UNRESOLVED

Sadly for me, a proud Texan, there were very few images in this project representing Texans. But towards the end of the acquisition I finally recognized a famous Texan,  famous for being an Oklahoman!

 Finally! A Texan! Temple Houston was an Oklahoma

lawyer, gunslinger, and sometime politician.  He was

 Sam Houston's youngest and most genetically similar 

son... even though he never really knew his father. 

 

 Due to difficulty, I waited as long as possible before unveiling this portion of the Russell Cushman Historical Image Collection. This was a challenging puzzle, with four brothers who shared a strong family resemblance. 

First the flamboyant and idiosyncratic Temple Houston, fourth son of Sam Houston, showed up on a CDV in one of the auctions where I had been snagging historical images for almost a year. As usual, the seller could not provide identification or provenance. Still, I knew it was him, and eventually found several more of his brothers...

There are very few images of the Houston children, which in itself is something of a mystery. Their father was an extroverted politician of great importance in American history, and certainly was painted, sculpted and photographed to the saturation level. But it is as if the children and Mrs. Houston were sequestered all of their lives, with scant and dimly lit peeks of them made available through limited family channels. Now my photographs prove that there were some... but perhaps they were loaned out for publishing purposes and never returned. Until NOW!

Considering the context of the rest of the collection, I believe that if I keep digging, will find somewhere that Albert Bigelow Paine, one of America's leading biographers, and the central culprit in this whole blog, at one time considered doing a biography of either Sam Houston or Temple Houston. And as I have displayed here, if my theories are correct, he was something of an image hoarder.

 #1, Andrew Jackson Houston, named after Sam Houston's

 close friend and commander and President of the United States.

Andrew was the second oldest, but was not old enough to 

serve in the Confederacy, but served later in the National Guard.

 Just some of the photos, nicely arranged,  which guided 

my identifications of three of the Houston boys, numbered

1 - 4. Ironically, the larger portion of them was of Andrew, 

a man my father knew well and interviewed for his book.

 

First Temple and then several tintypes emerged with boys that looked very Houstonesque.  They looked very much akin, but it would take me a long time to make this final graphic, organizing them, and hopefully correctly identifying them, using every photograph I could find for comparison.  I never did see a photograph of Sam Jr., who was the oldest and less likely to have been photographed as a child, since he was born before photography had even come to frontier Texas. 

But certainly after the Civil War, photography had come of age, and was available to the upper middle class in the larger population centers. The problem was the younger children were usually kept at home, which was probably Independence, Texas for most of them, and rarely seen in the political circles where Sam spent most of his time. The CDV (#4) of Temple in a suit was probably made when he served as a page in Washington D.C. when he was 15 or 16. By then he had already driven cattle all the way to the Dakotas, worked as a night clerk on a riverboat on the Mississippi, learned the "ways of the world," and then negotiated an appointment as a Washington page by a U.S. Senator.

 #2, Andrew Jackson Houston in his late twenties. This one

 well illustrates the Houston ferocity.  Andrew was not as 

handsome as the others, but was actually appointed to

 the U. S. Senate from Texas, right before he died.

I will admit that the photos, numbering 1-4, are not the most flattering, but because they were grouped relatively close in an Internet auction march of thousands, I felt then and still feel strongly that they were related. And they certainly do look like Houstons. There is that intense scowl... with powerful lips, but basic good looks that ties them together. The toughest thing was to tell them apart, with no clues. The ears were the only way to differentiate one from another.

#3, Little William and Andrew Jackson Houston, 

about 6 & 10, around the end of the Civil War-

perhaps dressed for their father's untimely funeral.

Here are some of the most acknowledged sons of Texas,  all of which grew up in public shame after their father refused to lead Texas in Secession and joining the Confederacy, and was forced out of the Governor's office. They had to find their own way while time would eventually prove the Houstons were on the right side of history.  All of them would have made Sam proud at one time or another, but some of them, especially Temple, would have frustrated the hell out of him. Sam Houston died during the Civil War, leaving the children to be raised without him. His devoted wife passed away soon after, and Temple and William were raised by their sister. The military and political legacy of his father, combined with the frustrations of defeat during the Civil War and the ostracism of his family because of his father's stance forged Temple Houston into a fierce young man with something to prove. And he soon chose someplace else to do it.

Temple Houston's life story included a law degree, political appointments, and a scandalous legal career which included shooting his pistols during a trial in his adopted state, Oklahoma. It is too much to cover here, but he would have been an intriguing western character to inspire a popular biography, but if anything, even Albert Bigelow Paine, the original spin doctor, might have hesitated. 

There were at least two biographies written about him in the late Twentieth Century, the better one by Glenn Shirley; Temple Houston- Lawyer With A Gun.