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On July 30, 1902, legendary Texas merchant Charles Rath died in Los Angeles, California. Rath, born near Stuttgart, Württemberg, in 1836, came to the United States in 1848. About 1853 Charles joined William Bent’s Colorado trading empire, working as an independent freighter hauling supplies and trade goods across Kansas. In the early 1870s Rath brought Andrew Johnson into his employ. Rath was among the first to take advantage of the growing buffalo-hide trade, hunting, freighting, and marketing the hides for a high profit. Often the hideyard of the Rath Mercantile Company was filled with 70,000 to 80,000 hides at one time.
In 1874, as the buffalo slaughter moved south into the Texas Panhandle, Rath and a business partner opened a combination store and restaurant at Adobe Walls, near the site of William Bent’s old outpost; Rath himself was back in Kansas on June 27 and thus missed the second battle of Adobe Walls. In the 1870s, Rath and partners such as Frank E. Conrad and William McDole Lee opened commercial establishments at Fort Griffin, Mobeetie, and Rath City.
By 1879, however, the buffalo supply was exhausted. Although Rath and his associates profited briefly from the bones their crews hauled away and sold for fertilizer, his fortune soon decreased as his debts from unsuccessful land speculations mounted. He lived in Mobeetie for a while before moving to Los Angeles, where he died of “mitral insufficiency.”
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Texas is 1,078,295,921,049,600 square inches in size.
That’s more than 1 QUADRILLION inches.
Just thought I would throw that out there.
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On July 29th, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The national commitment to a broad program of space exploration, including manned space flight, came in response to the Soviet Union’s successful space launches, begun in 1957.
In 1961, President John […]
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The weather is just so crazy in Texas.
By this time last year we’d had 41 days in a row with highs of more than 100 degrees. It turned out we were in the middle of a 67 day stretch in which temperatures reached the century mark, and the whole summer had a bottomless feel to […]
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On this day in 1884, Cayton Erhard died in Bastrop. This veteran and
prisoner of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition was a native of Munich,
Germany. He immigrated to Texas in 1839 and joined the Santa Fe Expedition
in 1841. He was taken prisoner by Mexican troops and spent two years
in Mexican prisons. Afterward, he was active in […]
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On July 18th, 1918, , Daniel R. Edwards of Mooresville, Texas, performed feats of valor near Soissons, France, that earned him the Medal of Honor. Edwards was a member of Company C, Third Machine Gun Battalion, First Division. After undergoing treatment for battle wounds and suffering from a shattered arm, he crawled alone into […]
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On July 17th, 1835, at the Lavaca-Navidad Meeting, an assembly of Jackson Municipality colonists gathered to discuss the growing list of grievances against the Mexican government of Antonio López de Santa Anna. The group met at William Millican’s gin house, located on the Job Williams league some four miles northeast of Edna in Jackson County. […]
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My Texas history calender has many days circled as being worthy of celebration.
One of these dates is today, July 16th, which I am hereby declaring “Texas Empresario Day.”
Early on Monday morning, July 16th, 1821, Stephen F. Austin, accompanied by Juan Seguin and 13 others, crossed the Sabine river and into Texas for the very first […]
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On this day in 1839, some 500 Texas troops under Kelsey H. Douglass routed 700 to 800 Cherokees led by Chief Bowl in what is now Henderson County. The battle of the Neches was the principal engagement of the Cherokee War; it resulted in the expulsion of the hostile Indians from East Texas and virtually […]
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On July 14th, 1938, texan Howard Hughes and a four-man crew landed their specially equipped Lockheed 14 in New York City, having circled the globe in three days, nineteen hours, and seventeen minutes. Along the way, they cut in half Charles Lindbergh’s record for crossing the Atlantic.
Hughes, born in Houston in 1905, inherited a […]
