Bat’s gun-hand was in working order, so I made him a deputy. He patrolled Front Street with a walking-stick for several weeks and used his cane to crack the heads of several wild men hunting trouble; even as a cripple he was a first-class peace officer.
—WYATT EARP
Dodge City had to pull together a police force that would uphold the law—and do it before Marshal Lawrence Deger wound up like his predecessors. He had the advantage of the support of the new Hoover administration, which wanted an end to the rampant lawlessness. The first appointment, in May 1876, was to make Wyatt Earp the deputy marshal. Another step toward a more civilized city that month was the founding of its own newspaper, the Dodge City Times, by the brothers W. C. and Lloyd Shinn.
Wyatt later claimed that the mayor himself had sent him a telegram in Wichita offering him the marshal’s job. Half of this is true. Hoover, not Deger, had the authority to choose Deger’s right-hand man, and because of the good reports about Earp that had drifted west from Wichita, the mayor may indeed have sent off the invitation. But Hoover already had a marshal, even though Deger might end up being nothing more than a rather rotund figurehead.
Wyatt, with Mattie, also came to Dodge City because James and Bessie were there, in the brothel business. (A month after Wyatt arrived, they would be joined by Morgan.) This would seem to set up a conflict of interest, with Wyatt charged with enforcing law and order in the city. But prostitution, while not condoned, was not high on the list of sins as long as the soiled doves were not flaunting it on the streets. The killings and other forms of violence, especially by the cowboys—with “cow boy” being a derogatory name given to the trail riders, devoid of the romantic image of today—instilled more fear in the citizens and those businesspeople who did not depend on selling alcohol. It was beginning to get crowded up on Boot Hill, with grave markers informing that recent additions included Horse Thief Pete, Pecos Kid, and Toothless Nell.
Dodge City needed an enforcer who was not going to cross the line into lawlessness himself, as the soon-to-be-lynched Brooks had. And that man had to get to work right away because all indications suggested that the summer of 1876 would be the biggest and busiest and therefore rowdiest cattle-drive season the city had ever seen. That did not bode well. The word “stinker” was first applied to buffalo hunters due to the odor they spread through Dodge City, and another word recently introduced into the American language was “stiff,” attributed to dead men found lying in the streets. (A third slang word, “joint,” was what the Dodge City Times was calling a saloon.) The more civilized element did not want any more of such vocabulary entries.
While Hoover could not appoint Wyatt to the top job, he did allow him to select the deputy marshals. Deger had inherited a man named Joe Mason from what was left of the previous police force, and perhaps for continuity’s sake, Wyatt kept him on. His first new hire was Jim Masterson. Bat’s brother was three years younger and thus was only twenty in 1876. He could not have had much lawman experience at such a tender age, so most likely he was appointed because of Wyatt’s regard for Bat and seeing potential in him—potential that would be well fulfilled. Wyatt said that Bat’s brother was “a good, game man who could handle himself in a fracas.”
There was one more opening on the force, and that was filled by Bat himself. He was still limping from the gunfight with Sergeant King when he arrived in Dodge City. Bat already had an older brother, so it is probably a stretch that Bat saw Wyatt in that role, but Wyatt was someone he respected as well as being a good friend. However, and as far as other friends went, Bat counted several among members of the Dodge City Gang, given his enjoyment of spirits and gambling during his previous sojourns there. Still, Bat signed on to become a peace officer.
Thus, for the first time, and in the nation’s centennial year, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson would be frontier lawmen together. One question to be asked: Why do this?
Wyatt had experienced “lawing,” as he preferred to call it, in Wichita, so he had some taste for it. And there was the money—many years later, he claimed that in Dodge City he had been paid more than the marshal. This may have been true because added to the monthly salary was $2.50 for every arrest made by Wyatt, who, unlike the deskbound Deger, spent much of his time out on patrol. Still, what a frontier lawman made paled in comparison to what could be made as a full-time faro dealer or as a saloon enforcer, especially in the most booming cow town in Kansas.
But the better answer probably goes back to Lamar. When he and Aurilla were newlyweds with a baby on the way and Wyatt was working as a peace officer, he was approaching respectability. Maybe he could go places. Maybe of the six Earp brothers he could make a name for himself by upholding the law, especially having a father who some viewed as a restless ne’er-do-well with a reputation as a welsher. That piece of his life had ended tragically and shabbily for Wyatt, but then in Wichita, especially, he had distinguished himself as being a man with more sand than a brothel bouncer. Wyatt didn’t necessarily aim to be a saint in Dodge City, but being less of a sinner could be a more satisfying life. There was more of a future in it, and the same for the American frontier. If he didn’t get killed upholding the law, the Earp name might mean something more reputable.
For Bat Masterson, there was loyalty to Wyatt and the opportunity to watch over his younger brother. And for an adventurous young man, “lawing” offered a challenge and a different kind of excitement. Bat had already experienced quite a bit of the frontier and its harsh realities. Maybe staying put and trying to build something good in Dodge City would make for a full life in a different, more enriching way … as long as he didn’t get shot, again, doing it.
Wyatt and Bat were intelligent but not necessarily educated young men, yet they and Charlie Bassett, the Ford County sheriff, were now responsible for enforcing the rudimentary and flawed system of justice trying to take hold on the frontier. If it worked in Dodge City, it could spread to the rest of the Wild West. And Wyatt and Bat were indeed still young men. In early July 1876—as the nation tried to swallow the astonishing news circulating about the Little Bighorn debacle—Wyatt was twenty-eight and Bat only twenty-two. They could not possibly have had any grand design about how to bring law and order to the wickedest town in the West. If there was any kind of plan, it was to get going with the lawing and see what came of it.
It helped the effort that both men made a good impression on others. Built into Wyatt’s lean, six-foot frame was a lot of taut muscle. When he wasn’t wearing a hat, people could better see his dark-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. His chin jutted in a determined way under a bushy dark mustache. He didn’t scare easily, and according to many who encountered him, he didn’t scare at all. As Bat would tell The Tombstone Prospector in 1910, “I think it was the distinguishing trait of Wyatt Earp, the leader of the Earp brothers, that more than any man I have ever known, he was devoid of physical fear. He feared the opinion of no one but himself and his self-respect was his creed.”
Much of this was true for Bat, too, who had already survived several tough scrapes. His hair was darker than Wyatt’s and his shoulders were wider, and he was mostly muscle, too. He appeared a bit dapper with a brown bowler hat and an occasionally twirled cane. Wyatt wore a white shirt, but otherwise his hat, pants, and boots were black. What Wyatt and Bat had come to know about each other included courage, not backing down, and loyalty to friends. For that time and place on the frontier, if any two men could lead a town-taming effort, those men were Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson.
They would not be alone, of course. There were Joe Mason and Jim Masterson, and Bassett, who now had Bill Tilghman as undersheriff. For him, this was where and when one of the longest and most successful careers as a lawman began.
Tilghman was even younger than Bat, born on Independence Day in 1854 in Fort Dodge—the one in Iowa. He was hunting buffalo on the frontier before he turned sixteen, and it was during the next couple of years that he first encountered Wyatt and Bat. Like the latter, Tilghman was accompanied by an older brother, Richard. They, like other young men in hunting parties, worked long, hard days in difficult conditions and tried to stay away from Indians—but the Tilghman brothers were not successful, in that Richard was killed during a raid on their hunting camp. Bill was finished with hunting after that and went to work in a saloon in Dodge City. The owner didn’t have to worry about profits draining down Tilghman’s throat, as he was a teetotaler.
Tilghman would hold several significant law-enforcement positions over the years in Dodge City; then in 1889 he moved to Guthrie, Oklahoma, to become a lawman in Logan County, which was booming thanks to the land rush. Though wounded, he survived the Battle of Cimarron that year—fighting alongside Jim Masterson—the most famous gunfight of the Gray County War. With other colleagues, Tilghman tracked down the Wild Bunch and the Doolin-Dalton Gang, the latter a notorious band of brothers. (Theodore Roosevelt once stated, “Tilghman would charge hell with a bucket.”) In 1900 he became sheriff of Lincoln County, also in Oklahoma, and eleven years later he was appointed the chief of police in Oklahoma City.
When he retired, Tilghman became a member of the Oklahoma State Senate, and in 1915 he starred in the Hollywood western Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws. In 1924, at age seventy, Tilghman was persuaded to come out of his second retirement to become marshal of Cromwell, tasked to clean up the city, which was ignoring Prohibition and had some business leaders thriving on prostitution profits. He was in the process of doing that when a drunk and corrupt Prohibition agent killed him in a street shoot-out. No one was ever convicted of the crime. A month after Tilghman died, Cromwell was set afire, its saloons, brothels, and seedy flophouses destroyed.
Wyatt was often described as a dour man who did not talk much and also as pretty sensible. He demonstrated the latter quality when he told the deputies that bounty money would be pooled but paid out only when prisoners were brought to the jail alive. This would not be “wanted, dead or alive”: dead prisoners were worth nothing. Each officer carried two six-shooters, and Wyatt placed loaded shotguns at locations only he and the deputies knew about, but shooting at a man would be a last resort. The mayor had told Wyatt of Brooks’s failed strategy, and he wasn’t about to repeat it. According to Wyatt, “Hoover had hired me to cut down the killings in Dodge, not to increase them.”
The assistant marshal could count as well as the next man, and if there was a fight involving gunplay, there were a lot more cowboys than there were lawmen. As Wyatt pointed out, “Any one of the deputies could give the average cowboy the best of a break, then kill him in a gunfight,” but the odds would eventually catch up with him. Equally undesirable would be ranch owners and trail bosses looking for other cow towns in which to sell their cattle if, ironically, the law made Dodge City too dangerous for their employees.
Wyatt imparted to his outgunned team three guidelines: One was to try to politely reason with a man, because he was not as dangerous when in the middle of a conversation. The second was if a deputy had to shoot, do it deliberately and accurately, because often the quickest man was off the mark. Third, don’t shoot to kill, because wounding a man usually disabled him enough and he would be worth more money that way.
This policy was fine with Bat and Jim Masterson. They hadn’t signed on for a license to kill but to keep the peace and earn decent wages while doing it. They would enforce the new laws, which included no horses or other animals in saloons and no guns allowed north of the “Dead Line,” which essentially was the railroad-tracks separation between the respectable section of the city on the north side of Front Street and the “anything-goes” section between Front Street and the Arkansas River.
What went on south of the Dead Line was what the business leader Robert Wright characterized as the “greatest abandon.” The prairie historian Odie B. Faulk wrote that there were seemingly moral civic-minded men who “would drink on the north side of the street until the dark of night, when their wives went to bed, and then cross the tracks for uninhibited fun until the early morning hours.”
But cowboys and buffalo hunters made up most of the customers, with money in their pockets “and a desire to make up in a single night for all the revelry they had missed during the lonely nights on the plains,” wrote Faulk. “They drank the raw, potent whiskey or huge steins of beer, they smoked cigars, they talked loudly, they spent seventy-five cents to dance ten minutes with one of the dark-eyed viragoes or brazen-faced blondes, and all the while the music swirled about in loud profusion.” Between dances, the girls “escorted the men to the bar to accept a drink, which usually was tea, or they coaxed them into the back rooms.”
The Hays City Sentinel reported, “Gamblers are congregating at Dodge and Larry Deger has his hands full.”
The mandate for Wyatt and Bat and the other officers who worked for the city was to contain the chaos that the town had experienced since the railroad had arrived four years earlier. But because they did it, herding many of the troublemakers to be confined to literally the wrong side of the tracks, what ensued was by Dodge City standards a nonviolent summer of 1876. Wyatt helped the deputies sharpen their skills at buffaloing, and that maneuver was often a preamble to a man landing in jail. The bars clanged shut quite a few times, with three hundred arrests a month. This kept the peace and made lawing a profitable occupation.
Some men needed more convincing than others, “but as practically every prisoner heaved into the calaboose was thoroughly buffaloed in the process, we made quite a dent in cowboy conceit,” Wyatt reported. “We certainly enforced a change in their ritual.”
Based on his experience with Virgil in the freight-hauling and mining camps, Wyatt was the better man with his fists. One day in Dodge City, after a herd had been penned up, the cowboys prepared to begin the same revelry they had enjoyed the last time in town, which had often ended with a midnight ride down Front Street with six-shooters blazing. As they were about to cross the Dead Line, Wyatt halted them and explained there was a new assistant marshal in town.
There was a lot of guffawing and backslapping over that. When Wyatt insisted that the cowboys either stay south of the line or leave their guns at the marshal’s office, the biggest of them was chosen to remind the impertinent lawman what Dodge City was really all about. The cowboy was flexing his fingers when Wyatt slugged him twice in the jaw, with a shot to the belly in between. The unconscious man was dragged off by his fellow cowboys as they headed south of the Dead Line.
Another incident tested Bat’s patience. He and Wyatt were confronted by a group of cowboys who wanted to air their grievances, and talking with their fists was just as fine. A large man hailed by his friends as the “champion of Texas” (there was probably one with every herd) stepped forward. Bat deferred to Wyatt, who removed and handed him his gun belt, and the bout began. The cowboy must indeed have been one of the better-boxing Texans, because before it was lights-out for him, Wyatt was bruised and bloodied.
Wyatt called out to the others, “Any of you want trouble?” Bat stepped in, offering to fight next. Wyatt refused, saying, “Either I run this town or I don’t.”
Another cowboy did step forward and put up his fists, but in a few moments the tips of his boots were pointed at the sky. There was no more trouble from this group.
As the eminent biographer Robert DeArment pointed out, “Bat’s role at these slugging sessions was more than that of an interested bystander.” As more of the cowboys fell to Wyatt’s fists, “doubtless they would have liked to catch him with his gun belt down. Bat was there to see that Wyatt did not take a bullet in the back while fighting.”
Understandably, Wyatt, Bat, and the other peace officers did not endear themselves to the Texans, who made up most of the cowboy population. Business was booming thanks to the Texas ranchers from as far south as the Rio Grande sending their cattle to Dodge City, where they were purchased for anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars a head, depending on how fat they were at the end of the journey. In 1876, 250,000 head of cattle hoofed their way to the city, and that number would increase by 50,000 head the following year. Having too many cowboys buffaloed while forking over their wages to saloons, brothels, and the more upstanding businesses could begin slowing that swollen stream of revenue.
Sometimes it wasn’t cowboys but their bosses who caused trouble. One night that summer of 1876, Bob Rachals, a cattleman from Texas, was amusing himself by shooting at the feet of a musician—proverbially “making him dance.” The gunshots attracted Wyatt’s attention, and Rachals learned what being buffaloed meant. Wyatt dragged him off to jail, and the weary musician could finally stand still.
The assistant marshal did not know that Rachals was a friend of Robert Wright’s. (The entrepreneur did not include this incident in his memoir, for an obvious reason.) Wright confronted Wyatt, demanding that the cattleman be released immediately. The lawman refused. Wright threatened to have Wyatt fired, and launched into a rant about how arrogant and high-handed the lowly assistant marshal was. Finally, even Wyatt’s patience was exhausted. A couple of minutes later, Rachals had company in his jail cell.
A story has persisted for decades that the initial successes of Wyatt, Bat, and the other lawmen in lifting Dodge City up out of chaos attracted the attention of Ned Buntline, whom biographer Jay Monaghan, with justification, called the “great rascal.” Among other things, the man was a prolific writer of “dime novels,” tales that used few if any facts and were aimed at creating or enhancing the legends of lawmen and outlaws on the frontier. Buntline was credited with composing at least three hundred of them, many written not in a town west of the Missouri River but in his home in Upstate New York. It was reported that in 1876 he traveled to Dodge City to present members of the marshal’s and sheriff’s teams with custom-made Colt guns that would become known as “Buntline Specials” or “peace keepers.”
It is true indeed that the rascal had a very active life. Edward Zane Carroll Judson was born in Stamford, New York, in 1823. He was called Ned, and he later adopted the nautical term “buntline” to become his pseudonym, as he had run away at age eleven to become a cabin boy on a ship. As a midshipman, he participated in the Seminole War in Florida, and during the Civil War he rose to the rank of sergeant in the Union Army before being dishonorably discharged for drunkenness. He always referred to himself as “Colonel” because he was photographed in Mathew Brady’s studio wearing such a uniform, which was as close to being an officer as he got.
Somehow, Buntline was able to combine being a heavy drinker with being a serial philanderer and husband. He was paid handsomely for giving lectures on temperance, often delivering them while drunk. He had six wives and committed bigamy at least twice. He had five children that he knew about. In 1846, in Nashville, Tennessee, a man confronted Buntline over having an affair with his wife and fired a gun. He missed, but Buntline didn’t. He pleaded self-defense during the hearing, then fled the courtroom, followed by an angry mob. He was chased through the streets and in and out of buildings and was finally caught and taken to jail. That night the impatient mob broke open the jail and hung Buntline. Somehow, he managed to pretend he was dead while staying alive, and when the crowd dispersed, the few friends he had in Nashville cut him down. Over the years, when Buntline displayed his scars, he contended that he had survived an Indian’s arrow.
He did travel to the frontier several times, and hit pay dirt in 1869 when the New York Weekly published his serial titled “Buffalo Bill: The King of Border Men—the Wildest and Truest Story I Ever Wrote.” One of the most surprised readers was Cody himself, upon learning of all his exploits and that he did not drink alcohol. The frontiersman was smart enough to go along rather than object. He met the author in Chicago and starred in a play Buntline had written in only four hours (some critics wondered what took so long), Scouts of the Prairie, with the playwright costarring as well as Texas Jack, a friend of Cody’s, and an Italian actress playing an Indian maiden with a “weakness for scouts” (and apparently for Texas Jack, as the two wound up married). The play toured other cities, and for a time Wild Bill Hickok was a member of the cast in a rewritten version titled Scouts of the Plains. In 1876, Buntline could afford to commission the Colt company to manufacture single-action pistols with twelve-inch-long barrels and detachable shoulder stocks. Buntline traveled to Dodge City to personally present them to Wyatt, Bat, Bill Tilghman, Neal Brown, and Charlie Bassett. Wyatt preferred the long barrel, the better to buffalo miscreants, but the other four cut their barrels down.
Here is one of those temptations to print the legend, but the facts do not support the gifting of the “peace keepers.” Colt has no record of the custom-made weapons, and there is no evidence that Buntline was anywhere near Kansas in the summer or fall of 1876. For some historians, the convincing point is that Buntline always exploited and exaggerated adventures he was involved in, yet wrote nothing about meeting the “famous” lawmen and presenting them with unique pistols with “Ned” carved into the stocks. Also, in 1876, though the building of their reputations was under way, Wyatt and Bat were far from famous and no one from the East would make a special trip to honor them.
Buntline continued to write and have trouble with women and money, yet he still found ways to maintain his estate, Eagle’s Nest, in the Adirondacks. He occasionally roamed the grounds there wearing buckskins and carrying a rifle. When he died in July 1886, one New York newspaper, perhaps with some tongue in cheek, credited Buntline with being the “most thoroughly ‘American’ American of his time.” Because of all the debts that lived on after him, his remaining wives had to sell Eagle’s Nest.
Bat’s first year of lawing didn’t last very long. In the aftermath of the Little Bighorn disaster, the army was running down Indians and forcing them onto reservations, or killing them, or frightening them enough to follow Sitting Bull to Canada. (Another shocking piece of news would sweep through the frontier towns that summer: in Deadwood, South Dakota, the seemingly invincible Wild Bill Hickok had been killed, shot in the back by “Crooked Nose” Jack McCall.) That left the Black Hills in southwest South Dakota wide open. Gold had been discovered there.
Like many other men his age, Bat contracted gold fever. The team of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson ended—temporarily—when Bat hopped on a horse and headed for what he hoped would be riches ready for the taking.
Wyatt would miss his friend, but he had an able and willing replacement as a deputy marshal. The dust had hardly settled behind Bat when Morgan Earp was appointed to replace him.