This Day In Texas History - February 7

[joe817]

1836 - Col. James Fannin learned that Santa Anna's threatened movement to overwhelm Texas and suppress the rebellion was already under way and wrote that "It is useless to controvert the fact that our true strength and geographical situation are well known to Santa Anna."

1836 - Warren Jordan Mitchell was promoted to the rank of major in the Georgia Battalion as regimental surgeon. Mitchell was captured after the battle of Coleto and killed in the Goliad Massacre on March 27, 1836. His brother, Edwin T. Mitchell, died at the Alamo.

1837 - Brig. Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston was wounded in a duel by Brig. Gen. Felix Huston. Johnston had been sent by President T. J. Rusk to replace Huston as commander of the Texas army. Huston considered the lack of confidence in his leadership such an affront that, in spite of his esteem for the senior officer, he challenged Johnston to a duel. Johnston's wound was so severe that he was unable to take command.

1853 - The town of Seguin was officially incorporated. This South Texas seat of Guadalupe County saw settlement as early as the 1830s, and founders originally called the site Walnut Springs before changing the name to Seguin in honor of Tejano revolutionary and Texas Republic senator Juan Nepomuceno Seguín in 1839.

1855 - Charles Siringo was born in Matagorda County. Beginning in 1870, he worked as a cowboy, part of the time for Shanghai Pierce, and later helped establish the LX Ranch. While working as an LX cowboy, he met Billy the Kid and led a posse into New Mexico in pursuit of him. In 1884, while working as a merchant in Caldwell, Kansas, Siringo began writing his first book, A Texas Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (1885), which established him as the first cowboy autobiographer and became a range literature classic. Siringo met such varied celebrities as Pat Garrett, Bat Masterson, Clarence Darrow, William S. Hart, and Will Rogers. He helped to romanticize the West and to create the myth of the American cowboy.

1862 - Brig.General Henry Hopkins Sibley, with his detachment of 2,500 Texans, fifteen pieces of artillery, and an extensive supply train, started up the Rio Grande toward Fort Craig(a Federal bastion in south-central New Mexico), seventy miles distant. Thus began the Confederate Texan invasion of New Mexico Territory in 1861–62 was the westernmost campaign of the Civil War. It became known as the Sibley Campaign.

1866 - The date for an election of delegates to The Constitutional Convention of 1866 in Austin was announced by Andrew Jackson Hamilton, provisional governor of Texas. The number of delegates was to be equal to the number of members in the Texas House of Representatives, and no person excluded from President Andrew Johnson's general amnesty proclamation was eligible as a delegate unless pardoned by the president. Few former secessionists were barred from voting for constitutional delegates. When the delegates assembled, it became apparent that there were two strong factions in the convention-radical Unionists and radical secessionists-with the extremes of each group holding most power.

1908 - Fred Gipson, who writes Old Yeller and other children's books, is born in Mason.

1976 - The Texas Ranger Hall of Fame was dedicated along the Brazos River in Waco. It will be home to artifacts from over 100 years of the Texas Rangers including memorabilia from Bonnie and Clyde.

[ELB]

1853 - The town of Seguin was officially incorporated. This South Texas seat of Guadalupe County saw settlement as early as the 1830s, and founders originally called the site Walnut Springs before changing the name to Seguin in honor of Tejano revolutionary and Texas Republic senator Juan Nepomuceno Seguín in 1839.

Woohoo!