Dodge City

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  To Kathryn Clavin and James Vunkannon and their long life together

  Author’s Note

  With Wyatt Earp, there is too much material, and with Bat Masterson, there is not nearly as much. To write about both, you hope to find a reliable middle ground you can hang your Stetson on.

  There have been many books and films that feature Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Almost all of the books are largely fiction, including the ones published as nonfiction. They contain exaggerations, embellishments, rumors, and outright falsehoods. The same goes for the onscreen efforts that began in 1932 with Walter Huston playing a character based on Wyatt Earp in Law and Order. The challenge for a writer today is to sift through all that has been done before to find the most reliable sources on both Wyatt and Bat and then tell how their stories intersected in Dodge City in the 1870s, where they became lifelong friends and met the one-of-a-kind characters who share many of those stories. Given what iconic figures these legendary lawmen are in American history and how over the years tall tales have stuck to them like barnacles on a boat, for me it was a challenge indeed.

  As an individual subject, Wyatt Earp has been written about extensively. That would appear to be good news for an author taking a crack at a period in his life that has tended to be previously overlooked. Yes and no. While Wyatt had some notoriety during his lifetime, most of it was connected to the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and the revenge ride that followed the shootings of his brothers Virgil and Morgan. Wyatt did not become a fully imagined legend of the Wild West until the publication of Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal in 1931, two years after his death. It sold briskly, even in the Depression, and Stuart Lake’s biography would be the basis of movies and television episodes—and, alas, most “nonfiction” books and articles—for decades to come. Like Frontier Marshal, many such projects unashamedly played fast and loose with the facts. Even a classic motion picture like My Darling Clementine has Doc Holliday dying in the O.K. Corral gun battle, and Virgil Earp is not only portrayed as Wyatt’s younger brother but is killed before the brothers even get to the corral.

  Frontier Marshal is packed with stories and reads like a darn good yarn. The award-winning western and mystery writer Loren D. Estleman considers it “a pivotal work in the uniquely American process by which the common straw of history is spun into legendary gold.” The problem is that some of the stories are inventions or at least embellishments. As Estleman immediately informs readers in his foreword to the 1994 edition of Lake’s book, the book’s contents are less fact than fable. Thankfully, with some Wyatt Earp stories, over the years diligent and dedicated researchers have found that there are sound, solid sources of information. A handful of those authors, particularly Casey Tefertiller and Sherry Monahan, have written accurately and wonderfully about Wyatt and the Earp family. Wyatt himself, though, and later his fourth wife, Josephine (also known as Sadie), had other priorities than being reliable raconteurs. At times his own recollections or those of his contemporaries were the only foundations for what may or may not be tall tales. From the time that Lake’s book was published, the expanding and burnishing legend of Wyatt Earp became more important than the real life of the man.

  And there were those who wanted to do the opposite, to tear Wyatt down, to chip away at the statue of the most famous lawman of the American West while it was still being sculpted atop those faulty foundations. There were people who didn’t like Wyatt or any of the other Earps or who simply were jealous enough of one western figure rising above the others that attacks were launched. As Estleman further explained, “If, for example, Lake’s undisguised admiration for his subject compels him to paint an impossible picture of Wyatt Earp as saint, Frank Waters’s personal grudge against Earp’s widow moves him just as surely, in The Earp Brothers of Tombstone, to cast the lawman-entrepreneur in the equally untenable role of Antichrist.”

  As is usually the case in research, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. That is the course I have tried to steer when it comes to the lives and experiences of both Wyatt and Bat Masterson.

  This writer’s life would have been easier if more had been previously written about Bat. Aside from scholarly articles published from time to time, there are only three main sources of information. One is a series of profiles of his contemporaries in the Old West, profiles that Bat himself wrote for a magazine and that were published as a collection in 1907 as Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier. They are colorful pieces indeed and should be, considering that Bat had led a colorful and adventurous life. But only some of what the profiles report is true. Bat relied primarily on his memory, and being in his fifties then, it was somewhat suspect, and to some extent he enjoyed the attention he received that was based more on legends than facts.

  There are only two reputable, full-length biographies of Bat. The first, published in 1957, was written by Richard O’Connor. It is credited with being the basis of the Bat Masterson television series, and it reads more like popular screen fare than serious scholarship. But at least O’Connor tried to give Bat his due, and while the research is sketchy (beginning with Bat’s place of birth), there are more accurate ingredients than knee-slappers. The second and, to date, last biography is by the eminent historian Robert K. DeArment and was published in 1979. It does a much better job of offering a full portrait of Bat. DeArment did his best to meet the challenge of Bat’s life not being as well chronicled as Wyatt’s, and he regarded what had been written before—one example being Bat credited with killing twenty-two men in gunfights—as being more harmful than helpful.

  Of course, there are other sources to draw from when writing about Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and all the truths, legends, and lies about Dodge City in the 1870s. Many writers have emphasized the “Wild West” reputation of the city, and correctly so, because for a time in the 1870s no other city west of the Mississippi was more of a free-for-all of cowboys, gunfighters, gamblers, prostitutes, entrepreneurs, prospectors, and others just passing through.

  Even now, not just in the United States but around the world, to hear someone say “Dodge City” immediately conjures up images of lawlessness and violence, corruption and roughriding men in black hats. This overlooks that there were men and women in Dodge City working to establish a more civilized life, and they hired lawmen like Wyatt and Bat and Charlie Bassett and Bill Tilghman and Ed and Jim Masterson to forge a system of frontier justice that would eventually create the West we know today. If these men had failed, the history of America in the late nineteenth century would have been quite different.

  The bibliography found at the back of this book offers a glimpse of the effort to cast a wide net to capture the facts and toss the falsehoods back into the sea of legend. But the more research I did, the more I realized that what is “known” was often contradictory or just plain hooey, perpetrated by public-relations men posing as writers, peop
le with their own anti-Earp and/or anti-Masterson agendas, and Wyatt and Bat themselves. With this in mind, I did my own presorting before writing so that in this book there will be very little waffling. I would think that readers would find it frustrating to keep seeing “One version goes” and “Other accounts contend” repeatedly throughout the book. A few times this may be necessary, but for the most part, Dodge City is an attempt to spin a yarn as entertaining as tales that have been told before but one that is based on the most reliable research. I attempted to follow the example of the Western Writers of America, whose members over the years have found the unique formula of combining strong scholarship with entertaining writing.

  However, despite how deeply devoted I was to using solid research and reasonable versions of events, there will be readers who disagree, often because they prize one source over another. So be it. And to those who disagree because I truly am in error, I apologize and take full responsibility. May Clay Allison or Dirty Dave Rudabaugh inhabit my guilt-ridden dreams.

  The most famous line of dialogue in John Ford’s late-career western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was, “This is the West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” For this book, most research sources revealed that legend and fact often overlapped and that the facts about the lives of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson before, during, and after Dodge City were usually at least as satisfying as the fictions. What mattered—in addition to being authoritative and to portraying a generation of lawmen and villains and everyone in between at a particular place and time—was sharing a lot of good stories.

  So let’s focus on that as you sort of sit around the campfire under a tall, dark sky. Once upon a time on the prairie …

  PROLOGUE

  It was decided that if a fight was all that would satisfy the mayor of Dodge—a fight he would have.

  —BAT MASTERSON

  On a gleaming-bright morning in early June 1883, Bat Masterson was on a train bound for Dodge City. When he disembarked there, he expected to be greeted by Wyatt Earp. Neither man knew for sure, but they had a pretty good idea that whatever was to transpire that day—there were already national headlines about the “Dodge City War”—could mark the last time they would walk the streets side by side as men determined to do what was right. It was very likely that each would go his separate way, pursuing the myriad possibilities the American West offered … or on this day, their luck would finally run out.

  The train, its plumes of puffing steam dissipating in the wide blue sky and dust-dry air above the prairie, traveled on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe line. This was the railroad company that had done the most to connect the Kansas cow towns more than a decade ago and had made Dodge City, especially, the keystone not just of Kansas but of the entire frontier.

  Bat had a fondness for trains. He had traveled on a lot of them since he and his brother Ed had first come to Dodge City and labored to lay tracks for them. They had been buffalo hunters and skinners then, and still teenagers. Both had become lawmen in Dodge, and his brother had died as one, gunned down by cowboys who then had to face Bat and his blazing six-shooters. Two years earlier, Bat had been on another train to Dodge City, arriving just in time to prevent a second lawman brother, Jim, from getting bushwhacked. Now, once again, Bat might have to step off with his pistols primed for sudden action.

  None of his three remaining brothers were at risk, yet there was still a sense of urgency—and one of unfinished business. When he and Wyatt had gone their separate ways out of Dodge City several years earlier, the job of peacekeeping had been carried on by other men, capable ones like Charlie Bassett and Bill Tilghman. The town was tamed, so to speak, at least quite a bit compared to when “wicked” was the most common adjective for it and tales were told far and wide about dead men being hauled out to Boot Hill faster than graves could be dug. But now hell really had broken loose all over again. That was why Wyatt and Bat and their friends, most of them good with a gun, were back.

  What had come to be called the Dodge City Peace Commission was Luke Short’s doing, though he didn’t intend it. He was a friend from back in their Dodge City days, and afterward he had landed in Tombstone. After first Bat then Wyatt had left that infamous Arizona town, Luke decided to go back to Dodge City and make a living gambling there. His stature fit his name. Maybe because some people looked at him as something of a runt, or because he did so himself, Luke Short could be a stubborn and hotheaded man. Bat described him as “a small package, but one of great dynamic force.” He was a good and reasonably honest gambler and a hell of a dresser—the finest pants and shirt and vest, his head sporting a top hat, a diamond pin stuck in his tie—and he strode the streets of Dodge City with a gold-headed stick. More important, he had remained friends with Wyatt and Bat, and both men prized loyalty. That spring of 1883, their pal had been receiving the short end of the stick, and that had to stop.

  However, Wyatt sure wasn’t looking for a fight. The twenty months since the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral had not been easy ones. In December 1881, his older brother Virgil was ambushed on the street and hit with shotgun blasts. He survived, but his left arm was permanently crippled. The following March, as Wyatt shot pool with him in a saloon, his younger brother Morgan was killed.

  The attacks on the Earps inspired what became known as the Earp Vendetta Ride. Wyatt recruited a posse of Doc Holliday, “Turkey Creek” Jack Johnson, Sherman McMaster, and younger brother Warren Earp and set off after the killers. For the most part, they were successful, but for a long time Wyatt was in legal hot water, charged with murder and other offenses. Another high-profile gunfight was not going to make life easier—assuming he survived it.

  But Wyatt’s code called for not letting a friend down. And he would be reunited with Bat. Already in the imagination of some of the American public back east they represented the toughest of the frontier lawmen, an undefeated duo who had been in any number of gun battles and had rescued the infamous Dodge City from being a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah filled with desperadoes, drunks, and fallen women. (All three remained; they just were better at behaving themselves.) By doing so, Wyatt and Bat, their respective brothers, and the men they rode with had created the blueprint for law and order and justice throughout the frontier. The “Wild West” being no longer nearly as wild might make it less fun for some, but it was a lot more livable for families and others pursuing manifest destiny.

  Wyatt and Bat had accomplished this without quite realizing it and while still very young men. Both had received little formal education, and they did not have enlightened or religious upbringings. Their fathers had to scrape out a living—in Wyatt’s case, sometimes on the wrong side of the law—and their mothers bore and raised large broods of children, most of them boys. Somehow, Wyatt and Bat developed a rough sense of justice and how best to keep the peace. The Earp brothers and the Masterson brothers were, in a way, a gang who were tougher and more righteous than the other gangs in western Kansas and across the frontier. There were many setbacks, but as would later be portrayed in many Hollywood westerns, in the end the good guys won.

  The ending in Dodge City had yet to be written. The six-shooters on the Peace Commission members’ belts might be the pens that would do it. After all, giving fair notice, Wyatt had told Mayor Lawrence Deger and his followers just the day before, “Bat will arrive at noon tomorrow, and upon [his] arrival we expect to open up hostilities.”

  It had to be satisfying the way their faces had paled. Already, rumors had reached a fever pitch, that ruthless men including Dirty Sock Jack, Cold Chuck Johnny, Black Jack Bill, Dynamite Sam, Rowdy Joe, and Shotgun Collins had flocked to Dodge City when Bat and Wyatt had sent out a call to arms. The Kansas City Daily Journal had colorfully reported that Wyatt “is equally famous in the cheerful business of depopulating the country. He has killed within our personal knowledge six men, and he is popularly credited with relegating to the dust no less than ten of his fellow men.”

  Adding Masterson to the mix—who the
Journal had declared was “one of the most dangerous men the West has ever produced”—meant that local lawyers may have been kept extra busy that night drawing up wills for the rattled “reformers.” They had tossed Luke Short out so they could take away his gambling house, and increasingly that looked like a bad bet.

  As Bat’s train pulled into the station, he had to have mixed feelings about returning to Dodge City. He had told a newspaper reporter that Wyatt was “the best friend I have on earth,” so he had to be looking forward to seeing him again. But he knew that corrupt tub of lard Larry Deger and his ilk were waiting for them. Gunplay was never Bat’s first option, nor Wyatt’s, but the scoundrels who had taken over the city might have different intentions.

  When Bat stepped off the train, he had an ivory-handled six-gun on each hip and a double-barreled shotgun in his hands. Wyatt waited for him, along with Bassett, Frank McLain, Neil Brown, and several other men wearing pistols. Bat was curious as to the whereabouts of Doc Holliday, who he knew had joined Wyatt in Kansas City, but with the men already here—and this was just the reception committee; likely there were more in town—there was plenty of firepower.

  Wyatt and Bat greeted each other. Though different men physically—Wyatt tall and slender, Bat of average height and stocky—their grins were the same, indicating pleasure to see each other, even though the reunion was to settle a matter that might risk their lives. Then they set off, natural leaders, the rest of the men flanking them, starting down the dusty streets of Dodge City, ready for one last showdown to preserve the peace.

  ACT I

  Dodge City in the 1870s, as viewed from Boot Hill.

  (COURTESY OF KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY)