Traces of Tx (today)

[Shakey Jake]

Here's a fine story from the Traces of Texas facebook group today:
The Texas Quote of the Day is fantastic. I edited it ever-so-slightly to make it a tad clearer, so it's not verbatim. Being that nobody actually got hurt in this tale of a fight between a cowboy and a singer, it's actually very funny:
"All old time printers and telegraphers of the 1880s remember 'Peg,' for he was a remarkable character, never to be forgotten. He had lost one of his legs in a railroad accident, having gone to sleep and fallen off the brakebeam, or something like that. The leg was really a fine one and "Peg" could, and did, get from $10 to $15 on it in any pawnshop. He was a great talker, and when only half-loaded, was very amusing. He told some good stories, too. I remember one in particular....
'Gentlemen,' said he, 'you can talk about your hot towns as much as you want to, but Santone takes the cake. I was out there last winter and I had the time of my life. There was a big variety show going on down on one of the plazas and, of course, I went to see it.
The show was nearly over when a drunken cowboy came in. He had two big guns strapped round his waist and a Bowie knife that looked like a young sword. He swaggered about and the show had to stop for a few minutes and then catching sight of the boxes on the edge of the stage, he made for one. Everybody seemed to be afraid of him and tried to quiet and pacify him.
A fellow on the stage began to sing. The cowboy promptly ordered him to stop. The fellow paid no attention, but went on singing. The cowboy kept making a fuss. Finally the singer got mad and, advancing to the front of the stage, asked if there was not an officer in the house to take the drunken nuisance out and lock him up. There was no response so the singer advanced to the side of the stage and began climbing to the box.
The cowboy reached out and dragged him into the box. They dropped to the floor in a clinch, but as they fell I saw the cowboy had his knife in his hand. Then I saw them rise, the cowboy holding the singer by the back of the neck. He rammed him face foremost against the wall and rammed that big knife through him twice and then, slamming it plumb through him between the shoulders, he left it sticking in his body and, picking him up, hurled him out of the box to the stage below. "It was all over in a minute and there was the biggest stampede you ever saw. The whole audience made for the door in one solid mass, and I was working well in the lead, in spite of having only one good leg to work with.
When I struck the sidewalk I saw a policeman and rushed to him: I said, 'You had better go down yonder, a cowboy just murdered a man in the theater down there.' He looked at me and just grinned. 'That's all right,' said he. 'They been killing that same man for two nights now. It's part of the show.' "Next night I went back to enjoy the fun of seeing the stampede, now that I knew it was part of the show. I got a seat near the end of a row and there is where I was a fool.
The cowboy came in and went through the same performance. There was the same stampede, too. and a big Dutchman near me stampeded at the first flash of the knife and took the whole tier of seats with him. In the rush they got my leg, the broomstick one, jammed in the seat and broke it square off. Then they walked all over me and I never saw a thing. When the dust settled they found me all spraddled out on the floor. The proprietor acted pretty square. He set 'em up two or three times, sent me home in a hack and next morning early they had a carpenter come 'round and fix my stem, and that night I left for El Paso. Santone was too strenuous for me.'
----- Samuel Oliver Young, True Stories of Old Houston and Houstonians, 1910. Incidentally, Samuel Oliver Young, the author, led an interesting life himself, having been born in 1848, was a member of Hood's Brigade as a young boy during the Civil War and, having become a physician after the war, died in in 1926. His book is super entertaining. Here's a photo of his gave in Houston's Glenwood cemetery.

[Shakey Jake]

Here's another fun fact from the Traces of Texas facebook group:
The Arcane Texas Fact of the Day:
173 years ago today, back in 1850, the state of Texas suddenly got a lot smaller when it agreed to give up its claim to hundreds of millions of acres of land in New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming in what's called the Great Compromise of 1850. What happened was this:
Texas had claimed the areas in New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming since gaining independence from Mexico in 1836, claims that were only strengthened by the terms of the settlement of the 1846 U.S.-Mexican War. At the same time, Texas was having a hard time paying off the millions of dollars it still owed the United States under the terms of its annexation to the United States in 1846. Meanwhile, folks in Taos and Santa Fe were saying "Hey, we don't want to be part of Texas. We want our own place." Various land-for-debt-relief proposals were made, but none gained traction.
Finally, Senator James A. Pierce of Maryland introduced a bill that offered Texas $10 million in exchange for ceding to the national government all land north and west of a boundary beginning at the 100th meridian where it intersects the parallel of 36°30', then running west along that parallel to the 103d meridian, south to the 32d parallel, and from that point west to the Rio Grande. The bill had the support of the Texas delegation and of moderate leaders in both the North and South. Holders of bonds representing the debt of the Republic of Texas naturally lobbied very hard for the bill because it specified that part of the financial settlement be used to pay those obligations. The measure passed both houses of Congress in the late summer of 1850 and was signed by President Fillmore.
Though there was some opposition in Texas to accepting the proffered settlement, voters at a special election approved it by a margin of three to one. The legislature then approved an act of acceptance, which Governor Bell signed on November 25, 1850.
This is why we can't go skiing in Taos, Texas.

[Shakey Jake]

Willie Nelson bought the Methodist Church in Abbot, TX, his hometown, in 2006 after the congregation merged with another church. I'm not quite sure what he does with it.

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1864, Confederate general Hiram B. Granbury, commander of Granbury's Texas Brigade, was killed in the battle of Franklin, Tennessee. Granbury, a native of Mississippi, moved to Texas in the 1850s. He was chief justice of McLennan County from 1856 to 1858. At the outbreak of the Civil War he recruited the Waco Guards, which became a unit in the Seventh Texas Infantry. By 1864 he had commanded in turn a regiment and a brigade. After the fall of Atlanta, Granbury led his brigade in Hood's invasion of Tennessee. He was one of at least 1,750 Confederate soldiers killed in the frontal assault at Franklin, the highest total of rebel dead for any single-day battle of the war. A Texas captain wrote of the battle, "It can't be called anything else but cold blooded murder."

[Shakey Jake]

Traces of Texas……..
Legendary Panhandle cowboy Tom Blasingame, who was born in Waxahachie in 1898. He rode his first horse at the age of six. At ninety-one, he was still on the job at the JA Ranch south of Amarillo. Two days after Christmas in 1989, he dismounted his horse, Ruidosa, stretched out on the grass, folded his arms across his chest, and died.
Photo courtesy the JA Ranch, where Tom worked for 73 years.

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1907, citizens of Peck, located about thirty miles north of Houston, renamed their community Tomball in honor of Thomas Henry Ball, a well-known politician and prohibition advocate. Ball had been a United States congressman and strong supporter of the development of the Houston Ship Channel. The town of Tomball later rose to prominence in 1933 when drillers struck oil. The population of the new boomtown, nicknamed “Oil Town U.S.A.,” tripled as twenty-five to thirty oil and gas companies rushed in to set up camps, housing developments, and recreation facilities. In 1935 Humble Oil and Refining Company (which later became Exxon Company, U.S.A.) granted free water and natural gas to Tomball residents in exchange for drilling rights within the city limits. This arrangement gained the attention of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which heralded Tomball as the only city with free gas and water and no cemetery. Tomball has 13,854 citizens in 2023.

[Shakey Jake]

It's been a few days but here's another great picture from the Traces of Texas facebook group:
The first jail in San Angelo, built in 1875. It was a wooden stockade with a sod roof. Taken by noted San Angelo photographer M.C. Ragsdale. I wonder how well a sod roof worked to keep prisoners in jail.

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1835, the Texas revolutionary army began its assault on the Mexican garrison at San Antonio de Béxar. Ben Milam and William Gordon Cooke gathered more than 300 volunteers to attack the town in two columns, while Edward Burleson and another 400 men forced Mexican general Martín Perfecto de Cos to keep his 570 men divided between the town and the Alamo. The battle ended with the surrender of the Mexican army on December 9. Texas casualties numbered 30 to 35, while Mexican losses totaled about 150; the difference reflected in part the greater accuracy of the Texans' rifles. Most of the Texas volunteers went home after the battle, which left San Antonio and all of Texas under their control.

[Shakey Jake]

Traces of Texas reader James Howard Hefley thoughtfully sent in this nice circa 1910 photo of the Humble oilfield, which is just a mile or so northeast of the city of Humble, northeast of Houston. Along with three other highly prolific piercement salt dome fields, Spindletop (1901), Sour Lake (1901), and Batson-Old (1903), Humble helped to establish the Texas oil industry when these fields produced the first Texas Gulf Coast oil. By 1905, the Humble oilfield was the largest of the four. Field development was guided by both major and independent companies and centered on the caprock from 1905 through 1913, when flank production was begun. Through continued yields from deeper horizons on the flanks, the Humble oilfield is still active and has produced over 138,835,590 barrels of oil over 12 decades.
Thank you, James. A super photo!

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1941, during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Texas native Doris Miller responded courageously to the assault. He was serving as a mess steward on the USS West Virginia. When the ship was attacked he went on deck and manned an unattended deck gun. It was Miller's first experience firing such a weapon because black sailors serving in the segregated steward's branch of the navy were not given gunnery training.

"The sky seemed filled with diving planes and the black bursts of exploding anti-aircraft shells. I pulled the trigger and she worked fine. I had watched the others with these guns. I guess I fired her for about fifteen minutes. I think I got one of those Japanese planes. They were diving pretty close to us."
----- Doris "Dorie" Miller.

Although later news stories credited Miller with downing from two to five airplanes, these accounts have never been verified and are almost certainly apocryphal. Miller himself told navy officials he thought he hit one of the planes. The navy awarded him the Navy Cross for bravery in battle. He died on November 24, 1943, when his ship, the aircraft carrier Liscome Bay, was torpedoed and sunk.