This Day In Texas History - June 19

[joe817]

1841 - A party of 321 men, comprising five companies of infantry and one of artillery, officially designated the Santa Fe Pioneers, set out from Kenney's Fort on Brushy Creek, twenty miles north of Austin, and traveled north, crossing the Brazos River just below Bee Mountain on July 8 and striking the Western Cross Timbers in the area of present Parker County on July 21. This was the beginning of what is called "The Santa Fe Expedition".

The Texan Santa Fe Expedition, a politico-military-commercial expedition of 1841, was occasioned by President Mirabeau B. Lamar's desire to divert to Texas at least a part of the trade then carried over the Santa Fe Trail and, if possible, to establish Texas jurisdiction over the Santa Fe area, which the Republic of Texas claimed on the basis of an act of December 19, 1836. Texas needed trade, and the Santa Fe market apparently offered the best opportunities, but no steps had been taken to exercise control over the New Mexican settlements until 1840, when William G. Dryden, a citizen of Santa Fe, visited Austin and, on being approached by Lamar, agreed to act as commissioner for Texas in an effort to influence the people of New Mexico to approve the change in government. [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qyt03 ]

1864 - Fort Duncan was attacked by a force of about 100 Mexicans from the surrounding area and Piedras Negras, but they managed to capture only a few horses. Fort Duncan, on the east side of the Rio Grande above Eagle Pass in Maverick County, was established by order of Maj. Gen. William J. Worth on March 27, 1849, when Capt. Sidney Burbank occupied the site with companies A, B, and F of the First United States Infantry. John Twohig owned the 5,000-acre site.

1865 - Fort Moore, a Confederate installation at Eagle Grove on Galveston Island, Galveston County, was established soon after the battle of Galveston on January 1, 1863. It was an earthen fortification defended by two thirty-two-pound smoothbores and two eighteen-pound howitzers. The fort was dismantled after the city surrendered to federal troops on June 19, 1865.

1865 - On this day in 1865, Union general Gordon Granger read the Emancipation Proclamation (originally issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863) in Galveston, thus belatedly bringing about the freeing of 250,000 slaves in Texas. The event, now celebrated as "Juneteenth," eventually gave rise to an annual day of thanksgiving ceremonies, public entertainment, picnics, and family reunions. Some communities have set aside land, known as Emancipation Parks, for celebrations on Juneteenth. In 1979 Governor William P. Clements signed an act making the day a state holiday. The first state-sponsored Juneteenth celebration took place the next year. [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/lkj01 ]

1890 - Poet and ranchman Larry Chittenden's "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball" was first published in the Anson Texas Western. Chittenden, born in New Jersey in 1862, came to Texas in 1883 and established a ranch at the foot of Skinout Mountain near Anson. An annual Christmas dance at Anson's Star Hotel, which burned in 1890, inspired his best-known poem.

It has been reprinted and anthologized many times since. John A. Lomax and his brother Alan published it in their book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910. Chittenden, who moved to Bermuda in 1904, died in 1934, the same year the citizens of Anson staged the first annual Cowboys' Christmas Ball. The poem was set to music and sung at the Anson ball in 1946, and it became a tradition to have a soloist sing the ballad before the ball.

1919 - Texas Congressman Claude B. Hudspeth called Mexican president Venustiano Carranza "that spineless cactus of Mexico" on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Hudspeth, a vociferous supporter of American intervention in the Mexican Revolution, was defending Secretary of War Newton Baker's controversial decision to send troops into Juárez against Francisco (Pancho) Villa. Hudspeth, born in Medina in 1877, became editor and publisher of the Ozona Kicker as a teenager and had settled in El Paso by 1902. He was elected to Congress in 1918 and served until 1930, when he declined to run for renomination because of ill health. He died in San Antonio in 1941. Hudspeth County was named in his honor.