T o please an old pal and improve his standing in Texas, Alexander Le Grand accepted a dangerous assignment on Sep. 9, 1836 only to learn that making peace with the Indians was easier than squeezing money out of Sam Houston.  During his last days as interim head of the Lone Star Republic, David G. B...

M inutes after midnight on Sept. 7, 1943, a fire broke out in a fleabag hotel a couple of blocks from the bus station in downtown Houston. The Gulf Hotel was a residence of last resort for the old, the infirm and the able-bodied who had come to Houston to look for work during the Second World War. L...

W ith independence about to be swapped for statehood, Texans packed the polls on Sept. 2, 1844 to pick a president for the fourth and final time.  The year before the Lone Star Republic’s last election, Texans could not have imagined that they would be forced to choose between Anson Jones and Edward...

By Bartee Haile W ith his inheritance squandered and his reputation in ruins, Louis Trezevant Wigfall left his native South Carolina on Aug. 22, 1846 to start a new life in Texas.  The son of a well-to-do planter, Wigfall’s college days at South Carolina College, forerunner of the University of Sout...

D uring a tour of Europe with a ballet company, 17 year old Tula Ellice Finklea of Amarillo married her instructor Nico Charisse, 32, in Paris on Aug. 12, 1939. If the name on her birth certificate fails to ring a bell, how about Cyd Charisse, the beautiful brunette who danced her way to stardom in ...

T he strangers that arrived at a West Texas ranch on Aug. 5, 1891 came with enough firepower to start a war, but instead of soldiers in some foreign army they were scientists on a mission to make it rain. During the Civil War, Edward Powers observed that downpours often followed battles punctuated b...

T wo Greyhound buses collided on a Central Texas hilltop before dawn on Aug. 4, 1952 killing both drivers on impact and burning an estimated 26 passengers to death. The horrendous head-on crash happened on U.S. Highway 81 seven miles south of Waco. The night was clear, the moon was shining and the t...

W ith no more buffalo left to slaughter, the last of the High Plains hunters, as shaggy as the beasts they once stalked, departed the Panhandle on July 23, 1879.   The wild rush of gold-seekers to California in 1849 split in half the multitude of North American bison.  The coming of the transcontine...

A fter three wave-tossed months at sea, a shipload of thirsty Germans streamed ashore at Galveston on Jul. 17, 1847 and went in search of the nearest tavern. The previous year, Prince Carl Solms-Braunfels had made the rounds of the universities in his fatherland to talk restless students into taking...

A  handsome lady-killer, who lived his last four decades in Texas, was arrested on July 9, 1943 for the murder of his father-in-law, the wealthiest man in the Bahamas. The woman, who gave birth to Alfred de Marigny on an island in the Indian Ocean in 1910, ran off with another man when her child was...