Hell's Half Acre: The Life and Legend of a Red-Light District
by Richard F. Selcer

Fort Worth, Texas, can lay claim to one of the most notorious red-light districts in the West—the legendary Hell’s Half Acre, a wild ‘n’ woolly accumulation of bordellos, cribs, dance houses, saloons, and gambling parlors that thrived from the 1870s into the early twentieth century. The Acre attracted the most famous and infamous westerners of the day: men like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Luke Short, and Jim Courtright; women like Etta Place and Fannie Porter; gangs like Sam Bass’ stage robbers and Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch.

Tenderloin districts were a fact of life in every major town in the American West, and Hell’s Half Acre—its myth and its reality—can be said to be a microcosm of them all. Controversial in its heyday, Hell’s Half Acre remains the subject of debate among historians and researchers today. In this book, historian Selcer successfully separates fact from fiction, myth from reality in a fast-paced narrative of sin and violence.

The volume, Number 9 in the Chisholm Trail Series, includes many period photos, maps, endnotes, bibliography, and index.