He was born in the Governor's Mansion in Austin on August 12, 1860.
His father was Sam Houston. The man who won Texas its independence. The president of the Republic. The governor of the state. The most towering figure in Texas history.
Temple Lea Houston spent his entire life standing in that shadow and somehow managed to cast one of his own.
Sam Houston died when Temple was three years old. His mother died when he was seven. Orphaned and restless, the boy ran away at thirteen to join a cattle drive headed north. He worked his way back south on a Mississippi riverboat. A friend of his father's found him drifting and arranged a position as a page in the United States Senate in Washington. Temple spent three years watching the most powerful men in America argue and maneuver and he paid close attention.
Then he came home to Texas and went to Baylor.
He graduated with honors in law and philosophy in 1880. At twenty one he was the youngest practicing attorney in Texas. At twenty two he was appointed District Attorney for the 35th Judicial District, a territory that covered fourteen thousand square miles of the Texas Panhandle headquartered in the frontier town of Mobeetie.
He strapped an ivory handled Colt revolver he called Old Betsy to his hip and went to work.
His jurisdiction included Mobeetie, Tascosa, and Clarendon, three towns scattered across some of the most remote and dangerous land in Texas. His cases involved killings, cattle rustling, assault, and every variety of frontier lawlessness. He wore a buckskin coat from Mexico and a wide brimmed sombrero with a silver eagle on the front. His auburn hair fell to his shoulders. He was over six feet tall and looked like exactly what he was.
The son of Sam Houston, dressed for a fight and carrying a gun.
At twenty four he was elected to the Texas State Senate, the youngest in Texas history. The state constitution required a minimum age of twenty six. Nobody seemed inclined to argue the point with him. In 1888 he stood before fifty thousand people at the dedication of the new Texas State Capitol and delivered the acceptance speech on behalf of the people of Texas. Those who heard it said they had never heard anything like it.
But the moment that made Temple Houston a legend happened in a makeshift courtroom in Woodward, Oklahoma in 1899.
A young woman named Minnie Stacey who worked at the Dew Drop Inn had been charged with a crime. She was a prostitute and nobody expected her to walk free. Temple Houston stood up to defend her.
What came out of his mouth stopped the room cold.
He spoke of women who through circumstance and hardship and the cruelty of the world had ended up in places no woman should have to be. He spoke of Mary Magdalene. He spoke of mercy and judgment and what a man reveals about himself in how he treats the most vulnerable. He asked the jury whether they would cast the first stone.
The jury deliberated for ten minutes and acquitted her.
The speech became known as the Soiled Dove Plea and was reprinted in newspapers across the country. Edna Ferber read about Temple Houston and modeled the hero of her novel Cimarron after him. The book became one of the bestselling novels of 1930 and was made into a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Temple Houston died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Woodward on August 15, 1905. He was forty five years old.
He was born in the Governor's Mansion. He died in a frontier town in Oklahoma Territory. In between he was everything Texas has ever tried to be.
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