Traces of Tx (today)

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1825 Dilue Rose Harris was born in St. Louis, MO. Her family moved to Texas in 1833. She made bullets for men going to the Alamo and took part in the Runaway Scrape. Her memories were published in the "Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association" and are a primary source for early Texas history. She was married on February 20, 1839, to Ira A. Harris, who was born in Jefferson County, New York, in 1816, arrived in Texas in 1836, and served with the Texas Rangers, Company E. The couple lived in Houston until 1845, when they moved to Columbus. Their Houston home in the 1990s had a historic marker. Ira Harris died in 1869 and was survived by his wife and nine children. She died at Eagle Lake, Texas, on April 2, 1914.

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1856 at the port of Indianola, 53 camels arrived for a 10-year U.S. Army experiment using them for pack animals in the arid areas of the Southwest. The animals were quartered at Camp Verde, near present-day Kerrville. Indianola no longer exists. It was destroyed by hurricanes and never rebuilt. The first of the two great Indianola hurricanes that resulted in the demise of the town began on September 15, 1875, when Indianola was crammed with visitors attending a trial growing out of the Sutton-Taylor Feud : https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/ent ... aylor-feud

The hurricane blew in from the sea, carrying the water from Matagorda Bay deep into Indianola's streets. Two days later, when the storm had subsided, only eight buildings were left undamaged, and fatalities were estimated at between 150 and 300 persons. After being rebuilt on a lesser scale, Indianola was completely destroyed by a second hurricane that blew in on August 19, 1886, this time accompanied by fire. This storm was considered worse than the first one, but because there was less town, it caused less damage. Below is a picture of Indianola taken in 1873.

[Shakey Jake]

A Happy Birthday to Willie Nelson (April 29) I attended Willie's first Fourth of July concert (1973). It was a hot madhouse. There wasn't any shade, little to no concessions, and people were passing out from dehydration (and other things) like crazy. It wasn't a surprise to see a lot of nudity and I thought my, oh, my they're going to regret that sunburn. The river was close by and people were skinny dipping in the water to keep cool. The music was great but the heat and humidity was unbearable. I was with my wife, and we couldn't wait to get home and cool off. It was a three-hour plus drive to get from Dripping Springs back to Fort Worth with the poorly organized traffic flow at the event. Aside from the music, it was a miserable time.
Per TSHA:
The country music extravaganza began in 1973 and was inspired by a country music festival that took place outdoors on a ranch near Dripping Springs, Hays County, in March 1972. Willie Nelson, one of the performers, and some of his business associates decided to organize a one-day event for July 4, 1973. Eddie Wilson, owner of Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, promoted the concert, which was held at the same ranch in Dripping Springs. Musicians in addition to Nelson included Kris Kristofferson, Rita Coolidge, Charlie Rich, Waylon Jennings, and Tom T. Hall. Organizers soon realized that their plans were incomplete: the lack of sanitation, electricity, and parking space became obvious as an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 fans jammed two caliche backroads to the site. As understaffed health-care volunteers treated cases of heat exhaustion, security personnel tried to keep the stage clear and contended with intoxicated fans. The event attracted an estimated attendance of 40,000 and became an annual festival. The organization provided only few portable toilets, while trash was left around the concert site and the town. The event was qualified as "moral pollution" by the local residents. For the bad organization of the concert, Nelson was fined US$1,000 for violating the Texas Mass Gatherings Act.
Still, you gotta love Willie!

[Shakey Jake]

Company B of the Texas Rangers camped on the San Saba River September 1896. Left to right on horses Edgar T Neal and Allen R Maddox. Standing Thomas Samuel "Tom" Johnson (cook) Dudley S Barker and John L Sullivan.

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1874, Governor Richard Coke appointed John B. Jones to command the newly raised Frontier Battalion of Texas Rangers. Jones, a veteran of the Civil War, was well suited to execute the governor's mandate to put an end to Indian raids on the frontier and to enforce the laws of Texas in the interior. The new battalion was successful in suppressing Indian incursions against white settlements. Jones reported to Gen. William Steele that during the first six months of the battalion's service more than forty Indian raiding parties had been reported on the frontier, of which the rangers engaged fourteen. During the second six months Jones's men had only four Indian fights, and after May 1875 only six raids and one small battle were reported. During this period Jones reported an estimated thirty-seven Indians killed; the battalion lost two killed and six wounded. In the seven years of its service under his command the battalion was also responsible for the quelling of considerable civil unrest as well as the return of much stolen property recovered from the Indians.

[Shakey Jake]

Today's Source: Traces of Texas Facebook Group
Traces of Texas reader Gayle Smith graciously sent in this Jan., 1928 photo of men in a barbershop in Goldthwaite, Texas. The photo comes from the Mills County Historical Museum , which would be most appreciative, of sure, of any follows or likes y'all could send their way. On the back the names of the men are written but the order is uncertain. They are Dr. Campbell, Marvin Spinks, Andrew Westerman, Pribble, Jim Brim, Earl Hall. I love the man under the towel in the last chair. He's like "no way I'm getting my photo taken today!" Super crisp details here.
Thank you, Gayle. I love it!

[Shakey Jake]

Source SVR the best pictures:
From boyhood in Dallas to adulthood in Austin, Doyle Bramhall and Stevie Ray Vaughan were friends, playing in bands and dreaming of the big time. Bramhall was a songwriter as well as a drummer, and he and Vaughan often wrote together; one of their early songs, “Dirty Pool,” made it onto Vaughan’s first album, 1983’s Texas Flood.
Over the next few years, their paths diverged—one man playing stadiums, the other playing bars—yet the two remained close. Eventually Bramhall began writing a song about their friendship..
“Doyle wasn’t jealous,” says Barbara Logan, who was Bramhall’s wife. “He was proud of Stevie. It was a dream they had both had, and now Stevie was living it.” Though the men had their problems with drugs and alcohol, Logan says that’s not what the song was about. “It was about living life day by day, one drop at a time.”
In 1988 Vaughan decided to record the song, which Bramhall had never quite finished. Bramhall told Logan they needed a third verse, and though she’d never written a song before, she composed some lines on the spot about two friends taking a walk together, happy to be alive. Vaughan recorded the song on a twelve-string acoustic; it wasn’t released until a year when his brother put together a posthumous album, The Sky Is Crying.
After a career playing the sturm und drang of electric blues, “Life by the Drop” stood as a pure and simple coda, with Vaughan singing the words written by his faithful friend. “He was very proud of that song,” Logan says of Bramhall, who died in 2011. “It speaks to so many people in so many ways. Songs are like that—that’s something I learned from Doyle. Everybody hears songs in their own way.”

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1886, Albert Richard Parsons, a labor organizer from Texas, was implicated in the infamous Chicago Haymarket Massacre. The brother of Confederate colonel William Henry Parsons, Albert served in Parsons's Brigade, a unit of Texas cavalry commanded by his brother, during the Civil War. After the war he became a Radical Republican and traveled throughout Central Texas registering freed slaves to vote. When Reconstruction came to an end in Texas, Parsons was hated and persecuted as a miscegenationist and a scalawag. He moved to Chicago with his wife, Lucy E. Parsons, a woman of mixed racial heritage, and became a leading agitator for social change there. On the evening of May 4, 1886, Parsons spoke at a meeting in Haymarket Square to protest police brutality. He and his family were in nearby Zepf's Hall when nearly 200 policemen marched into the square; an unknown person threw a bomb, and police began shooting wildly. Most of the seven police officers and seven members of the crowd who died apparently sustained wounds from police revolvers. Albert Parsons and seven others were tried for conspiracy to murder; he was among the four men who were eventually hanged for the crime. Six years later, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the three defendants who remained in prison and condemned the convictions as a miscarriage of justice.

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Peter Hernandez. The Supreme Court issues a momentous ruling that clarified the way that the American legal system handled charges of discrimination. In Hernandez v. Texas, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to all racial and ethnic groups facing discrimination, effectively broadening civil rights laws to include Hispanics and all other non-whites. Hernandez was convicted of murder in Jackson County, Texas. His lawyers argued all the way to the Supreme Court that in the 25 years previous and including Hernandez's jury, there were no Hispanics summoned for jury duty. Over 6,000 jurors had been selected in that span of time and there was not a single juror with a Hispanic surname. The state of Texas had argued, unsuccessfully, that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to blacks.

[Shakey Jake]

On this day in 1862, Mexican general and Texas native Ignacio Zaragoza defeated French expeditionary forces at Puebla, Mexico. This event is celebrated annually as El Cinco de Mayo. Once widely observed throughout Mexico, today it is an official public holiday only in the Mexican state of Puebla, where it is known as El Día de la Batalla de Puebla, or Battle of Puebla Day. However, Cinco de Mayo remains popular in the United States as a celebration of Mexican culture and heritage.