Texas Almanac 2012-2013
736
Texas Almanac 2012-2013
736eBook66th Edition (66th Edition)
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Overview
First published in 1857, the Texas Almanac has a long history of chronicling the Lone Star State and its residents. The Almanac's 66th edition is printed in full color and includes hundreds of photographs from every region of the state. Color maps of the state and each of its 254 counties show relief, major and minor roads, waterways, parks, and other attractions. Each county map is accompanied by a profile outlining that county's history, physical features, recreation, population, and economy.
Special features in the 66th Edition include:
• An article on the birth of the Austin music scene and the influence on it by legendary musician Willie Nelson, written by Nelson biographer Joe Nick Patoski. The Austin music scene is recognized worldwide through Austin City Limits, the longest running music program on American television.
• A history of the Civil War in Texas to mark the 150th year since the beginning of that conflict. Composed by Texana writer Mike Cox, the article highlights the unique aspects of the war in Texas, such as the Great Hanging at Gainesville and the Battle of Palmito Ranch.
• Newly released 2010 population figures.
• A complete history of voter turnout in Texas going back to 1866.
• A history of professional football in Texas.
• Comprehensive lists of high school football and basketball championships, Texas Olympians, and Texas Sports Hall of Fame inductees.
The Texas Almanac 2012–2013 includes articles and data about:
• history and government
• population and demographics
• the natural environment
• sports and recreation
• business and transportation
• oil and minerals
• agriculture
• science and health
• education
• culture and the arts
• obituaries of notable Texans
• pronunciation guide to town and county names
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780876112571 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Texas State Historical Assn |
| Publication date: | 11/08/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 736 |
| File size: | 103 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
About the Author
ELIZABETH CRUCE ALVAREZ is a journalist and editor who has worked in both newspaper and textbook publishing. She lives in Southlake, Texas. She has served as Texas Almanac editor since 2002.
Journalist and editor ROBERT PLOCHECK is a native of Houston who was raised in Damon and now lives in Denton. He has worked as the Almanac's associated editor since 1994.
Read an Excerpt
Texas Almanac 2012â"2013
By Elizabeth Cruce Alvarez
Texas State Historical Association
Copyright © 2012 Elizabeth Cruce AlvarezAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87611-257-1
CHAPTER 1
History
The Civil War on the Home Front
Willie Nelson and the Birth of the Austin Music Scene
A Brief Sketch of Texas History
By Mike Cox
In a reflective mood, on Aug. 30, 1914, W.D. McDonald wrote a long letter to the Trenton Tribune, his old hometown newspaper in Fannin County. He noted it had been 54 years that month since his honorable discharge from Company C, First U.S. Cavalry, and 52 years since he enlisted in the Confederate Army to fight against some of the same men with whom he had once chased hostile Indians.
Married Sept. 1, 1861—only four months into the Civil War—McDonald built a log cabin near Honey Grove and settled into domestic life. "We ... were happy," he wrote. "But listen, we hear patriotic men and women all over our Southland saying: 'Your homes are in danger of being destroyed.' I, with every fibre of my being going on to that six-months bride in love said, 'Here am I; send me.'"
On Feb. 22, 1862, Mc-Donald enlisted in Company D, 16th Texas Cavalry, "and for three years and four months I did the best I could to protect that log cabin home and that wife."
Unlike many thousands of Texans who fought for the South, McDonald survived unscathed. Late in life, he and his wife moved to Abilene, a West Texas town that had not even existed during the Civil War.
As a young Federal cavalry trooper, McDonald had followed in newspapers the growing sectional crisis that led to what would be the nation's deadliest war. The election of that "Black Republican" Abraham Lincoln as president in the fall of 1860 climaxed nearly a decade of political strife between the slave-reliant South and the more urbanized North. Starting with South Carolina, the Southern states began seceding from the Union as the not-even-century-old nation edged steadily toward fratricidal war.
In Texas, a secession convention composed of 177 locally elected delegates convened in Austin on Jan. 28, 1861. Only five days later, by a vote of 166 to 8, the body adopted an ordinance of secession.
Future governor James W. Throckmorton drew boos when he cast his vote against the measure.
"Mr. President, when the rabble hiss, well may the patriots tremble," he retorted, addressing Oran M. Roberts, the convention's presiding officer. In addition to voting for leaving the Union, the convention created a Committee of Public Safety, which claimed all Federal military installations in Texas, including the U.S. arsenal in San Antonio. U.S. Army Gen. David E. Twiggs, the ranking military officer in Texas, surrendered his entire 3,000-soldier command and relinquished all military property, including 10,000 rifles.
The last chance for Texas to avoid the coming hostilities came with a statewide referendum on Feb. 23, 1861, but 46,153 Texans voted for secession, with only 13,020 voting against leaving the Union. Texas would be the nascent Confederate States of America's seventh star, with four more breakaway states soonto join the confederation.
The nation's long war of words over states rights and the extension of slavery ended on April 12, when Confederate artillery began bombarding Fort Sumter, a Federal harbor defense installation off Charleston, South Carolina. Three days later, President Lincoln signed a proclamation calling for 75,000 militiamen to put down a rebellion. Then, on April 19, he ordered a naval blockade of the Southern states from the mouth of the Rio Grande to South Carolina. Lincoln extended the blockade to Virginia a week later following the secession of that commonwealth and North Carolina.
The first fighting in Texas was Texan versus Texan, as a vicious war within a war broke out in the Hill Country, where many of the liberal-minded German settlers who had come to the state in the mid-1840s opposed slavery and remained loyal to the Union. Confederate militiamen, some more outlaw than soldier, terrorized Gillespie and surrounding counties, lynching Unionists and stealing what they could under the guise of military authority. When the German-Texans in Gillespie County organized as the Union Loyal League to defend themselves against what they called Die Hangerbande (the Hanging Bandits) things only got worse.
By the summer of 1862, the South instituted mandatory military service for all white males 18–35. Needless to say, the German immigrants had no interest in fighting for the Confederacy. James Duff, a dishonorably discharged U.S. Army soldier who now led Confederate forces in the Hill Country, declared the region in open rebellion against the Confederacy. Faced with hanging or conscription, 68 German men decided to ride for Mexico. They made it as far as the Nueces River, when, on Aug. 10, Duff and his men caught up with them. A sharp battle ended with 19 Germans and 12 Confederates dead. An additional nine wounded German-Texans were later executed. The bloody incident broke the spirit of German resistance, but hangings and murders of suspected Union sympathizers continued throughout the war.
The next outbreak of internal strife came along the Red River in North Texas, another pocket of pro-Union sentiment. On Oct. 1, 1862, a roundup of suspected Unionists led to the hanging of seven men following their hasty trial for treason. Fourteen more were lynched without benefit of a court proceeding. When one of the leaders of the Unionist cleanup was murdered, his killer was soon hanged. But 19 others suspected of Union complicity also got lynched in Gainesville, with five more hanged in Sherman. The event became known as the Great Hanging at Gainesville and still stands as one of the worst episodes of vigilantism in U.S. history.
1861 Referendum on Secession
The same month the hangings began in North Texas, the U.S. Navy captured Galveston, which ranked as Texas' largest and most prosperous city. One of the busiest ports on the Gulf of Mexico, its capture had been a key objective of Federal war planners. Federal control of the port, which came on Oct. 8, 1862, made it even harder for blockade-runners to escape with cotton to sell in the foreign market and for the South to receive badly needed supplies.
Earlier that year, on Aug. 16–18, 1862, the U.S. Navy shelled Corpus Christi and attacked by land, but an attempt to take the town failed. One possible factor in that came to light when Confederate defenders noticed that an inordinate number of Federal shells had not exploded on impact. Examining one of the still-intact rounds, someone discovered it held whiskey, not gunpowder. Though not mentioned in the official record of the engagement, the enduring legend is that some of the Yankee seaman had been emptying shells to hide their clandestine whiskey supply. Elsewhere along the Texas coast, Federal naval forces conducted periodic offensive operations from 1862 to 1864.
Attacking by land and sea, Confederate forces under Generals John B. Magruder, the ranking CSA officer in Texas, and William B. Scurry retook Galveston on New Year's Day 1863.
While rebel soldiers defeated the 43rd Massachusetts Volunteers on land, two Confederate vessels armored with bales of cotton took on a much larger and better-armed Federal flotilla. One of the "cottonclads" ran aground, but the other, though badly battered by Union cannon fire, rammed the Federal gunboat Harriet Lane. Capt. Henry Lubbock, the brother of Texas Gov. Francis Lubbock, boarded the Union vessel, killed most of her officers (including the grandfather of future U.S. Army Gen. Jonathan Wainwright), and called for the surrender of the rest of the Federal fleet. Commodore William Renshaw declined to lower his flag, but accidentally ran his flagship, the Westfield, aground. As he prepared to scuttle his ship rather than have her pass into rebel hands, the vessel's powder magazine exploded before he meant it to, killing him and most of his officers and sailors. (See engraving on page 25.) Seeing this, the remaining Union vessels soon stood to sea, leaving Galveston back in Confederate control for the rest of the war.
Loss of Galveston severely crimped Federal plans for a Texas invasion, but the North did not give up. In September 1863, red-headed 27-year-old Houston bartender Dick Dowling proved he could do more than mix a stiff drink. Commanding 47 mostly Irish soldiers known as Dowling's Davis (as in Jefferson Davis) Guards, the withering artillery fire Dowling directed stood off an invading force of 20 warships and 5,000 Union soldiers during the Battle of Sabine Pass. In appreciation, the Confederate government presented Dowling and his men silver medals, the only such awards conferred on any Confederate soldiers during the war.
Dowling's victory would not affect the war's outcome, but it had huge significance for Texas. Historians agree that the one-sided, short-lived battle spared the state from a Union invasion that would have visited on Texas the same level of devastation and misery experienced by other Confederate states, such as what Georgia saw when Gen. William T. Sherman made his infamous march to the sea.
Throughout the Civil War, Texas had to contend with another problem none of its sister Confederate states faced: An ongoing threat from hostile Indians. The withdrawal of Federal forces at the beginning of the war had left Texas' western frontier exposed to raids from Comanches and Kiowas, effectively contracting the settled portion of the state by a hundred miles. Texas garrisoned some of the abandoned Federal forts with state troops and mounted regular patrols to look for and occasionally skirmish with Indian war parties.
In West Texas, Fort Chadbourne, Camp Colorado, Fort McKavett, Fort Mason, and Camp Verde also served at various times as prisoner-of-war camps. The Confederacy also had four such camps in East Texas, the largest being Camp Ford at Tyler. The state prison at Huntsville also housed Federal prisoners.
The North tried one more time to invade Texas, this time along the Red River through Louisiana in the spring of 1864. Confederate troops, many of them from Texas, defeated Union forces in western Louisiana at the battles of Mansfield and Pleasant Hill.
If anything, given the destruction of telegraph lines in the South, at the end of the war news traveled even slower than it had early on in the conflict. Though rumors were afloat in Brownsville that Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, no official word had been received by Gen. James E. Slaughter and Col. John Salmon "RIP" Ford, who commanded Confederate troops in the Rio Grande Valley.
The two officers learned on May 12, 1865, that 1,600 Federal troops under Lt. Col. David Branson were on the march from Brazos Santiago to Brownsville to take the town. Slaughter proposed retreat, but Ford famously declared: "Retreat, hell!"
That night, Ford's men skirmished with Union forces at Palmito Ranch, a dozen miles east of Brownsville. Fearing Confederate reinforcements, the Federals torched the ranch and withdrew to Palmito Hill, four miles distant.
On May 13, supported by a battery of 12-pounders, Ford's command advanced on the Union troops. Soon, those who were not killed or wounded surrendered. This was not only the final fighting in Texas, it was the last land battle of the Civil War.
Gen. E. Kirby Smith formally surrendered what little remained of the CSA's Trans-Mississippi Department on June 2. Seventeen days later, U.S. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston. The same day, June 19, he issued an order advising Texans that the Emancipation Proclamation was in effect. That marked the end of slavery in Texas for more than 200,000 African-Americans, a figure that included thousands of slaves moved by their "owners" into Texas from other Confederate states for "safekeeping" during the war.
While Texas had been spared the devastation seen in much of the South, it paid a dear price for its decision to join the Confederacy. Of the 65,000–70,000 Texans (more than 10 percent of the state's population) who served in the Confederate military, an estimated 24,000 died. Thousands more came home with life-altering wounds, from missing arms or legs to blindness. Countless others suffered from the psychological trauma they had endured, a condition that more than a century later would come to be called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Texas' elected officials were far slower in providing assistance to these veterans than their predecessors in office had been in contributing men and treasure to the war effort. A home for Confederate veterans in Austin that opened in 1886 with money raised by the Daughters of the Confederacy did not begin receiving state funds until 1891.
The last survivor of the war was Mississippi-born Walter Williams. He came to Texas at age 14 and served under Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood. Williams died at age 117 in 1959 and is buried in Franklin in Robertson County.
Aside from the thousands of lives lost and economic and social upheaval, the Civil War changed the Texas map. Of Texas' 254 counties, 29 are named for Confederate veterans. Ten of the tens of thousands of Texans who served in the military during the war would become governors.
Not every Texan who went to war fought for the South. Some 2,000 men from the Lone Star State joined the Federal military. One of those Texas Unionists was Edmund J. Davis, who as a brigadier general commanded the Federal 1st Texas Cavalry during the war and served as governor during Reconstruction.
Texas' economy did not fully recover from the impact of the Civil War until World War II, when Japan and Germany threatened the nation that Lincoln and his armies had saved from division.
The Civil War claimed its last life in Texas nearly 145 years after Appomattox when a 62-year-old Victoria man drowned on Jan. 1, 2010, after his 14-foot aluminum boat struck the submerged wreckage of the Mary Summers, a Confederate blockade runner sunk during the war at the confluence of the Navidad and Lavaca rivers to prevent Union vessels from navigating up either stream.
Lewis Maverick, one of the three sons of Texas pioneer Samuel Maverick and his wife, Mary, who had fought for the South, survived the war. Like many of the soldiers on both sides, he kept a diary. Back in Texas from the battle-scarred Deep South, his wartime journal ended on May 31, 1865, with this: "Alas under what gloomy circumstances we return, how different from our fond hope."
Mike Cox is an author and Texana writer living in a Austin.
Willie Nelson and the Birth of the Austin Music Scene
By Joe Nick Patoski
Over the summer of 1970, a loose collective of hippies, free spirits, and dreamers refashioned the old National Guard armory building at the corner of South First Street and Barton Springs, just across the Colorado River from downtown Austin, into a concert hall and beer garden.
The Armadillo World Headquarters was all about music, a shared tolerance for marijuana, psychedelic drugs, and cold beer, and like its namesake had a hard-shell interior with a docile disposition. During its first two years of operation, the Armadillo brought in a parade of touring talent who otherwise would have bypassed Texas, including Ry Cooder, Captain Beefheart, Taj Mahal, Dr. John the Night Tripper, Frank Zappa, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Bill Monroe, and especially Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.
But it wasn't until the night of Aug. 12, 1972, when Willie Nelson walked onto the stage of the Armadillo that everything changed. That performance in front of a mixed crowd of hippies and rednecks is recognized as the starting point of the modern Austin music scene.
A vibrant music community was already in the making, articulated by several outsiders who relocated to Austin like Nelson did to make music unfettered by commercial restraints. Most prominent were Jerry Jeff Walker, a New York folkie from the Greenwich Village scene who had written a hit song about a New Orleans street dancer called "Mr. Bojangles," another singer-songwriter from Houston named Guy Clark, whose vivid story songs had been covered by Walker, and a lanky Fort Worth kid with high cheekbones and a taste for liquor named Townes Van Zandt, considered by his peers as the purist songwriter of all.
Walker also fronted the Lost Gonzo Band. Their live recording Viva Terlingua! —made in the old Hill Country dancehall at Luckenbach (pop. 3) with fiddler Sweet Mary Egan and a harmonica player named Mickey Raphael—set the standard for rowdy Texas-style country rock. It was the first "made-in-Austin" album to go gold.
The Lost Gonzos—Gary P. Nunn, Bob Livingston, Michael McGeary, Herb Steiner, Craig Hillis, and Kelly Dunn—performed as the Cosmic Cowboy Orchestra whenever they supported Micheal Murphey, the flaxen-haired, buck-skin-loving singer-songwriter from Dallas with the two best-selling albums in Austin, Geronimo's Cadillac and Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir. Murphey came out of the same Rubiyat Club folk scene in Dallas where a husky-voiced belter named B.W. Stevenson from Murphey's high school, Adamson, developed his robust singing style that led to several hit singles, notably "My Maria," No. 9 on Billboard's pop singles chart and No. 1 on the adult contemporary chart in 1973.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Texas Almanac 2012â"2013 by Elizabeth Cruce Alvarez. Copyright © 2012 Elizabeth Cruce Alvarez. Excerpted by permission of Texas State Historical Association.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
TEXAS STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION,INDEX OF MAPS & TABLES,
STATE PROFILE,
STATE FLAGS & SYMBOLS,
HISTORY,
ENVIRONMENT,
WEATHER,
ASTRONOMICAL CALENDAR,
RECREATION,
SPORTS,
COUNTIES OF TEXAS,
POPULATION,
ELECTIONS,
GOVERNMENT,
STATE GOVERNMENT,
LOCAL GOVERNMENT,
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT,
CRIME IN TEXAS 2010,
CULTURE AND THE ARTS,
HEALTH AND SCIENCE,
EDUCATION,
BUSINESS,
TRANSPORTATION,
AGRICULTURE,
APPENDIX,