Handbook of Texas

William (Red) Garland, jazz pianist, was born in Dallas on May 13, 1923. He began his musical training on the clarinet as a child and played the alto saxophone at Booker T. Washington High School, though he never graduated. He quit to join the United States Army during World War II and took impromptu piano lessons from other servicemen at Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona. After leaving the army in 1944 he joined a band led by Buster Smith, and a year later was touring the southwestern and eastern United States with Oran (Hot Lips) Page. After the tour ended in 1946 in New York, Red Garland began playing in nightclubs.

Rodríguez et al. v. San Antonio ISD, a class-action suit, was a 1971 landmark case in which a federal district court declared the Texas school-finance system unconstitutional. The case followed the work of the School Improvement League, a San Antonio organization that battled racial and class inequities in the San Antonio schools although not through legal action. The state of Texas had not addressed school-finance reform since 1949, when the Gilmer-Aikin Laws were passed. On May 16, 1968, 400 students at Edgewood High School in San Antonio held a walkout and demonstration, and marched to the district administration office. Ninety percent of the students in the Edgewood district were of Mexican origin. Among the students' grievances were insufficient supplies and the lack of qualified teachers. The walkout induced parents to form the Edgewood District Concerned Parents Association, which sought to address problems in the schools. The group consisted of Alberta Snid, Demetrio Rodríguez, and other parents, mostly mothers. Rodríguez, a veteran and sheet-metal worker at Kelly Air Force Base, had worked with the American G.I. Forum, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the Mexican-American Betterment Organization in San Antonio. William Velásquez, an activist in San Antonio, connected the parents' group with lawyer Arthur Gochman, who appealed unsuccessfully to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund for assistance. On July 10, 1968, Rodríguez and seven other Edgewood parents filed on behalf of Texas schoolchildren who were poor or resided in school districts with low property-tax bases. They claimed their school district had one of the highest tax rates in the county but raised only $37 per pupil, while Alamo Heights, Bexar County's wealthiest district, raised $413 per student. Studies revealed that in Bexar County the tax rate per $100 property value needed to equalize education funding was $0.68 for Alamo Heights but $5.76 for Edgewood.

The Texas Revolution began in October 1835 with the battle of Gonzales and ended on April 21, 1836, with the battle of San Jacinto, but earlier clashes between government forces and frontier colonists make it impossible to set dogmatic limits in terms of military battles, cultural misunderstandings, and political differences that were a part of the revolution. The seeds of the conflict were planted during the last years of Spanish rule (1815–21) when Anglo Americans drifted across the Neutral Ground and the eastern bank of the Red River into Spanish territory, squatted on the land, and populated Spanish Texas. More alarming than these illegal residents, who only wanted to "settle and stay," were filibusters such as Philip Nolan, who commandeered portions of Spanish lands for personal gain and political capital. During the fading years of New Spain, its ruling council, the Cortes, worried about securing their far northern frontier and began to encourage foreign immigration to Texas, including Anglo American colonization. One who was eager to take advantage of a change in Spanish policy was Moses Austin, who received a commission from the Spanish governor of Texas to bring 300 families and establish a colony, thereby rebuilding some of his lost fortune associated with the Panic of 1819. Upon his death in 1821, his son and heir Stephen Fuller Austin fulfilled his father's vision and became the first empresario of Texas.

Country Campus, on State Highway 19 some twelve miles northeast of Huntsville in northeastern Walker County, was established during World War II. The community was begun in 1942 as a German prisoners of war camp with a capacity to house 4,800 men. The camp's construction began on May 12, 1942, and its formal opening was observed on September 18 of that year. The camp commander was Lt. Col. H. E. Fischer. The camp had housing and medical facilities, a clothing shop, a barbershop, a laundry, a bakery, a cafeteria, a commissary, a gymnasium, a guardhouse, a fire station, and a motor pool. In addition, clubs for both officers and enlisted personnel were provided. Prisoners held at the camp were leased as laborers to local farmers. The camp was deactivated on January 25, 1946, and the property was donated by the government to Sam Houston State Teachers College (later Sam Houston State University) and renamed the Sam Houston Country Campus. The buildings were adapted to serve as dormitories, administrative offices, classrooms, and recreational facilities. Buses shuttled students between the country and main campuses. A post office was established at the site in 1948, with Mrs. R. H. Maxwell as postmistress. In 1949 the community reported a population of 1,000, and by 1952 it reported 500 residents and three businesses. Its post office closed in 1964, when the town reported 425 residents and one business. By 1968 the population had decreased to 121, and by 1972 the community reported only sixty inhabitants and no businesses. In the 1980s some of the old buildings, a golf course, and pastureland remained at the site. Country Campus in 1990 comprised sixty residents.

In the fall of 1835 many Texans, both Anglo-American colonists and Tejanos, concluded that liberalism and republicanism in Mexico, as reflected in its Constitution of 1824, were dead. The dictatorship of President Antonio López de Santa Anna, supported by rich landowners, had seized control of the governments and subverted the constitution. As dissension and discord mounted in Texas, both on the military front and at the seat of the provisional government of the Consultation at San Felipe, the colonists agreed that another popular assembly was needed to chart a course of action. On December 10, 1835, the General Council of the provisional government issued a call for an election on February 1, 1836, to choose forty-four delegates to assemble on March 1 at Washington-on-the-Brazos. These delegates represented the seventeen Texas municipalities and the small settlement at Pecan Point on the Red River. The idea of independence from Mexico was growing. The Consultation sent Branch T. Archer, William H. Wharton, and Stephen F. Austin to the United States to solicit men, money, supplies, and sympathy for the Texas cause. At New Orleans, in early January of 1836, the agents found enthusiastic support, but advised that aid would not be forthcoming so long as Texans squabbled over whether to sustain the Mexican constitution. They then proceeded to Washington and separated: Wharton remained in the capital, Archer went to Richmond, and Austin headed for New York City.

William Barret Travis, Texas commander at the battle of the Alamo, was the eldest of eleven children of Mark and Jemima (Stallworth) Travis. At the time of his birth the family lived on Mine Creek near the Red Bank community, which centered around the Red Bank Baptist Church in Edgefield District, near Saluda, Saluda County, South Carolina. There is some confusion regarding the date and circumstances of his birth. Many sources give the date as August 9, others as August 1, 1809. The family Bible, however, records the former date. Others have confused the date of his birth with that of his elder, and illegitimate, half-brother, Toliferro Travis. Travis's ancestor, William Travers, settled in the Virginia Colony in 1658. Subsequent generations of the family drifted southward to the Carolinas, where Barrick or Barrot Travers established a farm in the Edgefield District. Eventually the name Travers became Travis, and Barrot came to be spelled Barret. Barrot Travis's sons, Alexander and Mark, became farmers, and Alexander also became a prominent clergyman.

In Galveston on the rain-darkened and gusty morning of Saturday, September 8, 1900, newspaper readers saw, on page three of the local Daily News (see GALVESTON NEWS), an early-morning account of a tropical hurricane prowling the Gulf of Mexico. On the previous day Galveston had been placed under a storm warning by the central office of the Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) in Washington, D.C. A one-column headline announced, "Storm in the Gulf." Under that, a small subhead proclaimed, "Great Damage Reported on Mississippi and Louisiana Coasts-Wires Down-Details Meagre." The story, only one paragraph long, had been sent out of New Orleans at 12:45 A.M. that same day, but it added nothing to the information presented in the headlines. Additional details were unavailable "owing to the prostration of the wires." Beneath the New Orleans report appeared a brief local story: "At midnight the moon was shining brightly and the sky was not as threatening as earlier in the night. The weather bureau had no late advice as to the storm's movements and it may be that the tropical disturbance has changed its course or spent its force before reaching Texas."

Singer Selena Quintanilla Perez, known simply as Selena, the daughter of Abraham and Marcella (Perez) Quintanilla, Jr., was born on April 16, 1971, in Lake Jackson, Texas. She married Christopher Perez, guitarist and member of the band Selena y Los Dinos (slang for "the Boys") on April 2, 1992. They had no children. Selena attended Oran M. Roberts Elementary School in Lake Jackson and West Oso Junior High in Corpus Christi, where she completed the eighth grade. In 1989 she finished high school through the American School, a correspondence school for artists, and enrolled at Pacific Western University in business administration correspondence courses.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, an early explorer and first historian of Texas, was born in Jerez de la Frontera, an Andalusian province in the south of Spain near Cádiz. The precise year of Cabeza de Vaca’s birth cannot be determined, but it was within the “birth window” of 1487–92. The origin of his surname (“Cow’s Head” in Spanish) is not known, but it assuredly did not come from an alleged ancestor named Martín de Alhaja and his heroics at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in central Spain in 1212. That story, repeated by the author of this entry in The New Handbook of Texas (1996) and many others, is unquestionably apocryphal.

The Mexican War of Independence was in reality a series of revolts that grew out of the increasing political turmoil both in Spain and Mexico at the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars Spain fought both as an ally and as an enemy of France and suffered frequent interruptions in its commerce with its American colonies. Burdened with mounting war debts and facing a deepening economic crisis, Spanish rulers settled on extracting increased colonial revenues to meet European obligations. A royal decree in 1804 ordered imperial officials to confiscate certain church assets and place them at the disposal of the crown. In Mexico, as the church called in loans and mortgages and credit from that source dried up, a financial crisis emerged that was aggravated by an economic downturn caused by disruptions in overseas trade and bad harvests. Growing disaffection in New Spain received considerable reinforcement when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 and forced Ferdinand VII to abdicate the Spanish throne in favor of his brother Joseph.

The trail popularly known as the Chisholm Trail was one of several routes used by Texas drovers to move livestock north to markets in Kansas after the Civil War. Its historic period of use as a cattle trail was from the summer of 1867 to 1884. After the cattle market opened at Dodge City by the summer of 1876, much of the herd traffic diverted from this trail route to the Western Trail, also known as the Fort Griffin and Dodge City Trail, to head for the newer markets in Kansas and in neighboring states and territories.