Determined to succeed where his predecessor had failed, Texas Ranger Capt. Lee Hall arrested King Fisher on five counts of murder on Nov. 19, 1877. Had the smartest outlaw in the Lone Star State finally run out of luck? Seven years earlier, Fisher entered the state penitentiary to do a five-year str...

“Big D,” a popular fixture on the front page of the Dallas Morning News for nearly a quarter of century, appeared in print for the last time on Nov. 13, 1975. One winter night in 1952, Paul Crume came home from work and announced to his wife Marion, “They’ve asked me to start writing a new column.” ...

Dolph Briscoe survived a surprisingly strong challenge from Republican Henry Grover on Nov. 7, 1972, but the six-percent showing by the Raza Unida candidate made the Democrat the first Texas governor in 78 years elected without a clear majority of the votes. State law can be confusing when it comes ...

A torpedo-shaped sphere cruised the night sky over the West Texas town of Levelland on Nov. 2, 1957, while on the ground mysterious “eggs of light” blocked the roads. The reexamination of the so-called “Roswell Incident” in the 1990’s revived interest in Unidentified Flying Objects. Although nothing...

One of the many articles that have kept alive the legend of hidden riches on a narrow strip of sand off the Texas Gulf Coast ran in the Harlingen-based Valley Morning Star on Oct. 27, 1966. The subject of this always entertaining tale is the treasure supposedly buried on Padre Island by a band of ca...

The daughter of a long dead and all but forgotten hero of the Texas Revolution unveiled a statue of her tragic father at a Galveston intersection on Oct. 20, 1938. San Jacinto should have ensured him success and immortality, but Sidney Sherman knew only pain and disappointment. The most powerful pol...

Gus Mancuso watched the seventh game of the World Series from the St. Louis dugout on Oct. 10, 1931 as his Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Athletics for the championship. The son of Sicilian and German parents was born in Galveston five years after the Great Storm of 1900 nearly blew his birthplace ...

Texans turned out in record numbers on Sept. 9, 1844 to pick a president for the fourth and final time. With independence about to be traded for statehood, voters took comfort in the fact that the winner would soon be out of a job. The year before the Lone Star Republic’s last election, Texans never...

Two hundred Texans looking for a fight answered the call of Gen. William Walker and sailed for Nicaragua on Sept. 8, 1856. By the mid-1800s, the South was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. To satisfy the increasing demand for cotton, planters from Texas to Virginia desperately nee...

With the modern and supposedly more humane electric chair due to replace the gallows at midnight, an overflow crowd packed the courthouse square in Angleton on Aug. 31, 1923 for the last public execution in Texas. The first dose of “manufactured lightning” was administered in 1890 to a convicted wif...