Hell's Half Acre: The Life and Legend of a Red-Light District (Chisholm Trail, 9, Band 9) - Softcover

Selcer, Richard F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0875650880 ISBN 13: 9780875650883

Verlag: TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIV PR, 1991

Inhaltsangabe

Texas is a place where legends are made, die, and are revived. Fort Worth, Texas, claims its own legend – Hell’s Half Acre – a wild ’n woolly accumulation of bordellos, cribs, dance houses, saloons, and gambling parlors.

Tenderloin districts were a fact of life in every major town in the American West, but Hell’s Half Acre – its myth and its reality – can be said to be a microcosm of them all. The most famous and infamous westerners visited the Acre: Timothy (“Longhair Jim”) Courtright, Luke Short, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Sam Bass, Mary Porter, Etta Place, along with Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch, and many more. For civic leaders and reformers, the Acre presented a dilemma – the very establishments they sought to close down or regulate were major contributors to the local economy.

Controversial in its heyday and receiving new attention by such movies as Lonesome Dove, Hell’s Half Acre remains the subject of debate among historians and researchers today. Richard Selcer successfully separates fact from fiction, myth from reality, in this vibrant study of the men and women of Cowtown’s notorious Acre.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard F. Selcer, a Fort Worth native, is the author of seven books on Western and Civil War history. He teaches history at Cedar Valley College in Dallas, at Tarrant County Community College, and at the International Christian University in Vienna, Austria.

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Hell's Half Acre

The Life and Legend of a Red-Light District

By Richard F. Selcer

TCU Press

Copyright © 1991 Richard F. Selcer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87565-088-3

Contents

Introduction, 
1 Cowboy Capers, or "Dress and Delight Days", 
2 "The Wages of Sin Are A Damned Sight Better Than the Wages of Virtue", 
3 "Better Undressed Than Unarmed", 
4 "Lord Make Us Good But Not Right Now": The Timothy Courtright Years, 1876–1886, 
5 "The Gamblers Must Go!", 
6 "Ful, they've got me!", 
7 "Nothing But Brick and Mortar ...", 
8. The End of the Line, 
9. Epilogue, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Appendix 1, 
Appendix 2, 
Appendix 3, 
Appendix 4, 
Appendix 5, 
Appendix 6, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Cowboy Capers or "Dress and Delight Days"

Crime and vice in early Fort Worth were virtually synonymous with Hell's Half Acre. The night of April 9, 1877, represents a typical example. The cattle season had not really gotten underway, so there were few cowboys on the street and things were a little slow in the popular night spots. But homesteaders, section hands and drummers were looking for action. At the Blue Light Saloon and Dance House on Rusk Street, the girls leaned up against the bar, sharing a drink with anyone who was buying. The man at the piano played absently, wishing the cowboys would hit town so things would pick up.

Then Ben Tutt walked in. A small-time gambler, more often minnow than shark when he sat down at the table, Ben had a sour look on his face and more than a few drinks under his belt this night. Tutt made a beeline for the bar and demanded that the bartender set up drinks on the house. Startled, the bartender looked warily at the obviously drunk and agitated gambler and decided not to argue. He poured a shot of the cheap stuff, and Tutt downed it in one swallow.

Without another word, the gambler reached for his six-shooter and let fly three rounds in the general direction of the bartender, who prudently ducked behind the bar. The few patrons in the saloon dived for cover. Having made his point, Tutt backed unsteadily out the swinging doors, keeping the room covered with his gun. Outside, he fired three more shots into the saloon, grazing the bartender with one. Then he hotfooted it down the street.

Before the echoes of the second volley had died, the bartender grabbed his own pistol from under the bar and fired several shots out the door. They all missed. Folks inside rushed to the door to see which way Tutt went, but he had already disappeared. Figuring that the excitement was over, they went back to their dancing and drinking, but the pace had definitely picked up a little.

Someone sent for the town marshal who listened to the story, then took out after Tutt. Later that evening, the object of the manhunt turned himself in, but nobody filed charges, so he was released with only a stern warning from the lawman.

That was not the end of the story, however. On Sunday, April 15, Ben Tutt was again the talk of the town. It seems he was in the Theater Comique watching the girlie show when he began fooling around with his six-shooter, probably trying to impress the girls. He didn't make much of an impression, however, when he shot himself in the hand.

Tutt was hustled over to Doc Burts, who took the bullet out with the skill of one who had treated more than a few gunshot wounds in his day. A few days later, the Fort Worth Daily Democrat reported that Tutt was "doing well." He'd be dealing cards again soon.

* * *

Fort Worth in the late nineteenth century was no different than dozens of other western towns built on cattle and railroads. They all had their Ben Tutts and Blue Light Saloons and Theater Comiques. In fact, every frontier community—from Deadwood to Denver and San Francisco to San Antonio—had its own red-light district. They were as ubiquitous in the West as "boot hills" but much more fun and profitable for everyone involved. In Texas the chief rivals to Fort Worth for "Sin Capital of the State" were Austin, San Antonio, El Paso and Galveston—in all, two cattle towns, a railroad town and a seaport. Austin had an unfair advantage because, some said, politics are the worst sin of all and that was the main business in Austin. Dallas, some Fort Worthers were proud to point out, was not even in the running.

In the typical red-light district, prostitution went hand-in-hand with gambling, drinking and general hell-raising. One just naturally led to another. The amount of sinning and hell-raising that went on in these districts largely explains a curious sameness in the names of the most notorious examples. From Devil's Addition in Abilene to Hell's Half Acre in Fort Worth, most paid homage to Satan, the devil or hell somewhere in their names. Neither creative originality nor any desire to come up with mellifluous-sounding monikers entered into the picture; nor did anyone ever hold a contest to "Name that red-light district." Instead, the same names appear again and again in the local histories of western towns. San Antonio called its red-light district "Hell's Half Acre"; so did Tascosa, Texas, and Perry, Oklahoma. Even Dallas, only thirty miles away, had a smaller, less notorious district that went under the same name as Fort Worth's. Hell's Half Acre was such a common name on the frontier, it acquired an almost generic status. A cowboy could ride into practically any trail town and ask the first citizen he met, "Where's the Acre?" and the locals would know exactly what he was talking about.

Several theories can be advanced to explain the origin of the name Hell's Half Acre. One of the numberless mining camps in California during the 1849 gold rush was named Hell's Half Acre. Like so many of those camps built out of canvas and false hopes, it soon disappeared when the local claims played out, and no record of Hell's Half Acre, California, exists today. The earliest known use of the name in Texas was also well before the Civil War when the tiny community of Webberville, near Austin, was known as "Hell's Half Acre" because of its notorious lawlessness and immorality. But the name really came into vogue in trail towns after the Civil War. Texans may have brought it back with them from the bloody battlefield of Stones River in Tennessee where it was applied to a different type of hellhole for a few brief hours.

In Texas and Kansas a number of such red-light districts sprang up after the Civil War to serve cowboys who traveled up and down the trails between cow towns. Many, like Abilene, scarcely existed before the cattle boom era, while others, like Fort Worth, were small villages at a crossroads or a river crossing. All of that changed after 1866 when the first successful cattle drive traveled up the Chisholm Trail from south Texas to Kansas. The vast unclaimed herds of longhorns in south Texas and the highly profitable beef market in the East made cattle driving the most lucrative business on the frontier. As one historian expressed it: "No event since San Jacinto ... meant as much to Texas as the cattle drives."

Fort Worth's location on the Trinity River, on a direct line between San Antonio and the Indian Territory, placed it in a unique position, both economically and geographically, to cash in on the cattle boom. It was the last major stop between the broad, unfenced ranges to the south and the rail centers of the Great Plains. The journey north took up to two months, and even under the best of conditions, it was six weeks of eating dust,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1991
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0875650880
• ISBN 13: 9780875650883
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 364
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar