Justice Lee Harris

@1thread6flags Horrible day for Waco. Both Chief Justice Matt Johnson’s father (Judge Derwood) and Judge Robert Stem’s father were activated to duty of the National Guard that day. They served their neighbors admirably as they looked around at utter destruction to the place they called home!

On this day in 1953, Waco was ravaged by a tornado that tore through the heart of the city. The storm killed 114 people and seriously injured another 145; 196 business buildings were completely destroyed, and 396 were damaged so badly that they had to be torn down. Source: @TxStHistAssoc

@necky_fade Aoki

Who is the first golfer you think about when you see a Bullseye putter? For me it’s Mark McNulty

@OldAPG 9 and 11

My top ten Merle Haggard list 1 Mamma Tried 2 Okie from Muscogee 3 Sing Me Back Home 4 Fightin side of me 5 Today I started Loving you again 6 Workin Man Blues 7 Silver Wings 8 If we make it through December 9 Are the good times really over 10 Big City 11 Misery and Gin .. my fav

@EchoesofWarYT Pretty certain that Wyatt and Doc first met a Fort Griffin, Tx where Wyatt was buffalo hunting. They would run into each other often after that including Dodge City.

Wyatt Earp died in 1929. Let that sink in. The man who shot his way through the O.K. Corral lived long enough to see talking pictures, the Model T, Prohibition, jazz, and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a single season. He consulted on early Hollywood Westerns. He drank coffee with Charlie Chaplin on studio lots. A young John Wayne, then a prop boy named Marion Morrison, met him on a film set and later admitted he built his entire screen persona around the way Wyatt carried himself. Quiet. Slow. Absolutely certain. The legend almost never happened. Wyatt was born in 1848 in a small Illinois town to a farmer with a temper and eight children. When the Civil War broke out, thirteen year old Wyatt tried to run away and enlist three separate times. His father caught him each time and dragged him home by the collar. By sixteen he was hauling freight across the prairie. By twenty he had buried his first wife, Urilla, who died of typhoid while pregnant with their first child. He went off the rails after that. Got arrested in Arkansas for stealing a horse, broke out of the jail by climbing through the roof, and disappeared into the West. He hunted buffalo on the plains alongside a young Bat Masterson, who would later become his lifelong friend and, decades later, a sportswriter for a New York newspaper. He worked as a stagecoach guard, a faro dealer, a bouncer, a saloon owner, and at various points, a pimp. The legend tends to leave that last one out. His common law wife in Wichita was a known prostitute, and Wyatt himself was once fined for running a brothel. The myth wants a saint. The man was something messier and more interesting. He drifted into Dodge City, then the rowdiest cattle town in America, and pinned on a deputy's badge. He almost never fired his gun. His preferred weapon was the long barrel of a Colt revolver, which he used to crack drunken cowboys across the skull. They called it "buffaloing." It was free, it was fast, and the man stayed alive while everyone around him kept dying. It was in Dodge that he met Doc Holliday, a tubercular dentist from Georgia who had killed at least one man and was slowly drowning in his own lungs. The story goes that Doc once saved Wyatt's life in a saloon by drawing a pistol on a crowd of cowboys closing in behind him. From that moment on, the two were bound together. The lawman and the killer. The teetotaler and the alcoholic. The most unlikely friendship in the American West. In 1879 Wyatt's older brother Virgil sent word from a new silver town in Arizona Territory called Tombstone. The whole Earp clan went, hoping to get rich. They never did. What they got instead was a feud. A loose gang of cattle rustlers and stagecoach robbers known as the Cowboys ran the back country around Tombstone. The Earps, now wearing federal and city badges, kept tangling with them. Words turned to threats. Threats turned to ambushes. On October 26, 1881, in a narrow vacant lot beside a livery stable, the two sides finally met. The famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral lasted thirty seconds. Around thirty shots fired. Three Cowboys dead. Virgil shot. Morgan shot. Doc Holliday grazed. Wyatt walked away without a scratch. It wasn't even at the O.K. Corral. It happened next door. The papers got it wrong and history kept the mistake. Two months later, an assassin in the dark shot Virgil through the arm and shoulder, leaving him crippled for life. Three months after that, while Morgan was playing pool in a saloon, a gunman fired through a glass door and put a bullet through his spine. Wyatt was standing a few feet away. He held his brother as he bled out on the floor. Morgan's last words, according to Wyatt, were a request that no one ever wrote down on paper. Then Wyatt did something the law could not. He pinned on a federal marshal's badge, gathered a small posse including Doc Holliday, who was coughing blood into a handkerchief the entire ride, and hunted every man he believed responsible for his brothers. No trials. No arrests. He killed them where he found them. A train yard. A wood camp. A creek bed at sunset where he reportedly emptied both barrels of a shotgun into a man named Curly Bill at point blank range. History calls it the Earp Vendetta Ride. He was never charged. He was never caught. Arizona issued warrants for his arrest. Wyatt simply rode out of the territory and kept moving for the next forty seven years. He went to Colorado. To Idaho. To San Francisco, where he met Josephine Marcus, a Jewish stage actress who had once been engaged to the very sheriff Wyatt had been feuding with in Tombstone. She left that life behind and stayed with Wyatt until the day he died. They never had children. They never owned a real home. They lived in hotels, tents, mining camps, and rented rooms. In 1896 Wyatt was hired to referee a heavyweight prizefight in San Francisco between Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey. He walked into the ring with a loaded pistol still in his coat pocket. The police made him remove it on the spot in front of ten thousand people. He then awarded the fight to Sharkey on a controversial foul call that the entire sporting world believed was fixed. Wyatt insisted, until the day he died, that the call was honest. Most historians still doubt him. He chased gold in the Yukon during the Klondike rush, running a saloon in Nome, Alaska, where temperatures hit forty below and miners paid for whiskey in raw gold dust. He came back south. Prospected in the Mojave Desert with Josephine in a tent for years. Found a little copper. Lost most of it. By the 1910s he was old, broke, and living in a small bungalow in Los Angeles. He spent his days at the new film studios watching cowboys ride across painted backdrops. He befriended Tom Mix, the biggest Western star of the era. He befriended William S. Hart, the second biggest. He told them stories. He corrected their gun handling. He hated almost every Western he saw because none of them got it right. He tried to commission an honest biography of his life. Three different writers gave up. The first one Wyatt fired for being too soft. The second died. The third, Stuart Lake, wouldn't finish until after Wyatt was dead, and the resulting book, published in 1931, invented half the legend we know today, including a special long barreled revolver called the Buntline Special that almost certainly never existed. Wyatt Earp died in his sleep in Los Angeles on January 13, 1929, at the age of eighty. He had no money. He had no land. He had Josephine, a few photographs, and a reputation he had spent a lifetime trying and failing to control. When he was buried in a small Jewish cemetery just south of San Francisco, in Josephine's faith rather than his own, the pallbearers included Tom Mix and William S. Hart. Tom Mix wept openly at the grave. A studio orchestra played softly. The frontier was already a movie by then. The last real gunslinger had just become a character in it. Josephine lived another fifteen years. She spent most of them trying to clean up his story for the public and burning the parts she did not want history to see. She is buried beside him. His grave was robbed in 1957. The headstone was stolen. Twice. They keep replacing it. People keep coming.

@RileeDHarrison It doesn’t stop if you end up on the bench. Maybe worse. First, they know you can’t charge them & will say “I don’t want legal advice, I just want you to tell me what to do”

Being a lawyer is just getting reached out to by a distant family member, friend or acquaintance with some variation of “Wow! You are so blessed with a beautiful family! Can I get some legal advice?” over and over again until you die.

@JudgeJoeHardy Congratulations! I’ll start year 22 on September 1. It’s been a great way to dedicate my life to public service on three different benches! Thank you for doing the same!

11 years on the bench today!

@TracesofTexas Don’t forget, Mickey did The Highway Men tour for years with Kris, John, Willie, and Waylon!

I've written about Willie Nelson countless times here on TOT but have never written a single post dedicated to Willie's harmonica player (for 54 years!), Mickey Raphael. Mickey was born in Dallas and was introduced to Willie by none other than Darrell K. Royal. How crazy is that? Also, check out a (partial) list of musicians and groups with whom Mickey has played: Ray Charles, U2, Elton John, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Chris Stapleton, Jerry Jeff Walker, Tom Morello, Snoop Dogg, Engelbert Humperdinck, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Leon Bridges, Neil Young, Norah Jones, Duane Eddy, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Leon Russell, Lionel Richie, Mötley Crüe, Zac Brown Band, Dave Matthews, Blue Öyster Cult, Wynton Marsalis, Lonnie Donnegan, Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, Don Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, Blind Boys of Alabama, Waylon Jennings, Aaron Lewis, Margo Price, Rodney Crowell, Gov't Mule, Warren Haynes, Tanya Tucker, Supersuckers, Jason Isbell and Lucinda Williams. This publicity photo of Mickey courtesy Magnatone.

@AllieJade1 Lime it appears. Makes soil lest acid!

This farmer is working hard to get the ground ready for planting! Does everyone know what the white stuff is, that's being tilled into the ground? And what's its primary purpose? For what crops? Can some farmers help us newbies and city folks out! What's the white stuff and what's it for?

@TracesofTexas If I’m not mistaken, Doc stabbed and killed a man over a game of card in there. Hollywood aside, apparently he was a very poor marksman, but did better with a knife.

Traces of Texas reader Francis Rourke was nice enough to send in this nifty photo of Shaunissy's Saloon at Fort Griffin. This is actually a replica based on photos of the original saloon, but it was built on the original saloon's foundation. This is the saloon in which Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday met for the first time, in 1877. Thank you, Francis. Cool slice of Texas history!

@TracesofTexas I remember several into the 1980’s in deep east Texas. Both parties just trying to make it through. Unfortunately, the shop keepers didn’t see what was coming in the way of meth, crack, etc and most of them went under by trusting too much young people that they watched grow up!

San Augustine, Texas grocer R.V. Hall settles an account with one of his customers, 1943. A scene repeated countless times in small-town Texas over the years, customers coming on to settle their tab with the grocer at the end of a month. I love the details here: the man's hat, the cigarette in his hand, the cash in the grocer's hand etc... The customer looks like a working man, maybe a mechanic or something like that. 3-4 times I've been exploring some old abandoned building with my camera, wonder what function it served, and come across a box of old tabs, alphabetized, all from the same month in 1934 or whatever, and I think, "Aha! It was a grocery store." Do you remember any stores that ran monthly tabs for their customers? I think by my time they were pretty much a thing of the past. An incredible photo!

@TracesofTexas Crappie!

Traces of Texas reader Dennis Harper graciously sent this 1937 photo of Travis Hayes in Fort Worth with a mess of fish to me. That's right: a girl named Travis. Dennis actually sent in a slew of photos of Travis, all taken by her husband Johnny, who was a professional photographer in Fort Worth.

@JudsonHerringt1 @TracesofTexas Then you didn’t read all of the sign on the door! The part that ends with “brave men died here.”

@TracesofTexas To be fair. The first time I went, I was a little underwhelmed. The history is big, what we see on the ground is really an old, small building and a sign. A real quick box check for most San Antonio visitors. The river walk and Golf are much better attractions IMO.

Oh, yes, Virginia ... San Antonio is 308 years old today --- sort of. On May 1, 1718, a Spanish expedition led by Martín de Alarcón formally established the settlement that evolved into San Antonio when, on that date, he founded Mission San Antonio de Valero—better known today as The Alamo— on the banks of the San Antonio River, along with a nearby presidio, San Antonio de Béxar. Of course, that first mission didn't really stick. Within about a year, flooding and unstable conditions forced the mission to move to a second site nearby. That, too, proved less than ideal. By 1724, the mission was relocated again—this time to the spot where it would remain permanently, the location we now know as the Alamo in downtown San Antonio. So happy 308th birthday, San Antonio! You don't look a day over 300. 😀 Shown here: the @OfficialAlamo circa 1890.

@ThrillaRilla369 Johnny Bench; Pete Rose; Joe Morgan, Ken Griffey; Pat Zachary; Jose Cruz; Nolan Ryan!

Age yourself by naming an MLB player from your childhood. I'll start: Cal Ripken Jr

@BeelFrankbeel Some of the best times of my life! Congratulations!

FFA banquet this week. Another Chapter Star Farmer in the family. And the new chapter reporter.

@SamaHoole Hunting, like freedom, is never more than one generation away from extinction. We can’t pass it to our children in their bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and passed on to them to do the same. Otherwise, some day, we will sit around and reminisce. Ronald Reagan’s best

The American deer camp was, between approximately 1880 and 1990, the autumn ritual of every rural family in the upper Midwest, the Northeast, and the Appalachians. A cabin in the woods. Three or four men, three generations sometimes, who got there on the Friday before opening day, lit the wood stove, drank coffee that had been on the burner since 4am, played cards, told the same stories they had told the year before, and went out at first light on Saturday with rifles their grandfathers had owned. A buck taken cleanly with one shot. Field-dressed in the snow. Hung in the woodshed. Butchered the next weekend in the garage with the family. Forty pounds of venison in the chest freezer. Steaks for the winter. Sausage made by the grandfather with a recipe nobody had written down. A roast for Thanksgiving. The hide tanned and turned into mittens for the youngest grandson. The deer was free. The freezer was full. The boys learned to shoot, to clean a rifle, to gut an animal, to butcher it, to thank the woods for the deer, to be quiet for hours at dawn in the cold and notice things. Roughly 14 million Americans hunted in 1980. By 2020 that number was 11.5 million, and the average hunter age had risen from 35 to 51. The next generation is not coming up. Suburbanization removed the woods from the back door. Liability fears closed private lands. Public hunting access shrank. Time pressure on working families killed the long weekend at camp. The cultural drift made hunting socially suspect, then unfashionable, then, in some quarters, taboo. The number of American teenagers who have ever fired a rifle, gutted an animal, or watched their grandfather butcher a deer in the garage on a November Sunday afternoon is, in 2026, statistically vanishing. The freezer that used to be full of free, lean, grass-fed wild protein is full of ground beef from a Smithfield CAFO in Iowa. The skill is one generation deep. If the grandfather did not pass it to the father, and the father did not pass it to the son, the chain is broken. YouTube is, at the moment, where the few remaining young hunters are getting most of their training. A small American tradition that fed families for a century, taught a sequence of practical and moral lessons no textbook can replace, and connected three generations to the land their ancestors lived on, is closing down quietly, camp by camp, season by season. The cabin is still there. The stove still works. The buck is still in the woods. The grandfather is in the cemetery on the hill above the cabin. He cannot take the boy himself. Somebody else has to.

@TracesofTexas Wish I could tell more about the revolver on her hip! Interesting that she has a lariat as well.

Traces of Texas reader Soul Rebel graciously sent in this great photo of his/her great grandmother, Lula Bonnet Debonna, near Del Rio or Piedras Negras with an unidentified ranch hand. As you can see, she's in a body of water, probably the Rio Grande. Lula was born in 1869 and died in 1947. If you recognize the name "Debona," that's because last September I wrote about Lula's husband, Rocco Carmelo Debona, who was the manager of the Olmos Coal, Coke, and Oil Company, which mined up to 1200 tons of coal per day outside of Eagle Pass. It's a wonderful shot of Lula. My guess is that it was taken in (roughly) 1900. Thank you, Soul Rebel. I love it!

@CPY87 Grading other people’s papers is how I put it!

Think it’s simple and relaxing to be a judge? As I wrap up my judicial career and try to make life easier for my successor, I’ve handled all these cases by writing all these opinions in the last two and a half weeks with two and a half more weeks of this left. Fun, right? 😬🤓😉

Tennessee ag teachers have formally declared a loss of confidence in the current direction and leadership of National FFA. That should matter to every ag teacher in the country. This is not just about one state. It’s about mission, leadership, and trust in the FFA organization. If you’re an ag teacher, now is the time to speak up: Talk with your state association Ask where your state stands Make your voice heard Silence is not helpful. Tennessee spoke. Will your state? zurl.co/n0p34 x.com/messages/compo…

@GigaBeers My old neighbor in Abbott, Tx.

🤔Who is this man? He was born in a tiny Texas town during the Great Depression. His teenage parents walked away when he and his sister were just babies. Two exhausted grandparents — a blacksmith and a cotton-picking piano teacher — took them in with almost nothing to give… except music. They put a guitar in his hands at age six. He wrote his first song at seven. One grandparent died early. The other stayed long enough to watch him become a legend. Today he’s 92. He’s written over 1,000 songs. Sold tens of millions of records. Played for presidents. And built a sound that feels like the heartbeat of America. But every note still traces back to a dusty porch in Abbott, Texas. Guess who he is. (No Googling — just your gut.) Drop your guess below 👇

@TracesofTexas I’m betting it’s a load of barbed wire. Not much else is that heavy. Possibly shelled corn for feed?

A mule train in West Texas circa 1900. There are 20 mules. That is one HECK of a mule train and they are pulling one HECK of a load. That wagon is something else. My guess is that it's a ranch supply wagon headed south from Alpine or Marathon --- someplace with a railhead. I can't get over how sharp this is. It comes from the wonderful archives of the Portal to Texas history and it is a DOOZY, isn't it? I've ridden horses, of course, but I've never driven a team of horses or mules, and I have a question: After getting everything set up, is it any more work to drive a team of 20 mules than it is a team of 4 or 6? Courtesy the amazing archives of the Portal to Texas History.