DeMattos Jack - The notorious Luke Short : sporting man of the Wild West

by
Jack DeMattos
and
Chuck Parsons

With a Foreword by Rick Miller

Number 16 in the A. C. Greene Series

2015 Jack DeMattos and Chuck Parsons

Foreword2015 University of North Texas Press

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America .

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The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, z39.48.1984. Binding materials have been chosen for durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DeMattos, Jack, 1944- author.

The notorious Luke Short : sporting man of the Wild West / by Jack DeMattos and Chuck Parsons ; with a foreword by Rick Miller. -- Edition: first.

pages cm. -- (Number 16 in the A.C. Greene series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-57441-594-0 (cloth : alk. paper) -

1. Short, Luke L., 1854-1893. 2. Gamblers--West (U.S.)--Biography. 3. Cowboys--West (U.S.)--Biography. 4. Frontier and pioneer life--West (U.S.) 5. West (U.S.)--Biography. I. Parsons, Chuck, author. II. Title. III. Series: A.C. Greene series ; no. 16.

F594.S565D46 2015

795.092--dc23

[B]

2015003807

978-1-57441-602-2 (ebook)

The Notorious Luke Short: Sporting Man of the Wild West is Number 16 in the A. C. Greene Series

The electronic edition of this book was made possible by the support of the Vick Family Foundation.

• Jack DeMattos
• Chuck Parsons

Foreword

Its an iconic photographa group of stone-faced men, sitting and standing, staring stolidly back at the camera. Theres no way to detect that it was a celebratory pose, an image of the Dodge City Peace Commission taken to celebrate the victory of one group of gamblers and hard cases over another, a competing group of similar ilk. At least two men in the groupWyatt Earp and Bat Mastersonwent on to achieve a singular notoriety and fame of their own, helped along by a healthy dose of fictional television exploitation in the 1960s. The rest, for the most part, became mere footnotes in the history of the gunfighter west.

Standing in the rear, the men to either side of him standing much taller, is the diminutive Luke Short. It was for his sake that the so-called Dodge City War occurred in the first place, but, for some reason he never quite achieved the prominence of Earp and Masterson. He had been a cowboy, scouted during the Indian wars, and evolved into a well-known gambler, or sporting man, and was the survivor in two well-publicized gunfights. Like Earp and Masterson, he survived to die with his boots off. Yet he is not placed in the pantheon of famous gunfighters, such as Earp, John Wesley Hardin, Ben Thompson, and others. He has remained one of those characters in the shadow of others, familiar only to the aficionados of the Old West.

Two primary biographies were previously published about Short, one in 1961 by William Cox, and another in 1996 by Wayne Short, the grandson of Lukes brother, Henry Jenkins Short. Unfortunately, there was no effort at legitimate research in the former and a high degree of fictionalizing in the latter. Neither is a reliable source on which to base an understanding of the life of Luke Short.

The wild west is a uniquely American institution, including not just gunfighters and gamblers, but cowboys, ranchers, farmers, railroaders, Indians, and the many thousands of individuals and families who trekked westward, encountering all of the obstacles that nature and man could throw in their path. The era of the men we call gunfighters was brief, probably less than twenty years or so, personified by such figures as James Butler Wild Bill Hickok, Henry McCarty alias Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp and his brothers, and perhaps even extending to Luke Shorts dispatching of the deadly Jim Courtright.

Early on, the American public was fascinated by these larger-than-life men, that fascination fueled by a flood of many fictional accounts of their exploits. Hickok was lionized and credited with larger-than-life feats as early as 1867 in a popular national publication. In the 1880s and 1890s, cheaply printed pulp paper books perpetuated the myth of the Old West, enlarging on the legend and mythology of noted lawmen and outlaws. Jesse James killed seven or eight men with one bullet, as the story was told. Billy the Kid killed twenty-one men, one for every year of his life. Unfortunately those myths took on a life of their own, and were repeated in so-called legitimate accounts of these characters. Legend became fact, and the true nature of these men remained obscured. Even today, the general public is victimized by the output of so-called historians who pass their works off as credible, yet have not done the digging into primary sources necessary to support their conclusions. Such was the fate of Luke Short.

Enter Jack DeMattos and Chuck Parsons, two highly respected historians of the American gunfighter west. Jack is the author of six previous books on the subject of the Wild West, including a biography of the enigmatic gunfighter, David Allen Mysterious Dave Mather. He was also Historical Consultant for Real West magazine, for which he wrote (and illustrated) a series of fifty articles called Gunfighters of the Real West that ran from January 1978 until December 1985. Each article profiled a different gunfighterboth the well-known and the not-so-familiar, ranging alphabetically from Clay Allison to John Joshua Webb.

Chuck Parsons, also well-known to readers of the gunfighter west, left a career as a high school principal in Wisconsin to follow his passion for the Old West to the much sunnier climes of Texas. He has since established his credentials as a first-rate researcher, and has published well over a dozen books on the subject. He was the long-time editor of the Quarterly for the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History, and also served as the Answer Man for True West magazine.

Most of these Old West figures did not leave a paper trail that would allow a historian a century later to simply tell their story. There are gaps, and even the recorded accounts may have been written incorrectly. Thus, there is a temptation for the would-be historian to fabricate something, even if mere speculation, to fill the gaps. Likewise, there is a tendency to take secondary sources at face value and repeat them as accurate. That has happened to Luke Short.