It was the face that drew me in: clean-shaven; strong chin; eyes and mouth suggesting mischief, if not malice; handsome features framed by short, curly hair, no sideburns. If not for the tie and high collar, I would have guessed I'd seen the young man in a yearbook fraternity photo or maybe having a drink in a bar on Sixth Street in Austin.
He was the first child born in the Texas Governor's Mansion, on Aug. 12, 1860, although Texans rabid for secession forced his famous father out of office the year after Temple's birth. He was 3 when his father died, 7 when his mother succumbed to a yellow fever epidemic. He lived with an older sister in Georgetown until he was 12 and then rode his horse to West Texas to become a cowboy. After making a trail drive to the Dakota Territory, he got back home by hiring on as a clerk on a Mississippi River steamboat.
Taming the Panhandle
He served as a page in the U.S. Senate for four years before enrolling at 16 in a newly established Texas school, the Agricultural and Mechanical College at Bryan. He was an Aggie for a year before transferring to Baylor, where he majored in law and philosophy. Completing a four-year course of study in nine months, he graduated at 19 and applied to the Texas bar, even though the age requirement was 21. An exception was made for the brilliant young man with the sterling Texas pedigree.
Houston established a criminal-law practice in Brazoria, was elected county attorney at 20 and met young Laura Cross at a dance. He was 21, she 17, when they married.
Gov. Oran Roberts - the man who, as associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court, drew up the plan to force Sam Houston out of office - asked Temple Houston to help him tame lawless northwest Texas by serving as district attorney of the 27 Panhandle counties. Even though the young attorney was advised that to venture into a Panhandle courtroom unarmed was to risk his life, he said yes (maybe for that reason). He rode the train from Galveston to Fort Worth and then to the end of the line at Henrietta, where he took a stagecoach the rest of the way. He passed the time by shooting through the open window at jack rabbits, prairie dogs and rattlesnakes. A trail strewn with whiskey bottles signaled the coach was nearing Mobeetie, county seat in those days.
"He was a volatile type of guy," his grandson, Sam Houston IV, told me earlier this week. Houston, 84, mentioned his grandfather's famous defense of a friendless cowboy accused of stealing a horse and killing the animal's owner, an Oklahoma rancher. The rancher had the reputation of being a quick-triggered gunman. The cowboy's plea was self-defense, but witnesses testified he had shot and killed his victim without giving him an opportunity to draw.
Courtroom theatrics
Houston, tall and handsome at 33, strolled over to the jury box and leaned over the pine railing. He asked the jurors to consider what they would have done in a similar situation. "This malefactor was so adept with a six-shooter," he told them, "that he could place a gun in the hands of an inexperienced man, then draw and fire his own weapon before his victim could pull the trigger. Like this!"
From under his frock coat, he whipped out a white-handled, nickel-plated Colt revolver and fired six times at the jurors. The judge ducked beneath the bench, the defendant dived under the table, spectators ran for the doors and windows and the jurors "scattered like winter's withered leaves." (Houston was firing blanks, but given his reputation, no one was taking any chances.)
Once the jurors reassembled, they found Houston's client guilty, but the young attorney filed a motion for a new trial on grounds that the jury had "separated during the hearing and mingled with the crowd." The judge reluctantly granted the request, and several months later a new jury acquitted the cowboy.
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