Texas history from the Texas State Historical Association
11/11/1918: World War I ends
On this day in 1918, World War I came to an end. The armistice found the two most prominent Texas units on active service in France. The Ninetieth Division was fighting its way through the Meuse-Argonne, while the Thirty-Sixth Division was resting behind the lines after suffering heavy casualties in the same offensive. A total of 198,000 Texans saw service in the armed forces during the course of the war. Five thousand one hundred and seventy-one Texans, including one nurse, died in the armed services; 4,748 of the dead served in the army. More than a third of the total deaths occurred inside the United States, many of them as a result of the influenza epidemic of 1918. Four Texans were awarded the Medal of Honor. In a trend that would become even more marked during World War II, military camps were established in Texas to train men for service and the state was the main location for pilot training for military aviation.
11/12/1906: William Stallings becomes the first county agricultural agent in Texas
On this day in 1906, the Commercial Club of Tyler, with the cooperation of Seaman A. Knapp of the United States Department of Agriculture, appointed William Stallings agricultural agent of Smith County. He was the first county agricultural agent in Texas and the first in the nation to serve a single county. After serving Smith County for a year, during which he earned $150 a month, Stallings was appointed district agent; the district comprised Smith, Cherokee, and Angelina counties. Through his efforts the cotton and corn yields of the district increased by over 50 percent. In November 1971 the Texas Historical Commission placed a historical marker on the courthouse square in Tyler to commemorate Stallings’s services.
11/13/1947: First black SWC football player is born in Groesbeck
On this day in 1947, John Hill Westbrook, the first black student to play varsity football in the Southwest Conference, was born in Groesbeck, Texas. In 1965 he enrolled at Baylor University and tried out for the freshman football team as a running back. Despite racially motivated harsh treatment from some teammates and coaches, he earned an athletic scholarship. On September 10, 1966, in the fourth quarter of a game against Syracuse, Westbrook became the first black to play football in the Southwest Conference. He ran for lieutenant governor of Texas in 1978 and received 23 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. In 1983 Westbrook died in Houston at the age of 36.
11/13/1974: Karen Silkwood dies in mysterious crash
On this day in 1974, union activist Karen Silkwood died in an automobile accident. Silkwood, born in Longview in 1946, was a laboratory technician at a Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation plutonium plant in Oklahoma. She joined the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union and became the first female member of the union bargaining committee in Kerr-McGee history. On her first assignment to study health and safety issues at the plant, she discovered evidence of spills, leaks, and missing plutonium. As environmental concerns increased in the 1970s, Kerr-McGee faced litigation involving worker safety and environmental contamination, and Silkwood testified to charges before the Atomic Energy Commission that she had suffered radiation exposure in a series of unexplained incidents. She died en route to a meeting with an AEC official and a New York Times reporter. Speculations over foul play in her death were never substantiated, but an autopsy showed her body had been contaminated by plutonium, and Kerr-McGee eventually closed the plant. Her life was the subject of a motion picture, Silkwood, released in 1984.
11/14/1954: Cuero paper uncovers land fraud
On this day in 1954, the Cuero Record published an article by its managing editor, Roland Kenneth Towery, revealing violations of the intent and purpose of the Veterans’ Land Program through fraud and bribery. Towery’s story, and those which followed, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for distinguished reporting of local affairs. They also set off intensive statewide media reporting and accelerated an investigation begun in October by the office of the attorney general under John Ben Shepperd (who was a member of the Veterans’ Land Board at the time of the investigation), the Texas Department of Public Safety under Homer Garrison, the state auditor’s office, and the Senate General Investigating Committee. Governor Allan Shivers, as a member of the Veterans’ Land Board, was also actively involved in the investigation. Once investigations were begun, numerous charges were filed against various people accused of taking part in the improper use of state monies and violating veterans’ personal rights. Twenty people were indicted in nine counties, and Bascom Giles, commissioner of the General Land Office and chairman of the board of the Veterans’ Land Board, became the first elected state official to enter prison for a crime committed while in office.
11/14/1947: Historic World War II pipelines sold
On this day in 1947, the Big Inch and Little Big Inch, two strategic pipelines laid during World War II from East Texas to the Northeast, were sold by the U.S. government to a private company. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes realized as early as 1940 that shipment of petroleum to the Northeast by tankers would be impossible in time of war because of German submarines. In 1941, at Ickes’s urging, oil industry executives began to plan the building of two pipelines. One, twenty-four inches in diameter, called the Big Inch, transported crude oil. The other, twenty inches in diameter, called the Little Big Inch, transported refined products. The Big Inch ran from Longview to Southern Illinois, thence to Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Twenty-inch lines continued from there to New York City and Philadelphia. The Little Big Inch began in the refinery complex between Houston and Port Arthur and ended in Linden, New Jersey. Together the pipelines carried over 350 million barrels of crude oil and refined products to the East Coast before the war in Europe ended in May 1945.
11/16/1845: Republic of Texas signs its last Indian treaty
On this day in 1845, the Republic of Texas concluded its last Indian treaty. The agreement marked the end of the Tehuacana Creek Councils, which began in the spring of 1843, when Jesse Chisholm helped convince a number of Indian groups, including the Caddos, Tawakonis, Delawares, Lipan Apaches, and Tonkawas, to meet on Tehuacana Creek near the Torrey Brothers trading post south of present Waco. A second council met at Fort Bird on the Trinity River in the fall of 1843. These councils resulted in a peace treaty between the Republic and the Wacos, Caddos, and other smaller groups, but the absence of the Comanches caused President Sam Houston to call another council to meet at Tehuacana Creek in April 1844. The April council convened without the Comanches, but by October 9, 1844, Houston had negotiated a treaty with a part of the southern Comanches, Kichais, Wacos, Caddos, Anadarkos, Hainais, Delawares, Shawnees, Cherokees, Lipan Apaches, and Tawakonis. At the November 1845 council the Wacos, Tawakonis, Kichais, and Wichitas agreed to the treaty of October 9, 1844.
11/17/1835: Ohioans come to the aid of Texas with “Twin Sisters”
On this day in 1835, the people of Cincinnati, Ohio, decided to aid the cause of the Texas Revolution by raising funds to procure two cannons. Since the United States was taking an official stance of neutrality toward the rebellion in Texas, the citizens of Cincinnati referred to their cannon as “hollow ware.” Two guns, probably six pounders, were manufactured at the foundry of Greenwood and Webb in Cincinnati and then shipped down the Mississippi to New Orleans. The cannons arrived in Galveston at the beginning of April 1836, accompanied by the family of a Dr. Charles Rice. The guns were presented to representatives of Texas under the sponsorship of Dr. Rice’s twin daughters, Elizabeth and Eleanor. Someone in the crowd made notice of the fact that there were two sets of twins in the presentation, the girls and the guns, and thus the cannons became the Twin Sisters. The guns went into action on April 20, and, under the command of George W. Hockley, supported the infantry assault the next day at the battle of San Jacinto. Along with the Gonzales “come and take it” cannon, the Twin Sisters are among the most famous weapons of the Texas Revolution.
11/17/1884: Texas cattlemen propose National Trail
On this day in 1884, a cattle industry convention meeting in St. Louis passed a resolution calling upon Congress, “in the interest of cheaper food,” to build and maintain a National Trail from the Red River north to the Canadian border. Pushed through by prominent Texas cattlemen, it was an attempt to thwart proposed northern quarantines against Texas cattle. Texas fever, caused by ticks indigenous to the Southwest, had inflicted heavy losses upon the northern range-cattle industry by the early 1880s, and these losses had caused northern cattlemen to lobby for quarantines against infected livestock. Since it was much less expensive for Texas cattlemen to trail their herds to northern railheads and ranges and then ship them by rail rather than ship directly from Texas, most Texans saw these proposed quarantines as a threat to their economic well-being. In the wake of the National Trail proposal, however, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Canada passed quarantine laws against Texas cattle, seriously restricting drives during the regular trailing season. Finally, on January 7, 1886, Texas congressman James Francis Miller of Gonzales introduced the National Trail proposal in the United States House of Representatives. The measure was blocked in the House committee on commerce by northern cattle interests and by Texas railroads, which presumably wanted to replace the trail with rails. The failure of the National Trail, the northern quarantines, and the western migration of farmers and barbed wire sounded the death knell of trailing.
11/18/1837: Charles Morgan introduces steamship service to Texas
On this day in 1837, the steamship Columbia arrived at New Orleans in the first recorded voyage of the Morgan Lines, the first steamship line in Texas. The Columbia made its inaugural voyage to Galveston a week later. Originated by shipping and railroad magnate Charles Morgan, the Morgan Lines introduced Morgan’s economic influence into the Gulf region. In 1849, rebelling against port charges at Lavaca, Morgan built Powderhorn, which grew into Indianola and was for a time a chief port of the line. In 1858 the Morgan Lines had three sailings a week from Galveston and two from New Orleans, and by 1860 the company had a monopoly on coastal shipping. During the Civil War all of the vessels of the line were commandeered, either by the United States or by the Confederate States. The Morgan Steamship Company took an active part in building railroads after the war to feed the ship lines. In the 1870s pooling agreements were worked out among Morgan’s Louisiana and Texas Railroad and Steamship Company, the Louisiana Western Railroad Company, and the Texas and New Orleans Railroad. In the late 1870s Morgan worked with E. W. Cave to make Houston an inland port with better facilities for the line. In the late 1870s or early 1880s the Morgan Lines were sold to C. P. Huntington of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The fleet was sold to the United States Maritime Commission in 1941.
11/18/1977: National Women’s Conference begins in Houston
On this day in 1977, the National Women’s Conference began in Houston. The meeting was authorized by public law and supported with federal funds. In 1975 President Gerald Ford established a thirty-five-member National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year to make recommendations to promote equality between men and women. Conventions were held in all states and territories to elect delegates and consider recommendations. Houston was selected to host the national conference. A National Plan of Action reached at the conference was submitted to the president and the Congress in March 1978. The National Women’s Conference is recognized as a major event in the women’s movement in the United States.
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