Hell's Half Acre: The Life and Legend of a Red-Light District

Notes

Notes COMPLETE BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION FOR THE following sources can be found in the bibliography. Introduction 1. Quoted in Mark Thomas Connally, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era, p. II. 2. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, May 12, 1990, A.M. edition. 3. B. B. Paddock, Early Days in Fort Worth, p. 31. 4. J. A. Sharpe, "The Criminal Past: The Face of Crime in Later Medieval England," History Today (January, 1988), p. 19. 1. "Dress and Delight Days" 1. Fort Worth Daily Democrat, April 10, April 17, 1871. 2. According to western lore, the tenn "red-light district" originated in Dodge City, Kansas, when the town was a rail tenninus on the Santa Fe line. Railroad men would visit the bawdy houses and leave their red lanterns outside while they took care of business inside. The sight of one of these lanterns hanging outside a house was as good as a neon sign for advertising purposes. Whether myth or fact, this explanation is now finnly ensconced in the history of the West. See, Harry Sinclair Drago, Notorious Ladies of the Frontier, p. 256. Also, Fred and Jo Mazzulla, Brass Checks and Red Lights, p. 4. Compare, Paul I. Wellman, The Trampling Herd, p. 195. Wellman offers a slightly different version of the same story, saying that in the beginning red glass was used in the entrance of one of the favorite Dodge City honky tonks, the Old Red Light House, and from there came to be applied generically to all such establishments . Drago also cites the traditional story but moves the origin of the term back even further to Chicago's early days when working girls congregated on market days • 281 • 282 • Hell's Half Acre • to service the farmers who came to town to sell their produce. The girls advertised by hanging red lanterns on their wagons. True westerners stoutly deny the latter story. Some five hundred miles south of Dodge City on the opposite end of the Chisholm Trail, Fort Worth was no stranger to red lanterns in its early days. Like Dodge City, Fort Worth was a town built on cattle and railroads. In the 1870s, red lanterns often hung outside notorious houses on the south end of town. At least one early resident, Octavia Bennett, still remembered those days almost a century later. Interview with Mrs. Octavia Bennett, June 6, 1952, Fort Worth, Texas (Transcript in possession of Tarrant County Historical Society, Fort Worth). Gradually, the term "red-light" came to signify a particular type of district where prostitution was just one of a variety of vices offered to paying customers. 3. "Texas Writers' Project, Research Data: Fort Worth and Tarrant Counry, Texas" (Fort Worth: Fort Worth Public Library Unit, 1941), vol. 51, p. 20,100. Hereafter referred to as "Texas Writers' Project." 4. Unfortunately, the confusion this has created for later historians of the West knows no bounds. James D. Horan may be the writer most guilty of muddying the waters by confusing Hell's Half Acre in Fort Worth with the district of the same name in San Antonio in several books: The Desperate Men, The Wild Bunch and Pictorial History of the Wild West (with Paul Sann). Robert Elman in Badmen of the West commits the same mistake. Horan is the historian who started the story that Butch Cassidy's famous bicycle-riding episode romantically depicted in the 1969 movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" took place in Fort Worth's Hell's Half Acre. No such event ever occurred on the streets of Fort Worth. 5. Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State, p. 171. 6. This derivation is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Between December 3I, 1862, and January 2, 1863, 85,000 Union and Confederate soldiers fought around Murfreesboro, Tennessee, for control of middle Tennessee's railroads and rich fannland . At the climax of the battle on December 31, Union and Confederate soldiers fought a desperate hand-to-hand battle for control of a salient in the center of the Union line. The fighting was so intense in such a constricted area that soldiers on both sides christened it "Hell's Half Acre." Among the Confederates who took part in the fighting for Hell's Half Acre were members of the First Texas Brigade, McCown 's Division commanded by Brigadier General M. D. Ector. See, James Lee McDonough, Stones River - Bloody Winter in Tennessee, pp. 86, 131, 149 and 253. 7. Technically, the Chisholm Trail...