A few minutes after eight on February 8, 1887, Luke Short stepped outside Fort Worth’s White Elephant Saloon. Waiting for him was Jim “Longhair” Courtright, a former city marshal with a dangerous reputation.
They talked. A hand moved toward a pistol. Then five shots rang out on Main Street.
One man was still standing.
This week on Way Out West, meet the quietly dressed gambler and the formidable former lawman whose confrontation became Fort Worth’s most famous gunfight. There’s money, wounded pride, a warning that trouble was coming, and a loaded revolver that never fired.
And what about the famous story of a shattered thumb and a desperate “border shift”? We follow the action through contemporary newspaper accounts and later recollections to find out how much of that extraordinary sequence we can actually reconstruct.
Show notes and additional resources: https://WayOutWestPod.com/luke-short/
Transcript: For a full transcript of this episode, click on "Transcript"
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