The sun was shining so clear and sweet you wanted to run out and breathe the brilliant freshness. Father must have felt that way because he jumped up and fairly shouted, “Come on, Shane. I’ll show you what this hop-scotch climate does to my alfalfa. You can almost see the stuff growing.”
—JACK SCHAEFER, Shane
Despite the ongoing deaths from violence and disease, in 1878, only six years since it had been the very rough-hewn Buffalo City, Dodge City was much changed. Whether it was for the better depended on how you made your money and what your hopes were for the city’s future. To some extent, many of the changes to Dodge City reflected those under way in the United States, coursing across the country from east to west. They previewed what would be the progress in twentieth-century America that would eventually include much of the West.
The reputation of Dodge City had not changed to many people back east. To them, seeing the occasional breathless headline in the newspapers, it remained the center of dangerous hedonism of biblical proportions. Even in Kansas, Dodge was looked upon with awe for its perceived decadence. A Hays City editor expostulated, “Her principal business is polygamy without the sanction of religion, her code of morals is the honor of thieves, and decency she knows not.” Another Kansas weekly concluded that Dodge City was “a den of thieves and cut throats.”
But the frontier would not be immune to the social, political, scientific, and cultural changes under way in 1878. That year the U.S. Senate first proposed women’s suffrage (though women would not actually be given the right to vote until 1920). Also in 1878, the first college daily, the Yale Daily News, made its debut, and Joseph Pulitzer bought the St. Louis Dispatch and began the process of turning it into a modern major newspaper. A mask for baseball catchers behind the plate was patented. Also in sports, the fourth Kentucky Derby and twelfth Belmont Stakes were held. Thomas Edison patented the gramophone and he incorporated the Edison Electric Light Company, which began to provide electricity to households. A phone was installed in the White House, where Rutherford B. Hayes resided, and the first female phone operator was hired, in Boston. The first typewriter with a shift key enabling lower- as well as uppercase characters was introduced by Remington, and at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore the first university press was established. And perhaps the most low-tech innovation was the first firehouse pole, in New York City. The so-called Gilded Age was still under way and would be through 1896, and only one year was left to the national depression that had begun in 1873.
A sure sign of a more civilized society on the frontier was the proliferation of churches. In Dodge City there had been small congregations as early as November 1872, and two years later a building was used for services by various denominations. In June 1878, the Dodge City Times reported, “The wicked city of Dodge can at last boast of a Christian organization. We would have mentioned the matter last week but we thought it best to break the news gently to the outside world.”
The gently broken news was that plans had been initiated by the Presbyterian congregation to construct its own house of worship. The Gothic-windowed frame church would be completed two years later. Also in 1878, the Methodist congregation was officially organized and began the process that would lead to building a church. The congregation of Baptists would follow suit. Alas, it would seem that part of being more civilized was less mingling of the different faiths.
Catholicism made its way to Dodge City, too, which included the founding in nearby Clark County of a monastery known as the “Christian Fort.” In Windhorts, Ford County, was a church, and Bishop Louis Fink designated Reverend Ferdinand Wolf to man it. The priest ventured forth from time to time to conduct services, such as celebrating Mass for the first time in Dodge City in August 1878. Efforts to build a house of worship got under way, which would result in the opening of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church four years later. Not far behind with their own church would be the Episcopalians. Of course, all houses of worship would be north of the Dead Line.
The children of parents in an environment moving toward peace and prosperity needed to be educated. A schoolhouse had been built in 1873, anchoring the intersection of Walnut Street (two blocks north of Front Street) and First Avenue. This served the youngsters well enough for several years, but then it was obvious that a bigger building was required to house an expanding student body. This would result in the end of Boot Hill.
Dodge City needed a bigger cemetery, too. That fact plus the location being more desirable for a new school added up to those interred at Boot Hill being dug up and transported to a new and less centrally located cemetery. In their place went a two-story brick building that served elementary through high school students. The first teacher hired when the new schoolhouse opened in September 1880 was Margaret Walker, who, typical of teachers in those times, was unmarried.
Within the city limits more homes and commercial buildings were being constructed, and with better materials to withstand the wind-driven prairie storms. The city in southwest Kansas was maturing in 1878—so much so that it rated a visit from the commander in chief. But the visit of President Hayes also illustrated that Dodge City was indeed still a cow town on the frontier. The president desired to visit Dodge City to see firsthand what a Chicago newspaper editor had dubbed the “beautiful, bibulous Babylon of the West,” which now shipped almost all of the longhorn cattle driven up from Texas.
On that exciting day in late September, the presidential train arrived and Hayes emerged from his private car, accompanied by the Civil War hero William Tecumseh Sherman and the Kansas governor, John St. John. It was probably bad enough that summer hadn’t completely loosened its grasp, and the hot wind coming off the flat prairie carried with it clouds of dust. The wooden buildings and horses and the people waiting in the street as music blared were covered with the yellow, gritty powder. But the wind carried something else, too. During Mayor Dog Kelley’s flowery speech of welcome, the presidential nose began to twitch. The wind had picked up and brought along the unique scents of the cattle pens, and Hayes, though an Ohioan, had never been acclimated to that particular fragrance. The president returned to the less-aromatic confines of his car, leaving General Sherman and the governor to soldier on as the speech continued.
Most likely, Wyatt Earp looked on with a taut smile, while Bat Masterson repaired to one of the saloons for a rueful shake of his head and a beer. Though in Casey Tefertiller’s biography his focus was on Wyatt, the author pointed out that Bat “always had an air about him, a blend of cockiness and charisma that charmed just about everyone he met, and a style that seemed to invite good times.”
Loud tunes to welcome the twitchy-nosed chief executive were probably provided by another sign of civilization, a musical ensemble. It had begun as the pet project of Chalk Beeson, who was one of the more familiar and forward-thinking members of Dodge City society.
Chalkley McArtor Beeson had been born in Salem, Ohio, in 1848. As the youngest of seven children, he may have realized there would not be much opportunity left over for him in Albion, Iowa, where the family had moved, so at nineteen, like thousands of other young men soon after the Civil War, he set out for the West, landing in Denver. There he drove a stagecoach, and when he had enough for a stake, he became a rancher near a Colorado town named for Kit Carson.
By this time, Chalk could play violin pretty well. In January 1872, Denver hosted three distinguished visitors, the Union cavalry heroes Philip Sheridan and George Armstrong Custer, and the Russian nobleman they had just taken buffalo hunting, Grand Duke Alexei Romanov. At a ball in their honor, Chalk was one of the featured performers, and subsequently he served as a guide on the trio’s next hunt, which resulted in forty buffalo being shot and skinned.
He sold his ranch and began another one near Dodge City. Chalk’s timing was excellent, and he prospered. He and Ida Gause married and had three sons. His next investment was in a saloon—the Long Branch, which was named after a sportsmen’s resort in the East. Beeson wanted less of a haven for rowdy cowboys and more of a high-class tavern, so instead of prostitutes and the cheapest whiskey, the Long Branch offered top-shelf liquor, bartenders adorned with silk vests, walls festooned with artwork, and a long, carved-wood bar. By 1878, another incentive was a five-piece house band whose members were actually good musicians.
That same year, Chalk Beeson raised funds among members of polite society to match his own to underwrite what became the Dodge City Silver Cornet Band. It would expand and evolve into the Dodge City Brass Band, and by 1880 it was the Dodge City Cowboy Band. There were no actual Texas trail riders in it, but the musicians dressed the part with broad-brimmed hats, leather chaps, and unloaded six-shooters. Chalk boasted that one of his “cowboys” could “throw a steer over a horse.” The only loaded gun was brandished by the band’s director, a man known as Professor Eastman, who used it as a baton. When asked why a gun, Eastman replied, “To kill the first man who strikes a false note.”
The Cowboy Band played at holiday events and other celebrations, and its popularity spread enough that it would be invited to play in such major mid-American cities as St. Louis, Chicago, and Kansas City. It would even get to perform before another U.S. president, in March 1889 in Washington at the inauguration of Benjamin Harrison, “and my what a swath the bunch did cut,” commented Robert Wright, who had accompanied the troupe. “People just went wild over them, I expect because many of them had never seen a cowboy before and their uniforms were a wonder to them.”
The Washington visit was the proudest event in Chalk Beeson’s musical career. He later went into lawing, serving as the sheriff of Ford County in the 1890s, and in the decade after that he was a member of the Kansas legislature. He died at sixty-four in 1912 as one of Dodge City’s most respected citizens for having guided it into the new century.
Also in 1878, the city’s residents would no longer have to depend on buckets and willing neighbors when one of their wooden structures turned into a tinderbox, especially during the tail end of a typical bone-dry prairie summer. The Dodge City Fire Company was formed. The young men who volunteered for it had been born elsewhere, but by 1878 they must have believed that their future and that of their families lay in a growing Dodge City.
Surrounding Dodge City were more ranches and farms, yet western Kansas was still a largely unsettled expanse of land on the frontier. Men and women and children still shuddered along in prairie schooners, heading west on trips that had originated in Kansas City or St. Louis. Whether they were searching for a site to stake out and build a homestead or had dreams of California, they confronted hundreds of miles of flat land carpeted with tall grass being tossed by the warm winds coming up from the south. Above was a seemingly endless blue sky.
As Laura Ingalls Wilder recalled from her family’s travels west, “In a perfect circle the sky curved down to the level land, and the wagon was in the circle’s exact middle.” No matter how far her family drove their wagon during the day “they couldn’t get out of the middle of that circle. When the sun went down, the circle was still around them and the edge of the sky was pink.”
Travelers through Kansas had to be careful when they camped not to start a fire that would rush across the prairie, burning everything in its path. Before getting a campfire going, one had to clear a circle by pulling grass out by the roots. Drier grass could be mixed with twigs to begin the fire, then larger sticks of wood were laid on top. During the night the fire would keep away coyotes and most other animals.
In the morning the migrants would be woken by the songs of hundreds of meadowlarks, and after drawing water from the stream they had camped near and having a simple breakfast, the journey deeper into Kansas would resume. As the wagon trundled along, its occupants observed deer lying under trees on the low, rounded hills, and the pink, blue, and white blossoms of wild larkspur; and slithering along the ground were a variety of snakes making sure to keep clear of the horses and the rolling wheels. There was a scent in the air that reminded the travelers of bread being baked, which was really grass seeds parching in the heat.
Thankfully for those entranced by history, there remained in Dodge City and its surroundings characters drawn to frontier life who made an indelible impression. One was Mysterious Dave Mather, and a good illustration of him is his experience with Bill Tilghman and a petrified preacher.
David Allen Mather, born in 1851, was another adventurous man from New England—specifically, Connecticut. He claimed to be descended from the Pilgrim leader Cotton Mather, which probably did not mean a darn thing on the frontier. His father, Ulysses Mather, had been a ship’s captain who sailed away in 1856 and never sailed back. He was found murdered in Shanghai eight years later.
When he was nineteen, Mather and a younger brother boarded a ship, and this one brought them to New Orleans, where they worked as laborers. They took on jobs that kept them going west, and Dave’s first venture into Dodge City was in 1872 when he and his brother, Josiah, gave buffalo hunting a try. Not much is known of his activities after that, until 1878 when he was back in Dodge City.
Somewhere along the way Dave acquired his nickname. His personality was so taciturn that he made Wyatt Earp seem giddy. He rarely spoke, and even those who considered themselves friends could not discern what he was thinking. There was rarely an expression on his face. The curling of his thin lips was a dramatic outburst. Whatever went on in Dave Mather’s head was a perpetual mystery.
One evening, the last place Bill Tilghman, Bat Masterson’s deputy, expected to find him was at a revival meeting, but that is what happened at around nine. A preacher who had been dubbed “Salvation Sam” had come to Dodge City with a few male and female followers and had been given permission by Luke Short to hold a soul-saving service at the Red Dog Saloon, which had Luke as a silent partner. Tilghman was alone in the Ford County sheriff’s office when he heard shots fired. He hurried down the street, having been told that whatever was going on, it was happening inside the Red Dog.
Entering the saloon, Tilghman saw Salvation Sam and his followers cowering behind a lectern that stood before several rows of wooden benches. Mysterious Dave stood to the side, a gun in one hand. Tilghman did not know which way this situation was going to go, but his future suddenly got a lot shorter when Mather turned the gun on him.
As usual, whatever was on the gunman’s mind could not be gleaned. Hoping these were not the last words he would utter, Tilghman calmly said, “Dave, I need you to give me your gun.”
No response. Mather stared at him. In case the man was indeed mad, Tilghman kept his voice low and calm as he walked forward, assuring Mather that he would not hurt him and that he wanted the gun “so that you don’t hurt anybody either.” He could hear the preacher and his followers panting. Finally, he stood before Mather and extended his hand. After a few more moments of quiet, the gun was relinquished.
The others in the saloon stood up and spread out, still eyeing the unarmed Mather fearfully. The deputy sheriff looked them over. No one appeared injured. He asked Salvation Sam to accompany him to the sheriff’s office to swear out a complaint against Mather. But the preacher pointed toward the ceiling and said, “Charges against this sinner have been made in heaven. God will punish him as he sees fit.”
Good enough. Now to get Mysterious Dave out of the saloon so it could go back to being a church for one night. Once they were out on the street, Mather finally spoke: “Hypocrites.” Wondering if there was more, Tilghman waited patiently. In what for him was the equivalent of a Shakespearean soliloquy, Dave continued, “The preacher asked them to come forward and confess their sins, and after they did the preacher said they could go straight to heaven. I figured to help them take advantage of that opportunity right away, before sinning again and ruining things. But they really didn’t want to go, so they’re a bunch of hypocrites.”
Tilghman chewed that over while he escorted him to the bridge that crossed the Arkansas River. Handing back the gun, he told Mysterious Dave, “It’s best you stay out of Dodge City for a while.” Dave got on his horse and rode across the bridge—without a word, of course.
While characters like Mysterious Dave reminded folks that Dodge City was still very much a frontier town, another clear sign that civilization was encroaching was the ongoing efforts of its peace officers. A specific example was Bat Masterson not avenging his brother by gunning down the other cowboys who rode for Alf Walker and who had been present when Ed Masterson was killed.
Few would have blamed Bat for allowing his ivory-handled pistols to settle the score. As a county sheriff he had the power and opportunity, and he had watched his brother die from a grievous wound. Then, being still only twenty-four years of age, Bat could have put Ford County and its troubles behind him and gone elsewhere to start over. But he did not. He was surrounded by people he knew; there was his friendship with fellow lawmen, especially Wyatt; and he had a job to do, which included upholding the law and demonstrating a belief in the justice system, as faulty and arbitrary as it could be. Bat was emerging as a new kind of frontiersman, one who attempted to elevate law and order in the West, not ignore or repudiate it.
This was mostly true of Wyatt, too. Like the system he represented when he wore a badge, Wyatt was flawed, too, and he had a past that included being on the wrong side of that system. He did not envision spending the rest of his life as a lawman but as a businessman, and just having turned thirty, he had little time to waste in an era when for many men of that age, life was more than half over. But whatever other motivations he had, in the spring of 1878, Wyatt returned to Dodge City and the marshal’s office out of loyalty to Bat and to the citizens of the city. He probably did not have lofty thoughts about creating a peaceful environment for when he became a family man, because he was usually looking west for opportunity, and, in fact, Wyatt would never have children. (The same would be true for Bat.) But the job of taming Dodge City and by extension the American frontier was incomplete that April. There was much more to be done so that other people could raise families there.
That month saw the first public and certainly the biggest funeral in the brief history of Dodge City. The combination of a marshal being gunned down and the affection many of the population felt for Ed Masterson resulted in most residents turning out for it. The funeral began at two on the afternoon of the tenth. All businesses had closed at 10 A.M., and those that reopened would not do so until 6 P.M. Doors and windows were draped with black crepe paper. When the account of the funeral was published the following week in the Ford County Globe, the paper’s front page was bordered in black. Attending the funeral was Bat, the only Masterson brother there. He followed on foot, his eyes fixed on the wagon bearing Ed’s body as it trundled slowly out of town.
According to the newspaper’s coverage, “Everyone in the city knew Ed Masterson and liked him. They liked him as a boy, they liked him as a man, and they liked him as their marshal. The marshal died nobly in the discharge of duty; we drop a tear upon his grave.” It then offered a poem:
Whether on the scaffold high,
Or in the battle’s van,
The fittest place for man to die
Is when he dies for man.
The day after the funeral, Bat and a friend, Mike Sutton, journeyed to Sedgwick to give the news to his mother and father, Thomas and Catherine Masterson, and the three children still living with them on the farm, George, Minnie, and Thomas Jr. Yet to be told were Nellie, who was living in Wichita after marrying a lawman there, and Jim Masterson, who was off buffalo hunting and did not yet know of his brother’s death. After the trip to Sedgwick, Bat would track Jim down and tell him the details.
Because Boot Hill was not a cemetery for solid citizens like Ed Masterson, he was buried at Fort Dodge. In 1879, when the Prairie Grove Cemetery opened, members of the Dodge City Fire Company took care of moving Ed’s body to be reburied in it. Sadly, years later when the Prairie Grove graves were transferred to the larger Maple Grove Cemetery, the remains were lost, and there is no longer a grave in Dodge City bearing the remains of Edward Masterson.