Margaret Dunbar married Milton Hardy several years later Hardy died of cholera in 1855, leaving two more children with Margaret. Her first husband, Harrison Dunbar, was killed in a private argument in Victoria soon after she bore their only child, a daughter. Her family was among the Irish colonists who arrived in Texas in 1829 with John McMullen and James McGloin and settled at San Patricio. She was born in Ireland on April 3, 1824. On this day in 1873, Margaret Borland died of 'trail fever' or 'congestion of the brain' after successfully leading a drive of about 2,500 cattle from Victoria, Texas, to Wichita, Kansas.

1: The Uninhibited Story of Slats Rodgers, was coauthored by Hart Stilwell and published in 1954. Rodgers subsequently ranched and ran restaurants in Bandera and McAllen. Although his flight career extended to his later years, his flamboyant lifestyle and penchant for the illegal were increasingly limited by rules and regulations of the Civil Aeronautics Administration. On special charter requests he would sometimes shock his passengers with unforgettable aerial performances.

After prohibition, he turned to crop dusting in the lower Rio Grande valley. He was involved in gambling and moonshining operations, eventually serving six months in a Dallas jail. During prohibition he bought his own plane to ferry bootleg liquor from Mexico to Texas. He became a flight instructor for the army in 1916 and worked as a barnstormer and circus stunt pilot after World War I. With the help of an engineer friend, Rodgers designed and built a primitive aircraft, reputed to be the first built in Texas, which he flew without instruction in late 1912, a mere nine years after the first manned airplane flight by the Wright brothers. As a young man he worked for the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway, but aviation was his passion. Rodgers was born in Georgia in 1889 and moved to Texas with his family as a boy. On this day in 1956, Slats Rodgers, the colorful owner of the first pilot's license in Texas, died in McAllen.

Old Soggy No. 1 by Hart Stilwell