By Bartee Haile A small detachment of Lone Star rebels rode out of Goliad on Oct. 25, 1835 with orders to attack the government garrison at Fort Lipantitlan. As conceived by Capt. Philip Dimitt during the early days of the Texas Revolution, the Lipantitlan Expedition had two objectives:   the rescue...

By Bartee Haile After 22 weeks in solitary confinement, a former U.S. Senator and member of the Confederate cabinet was released by his Yankee captors and allowed to go home to Texas. John Henninger Reagan was born in 1818 in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee. As a boy,...

By Bartee Haile Ivy Baldwin, hero of the high wire, passed away in his sleep on Oct. 8, 1953 after 87 action-packed years. Who would have guessed that the little man, who lived so dangerously, would die so peacefully? photo courtesy of historycollection.com Ivy Baldwin preparing to walk over South B...

By Bartee Haile Always willing to do fellow Texans a favor, Phil Coe agreed on Oct. 4, 1871 to give four dozen cowboys the grand tour of Abilene when they arrived the next day in the Kansas cowtown. As adept at making friends as filling an inside straight, Philip Haddox Coe was so popular that a com...

By Bartee Haile His fate was already sealed when Gov. James Edward Ferguson rose to speak on Sept. 24, 1917. The defiant defendant aimed his parting shot not at the 28 jurors, whose minds were already made up, nor the hostile gallery but at the people of Texas. “You have decided to remove me from of...

By Bartee Haile In a double-header with the Kansas City Athletics on Sept. 17, 1958, Boston’s Pete Runnels hit safely in four of eight at-bats to raise his batting average to .322, four points better than Red Sox teammate Ted Williams. James Edward Runnells was the name the doctor wrote on his birth...

By Bartee Haile An 18-year-old brunette from Tyler waited anxiously with nine other finalists for the winner of the “Miss America” beauty pageant to be announced on Sept. 12, 1942. Ask any Texan how many young women from the Lone Star State have been chosen the most beautiful in the land, and the an...

By Bartee Haile On Sept. 6, 1896 the Katy Railroad put two-dollar tickets on sale for seats on excursion trains that would carry buyers to the sight of the century – a staged collision of two locomotives. The unique publicity stunt was the pet project of an imaginative passenger agent with the unlik...

By Bartee Haile Debs Garms went two for four on Aug. 25, 1940 in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ win over the Boston Bees and raised his league-leading batting average to a lofty .378. Garms was born in 1907 in the West Texas hamlet of Bangs a few miles west of Brownwood and named for his parents’ socialist...

By Bartee Haile On Aug. 19, 1895, John Wesley Hardin stuck to his usual routine of prowling the El Paso barrooms. But death stalked the middle-aged gunfighter, and the hot summer evening would be his last night on the town. A pistol-packing terror in 1870s Texas, Wes Hardin was a callous killer befo...