T he first-ever Texas Relays, a co-creation of University of Texas track coach Clyde Littlefield and athletic director Theo Bellmont, were held in Austin on Mar. 27, 1925.  In the history of college athletics, rarely have iconic stars returned to their alma mater to put their larger-than-life reputa...

By Bartee Haile W hile on patrol off the Mexican coast on March 20, 1836, the Invincible vanquished an enemy man-of-war and seized an American blockade runner on the high seas.  It was all in a day’s work for the Texas Navy. During the darkest hour of the Lone Star Revolution, Jeremiah Brown put to ...

M ar. 14, 1882 was the date and the Dallas County courthouse was the place a former mayor of three Texas towns chose to have it out with the man he blamed for his latest fall from political grace. It was no coincidence that James Thurmond went out west in the late 1850s.  Like other youths of draft ...

L t. William Whiting and his saddlesore cavalrymen were warmly welcomed to Fort Leaton on March 24, 1849 by the proprietor, who hoped to talk the army into making his private hideaway on the Rio Grande an official border outpost. The shavetail’s mission was to find the shortest and safest route from...

Q uanah Parker, the last Comanche chief, was buried beside his famous white mother on Feb. 25, 1911. A few days after surrendering at Fort Sill in the spring of 1875, the battle-scarred leader of the Quahada Comanches just happened to tell Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie that his mother was the former whit...

By Bartee Haile A  young marine from South Texas was one of six American fighting men caught on camera on Feb. 23, 1945 raising the Stars and Stripes on a Pacific battlefield called Iwo Jima. Harlon Henry Block was born in 1924 at Yorktown and grew up on 40 acres in the Rio Grande Valley.  The third...

T homas Rusk stepped out of Sam Houston’s giant shadow on Feb. 16, 1848 to give his first speech in the United States Senate, an impassioned defense of the Mexican War. When John Salmon “Rip” Ford wrote his memoirs in the 1880s, the old Ranger paid special tribute to the two original senators from t...

N ewspapers across the Lone Star State reported on Feb. 9, 1933 that “a wild man, who scales cliffs and speeds through the underbrush in the fashion of a fictional Tarzan, has been living in the hilly, wooded section near Newport.” The story was either an imaginative hoax or the subject was nothing ...

The Mittie Stephens steamed out of New Orleans on Feb. 2, 1869 on a pleasure cruise through the inland waterways of Texas that ended in fiery tragedy on Caddo Lake. The 312-ton side-wheel steamboat was built six years earlier in Indiana.  Used by the Union for a year as a transport and packet (a shi...

T he search for George Sessions Perry, missing from his riverside home in Connecticut, entered its second month on Jan. 13, 1957 with no sign of the famous writer. The future novelist and magazine contributor was born and raised in the Central Texas town of Rockdale.  His father, owner of two drug s...