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Did Luke Short shoot a "bad man" in Leadville?

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Bat Masterson, the famous Wild West gunfighter, chronicled the various pistoleers he had known in the Old West. One of the profiles was on his friend, Luke Short1. A famous sporting man and saloon owner in his day, Short never achieved the fame of some of Masterson’s other friends, such as Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday. Masterson was not always a particularly reliable narrator; in Luke Short’s case, he almost surely invented much of the scuffles with Native Americans young Luke was supposed to have had, for example. The most well-researched biography of Short, that by Parsons and DeMattos 2, makes no mention of them. We can’t, therefore, take everything in Masterson’s stories seriously. Neither can we dismiss him as a source: he really knew most of the men he was writing about. In this post, I will investigate a particular gunfight Masterson attributed to Short, which Masterson claims made Luke notorious.

He provides an intriguing description of the incident, the famous “bad man in Leadville”. Luke encountered a notorious gambler:

One day, he ran afoul of a bad man with a gun in one of the camp’s prominent gambling houses. The bad man, who had a record of having killed someone somewhere, attempted to take some liberty with one of Luke’s bets, and when the latter politely requested the bad man to keep his hands off, the bad man became furious and made some rude remarks. The dealer was frightened half out of his wits. He looked to see Short shot full of holes before anyone could raise a hand to prevent it. The dealer, of course, didn’t have Luke’s number. He knew the other fellow but had yet to become acquainted with the late vendor of “Pine Top” up Nebraska way.

“Gentlemen,” said the dealer, in his most suave manner, “I will make the amount of the bet good, rather than quarrel.”

“You will not make anything good for me,” said Short. “That is my bet, and I will not permit anyone to take it.”

“You insignificant little shrimp,” growled the bad man, at the same time reaching for his canister. “I will shoot your hand off if you dare to put it on that bet.”

But he didn’t. Nor did he reach for his pistol in his hip pocket. For quicker than a flash, Luke had jammed his own pistol into the bad man’s face and pulled the trigger, and the bad man rolled over on the floor. The bullet passed through his cheek but, luckily, did not kill him.

There was no arrest or trial. Such things were happening all the time in those days in Leadville. This, however, gave Luke quite a standing.

There are several red flags in this story. First of all, the bad man is described as having a reputation of “having killed someone somewhere”, which is a suspicious lack of specificity. In addition, the name of this “bad man” is not mentioned. It is also unlikely that Masterson would remember so precisely the words exchanged between men over twenty years prior. Narratively, Masterson uses the Leadville bad man to establish that though Short was, as the name suggests, quite short and frail-looking, he was exceptionally dangerous with a gun. DeMattos and Parsons conclude that this event probably did not happen, as they could find no trace of it in the Leadville papers.

I agree: Short was not involved in any such Leadville incident. The detail about the cheek shot, however, is curious. I managed to locate a notorious man that matches many of the details of the “bad man” Masterson mentions, and who resided in Leadville about the same time as Short: William Bartlett.

On June 26, 1880, the Carbonate Chronicle3 reported an incident at a Chrysolite mine during a strike. A man called Valentine had been fired from a guard position by a Lieutenant Bartlett. Valentine, angry about this, had trash talked Bartlett around town. Bartlett went to confront Valentine, and a fistfight followed. After a short scuffle, Bartlett drew his revolver and viciously pistol-whipped Valentine. Valentine then pulled his own revolver and shot Bartlett through the cheek. Bartlett survived his wound. Both men were interviewed – Bartlett with great difficulty – for that June 26 article. This incident happened around the time Short left Leadville.

The papers were mostly pro-Valentine and anti-Bartlett, perhaps due to political reasons relating to the strike. The bias is quite easy to see. The July 3, 1880 Leadville Weekly Herald, for example, conspicuously does not even mention that Bartlett had been shot in the face. It only speaks of a “condition” Bartlett had that made it difficult to move him. He might as well have had a particularly bad flu. Valentine ended up dying from the wounds sustained in the pistol-whipping by Bartlett, as reported by the Leadville Weekly Herald4 a few weeks later.

Bartlett sustained the unusual cheek wound, but the motive does not match that reported by Masterson. Yet it turns out that Bartlett’s trouble would not end with Valentine. On May 13, 1881, a report came in from Dodge City5: Bartlett had been shot in the face again. This time, it really was a gambling dispute. Bartlett had decided to walk away from a brewing confrontation, but his assailant confronted him before Bartlett had even “thought of a revolver”. Though badly wounded, Bartlett managed to shoot his assailant in the chest as he fell, killing him. Remarkably, Bartlett survived again, because he stood trial for the death of Valentine in 18826.

We have most of the details mentioned by Masterson: Bartlett did – at least subsequently – have a reputation for “killing someone somewhere”. He really was shot through the cheek in Leadville, and in the face in a gambling dispute later, according to local reports.

The reason for the muddled details reported by Masterson might be the remarkable corruption that happened in the near-contemporaneous reporting of the fight. Initial reporting agreed that Valentine had shot Bartlett. Yet already in September7, Carbonate Chronicle was reporting that it was Valentine who was shot by Bartlett, in a bizarre reversal. The Leadville Weekly Democrat’s yearly retrospective reports the same8. We see that within weeks of the actual shooting, not only the date on which it happened, but who shot whom, was already confused in the local reporting.

An additional wrinkle is presented by the Dodge City episode. It was certainly reported in the Leadville papers, but I could find no trace of it in the Dodge City papers, though the relevant ones are digitized for the time period. Note the source in that story: some unnamed traveller who just came from Dodge. There is, however, a funny possibility: mid-April, Bat Masterson himself had severely wounded a man by shooting him in the chest in Dodge City. It may be that a part of the Luke Short legend in Leadville is borrowed from Bat’s own legend in the making. He may have supplied the actual event behind the alleged gambling scuffle of Bartlett, since that man was also shot in the chest. It is plausible that people thought Updegraff, the victim, would die of his wounds; even Bat was seemingly unsure if he did. The connection to the Masterson gunfight is, of course, merely speculative.

Incidentally, Bartlett might be the “slowest gun in the West” if both reports of his gunfights are accurate. In the first fight with Valentine, he actually has the gun in his hand but gets beaten to the shot anyway. In the second fight, though apparently knowing that trouble was brewing, he had not even “thought of a revolver” before being shot in the face (again). Indeed, his skill as a gunfighter seems to not have been based so much on ability at gunplay, but rather his remarkable ability to get shot in the face and survive. It appears his plan for a gunfight consisted of first getting shot in the face and then re-evaluating.

At any rate, I suspect that Bartlett was the source material for Luke Short’s “bad man in Leadville”: he achieved notoriety around the same time Short was there, he was shot through the cheek, later allegedly shot in the face again in a gambling-related incident, and was not immediately at the time charged with Valentine’s murder. In addition, the facts in the case were being corrupted almost contemporaneously, making it unsurprising that Masterson would remember only vague details. I haven’t been able to ascertain if Masterson was the first to attach Luke Short to the story, but he may well have been: perhaps Masterson remembered the adventures of Bartlett vaguely, and since Short was in Leadville at the time, mistakenly remembered it was Short who shot Bartlett.

Short did later participate in a gunfight reminiscent of the alleged Leadville incident. In 1881, he would kill the notorious gambler Charlie Storms in Tombstone. Masterson claims there was “scarcely” any difference between that fight and the one in Leadville. Masterson’s account of the Storms fight is, however, not the most accurate we have. Short’s own inquest testimony survives, and so does a neutral third-party account9. In that gunfight, as told by Short at his own inquest hearing, Storms pulled him aside to address the insults they had previously traded. Storms asked Short whether he dared to repeat them. Short did not reply, and both men went for their guns. The end result was that Storms missed two shots and Short killed Storms.

I’m not sure how Short actually obtained his reputation as a hard case. He was already hired as a lookout for a faro game in Tombstone, which was not a job for the faint-hearted. He may indeed have acquired a hard reputation in Leadville for some reason or another. After the Storms killing, though, he really did become notorious, and his famed 1887 duel with Courtright – in which Courtright went for his gun first, yet died without firing once – made a legend out of him.

To answer the question posed by the title: no, but someone did!

  1. Bat’s biographies now circulate on various places on the internet, for example, https://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-lukeshort/. ↩

  2. Parsons and DeMattos: “The Notorious Luke Short”. 2015, UNT Press. ↩

  3. Carbonate Chronicle, June 26, 1880. ↩

  4. Leadville Weekly Herald, July 17, 1880. ↩

  5. Leadville Democrat, May 13, 1881. ↩

  6. The Colorado Daily Chieftain, February 19, 1882 ↩

  7. Carbonate Chronicle, September 11, 1880 ↩

  8. Leadville Weekly Democrat, Volume 2, January 1, 1881 ↩

  9. Brand. “The Killing of Charlie Storms by Luke Short: Being a Closer Look at the Gunfight and its Consequences,” WWHA Journal 9:1, pp. 5-17 ↩