for blacks, a lottery, and a bootlegging operation during Prohibition. Bellinger entered local politics in 1918 and, with the aid of black ministers, developed support among black voters for John W. Tobin, who served as sheriff and mayor, and later for the Quin family. In return the city government provided the black neighborhood with paved and lighted streets, plumbing, a meeting hall, and a branch library, as well as improved recreation facilities and schools. African-American political participation set San Antonio apart from most Texas and southern cities and stimulated the state legislature to require a white primary in the 1920s. In 1936 Bellinger was convicted of failure to pay income tax, a conviction that resulted in a fine and an eighteen-month sentence at Leavenworth penitentiary. Illness led to his transfer to a government hospital and to a parole granted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt

06/13/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1893, the organizers of the Loving Canal and Irrigation Company filed a petition with the Reeves County Commissioners Court requesting separate organization for Loving County. In 1887 the Texas legislature had separated Loving County from Tom Green County, but it remained attached to Reeves County for judicial purposes. Loving County is the only Texas county to be organized twice. The first organization appears to have been a scheme to defraud on the part of the organizers. Although the 1890 United States census reported a population of only three in Loving County, the petition filed with the Reeves County Commissioners Court three years later was signed by 150 allegedly qualified voters. In the ensuing county election eighty-three votes were reported, and county organization was approved. In the spring of 1894, however, only three people were found to be living in Mentone, the county seat. Loving County reportedly held a second election of county officials in November 1894, but there is evidence that neither election was legitimate. The legislature deorganized Loving County in 1897, reattaching it to Reeves County. After Mentone was abandoned in 1897, no town existed in Loving County. The 1900 census reported a county population of eleven females and twenty-two males, all white. With the discovery of oil in the county in the 1920s, the population grew, and the county was organized a second time in 1931. The oil town of Ramsey was renamed Mentone and became the county seat.

06/12/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1901, Gregorio Lira Cortez shot and killed Karnes County sheriff W. T. Morris and fled. The apparent misunderstandings that led to the killing, and the extended pursuit, capture, and trials of Cortez made him a folk hero. His exploits are celebrated in many variants of El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez, a popular ballad that has inspired books and at least one movie. Cortez, a Mexican native, was farming near Kenedy in 1901, when Sheriff Morris and his deputy, Boon Choate, questioned him about a stolen horse. With Choate interpreting, a misunderstanding apparently occurred that caused Morris to shoot and wound Cortez's brother Romaldo, after which Cortez shot and killed Morris. While newspapers followed the subsequent manhunt, Cortez became a hero to many Hispanics and some Anglos. Violent reprisals and a series of trials and appeals followed. During them, Cortez was held in eleven jails in eleven counties, after which he was finally granted a conditional pardon and released in 1913. The corrido lionizing him was sung as early as 1901.

06/11/2024

Today in Texas history:On this day in 1865, an estimated fifty desperadoes broke into the state treasury in Austin, one of the boldest crimes in Texas history. The robbery occurred during the chaotic period immediately after the downfall of the Confederacy in the spring of 1865. Gen. Nathan G. Shelley informed George R. Freeman, a Confederate veteran and leader of a small company of volunteer militia, that the robbery was imminent. By the time Freeman and about twenty of his troops arrived at the treasury, the robbers were in the building. A brief gunfight erupted in which one of the robbers was mortally wounded; all the other robbers fled toward Mount Bonnell, west of Austin, carrying with them about $17,000 in specie, more than half of the gold and silver in the state treasury. None was ever captured. The loot was never recovered, although some of the money was found strewn between the treasury building and Mount Bonnell. Freeman and his company of volunteers were later recognized by the state for their service in defending the public treasury, but the resolution providing a reward for their services never passed the legislature.

06/10/2024

Today in Texas history:On this day in 1821, Moses Austin died in Missouri. Austin, born in Connecticut in 1761, was the first man to receive permission to bring Anglo-American colonists into Spanish Texas. In 1798, while consolidating his position as a pioneer in the American lead industry, he established the first Anglo-American settlement west of and back from the Mississippi River, at modern Potosi, Missouri. When the Bank of St. Louis, which he had helped found, failed in 1819, Austin found himself in financial difficulties and developed a plan for settling American colonists in Spanish Texas. He traveled to San Antonio in 1820 seeking permission for his plan. Spurned by Governor Antonio María Martínez, he chanced to meet an old acquaintance, the Baron de Bastrop, who returned with him to the governor's office and convinced Martínez to endorse the plan and forward it to higher authorities. On the trip out of Texas, Austin contracted pneumonia. Shortly after he reached home, he learned that permission for the colony had been granted, but he lived barely two months more. It was his deathbed request that his son, Stephen F. Austin, take over the colonization scheme.

06/07/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1876, construction began on what was to become a permanent major military installation in northeast San Antonio. Citizens had long desired to secure a permanent military post. Over the years the army had leased many small areas of the city, most notably the Alamo and a plot where the Gunter Hotel now stands. A formal proposal made in 1870 was met with political opposition from Secretary of War Belknap. After his resignation in 1876 a contract for construction was let to the Edward Braden Construction Company. The quadrangular fort with only one entry gate was completed in 1878. In 1890 the post was designated Fort Sam Houston. Since that time Fort Sam Houston has grown to an installation of several thousand acres with hundreds of permanent structures. In 2000 it was host to many of the United States Army's major commands.

06/06/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1944, D-day, James Earl Rudder commanded the Second Ranger Battalion as it achieved one of the great feats of arms of the Normandy invasion. Rudder, a native of Eden, Texas, had served in the army in the 1930s and was recalled to duty during World War II. He became commander and trainer of the elite Second Ranger Battalion in 1943. On D-day Rudder's Rangers stormed the beach at Pointe du Hoc and, under constant enemy fire, scaled 100-foot cliffs to reach and destroy German gun batteries. The battalion suffered higher than 50 percent casualties, and Rudder himself was wounded twice. In spite of this, he and his men helped establish a beachhead for the Allied forces. In later life Rudder became president of Texas A&M. In 1967 he received the Distinguished Service Medal from President Lyndon Johnson.

06/05/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1856, Memucan Hunt died at his brother's home in Tennessee. He had come to Texas just after the battle of San Jacinto. President Houston appointed him agent to the United States to assist William H. Wharton in securing recognition of the Republic of Texas. That task successfully accomplished in March 1837, Hunt became Texan minister at Washington. Although his proposal of annexation was rejected by the United States (1837), he succeeded in negotiating a boundary agreement in 1838. Hunt served under President Burnet as secretary of the Texas Navy. In 1841 he ran unsuccessfully for vice-president. Hunt served briefly in the Mexican War and after annexation served one term in the Texas legislature. Hunt County is named in his honor.

06/04/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1845, David Catchings Dickson was elected justice of the peace of Precinct Two in Montgomery County. He had graduated from medical school in Kentucky and moved to Texas in 1841. Throughout his political career he practiced medicine intermittently. After his small beginning, he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives (1849). He ran successfully for lieutenant governor with gubernatorial candidate Elisha M. Pease in 1853, but lost in his attempt to unseat Pease in 1855. In the latter election, though he was a Democrat, he was supported by the American (Know-Nothing) party. After another stint in the House, he commanded a local militia company during the Civil War. In 1866 Governor James W. Throckmorton appointed Dickson financial agent of the state penitentiary at Huntsville, where, in addition to his primary duty, he cared for the inmates during a yellow fever epidemic. When Throckmorton was removed from office as an "impediment to Reconstruction," Dickson retired to Grimes County. He had become quite wealthy over the years.

06/03/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1850, delegates from the southern states collected in Nashville, Tennessee, to discuss the sectional crisis resulting from the Mexican War. In 1849 a bipartisan convention met at Jackson, Mississippi, and called for a southern convention to meet at Nashville in June 1850 "to devise and adopt some mode of resistance to northern aggression." Both Texas senators, Sam Houston and Thomas J. Rusk, opposed the convention. Nevertheless, the Texas legislature passed a joint resolution recommending that the people choose representatives to the convention on the same day they selected a permanent state capital. J. Pinckney Henderson was the sole Texas delegate to attend the convention. Like most Texans, he was primarily concerned about the boundary dispute with New Mexico. A total of 175 delegates from nine southern states met at the McKendree Methodist Church on June 3-12, 1850, passed a series of resolutions, and called for a second convention if Congress failed to meet their demands. The passage of the Compromise of 1850, by resolving the boundary issue with New Mexico to the satisfaction of most Texans, kept Texas away from the second Nashville conference in November 1850. However, the two conferences helped pave the way for the Confederacy, which would ultimately draw Texas from the Union.

05/31/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1783, San Antonio merchant and alderman Fernando Veramendi was killed by Mescalero Apaches near the presidio of San Juan Bautista in Coahuila. Veramendi, born in Spain in 1743 or 1744, came to Texas around 1770. He married into a family of Canary Islanders in San Antonio in 1776. Once established in San Antonio, Veramendi's business thrived. He opened a store, acted as moneylender, and bought extensive tracts of agricultural land. His success allowed him to build an opulent house on Soledad Street that later came to be known as the Veramendi Palace. He served in the city's militia, was alderman in the ayuntamiento of 1779, and was elected senior alderman for the year 1783. He was killed while on a business trip to Mexico City. His son Juan Martín de Veramendi served as governor of Coahuila and Texas in 1832-33.

05/30/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1688, Governor Alonso De León of Coahuila arrived at the Indian village ruled by Frenchman Jean Jarry. This deserter from the La Salle expedition (1685) took up residence among the Coahuiltecan Indians in what is now Kinney County, Texas, and held sway over them as their ruler. The location is generally believed to be Anacacho Mountain, some fifteen miles southeast of Brackettville. The Spanish governor, fearful of a French-inspired Indian uprising, persuaded Jarry to return with him to Monclova. The next year, Jarry served as a guide on De León's expedition to Fort St. Louis. Afterward, De León sent the Frenchman to the Rio Grande to await visitors expected from the Hasinai, or Tejas, Indians in eastern Texas. Nothing more is heard of him.

05/29/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1889, the Texas Spring Palace opened in Fort Worth. This fair, promoted by Robert A. Cameron, immigration agent for the Fort Worth and Denver Railway, was designed to attract settlers and investors to Texas. Cameron wanted to advertise Texas by displaying all the natural products of the state under one roof. The completed Spring Palace, built in record time (thirty-one days) by the Fort Worth Loan and Construction Company, served as an educational, cultural, and entertainment center for Texas residents and guests throughout June. A second fair held in the building in 1890 ended when a sudden fire destroyed the place on the night of May 30.

05/28/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1924, the U.S. Congress established the United States Border Patrol as part of the Immigration Bureau, an arm of the Department of Labor. Its duties included the prevention of smuggling and the arrest of illegal entrants into the United States. During Prohibition smuggling absorbed most of the attention of the border patrol, as bootleggers avoided the bridges and slipped their forbidden cargo across the Rio Grande by way of pack mules. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt united the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization into the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and in 1940 the patrol moved out of the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice. From 1942 to 1964, the border patrol recruited Mexican nationals, called braceros, authorizing them to visit the United States for specific periods of time as legal agricultural workers. In 1954, however, as illegal immigration along the Mexican border soared, the patrol inaugurated Operation We***ck, a large repatriation project. The 1980s and 1990s saw an influx of thousands of immigrants, both legal and illegal, from Mexico and Central America to the Rio Grande Valley.

05/24/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1857, Ernst Kohlberg was born in Beverungen, Westphalia, at that time a province of Prussia. He left home in 1875 with Solomon C. Schutz, who had business interests in the El Paso area. Kohlberg agreed to work for Schutz without salary for six months to a year in order to defray the costs of his passage to Texas. The two reached Franklin, as El Paso was then called, by stagecoach. Kohlberg's first impressions of his new home were less than glowing. He wrote to his parents that the town was "nearly the end of the world and the last creation." After working off his debt to Schutz, Kohlberg invested in a Mexican gold mine and worked in San Francisco before returning to Franklin in 1881 and opening a cigar store in partnership with his brother. On a family visit to Germany in 1884, Kohlberg met and married Olga Bernstein. The two became prominent civic leaders and philanthropists in El Paso; Olga Kohlberg founded the first public kindergarten in Texas. In 1886 the Kohlberg brothers established the first cigar factory in the Southwest. Among Ernst Kohlberg's other holdings was the St. Charles Hotel, which he leased to a compulsive gambler who in 1910 shot and killed Kohlberg after falling far behind in his rent.

05/23/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1934, celebrated Depression-era Texas outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were killed in a roadside ambush arranged by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer outside of Gibsland, Louisiana. Riddled by some 167 bullets, the bodies were taken to Arcadia and later put on public display in Dallas before being buried in their respective family burial plots.

05/22/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1911, the Carlos Villalongín Dramatic Company opened at the Teatro Aurora in San Antonio. The company was founded in Jalisco, Mexico, in 1849, and was based primarily in Nuevo León, although it toured throughout northern Mexico and the southwestern United States for many years. In May 1911 the company arrived in San Antonio, where Villalongín had contracted to perform at the Teatro Aurora for nine months. The initial residency at the Teatro Aurora met with such success that the company continued to work there for a year and a half. The troupe had expected to return to Coahuila after completing its agreement at the Aurora, but the Mexican Revolution made Carlos Villalongín, his family, and several other actors decide to remain in San Antonio, and the company took a long-term engagement at the new Teatro Zaragoza, which was owned by Sam Lucchese. The success of the Villalongín company produced a demand for high-quality performances in Spanish-language theater not only among Spanish-speaking audiences, but also in Anglo, Italian, and other communities.

05/20/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1805, a royal order commanded the viceroy of Mexico to compile all pertinent data concerning the true boundary between Texas and Louisiana. Fray Melchor de Talamantes was appointed the head of the historical commission, beginning work in 1807, but was removed a year later for political reasons and replaced by José Antonio Pichardo. Pichardo worked for four years, "uninterruptedly night and day, without even leaving [his] room," to complete the monumental (3,000 pages) treatise On the Limits of Louisiana and Texas (1812). The work was enthusiastically praised by the advisors of the viceroy, who granted him a pension of 100 pesos a month for life and recommended his appointment as canon of the Cathedral of Mexico. The sexagenarian Pichardo, however, sick with gout and suffering from rheumatism, died just a few months after the completion of his report, before this high honor could be conferred. Pichardo's treatise was translated into English and edited by Charles W. Hackett and published in four volumes by the University of Texas Press in the 1930s and 1940s.

05/17/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1839, Manuel Flores and his band were defeated on the North San Gabriel River by Texas Rangers. Flores had led an expedition from Matamoros carrying war supplies to Texas Indians whom the Mexicans were trying to organize as allies. After killing four members of a party of surveyors between Seguin and San Antonio on May 14, the Flores group was trailed by a company of rangers for two days. Some of the rangers, led by Lt. James O. Rice, confronted the Mexican group on the North San Gabriel on May 17 and routed them. Flores was reported among the dead. In the baggage removed after the skirmish the Texans found several documents that seemed to link the Cherokee Indians with a Mexican plot to conquer Texas. These documents prompted President Lamar to demand that the Cherokees leave Texas, and this precipitated the Cherokee War.

05/14/2024

Todayb in Texas history: On this day in 1836, in the aftermath of the decisive Texan victory at San Jacinto, ad interim president David G. Burnet and Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna signed two treaties at the town of Velasco. The public treaty was to be published immediately, and the secret agreement was to be carried into ex*****on when the public treaty had been fulfilled. The public treaty, with ten articles, provided that hostilities would cease, that Santa Anna would not again take up arms against Texas, that the Mexican forces would withdraw beyond the Rio Grande, that property confiscated by Mexicans would be restored, that prisoners would be exchanged on an equal basis, that Santa Anna would be sent to Mexico as soon as possible, and that the Texas army would not approach closer than five leagues to the retreating Mexicans. In the secret agreement, in six articles, the Texas government promised the immediate liberation of Santa Anna on condition that he use his influence to secure from Mexico acknowledgment of Texas independence; Santa Anna promised not to take up arms against Texas, to give orders for withdrawal from Texas of Mexican troops, to have the Mexican cabinet receive a Texas mission favorably, and to work for a treaty of commerce and limits specifying that the Texas boundary not lie south of the Rio Grande. Both the governments of Texas and Mexico then proceeded to violate the terms of the treaties, and their conflict continued.

05/10/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1979, the city of Dallas declared the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas a historic landmark. Among the civic leaders who helped secure a Federal Reserve branch for Dallas in 1914 were G. B. Dealey, Walter F. McCaleb, Nathan Adams, and Hatton W. Sumners. The Dallas Fed, designed by the Chicago firm of Graham, Anderson, Probost, and White in the Neoclassical style of the Beaux Arts School, opened in 1921. It serves the Eleventh Federal Reserve District, which covers approximately 350,000 square miles and includes Texas, northern Louisiana, and southern New Mexico. Like the other reserve banks, the Dallas Fed is primarily a "banker's bank." It serves as a bank for financial institutions in basically the same way commercial banks and thrift institutions serve the public. Financial institutions send their excess currency and coin to the Fed, where the money is verified, sorted, and stored until it is needed to fill new orders.

05/09/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1979, the Orange Show, an open-air, multimedia sculptural installation dedicated to the orange, was opened to the public. The show, located in east Houston on 2401 Munger Street, was conceived and built singlehandedly over a period of twenty-five years by Houston postman Jefferson D. McKissack. He first became interested in oranges when he trucked them from Florida throughout the Southeast during the Great Depression. He built the exterior walls of what became the Orange Show in the mid-1950s, as part of his plant nursery on two vacant lots across the street from the bungalow where he lived. He began work on the interior space in 1962. Built without architectural plans, the Orange Show evolved into a labyrinth of stairs, catwalks, and passageways encompassing two amphitheaters, several enclosed display areas, a guest shop, a wishing well, fountains, and two observation decks. The entire complex is painted in bright primary colors and festooned with striped awnings, banners, two United States flags, and seven Texas flags. Considered the state's leading example of a "folk art environment," the Orange Show is open to the public on weekends and holidays from March through December.

05/08/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1846, the battle of Palo Alto, the first major engagement of the Mexican War, was fought. At the site north of Brownsville, American forces under Gen. Zachary Taylor clashed with Mexican troops commanded by Gen. Mariano Arista. The battle, which began about 2:00 P.M. and lasted until twilight, resulted in a standoff. After darkness ended the action, both armies bivouacked on the battlefield. Of 3,461 troops that formed the Mexican Army of the North, Arista's commissary reported 102 killed, 129 wounded, and 26 missing, including deserters. The American army, which totaled over 2,200 soldiers, reported five dead and forty-three wounded. The Mexican army was decisively defeated the following day at the battle of Resaca de la Palma.

05/07/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1844, the Scioto Belle, a river steamer believed to have been built on the Scioto River in Ohio, arrived at Galveston from New Orleans. The vessel was described in the Telegraph and Texas Register as a substantial, well-built ship, nearly new, well adapted for carrying freight, and with excellent accommodations for passengers. The steamer operated between Galveston and Houston and landings on the Trinity River but, probably because of the poor condition of the Trinity channel in the 1840s, was not able to go much farther up the river than Liberty Landing. In 1844, during a yellow fever epidemic, the Scioto Belle was docked at Lynchburg and converted by Dr. John Henry Bowers into a hospital.

05/06/2024

Today in Texas history: On this day in 1864, in one of the most moving incidents of the Civil War, Confederate general Robert E. Lee ordered the celebrated Hood's Texas Brigade to the front, and they in turn ordered him to the rear. During a critical moment of the fierce Battle of the Wilderness, as the Southern battle line was crumbling, Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, was heartened to see the Texas Brigade, under the command of John Gregg, arrive on the field as reinforcements. With a cry of "Hurrah for Texas!" Lee ordered them forward against the Union army and, carried away by his enthusiasm, began to lead them into the charge. The Texans, unwilling to risk their idol in battle, stopped and gathered around him, yelling "Lee to the rear!" and held onto his horse until he withdrew. The Texas Brigade suffered severe losses, but the Union army was once more fought to a standstill.

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