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Southern Methodist University/Degolyer Library

“This is always the end of the journey for me,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist Horton Foote wrote more than half a century ago, referring to his hometown of Wharton. Indeed, though most of his writing was done outside Texas, his plays and films were nearly always set in small Southern towns that bear an uncanny resemblance to Wharton, where Foote was born in 1916. The modest, one-story house where he grew up, three blocks from the town square, remained his lifelong home away from home. “It was on the front porch of that house that he also heard for the first time many of the stories he would later use as the basis for more than sixty plays, movies, and TV dramas,” wrote biographer Wilborn Hampton. Seven decades ago, Foote, then living in New York City, returned home to pen his first full-length play, Texas Town. The three-act drama launched his storied career. —PC

Courtesy of the LBJ Library

Lyndon B. Johnson does not like to lose. He has already tasted defeat once, in 1941, when Governor W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel bested him by 1,306 votes in a special election for U.S. Senate. So when a second shot at the Senate presents itself, in 1948, Johnson is determined to prevail. He forces a runoff in the Democratic primary with former governor Coke Stevenson, and as the race draws to a close, in August, the early results favor his opponent. Suddenly an amended return is filed from Precinct 13, in Jim Wells County. The new count shifts two hundred votes to Johnson’s column, giving him the victory by 87 votes. An outraged Stevenson demands to see the return, but it has been locked for safekeeping in the vault of the Texas State Bank, in Alice, the county seat. Stevenson protests all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which opts out, deciding that matters of state politics should be left to the state. Johnson’s victory sticks, as does the derisive nickname “Landslide Lyndon.” —HWB

Photograph by Kenny Braun

More than a month after Robert E. Lee had surrendered, a number of Confederates had not yet laid down their arms. Still, it is unclear why a young colonel named Theodore H. Barrett decided to attack the Confederate encampments at Palmito Ranch, in what would be the last battle of the Civil War. Some argued that Barrett was hungry for action; others believe he was on a foraging expedition. Whatever the case, his maneuvers suggest hostile intent. Two days of skirmishes followed, with the bulk of the fighting taking place in a pocket between the Rio Grande and what is now Texas Highway 4. The last known combat fatality of the Civil War, a private from Indiana named John J. Williams, fell somewhere along this stretch of the road, and the skirmish ended with Barrett’s retreat. The Federals may have won the war, but the Confederates won the final battle. —KV