This Day In Texas History - September 13

[joe817]

1686 - Don Melchor Portocarrero Lasso de la Vega, Count of Monclova, became viceroy of New Spain on November 30, 1686. As a member of the Council of the Indies, he had come to America with a directive from that body to rid Texas of the French menace caused by La Salle's settlement at Fort St. Louis. Monclova arrived at Veracruz on September 13, 1686. He first sent out the expedition under Martín de Rivas and Antonio de Iriarteq that discovered the wreck of a French vessel in Matagorda Bay but failed to find the French colony.

Two other unsuccessful maritime expeditions were sent out during the two years of his administration. The third land expedition of Alonso De León discovered the French, but the location of La Salle's colony was not discovered until after the close of Monclova's administration in November 1688, when he went to Peru as viceroy. Monclova was commonly known as Brazo de la Plata because of his false arm. The city of Monclova, for a time a contestant to be the capital of Coahuila and Texas, was probably named for him.

1837 - John Rhodes King, legislator, Texas Ranger, Confederate officer, and first mayor of Seguin, son of William and Rachel (Petty) King, was born in Stewart County, Tennessee. He and his younger brother, Henry, joined a group of immigrants to Texas from Paris, Tennessee, in August 1837. The group crossed the Sabine River into Texas on September 13 and arrived in Gonzales on October 6. Finding prejudice in Gonzales against selling lots to new immigrants, King participated in forming a joint-stock company to purchase and survey land for a new town, named Seguin on February 25, 1839, in honor of Juan N. Seguín.

An act incorporating Seguin was approved by the legislature on February 7, 1853, and in March, King was elected first mayor of the town. He organized several Masonic lodges dedicated to encouraging education and regulating the use of liquor. In June 1855, he was elected to the Sixth Legislature and appointed to the committees on Public Lands, Indian Affairs, Military Affairs, and Claims and Accounts. In the fall of 1859 he moved to Cibolo Creek in Eastern Bexar County. He was active in the movement to create Wilson County, and carried the petition to Austin.
[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fki67 ]

1864 - Flag Springs is a popular spring-fed watering hole and cow camp on the Fort Worth-Fort Belknap road and an unnamed tributary of Salt Creek, ten miles east of Fort Belknap and three miles north of Graham in central Young County. A large pool at the spring, twelve feet in diameter, is fed by a constant flow out of Cisco sandstone. A smaller pool, four feet by two feet and thirty inches deep, has long provided water to wayfarers.

Plains Indians camped by the watering hole as they ranged through the northern end of the Cross Timbers hunting deer and following buffalo down from the Great Plains. The remains of a bedrock metate and evidence of paleolithic campsites may still be seen at the spring. After an attack by Indians on Company G of the Frontier Regiment on Salt Creek Prairie on September 13, 1864, Lt. William R. Peveler sought refuge at the small settlement by the springs, bearing some seventeen wounds. The nearest physician, summoned from Palo Pinto, performed surgery with implements forged at the springs. [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/rpfry ]

1875 -Luvenia (Lou) Conway Roberts, author and chronicler of life with the Texas Rangers, was born on September 14, 1849, in Crockett, Texas, the daughter of John and Henrietta (Renfro) Conway. As a young woman she moved with her family to Columbus, Texas, where she married Daniel Webster Roberts on September 13, 1875. Her new husband, a veteran of the Texas militia during the Civil War, had joined Company D of the Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers in 1874, when the rangers were reorganized to offer protection to pioneers on the Texas frontier.

Lieutenant Roberts originally planned to resign his position to marry but was told he could bring his wife into the company. Luvenia Roberts first settled in Mason, forty miles from her husband's ranger camp in Menard County but soon was forced to move into the camp after the Mason County War erupted. At the camp she and her husband lived in a renovated camp house, and she learned the skills of shooting, fishing, and horseback riding. Roberts enjoyed her unique position as a woman in a frontier ranger company, and she was well-received by her husband's colleagues.

In six years with the rangers, during which time her husband was promoted to captain and commander of the company, she lived in several frontier camps, including those at Sabinal and Junction City. She frequently met and developed friendships with pioneer women in these areas. In 1882, due to her health problems, her husband resigned his position. The couple subsequently moved to New Mexico and lived there for thirty years. In 1914 Lou and Dan Roberts returned to Texas, where they lived the remainder of their lives.

In 1928 she published a sixty-four-page memoir of her years with the rangers entitled A Woman's Reminiscences of Six Years in Camp with the Texas Rangers. Lauded for its contributions to both the military and social history of the Texas frontier, this work was reissued in 1987 by State House Press in a volume that also contained her husband's 1914 work Rangers and Sovereignty. Luvenia Conway Roberts died in Austin on July 14, 1940. Preceded in death by her husband and one son, she was survived by her daughter-in-law and several grandchildren. She was buried with her husband at the State Cemetery in Austin.

1892 - Barney McKinney Giles, chief of the Air Staff and deputy commander of the United States Army Air Corps during World War II, was born on September 13, 1892, on a farm near Mineola, Texas, to Richard Portlock and Louisa (Read) Giles. He and his identical twin, Benjamin F. Giles, attended East Texas State Teachers College to obtain teachers' certificates. For the next three years they taught in Ochiltree and Gray counties and then decided to go the University of Texas to study law.

In 1917 Giles enlisted as a flying cadet and took basic training at the University of Texas, at Mitchel Field, New York, and at Ellington Field, Houston. In September 1918 he was sent to Issoudun, France, and later was assigned to the 168th Observation Squadron. He returned to the United States in September 1919 and became an engineer officer at the Aviation Supply Depot at Morrison, Virginia. In 1935 he was assigned to command the Twentieth Bombardment Squadron at Langley Field, Virginia.

In 1936 he became operations officer of the Second Bombardment Group at Langley Field. That same year he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for leading the rescue of seven men stranded on an ice floe near Cape Cod Bay. In December 1941, with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, was ordered to California to take over the Air Service Area Command. He became brigadier general in charge of the Fourth Bomber Command in February 1942 and took over the Fourth Air Force in September of that year with the temporary rank of major general.

In July 1943 Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold appointed Giles chief of the Air Staff and later promoted him to be deputy commanding general of the air force. During this time General Giles was active in promoting the development of the long-range fighter planes, the P-38s, the P-47s, and the P-51s, that profoundly affected the course of the war in Europe.

General Giles often served as acting head of the army air force because of General Arnold's prolonged illness. In the spring of 1945 Giles went to the Pacific battle zone as the deputy commander of the Twentieth Air Force. He helped direct the B-29 raids on Japan and formulate plans for dropping the atomic bomb.
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As a very representative example of early pioneer life on the Texas frontier, the following caught my eye with keen interest, as it mentions the county I grew up in during my formative years, Clay County. We lived out in the country about 5 miles east of Henrietta. The ancestors of William Ikard still populate Henrietta to this day.

1934 - William S. Ikard, rancher, died at the age of eighty-seven on September 13, 1934, and was buried at Henrietta. He used the name Sude in place of his given middle name. His parents and four brothers moved from Mississippi, first to Union Parish, Louisiana, and in 1852 to Lamar County, Texas. In 1855 the family moved to a home about nine miles southwest of Weatherford in Parker County, probably the most dangerous and violent part of the United States at the time.

There Ikard received his schooling and learned to farm and ranch. His family fought in several encounters with Indians in the 1850s to 1870s and fortunately suffered no deaths. Ikard was a boy when the Civil War began, but by 1863 the Confederacy was desperate for recruits, and he joined a militia unit that helped defend the North Texas frontier. He lost a brother in the war.

In 1865 Sude and his brother Elisha Floyd entered the cattle business by rounding up cattle in Parker County that had strayed south during the winter. They held and then returned the cattle to their owners at a dollar a head, payable in money or cattle. With the herd formed from payments in cattle, all four Ikard brothers began in 1867 to make from one to three trail drives a year up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas City and other rail depots. They continued these drives until 1874, after the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad had been completed to Denison.

In 1871 W. S. and E. F. Ikard secured range rights and moved to what later became Clay County, where they built a log cabin with a buffalo-hide roof. The two brothers helped organize the county and lay out the town of Henrietta. In 1878 Ikard built a new home and moved to it. The two brothers bought 20,000 acres at Charlie in 1875, and this V Bar Ranch prospered until the great drought of 1881.

The Ikards then joined the three Harrold brothers and drove their combined herds to Greer County, Indian Territory, where they paid for range rights to a large area between the North and South forks of the Red River. This gamble succeeded, and the next year W. S. sold out to the Harrolds and to his brother.

In 1883 Ikard purchased a tract of 11,000 acres near Wichita Falls and 75,000 acres in Clay and Archer counties, the latter of which became the Circle Ranch. In 1884 he sold half interest in this ranch to E. F., who had liquidated his Greer County holdings, and they subsequently brought in the other two brothers, Lafayette E. and Milton Ikard, Jr. The Ikards were among the first ranchers in North Texas to fence their land but because they left large gaps and gates, they were never troubled by fence-cutting.

The Indians also left them alone because the Ikards employed several Indian cowboys and paid Quanah Parker a fee every month for protection from raids. The drought, however, persisted into the mid-1880s, and the winters of 1885–87 caused additional devastation to the Ikard herds. When the Circle Ranch went bankrupt, the four brothers divided their holdings and continued ranching individually.

Sude focused his efforts on purebred, especially Hereford, cattle that he had purchased at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. Unfortunately, most of these died from Texas fever soon after they reached Henrietta, and it took him years to build a small herd of immune cattle. The calves of these surviving Herefords provided the nucleus of the state's Hereford industry.

Ikard was one of the founders of the Cattle Raisers Association of Texas (now the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association) in 1896 and was a founder and first president of the Texas Hereford Association. He was a Democrat and a Baptist. He married Kate Lewis on September 18, 1877, and they had eight children. He died at the age of eighty-seven on September 13, 1934, and was buried at Henrietta.

[ELB]

...
1837 - John Rhodes King, legislator, Texas Ranger, Confederate officer, and first mayor of Seguin, …

... In the fall of 1859 he moved to Cibolo Creek in Eastern Bexar County. He was active in the movement to create Wilson County, and carried the petition to Austin.
[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fki67 ]

King's relatives are buried here (Seguin), and he still has descendants here, including the "King Ranger Theatre". When he and the other Rangers laid out the original town, they called it Walnut Springs for the trees that grew nearby.

That sentence about him moving to Bexar County is incorrect. I see it appears several places on the internet (like Find A Grave), but it is wrong. Cibolo Creek does run through eastern Bexar County and there is a city of Cibolo right on the eastern border, but the creek wanders all over the place and heads well south. The part of the Cibolo Creek that John Rhodes King had a ranch on is south of Seguin and Guadalupe County, southwest of Bexar County, in Wilson County. King owned part of and helped lay out the city of Stockdale, about 20 miles due south of Seguin. I guess the guy liked starting towns. He is buried down there in Stockdale Cemetary. The Texas Handbook Online has a clearer summary history of him: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fki67

[joe817]

Thanks for the clarification ELB!