This Day In Texas History - August 11

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1754 - Pedro de Rábago y Terán took over as commander of San Francisco Xavier de Gigedo Presidio, the military post at the San Xavier missions. He replaced José Joaquín de Ecay Múzquiz, who had been sent in 1753 to assist Capt. Miguel de la Garza Falcón in investigating the murder of a priest and a soldier at Candelaria Mission.

Nothing better illustrates the animosity that often existed between missionaries and soldiers than events at the San Xavier missions. Felipe de Rábago y Terán, Pedro's nephew, had served so poorly that conditions at the missions were deplorable when Ecay Múzquiz arrived. The nadir had come with the murder of Father Juan José Ganzabal and the soldier Juan José Ceballos, on May 11, 1752.

Commandant Felipe, who had debauched Ceballos's wife, blamed the violence on the Coco Indians. But evidence uncovered by Ecay Múzquiz and others strongly suggested that Felipe himself was behind the murders. When the elder Rábago y Terán replaced Ecay Múzquiz, he was unable to reverse the general decline. The San Xavier missions were abandoned in 1756, and their property was moved to Santa Cruz de San Sabá Mission, which was itself destroyed by Indians in 1758.

1840 - The battle of Plum Creek was an aftermath of the Council House Fight, in which many of the Comanche Indian chiefs, their women, and warriors were killed. In the summer of 1840 the Comanches swept down the Guadalupe valley, killing settlers, stealing horses, plundering, and burning settlements.

After sacking Linnville in Calhoun County, they started a retreat. The Texans organized a volunteer army under Gen. Felix Huston, Col. Edward Burleson, Capt. Mathew Caldwell, and others and with Texas Rangers under Ben McCulloch overtook the Indians at Plum Creek in the vicinity of the present town of Lockhart on August 11, 1840. There a decisive defeat on the following day pushed the Comanches westward.

1849 - Gov. George Wood sends three companies of Rangers to Corpus Christi to guard settlers from Goliad to the Rio Grande against Indian attacks.

1858 – Geologist Robert Thomas Hill was born in Nashville, Tennessee. At sixteen, he moved to Texas, where he led a surveying expedition of Big Bend in 1888.

1914 - A mysterious fire destroyed the Duval County courthouse and most of the evidence of illegal activity by South Texas boss Archer Parr and his political machine. In 1907 he took command of the Democratic machinery and established himself as the political boss of Duval County. The key to his success was the Hispanic vote, which he controlled through a combination of paternalism, corruption, and coercion.

He also converted the county treasury into a political slush fund for the benefit of himself, his associates, and his impoverished constituents, who received informal and modest welfare payments. In 1914 a preliminary audit of the county financial records conducted by his opponents revealed fourteen types of illegal activity, but the courthouse fire crippled the investigation.

Undeterred, a local grand jury still indicted Parr, who had just won election to the Texas Senate, and ten Duval County officials on various charges of corruption. The cases, however, collapsed for lack of evidence. By the time of his death in 1942, Parr had used his control of Duval County to build a vast personal fortune, and his son George, who had pleaded guilty to income tax evasion in 1934 and had served a brief term in prison, was already in control of the political machine that continued to dominate Duval County until 1975.

1961 - The Texas legislature adopted the design for the reverse side of the Great Seal of Texas. The design was submitted by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.