To day Mr. Bolling returned on the cars from Sabine Pass. James Wrigley left on a hand car for Houston. I am busily employed in making out Rail Road accounts for the last month. Business rather dull. weather clear and hot with Ther. at 91°. we had a hard rain and storm at night.
Thus closes my notes for the month of December and also for the year just passed and gone and now numbered with the things that were. Whether the Almighty will spare me to chronicle the daily events of the incoming year is more than I know but trusting in Him I shall enter upon the pleasing task, which is useful as a reference and may be profitable to those who have an interest in me.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Thursday, August 1st, 1861
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On this day in 1861, the controversial John R. Baylor declared himself governor of the Confederate Territory of Arizona in what is now Mesilla, New Mexico. Baylor, born in Kentucky in 1822, had come to Texas at an early age. During the Civil War he commanded the Second Texas Mounted Rifles, who were ordered to occupy a chain of forts protecting the overland route between Fort Clark and Fort Bliss. In July 1861 Baylor seized Mesilla without opposition and pursued the federal Seventh Infantry, which had evacuated Fort Fillmore, east into the Organ Mountains. Baylor secured their surrender in the battle of Mesilla at San Augustine Pass on July 27. Though he was subsequently promoted to colonel, Baylor was succeeded in Mesilla by Henry Hopkins Sibley and removed from command in the spring of 1862 after ordering the extermination of the local Apache Indians. The victory at Mesilla was nonetheless one of the war's early and surprising Confederate successes, and Baylor's dashing actions in the summer of 1861 added to his fame as a folk hero. He died in 1894.
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