Home Brewed Mojo: GOODBYE TO "LONGHAIR" JIM

2/8/1887 - Considered one of the fastest gunfighters of the Wild West (he is said to be quicker than Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, and Bat Masterson), the quick draw career of Timothy Isaiah Courtright (Tim mistaken for Jim, his nicknames are "Longhair Jim" and "Big Jim") comes to an abrupt and bloody end when his protection money feud with fellow pistolero Luke Short plays out with leather finally being slapped in front of the "Shooting Gallery," the appropriately named "Hell's Half Acre" bar and brothel of Fort Worth, Texas resident Ella Blackwell. Reputation destroyed compliments of his gun jamming (there is also talk that Courtright's draw is delayed a split-second by his gun catching on the chain of his gold pocket watch), the 39-year-old shootist goes to the local Boot Hill as a result of Short bullets that hit "Longhair Jim" in the right thumb, right shoulder, and center of his heart.

Courtright

The exact date unknown, Timothy Courtright is born to the family of Daniel Courtright (he will have four older sisters and one younger brother) in Sangamon County, Illinois in the spring of 1845 (some sources also having him being born in Iowa between 1845 and 1848). Little is known about the early years of Courtright beyond the fact that by the time he is a teenager he has developed deadly gunfighter speed drawing his revolver and firing it accurately. It is an ability that the youth will soon put to good use. Lying about his age, at seventeen Courtright joins the Union Army and is soon fighting under the command of General John Alexander "Black Jack" Logan (a former Illinois state representative and then a member of Congress who becomes a political general during the Civil War, and one of the veterans of the conflict that will play a major part in establishing Decoration Day after the war, an event that has now morphed into America's Memorial Day). It will be as a soldier that Tim will somehow mistakenly become Jim, and not worth the trouble of constantly correcting his fellow soldiers, Courtright will just go along with the name change. Seeing action in the west with the Army of the Tennessee, Courtright receives praise for his bravery in action at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg, and is said to gain the admiration of Logan when he is wounded taking a bullet for meant the general. War over and the Union victorious, looking for what to do next, Courtright drifts west and southward, working as an army scout and letting his hair grow long as is the custom of the time for many in that occupation, eventually taking up residence in Fort Worth, Texas by the 1870s (he also finds time to marry Sarah Elizabeth "Betty" Weeks, a women who will gift Courtright with three children and perform with him as a sharp-shooter in a Wild West show alongside Wild Bill Hickok). A wild town with a host of wild citizens, though he tries to become a farmer, Courtright walks the streets of the town wearing two six-shooters with their handle butts forward, and draws from the right hip with his right hand when he needs to shoot. Unable to make a go at farming, Courtright works as the city jailor, and then in 1875 is hired as a Deputy City Marshal, before running for city marshal himself in 1876.

Logan

Weeks

Winning his election by three votes (he becomes Fort Worth's first duly elected marshal), Courtright will bring a semblance of peace to Fort Worth for a time, but wears out his welcome with the city's merchants by 1879, falling prey to the businessmen in the city wanting calm, but finding them unwilling to allow him to put in place reforms that will achieve it or use his quick draw on too many of the money-bearing Chisholm Trail cowboys that fill the city (on August 25, 1877, Deputy Marshal Columbus Fitzgerald is shot and killed trying to break up a street fight, a murder that Courtright avenges the same evening). During his term in office, the gunman is said to have killed five men and cuts the town's murder rate in half, but loses the town's 1879 marshal election to S.M. Farmer (there are also rumors that some of the deaths are a result of Courtright operating a protection racket on the denizens of the town's wild red-light district, "Hell's Half Acre," a five acre of area of lawlessness that will be visited by the like of Bat Masterson, Butch Cassidy, Doc Holliday, Harvey Logan, the Sundance Kid, Etta Place, Luke Short, Sam Bass, and Wyatt Earp). Leaving his family behind, Courtright then moves west out of Texas and crosses into New Mexico. Alighting in the silver camp of Lake Valley, Courtright functions once more as a lawman, spending time as an ore guard for the American Mining Company (using a rifle instead of his pistols, Courtright will kill two Mexican bandidos trying rob a silver shipment in 1882), before being hired to become the foreman on the New Mexico ranch of his former commander, John Logan, where his duties include keeping the general's range free of sodbusters and rustlers. Too good fulfilling his duties, Courtright is once more on the move after he is part of a posse that kills two cowboys, Alexis Grossetete and Robert Elsinger, when the two men refuse to leave the ranch they have established at Gallo Springs, New Mexico (ignoring the men's claim of ownership by way of filing patents on unsurveyed land, Courtright and his friend, Jim McIntire, will shoot down the men as "Mexican" squatters in 1883). Local authorities advised of the killings by Mormon deacon, Daniel H. McAllister, Courtright and McIntire flee on horseback into Mexico just before they are indicted for murder by a grand jury. Tiring of life as south-of-the-border fugitives in less than a year, the two gunmen met up with their families in El Paso, Texas, before moving back to Fort Worth, where Courtright opens up the T.I.C. Commercial Detective Agency, a private detective firm that serves as a cover for the gunman's protection racket.

Hell's Half Acre

Lake Valley

Before he can get his detective agency running at full speed though, Courtright finds himself served with extradition papers by New Mexican officials working in conjunction with the Texas Rangers. Having made many friends while residing in Fort Worth, roughly 2,000 armed citizens are willing to keep Courtright free, but the gunman surrenders instead ... and puts a safer plan into play. Having a last meal at his favorite restaurant in Fort Worth, Courtright will pull two pistols out from under the table where friends have placed them, get the drop on the lawmen taking him back to New Mexico, and will flee the town on a swift horse that has been placed outside the eatery. Hiding aboard a train going to Galveston, Courtright will then take a ship to New York City, wander into Canada, before returning to the United States by way of the state of Washington the following year. Tired again of running, he surrenders to New Mexican authorities again, and placed on trial for the murders, is acquitted by Lake Valley jury (some witnesses have vanished and the "Mexican" lie is believed), a disposition that allows Courtright to return to Fort Worth and reopen his detective agency in 1884, where he quickly discovers that another pistolero, a former friend, has set up shop in the wild Texas city, a gent named Luke Lamar Short.

Luke Short

Wild West all the way, Luke is born on January 22, 1854 in Polk County, Arkansas (he will have nine siblings) to Hetty and Josiah Washington Short. Two years after his birth, the family packs up and moves to Montague County, Texas, and Short begins putting together a resume of adventure, gun fighting, and death dealing. In 1862, as an eight-year-old, Short and his older brother help their father escape a Comanche ambush on their ranch, and at the age of thirteen, while still just a school boy, he carves up the face of a local youngster that attempts to bully him, and escaping retribution for the act, the family picks up and moves to the cow town of Fort Worth. Three years later, as a sixteen-year-old in 1869, Luke drops out of school to become a cowboy, an occupation taking cattle to railheads in Kansas that will command his attention for the next six years (as a full-grown adult, Short will only stand 5'6" tall and weighs 125 pounds dripping wet). In 1876, Short becomes involved with whiskey peddlers in Sidney, Nebraska and as a result, kills six Sioux Indians when they become belligerent over the cost of what they've already imbibed. Occupation now that of an Indian fighter (his friend, Bat Masterson will claim that Short has over thirty encounters with hostile Indians during this period in his life), Luke signs on to scout and dispatch ride for General George Crook (a Civil War general that afterward, will chase Indians all over the West as Nantan Lupan, the "Grey Wolf," having encounters with hostiles from Oregon to Arizona, where his career culminates in his taking the surrender of the Apache leader and medicine man, Geronimo, in 1886) during the U.S. Army's campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne in 1876 that results in the massacre of George Armstrong Custer and part of the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (in one memorable encounter he is said to be ambushed by fifteen warriors and in a running battle on horseback, kills off five Indians with his pistols before reaching the safety of an Army camp). The Fort Worth Daily Gazette will describe him as "the bravest scout in the the government's employ." Out of the army by 1878, Short becomes a professional gambler and saloon keeper (he will be a part owner in three of the most notorious businesses of the Wild West, Tombstone, Arizona's Oriental Saloon, the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City, Kansas, and Fort Worth's White Elephant Saloon). Plying his trade in the mining camp of Leadville, Colorado, he will wound a man named Brown in the face with a pistol shot in a bitter argument over a gambling debt in 1879, as the house dealer at Tombstone's Oriental in 1881, he will kill Charles Storms with slugs to the fellow gambler's neck and heart (considered a justifiable homicide, the two men are so close that Storms' shirt catches on fire as he is shot), and in 1883, he will be wounded in a shooting scrape with Dodge City peace officer L. C. Hartman when three female "singers" (prostitutes) from the Long Branch are arrested by the officer (the policeman survives by feigning death and then slipping away in the darkness of the night ... arrested later, Short will be released on a bond of $2,000 and put on the first train leaving town). Fighting ordinances meant to clean-up the Dodge City bar business, Short will then become a member of what is called "The Dodge City Peace Commission," a group of gunmen that includes Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Charlie Bassett. As 1883 ends, Short sells his part in the Long Branch Saloon and returns to Texas, setting up shop briefly in San Antonio, before returning to Fort Worth, where he becomes a co-owner in the White Elephant Saloon (during this period he displays his marksmanship and speed of draw with an unusual feat gunplay ... dining in a local restaurant, he is given a glass of milk that has a fly perched on it's surface, a tainting of his drink that he takes care of by flinging the milk into the air, pulling his .45 pistol, and impressively shooting the fly out of the sky).

Crook

The Oriental Saloon

The Dodge City Peace Commission - Standing (L-R)

William Harris, Luke Short, Bat Masterson, William

Petillon - Seated (L-R) Charlie Bassett, Wyatt Earp,

Frank McLean, Neil Brown

One of the largest and most profitable saloons in Texas, the White Elephant inevitably is targeted for "protection" by Courtright's detective agency in 1887. Short offers his former pal a flat fee to stay away from his saloon, but Courtright's shakedown wants the business to sign a contract that requires on-site "security" agents to watch over the White Elephant, and because other establishments will then follow suit. Not one to be intimidated ever, when his compromise is refused, Short tells Courtright to "Go to Hell!" as the town waits for a gunfight between the two to take place ... and it does on Tuesday, February 8, 1887. Threats exchanged, tipsy and belligerent with liquor, at around 8:00 in the evening, Courtright shows up in front of the White Elephant and calls for Short to come outside and face him in the street. Accepting the challenge, dressed in his finest evening attire (which includes pants with a specially made right pocket tailored in leather to fit his pistol), Short steps out of the saloon (in town to see his friend, he is accompanied by Bat Masterson), ready to fight, but no guns are immediately pulled as a friend of both men, Jake Johnson, tries to dissuade the two men from fighting by walking the pair down the street. But the ire in both men has built to a point of no return, and outside a combination bar and brothel called "The Shooting Gallery," the two men square off to each other at a distance of about four feet. Claiming concerns that Short is armed and will draw on him (Short lies and says he is unarmed), thumbs in his fancy vest, Short moves to pull his coat back to show Courtright he is not wearing a holster, to which the former Fort Worth marshal responds by exclaiming, "Don't you pull a gun on me!" as he pulls his own weapon. Quicker than Courtright (some say the hammer of Courtright's gun catches on his watch chain), Short's cut-off .45 comes out of his pocket at rattlesnake speed and he gets off the first shot of the encounter, which blows off his opponent's thumb. Battle over, Short also gets off all the other shots of the confrontation as Courtright tries to make a "border shift" toss of his revolver to his unwounded left hand ... a seconds delay that allows Short to finish the job he has started by emptying his gun at the shakedown artist, wounding the man in the shoulder and sending a fatal bit of lead through the gunman's heart. Courtright dead with his boots on when he hits the sidewalk and becomes a bound for the local cemetery corpse (in the aftermath of the gunfight, Courtright will receive a huge Fort Worth funeral attended by hundreds with a procession through the city that is six blocks long, and his wife and family will given money by Fort Worth citizens before pulling up stakes and moving to California. Courtright is buried in the city's Oakwood Cemetery).

Courtright's Pistol

Big News

Fort Worth Grave

Arrested immediately after the killing, Short will almost be lynched by Courtright partisans (a mob is dissuaded from taking Short from his cell by Bat Masterson sitting in front of the cage of his friend with a buckshot loaded shotgun), but will be released from the Tarrant County Jail once the shooting is found to be a justifiable homicide. Legal matters settled, on March 15, 1887, Luke marries 24-year-old Harriet Beatrice "Hattie" Buck in Oswego, Kansas. They will spend the rest of Short's life as a loving couple. And as such, the pair will be found over the next few years following the horse races that take place in New York City's Coney Island racetrack (the Sheepshead Bay Race Track), the track at Saratoga Springs, New York and annually at the Washington Park Race Track in Chicago, Illinois. Briefly, Short will also try to become a boxing promoter, offering $20,000 for John L. Sullivan to defend his heavyweight boxing championship in Fort Worth. And in Short's last years, he will engage in one more gunfight on December 23, 1890 (with a former friend named Charles Wright who claims the gambling winnings he is holding for a consortium of men that includes Short has been stolen ... a battle that sees Short taking an ambush shotgun load of buckshot that wounds the gunman in the left leg, hip, and costs him his left thumb, while Wright has his right wrist shattered by a Short return firer ... thought to have life costing wounds, he will spend over three months in a Fort Worth bed being nursed back to health by his wife) and almost shoots down an innocent man in a case of mistaken identity after beating up a drunken lawyer named James J. Singleton he quarrels with in the lobby of Chicago's Leland Hotel in October of 1891. By the start of 1893 though, Short is at death's door after he develops Bright's disease (a kidney ailment). Seeking the healing qualities of it's waters, with his wife beside him (she will be only 29-years-old when she becomes a widow), he dies at Gilbert House in Geuda Springs, Kansas on September 8, 1893. Like Courtright, Short is only 39-years-old when he passes.