Elaine B. Davis Research Award Winner Announced

Former DRT Library Director Elaine Davis presents a certificate to Award winner Debra Winegarten.

At this year’s Texas History Forum, the first Elaine B. Davis Research Award was presented to Ms. Debra L. Winegarten of Austin. Ms. Winegarten is the author of several books, including Katherine Stinson: The Flying School Girl and Strong Family Ties: The Tiny Hawkins Story. Her book Mum’s the Word is a tribute to her mother, Ruthe Winegarten, who was a noted Texas women’s historian and a researcher at the DRT Library. Ms. Winegarten will use DRT Library collections to write a book about Clara Driscoll for middle school students.  Ms. Winegarten pointed out the the seventh grade history curriculum in Texas includes biographies of famous Texans, twenty-two men and three women; she sees her work as helping introduce young adults to more women who have contributed to the history of the state.

The Elaine B. Davis Research Award, endowed by the 2007-2009 Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library Committee chaired by Connie Impelman and sponsored by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, is awarded to bring scholars to San Antonio, Texas, to work with the unique materials housed at the DRT Library. Mrs. Davis served as Director of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library from 1998-2008.

From left to right, Connie Impelman, DRT Library Committee Chairman; Madge Roberts, DRT President General; Debra Winegarten, Award winner; Elaine Davis, former DRT Library Director.

Recap of the Texas History Forum, “Rangers and Rogues”

From left to right, Leslie Stapleton, DRT Library director; Dr. Paul Spellman, speaker; Connie Impelman, DRT Library Committee Chairman; Dr. Stephen L. Hardin, speaker; Mike Cox, speaker.

This past Saturday, the DRT Library held its twenty-second Texas History Forum. Entitled “Rangers and Rogues,” the program featured three speakers who explored Texans who enforced the law and those who broke it.

Mike Cox speaking about the history of the Texas Rangers.

Mike Cox, an author and former spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, got things underway by presenting ten arguments about the history of the Texas Rangers, taken in part from his most recent book, The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 (2008). For example, Mr. Cox noted that “in something of an irony, since Rangers sometimes were pitted against Mexicans, part of their tradition traces to Spanish Colonial law enforcement in Texas” (14). He also asserted that, even though “men riding in the name of frontier protection or law and order” killed some innocent people, some historians’ portrayal of Rangers as “racist practitioners of genocide, gun-toting tools of a greedy, land-grabbing Anglo establishment…is not accurate and certainly not fair” (15). Forum attendees also enjoyed Mr. Cox’s stories about his grandfather, a Fort Worth newspaper man who encountered interesting characters throughout his career. Among these were some famous old-time Texas Rangers:  John R. Hughes, for example, enjoyed many a Sunday supper at the home of Mr. Cox’s grandparents.

Dr. Paul Spellman reading an oral history from his book, Spindletop Boom Days.

Dr. Paul Spellman, a professor of history at Wharton County Junior College, focused on his work Spindletop Boom Days (2001), which contains reminiscences of east Texas oil pioneers. Collected in the 1950s to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1901 discovery of the Spindletop oilfield, these oral histories document the development of the state’s oil industry from the turn of the century to 1950. (The written manuscripts now form the Texas Pioneers of Oil Collection, the Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.) Dr. Spellman read some of the accounts included in the book, specifically stories of mayhem and lawlessness as well as stories of rangers trying to impose law and order. For example, Dr. Spellman quoted Plummer Barfield, who recalled that he would “go out in the event of an accident and haul the wounded, the crippled or the dead to the livery stable – it became an undertaker’s parlor in those days.” One wintry night, a group of men stopped Barfield as he was bringing a body to the livery and ordered him to pick up the bodies of a woman, her baby, and two men. Eventually, Barfield “found out what happened”:

The woman and the baby had been sick and were in the tent, and some rattlebrained drunks had seen the lamp in the tent and had shot at it. They killed the woman and her baby, shot right through the baby’s head and the woman’s breast. Then the roughnecks and the rigrunners nearby caught the two drunks and hung ’em from a sweet gum tree!…Five bodies. One night.

Dr. Stephen L. Hardin regaling the audience with the less than pleasant elements of life in early Houston.

Finally, Dr. Stephen L. Hardin, a professor of history at The Victoria College in Victoria, Texas, gave the final presentation of the day, focusing on his recent work Texian Macabre: The Melancholy Tale of a Hanging in Early Houston (2007). The book tells the story of David James Jones, a hero of the Texas Revolution who, along with John Christopher Columbus Quick, was hung for killing a man. They were among a group of young American men who had volunteered for the Texian army and had been indefinitely furloughed by President Sam Houston. While some of these former soldiers returned to the United States, many went to Houston, at that time the capital of Texas, where they were unemployed, bored, and broke. Respectable Houston residents called these troublesome men “rowdy loafers.” Dr. Hardin urged attendees to remember these men, who, like their more well-known compatriots at the Alamo or Goliad, made sacrifices for Texas. Throughout his talk, Dr. Hardin entertained the audience with quotes from eyewitness accounts of Houston that – with their vivid descriptions of mud, mosquitoes, and rats – confirmed its reputation in the 1830s as “an unpleasant place” and “the most miserable place in the world.”

Thank you to all of our speakers, who presented fascinating information about the history of “Rangers and Rogues” in Texas!

Special Event, Feb. 27: The Alamo Under Siege

This Friday, February 27, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and the Alamo invite the public to a museum gallery presentation of “To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World: The Alamo Under Siege.” Visitors will be escorted through the Alamo grounds to observe a series of historical vignettes that tell the story of the Siege of the Alamo.

The event will run from 6:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. The audience will be limited to the first 500 people who purchase tickets. Tickets in advance are on sale for $9. Tickets purchased the day of the event are $10.

To purchase tickets or for additional ticket information, call 210-225-1391, ext. 28 or email Ernesto Rodriguez at erodriguez@thealamo.org.

1888 Bill of Sale for Cattle

The San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo ends its two week run this Sunday, February 22. Rodeos began as a direct result of the Southwestern United States’ cattle industry. The industry truly began in the 1500s when the Spanish introduced cattle and horses to the area. After the Civil War, the large amount of cattle in the region coupled with the demand for beef in the Eastern United States made the cattle industry a highly profitable business. The skills that range cowboys acquired eventually led to contests that eventually grew into what we think of as a rodeo.

For more detailed information about the history of rodeos, click here.

Below is a bill of sale for twenty-two cows and calves from G.W. Buttery to J.E.T. Burris dated September 28, 1883. The second page features a list of marks and brands for the cattle. The document is from the library’s Documents Collection (DRT 9).

Bill of sale of 22 cows and calves to J.E.T. Burris from G.W. Buttery

This page lists the marks and brands for the cattle.

Click here for a full citation of documents and images included in this entry.

Texas Secession, Continued

Main Plaza in San Antonio. This photograph is captioned "Texas troops at San Antonio at the time of the surrender of the U.S. arms." (SC11484C)

In last week’s post, we presented some documents in the library’s collections relating to the actions taken by Texans in February 1861 to secede from the union. Meanwhile, members of the Committee of Public Safety, assembled by the state’s secession convention, also worked to move their state toward allegiance with the Confederacy.

Dismissed from the U.S. army due to his surrender to McCulloch, Twiggs joined the Confederate army in May 1861. (SC96.381)

According to historian Walter L. Buenger, when General David E. Twiggs, commander of the Department of Texas, “appeared ready to resign, the [Committee of Public Safety] ordered General Ben McCulloch and his men to enter San Antonio rather than wait and deal with Twiggs’s successor, who was less favorably inclined to the South.” On February 16, 1861, Twiggs agreed to surrender between 1.3 and “three million dollars’ worth of federal stores to Texas” and to evacuate all federal troops in the state (154), which included 160 men in San Antonio and 2,700 soldiers (or approximately fifteen percent of the entire pre-war U.S. army) scattered in forts across Texas.

One unit that participated in the surrender of federal supplies and troops was the Alamo City Guards, a local militia company comprised of volunteers from the San Antonio area that was formed in 1859. Captain William M. Edgar, commander of the unit, recorded what happened once the Texans accepted Twiggs’s surrender:

…as I with my command was placed in charge of the Alamo, this flag was hoisted and remained on the Alamo building for some time and in recognition of the Secession of the State [and] was the first flag and only flag used in San Antonio at that eventful time.

Edgar’s company was later sent east, where it served under the command of Confederate General Earl Van Dorn during the Civil War.

In this letter of February 16, 1861, Samuel Maverick authorizes and orders Captain William Edgar to seize an iron safe and its contents.

The flag described by Edgar was donated to the Alamo by his daughter in the early twentieth century and restored in 2006 by Textile Preservation Associations. The field was always thought to have originally been blue; however, conservators determined it had actually been cream colored with a salmon colored star in the center. The Latin motto on the flag translates to Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.

The flag of the Alamo City Guards. Donated by Mrs. O. M. Burt; restoration assisted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Image courtesy of Ernesto Rodriguez, Alamo assistant curator.

The flag is temporarily on display inside the Alamo shrine.

Some information for this entry was provided by Dr. Bruce Winders, Alamo historian and curator.

References and Further Reading

The Exodus of Federal Forces from Texas, 1861 by J. J. Bowden.

Secession and the Union in Texas by Walter L. Buenger.

Ben McCulloch and the Frontier Military Tradition by Thomas W. Cutrer.

Click here for a full citation of documents and images included in this entry.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

As Valentine’s Day approaches, we thought we would share Valentine’s Day cards located in the library’s Ephemera Collection (DRT 2). These Valentines are from Ruth Seele Aniol, the wife of Claude B. Aniol. Mrs. Aniol, a San Antonio native, was a collaborator for her husband’s advertising agency’s publications. She passed away in 1988 in Dallas.   Claude and Ruth Aniol donated  a large amount of material to the DRT Library, including subject files, photographs, books, periodicals, newspapers, clippings, artifacts, and other printed items.

This postcard was made in Germany and is postmarked February 12, 1913.

This postcard is postmarked February 13, 1918.

This postcard, which was not mailed, was also made in Germany.

This postcard was likely made between 1913 and 1918.

This card features the following poem behind the angel's head: "Pure affection's sweetest token, Choicest hint of love unspoken, To my Valentine."

Front and back of card.

The front and inside of a card. This card is made by "Whitney Made, Worcester, Mass."

Front and inside of card. This card is also by "Whitney Made, Worcester, Mass."

DRT Library lends paintings to Stark Museum exhibit

On February 6 and 7, Library Director Leslie Stapleton and Library Committee Chairman Connie Impelman attended a special preview of the exhibit Bluebonnets and Beyond: Julian Onderdonk, American Impressionist at the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas. The Dallas Museum of Art organized the exhibit, which will be at the Stark Museum from February 10-May 24.

The DRT Library loaned two of its Onderdonk paintings from its collection to the exhibition:

• Autumn Birches, Central Park, which shows Onderdonk’s work in New York and provides a contrast to his Texas landscape paintings.
• Spring Morning, which was the first of Onderdonk’s bluebonnet series of paintings.
  

Leslie Stapleton, Library Director and Connie Impelman, Library Committee Chairman in front of the Stark Museum in Orange.

In addition to touring the exhibit, Leslie and Connie received a guided tour of the W.H. Stark House. The house, built in 1894, appears much as it did in the early twentieth century. William Henry Stark and his family lived in the house from 1894 until 1936. The home contains the family’s extensive collection of art pieces and other decorative works that they collected from around the world. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark by the Texas Historical Commission.

Across the street from the Stark House.

In front of the Stark House.

“To Dissolve the Union Between the State of Texas and the…United States of America”

In February 1861, Texans put themselves on a path of separating from the United States and aligning their state with the Confederacy.

A broadside publicizing the February 1 ordinance declaring that Texas "is a sovereign State and that her citizens and people are absolved from all allegiance to the United States or the Government thereof."

While Texas shared many characteristics of other Southern states, historian Dale Baum writes in The Shattering of Texas Unionism that “the Lone Star State…was also distinctive [as] only Southern state with an international boundary, an extensive western frontier, and a sizable population of Mexicans and Germans” (1).

Additionally, asserts Ralph A. Wooster in the Handbook of Texas Online, “while most Texans had a strong attachment to the Union that they worked so hard to join in 1845, they expressed increasing concern over the attacks upon Southern institutions by Northern political leaders.” Specifically, even though “only one Texas family in four owned slaves, most Texans opposed any interference with the institution of slavery, which they believed necessary for the continued growth of the state.”

"Here I take my stand!" Governor Sam Houston declared soon after Lincoln's election. "So long as the Constitution is maintained by 'Federal authority' and Texas is not made the victim of 'Federal wrong,' I am for the Union as it is."

The Confederate States of America, writes James M. McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom, “organized itself, drafted a constitution, and set up shop in Montgomery, Alabama, within three months of Lincoln’s election.” (By comparison, the second Continental Congress “deliberated fourteen months before declaring American independence in 1776,” and two additional years were needed to write the Constitution and create a new government.) The South “moved so swiftly” because “secession proceeded on a state-by-state basis rather than by collective action” (234). Indeed, following Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, six states in the Deep South left the Union: South Carolina on December 20; Mississippi on January 9, Florida on January 10, Alabama on January 11, Georgia on January 19, and Louisiana on January 26.

In his March 16 broadside "to the people of Texas," governor Houston protested the actions of the secession convention. Its members removed him from office that same day.

These events caused the move towards secession in Texas to gain momentum. When Texas governor Sam Houston refused to call the legislature into special session, secessionist leaders formed a special convention and, on February 1, 1861, approved a secession ordinance by a vote of 166 to 8. Texas voters approved the ordinance by a better than three to one majority (46,153 votes to 14,747 votes) on February 23. The following month, the convention formally joined the Confederate States of America. Texas was the seventh state to secede, and the last to secede before Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4 and the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12-13.

References and Further Reading

The Shattering of Texas Unionism: Politics in the Lone Star State During the Civil War Era by Dale Baum.

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson.

Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas, 1861 edited by Ernest William Winkler; also available online here through the University of Texas at Austin.

Click here for a full citation of the documents and images included in this entry.

DRT Library is now on Facebook

The DRT Library is now on Facebook. If you are on Facebook, you can find us by searching for “Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library.” Our library page has general library information, as well as current news and events. Once on the page, we encourage you to become a “fan” of the library so that we can let you know about the latest news and events.

Facebook is a free social networking site available to anyone over the age of thirteen. If you are not currently on Facebook but would like to be, you can go to the Facebook homepage and follow the instructions under the “Sign-up” option.

Currency during the Texas Republic

The Republic of Texas used several different forms of currency during its existence. The library has a substantial collection of currencies of the Republic, as well as Confederate and U.S. currency.

The most commonly used money during the Republic period was what was issued by the Republic. On June 12, 1837 the Republic, under President Sam Houston, passed an act allowed the issue of $500,000 of promissory notes.

The star note was issued by an act on June 12, 1837 under President Sam Houston.

According to the Handbook of Texas Online, these notes “bore 10% interest, and were payable twelve months from date.” These notes were called “Star Money” because of the small star on the face of the note.

$2 change note

In December of 1837 the Republic authorized $10,000 of “change notes” (notes in smaller denominations). These notes had no interest and were able to be redeemed for notes with larger denominations.

President Mirabeau Lamar issued a new type of money, called “red backs.”

$5 Redback

This money came in denominations of $5, $10, $20, $100, and $500. Change notes also existed. When first introduced, Red Backs had a value of 37 ½ cents to the U.S. dollar. Eventually, the value went to two cents.

$20 Redback

$50 Redback

The back side of a Redback

The Republic was plagued with money troubles for its entire existence. Though rich in land and national resources, the Republic had to import most manufactured goods. This dependence on imports depleted the Republic’s gold and silver supply, since all imported goods had to be paid in these materials. The Republic was also greatly affected by the United States’ bank panic of 1837, which had lasting effects until around 1845. The Republic was in great need of the United State’s economic assistance that came with annexation in 1845.

For more detailed information on the history of currency in the Republic from the Handbook of Texas Online, click here.

Click here for a full citation of documents and images included in this entry.