Part 8, Note 67

Click Here to See All Notes to Part 8

Colorado County Bond and Mortgage Records, Book I, p. 114; Colorado Citizen, March 2, 1876, March 30, 1876, May 2, 1876, May 11, 1876, June 1, 1876, July 13, 1876, August 10, 1876. The theft of livestock, of course, was not new; however, the primacy of the notion that ranchers must exact their own retribution was. One must wonder what effect cases like that of Karl Friedrich Sophus Jordt, a longtime resident of Frelsburg and then Columbus, had on the psyches of ranchers. Jordt was convicted of stealing "a certain sorrel horse" and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary. He appealed the case to the state supreme court, which, in early 1869, overruled his conviction on the grounds that Jordt ought not have been convicted of stealing a horse because the term "horse" meant either a male or a female animal and Jordt had actually stolen a gelding (see Colorado County District Court Records, Criminal Cause File No. 775: State of Texas v. Charles Jordt; George W. Paschal, Reports of Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the State of Texas [Texas Reports], vol. 31 (Washington, D. C.: W. H. & O. H. Morrison, 1870), pp. 571-572; Galveston Daily News, March 10, 1869).