Lawyer was fast thinker

Bill Fairley’s Chronicles
Wednesday, July 13, 2005 –
Fort. Worth Star Telegram,


In 1913, William Capps bought a house on Penn Street that tayed in the family until 1971, and is no on the Nation Register of Historic Places.

In 1882, William Capps and Samuel Benton Cantey, Sr. formed Capps & Cantey, a law partnership that evolved into the oldest continuously operating law firm in Fort Worth. Capps was not only a lawyer, but was also the editor of Fort Worth’s first morning newspaper, the Fort Worth Record, before it was purchased by William Randolph Hearst.

Cantey was a lifelong student of the law, but Capps was “innovative” and practiced by “intuition,” according to the accounts of fellow lawyers.

Perhaps those qualities, rather than Cantey’s book learning, were the reason that Capps was called into the middle of one of those Wild-West-in-Cowtown episodes that sounds like a scene from a movie.

The same year Capps and Cantey became partners, two Texas Rangers came to town looking for “Longhaired” Jim Courtright.

Courtright, whose reputation as a fast draw was the equal of Hickok, Earp, and Masterson, was Fort Worth’s town marshal in the late 1870s. When he lost re-election in 1879, he took his guns to New Mexico where he was soon accused of killing two men.

He slipped back to Fort Worth and established a detective agency that one historian has called a “highly profitable protection racket.”

But then the Rangers showed up with extradition papers signed by Texas Gov. John Ireland and an arrest warrant accusing Courtright of murder in the New Mexico killings. The Rangers intended to take Courtright to New Mexico for trial.

After catching Courtright by trickery, the Rangers took him to a downtown hotel to await the next day’s train for New Mexico. Soon a crowd in a riotous mood had gathered outside, shouting for Longhaired Jim’s release.

The Rangers, knowing of Capps’ rapport with the townspeople, sent for the lawyer to help cool things down.

Capps climbed atop a shed over the railroad ticket office next to the hotel and made a speech reassuring the crowd that Courtright would not be harmed.

While the crowd’s attention was thus diverted, the Rangers moved the former marshal out the back of the hotel to the city jail. Courtright escaped in a couple of days anyway, but that’s another story.

Capps’ wife, Sallie, was active and popular in the community. She wanted a desirable home near downtown for her family, and in 1910, Capps bought a Victorian home at 1120 Penn St. that had been built in 1899 by Dr. Joseph R. Pollock. The house is just north of the West Lancaster Avenue bridge overlooking the Clear Fork of the Trinity River in a neighborhood that was then called Quality Hill.

The Cappses remodeled the home and in 1913, gave it to their daughter, Mattie Mae, and her husband, Frank M. Anderson. Mattie Mae Anderson died in 1963, and Frank Anderson lived there until 1971 when he sold the home to Historic Fort Worth Inc.

The Pollock-Capps home is listed on the Nation Register of Historic Places and is a Recorded Texas and Fort Worth Historic Landmark. It is the current home of the Dent Law Firm.

William Capps died at 75 in 1925; Sallie Capps lived until 1943. The law firm, now Cantey & Hanger, dropped his name in 1927.

Sources: Fort Worth Central Library Local History and Genealogical Department, History of Fort Worth’s Legal Community, by Ann Arnold; and Fort Worth: Outpost on the Trinity, by Oliver Knight.