This Day In Texas History - June 1

[joe817]

1690 - On this date in 1690, Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, was formally consecrated. Located deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas, the mission is Texas' first Spanish mission.

1836 - Santa Anna boarded the Texas Navy schooner "Invincible" in Galveston to be taken to Vera Cruz as terms of a treaty signed at San Jacinto. Santa Anna is gracious to his Texas hosts, and grateful for the kindness shown him. Unrest in Mexico placed doubts that a treaty signed by Santa Anna would have any weight at home. Instead, he was sent to Washington D.C. to lobby for recognition of Texas by the United States. He did not get to Mexico until the following year.

1844 - Capt. John Coffee Hays left his headquarters at San Antonio on or about June 1, 1844, with fourteen men of his ranger company to scout the hills to the north and west for a Comanche war party led by Yellow Wolf, which had recently been raiding into Bexar County. The party rode as far as the Pedernales River without encountering hostiles and turned back, following the Pinta Trail to its crossing of the Guadalupe River in the area of present Kendall County. The rangers were ambushed by a war party of an estimated 200 Comanche's. The ensuing fight is known as the Walker's Creek fight. The rangers repulsed two counterattacks on their flanks, after which the Indians fled the field and were pursued for three miles under heavy fire from the rangers' revolvers. This fight is considered to be the first in which revolvers were used in combat, and a Comanche who had taken part in the battle later complained that the rangers "had a shot for every finger on the hand." According to Josiah W. Wilbarger, it is the Walker's Creek fight that is depicted on the cylinder of the 1847 Walker Dragoon model Colt revolver.
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1864 - Celebrated Confederate partisan Adam Rankin (Stovepipe) Johnson was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. Johnson was born in Henderson, Kentucky, and moved to Texas in 1854. There he gained a reputation as the surveyor of much virgin territory in West Texas, as an Indian fighter, and as a stage driver for the Butterfield Overland Mail. With the outbreak of the Civil War Johnson returned to Kentucky and enlisted as a scout under Nathan Bedford Forrest. His subsequent exploits as commander of the Texas Partisan Rangers within the federal lines in Kentucky earned him a colonel's commission in August 1862 and a promotion to brigadier general in 1864.

1881 - Just 4 years after the first telephone was installed in Galveston, The Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company opened a telephone exchange in Dallas, providing telephone service to approximately 40 new subscribers. Three months later, Fort Worth began telephone service, followed by Waco. By the end of 1882, dozens of Texas cities had their own telephone exchanges.

1942 - Plainview Field was established at Plainview to train the military's glider pilots.

1963 - Texas A&M allows women to enroll.

1969 - The Lyndon B. Johnson State Historical Park opened to the public. The park is a strip of land bounded on the north by the Pedernales River and on the south by U.S. Highway 290, 1½ miles east of Stonewall in eastern Gillespie County. It is two miles long and a half mile wide and comprises 718 acres. It commemorates the life and career of Lyndon Johnson, whose birthplace and ranch just across the river are part of the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park.

1972 - The first Kerrville Folk Festival opened in the Kerrville Municipal Auditorium. The three-day festival was the outgrowth of several Austin musical events held during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. That first festival drew 2,800 fans and featured thirteen performers. By the 1990s the festival had expanded to an eighteen-day schedule over three weekends, and attendance had grown to 25,000. By 1993 more than two dozen of the early "unknown" performers at Kerrville had earned national recording contracts.

1975 - On this date in 1975, Texas born, Nolan Ryan, pitched his forth no-hitter, tieing a record set by Sandy Koufax in 1965. It would be another six years before Ryan pitched another no-hitter, closer to home with the Houston Astros. In all, Ryan surpassed Koufax's record by 3 with a total of seven career no-hitters.

[USA1]