After his parents died, seven-year-old Temple went to live with his older sister. By 1873, at just thirteen, he'd joined a cattle drive to Great Bend, Kansas. He headed east after that, working odd jobs — including night clerk on a Mississippi riverboat. Eventually he landed in Washington, D.C., as a page in the U.S. Senate. Three years on Capitol Hill pointed him toward the law. Back in Texas, he studied at Baylor University, graduating with honors in 1880 — he was only twenty. When he passed the bar, he became the youngest practicing lawyer in Texas. For the next twenty-four years, he'd be known as one of the Southwest's most brilliant — and most eccentric — legal minds.
In 1882, Houston took the job of district attorney for the 35th Judicial District — twenty-six unorganized counties across the Texas Panhandle. He and his new bride settled near Fort Elliott, and he built a reputation as a sharp trial lawyer and a gifted speaker, one who'd quote the Bible and the classics to make his case. For a while, he followed his father into politics, serving two terms in the Texas Senate. Then he moved his family to Canadian, Texas, where he worked for the Santa Fe Railroad and built a private defense practice.
When Oklahoma's Cherokee Strip opened in the land run of 1893, Houston moved again — this time to the new town of Woodward. His courtroom oratory, and his unorthodox style, made him a legend across the Oklahoma Territory. He kept his job with Santa Fe and his Panhandle clients, but he also took on cases that made headlines. In the rough-and-tumble Territory days, his clients included murderers, cattle thieves and gunfighters. His defense of a Woodward madam was so compelling, a copy of his closing argument is preserved in the Library of Congress. And Houston was just as well known for the pearl-handled pistol he carried — he once fired it, loaded with blanks, for courtroom effect. Another time, an unknown gunman shot at him — and a copy of the Oklahoma Territorial Statutes in his pocket stopped the bullet. When he was ambushed in a Woodward saloon, Houston killed a man in the fight — and was acquitted, defended by his own law firm.
Houston's popularity made him a natural candidate for office. In 1904, he let his name be floated as a possible contender for Oklahoma's first state governor. But his health was failing, and less than a year later, he died at home in Woodward of a brain hemorrhage. Years afterward, his colorful life found a second one: author Edna Ferber used Temple Houston as the model for the hero of her novel Cimarron.
Information for this story came from The Handbook of Texas Online and the Great Plains Preservation and Development Foundation. For High Plains Public Radio, I'm Debra Bolton, in Manhattan, Kansas.
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High Plains History is a production of High Plains Public Radio.
