Then the town’s peace officers were called to restore order, although many of those wearing badges little understood—or believed in—the laws they swore to uphold when they took their oaths of office.
—ODIE B. FAULK
After the funeral, Charlie Bassett resumed the role of marshal while remaining Bat Masterson’s undersheriff. Shaken by his close brush with death and the shame of having fled the fight, Nat Haywood had resigned as assistant marshal, so Bassett was indeed free to appoint Wyatt Earp to the position. With the cattle-driving season fast approaching, Bassett was quick to fill out his staff by appointing John Brown and Charles Trask as peace officers, and he would soon select Jim Masterson to replace Trask when Bat’s grieving brother was back from the buffalo hunt.
Steady lawmen with experience would be needed like never before in Dodge City in 1878. That year would go down as the one that saw the most cattle arrive from Texas, accompanied by well over a thousand drovers. That would mean the saloons would operate at full capacity, constantly populated by gamblers and dancing girls and prostitutes and an excess of customers. Drinking and carousing and hurrahing would be a nightly revelry, and not all of it stayed confined to the south side of the Dead Line. How the peace officers handled all this activity would determine whether the city could continue to progress or would descend into chaos.
Dodge City was as ready as it was going to get with Bassett’s team in place, and on the Ford County side of the ledger, Bat had Bassett—part-time, anyway—and the redoubtable Bill Tilghman as deputy. The Dodge City Times reported that the “far-famed ‘wicked city’ is decked out in gorgeous attire in preparation for the long horn” and the “Mary Magdaleens” were about to be “selling their souls to whoever’ll buy.” The saloons were well stocked with alcohol and “there is a great ado, for soon the vast plains will be covered with the long horn,” and Dodge City “is the source from which the great army of herder and drover is fed. The season promises to be a remarkable one.” Indeed: by just the second week in June, 110,000 head of cattle had enjoyed the hospitality of the cow pens near the railroad station.
It was as good a time as any for a confident gambler like Doc Holliday to pull into town. This would be the beginning of people puzzling over Wyatt’s devoted friendship with a man whom others disdained and whose sometimes appalling behavior they, with some justification, objected to. Some years later, reflecting on Doc, whom he described as “long, lean, and ash-blond and the quickest man with a six-shooter I ever knew,” Wyatt recalled that not long after Doc and Big Nose Kate Elder arrived in Dodge City “his quickness saved my life.”
Without identifying who the assailant was, Wyatt told of a man drawing a gun on him while his back was turned. Doc shouted, “Look out, Wyatt!” Before Wyatt could completely turn around, Doc had jerked his pistol out and shot the man. In his recollection, Wyatt commented, “On such incidents as that are built the friendships of the frontier.” This incident could have been invented years afterward to justify the odd friendship, but it was not out of character for Doc to have Wyatt’s back, and it would not be the only time.
Upon arrival that spring, Doc and Kate Elder settled into the Dodge House. The bursting-at-the-seams environment of Dodge City as the summer approached boded well for a skilled gambler—and con man. One story implies that Doc was still a bit short of cash or enjoyed practical jokes, or both. Wearing shabby clothes, Doc entered the Alhambra Saloon. He attracted the attention of a group of cowboys leaning against the bar, who decided to have some sport with the poor, thin, sallow fellow who obviously had seen better days.
They invited the man to have a drink. Doc refused. This wasn’t the expected response, so one of the cowboys called Doc over, poured a whiskey, handed him the glass, pointed a pistol at him, and ordered Doc to drink. Doc did, made a face, and coughed a few times (which did not take much pretending). The trail riders guffawed over this, and wanting to see that reaction again, insisted that the man have another whiskey. Finally, after the fourth drink and with Doc licking his lips and grinning, the cowboys got it. It is not known if the gathering ended in more laughter or with Doc making a quick exit.
With his gambling and carousing in fine fettle, it was odd, then, that Doc decided to resume his dental practice. He sent a telegram to Dallas, asking that John Seegar, his former partner, ship his old dental chair north. Doc then placed an ad in the Dodge City Times advertising his “professional services,” and set up shop in Dodge House. He was not giving up gambling, but perhaps Doc saw himself as gaining some respectability as a dentist in a city vying to become a bastion of civilization on the frontier.
And what could be more a sign of an emerging cosmopolitan civilization in Dodge City than the introduction of the cancan? And it was done by a man who would wind up being one of the most well known and, he claimed, the longest-living lawman of the West.
Ham Bell, into whose arms Alf Walker had fallen at A. J. Peacock’s saloon after the Ed Masterson shooting, had been born Hannibal Boettler Beltz in Washington County, Maryland. When he was nine, he and two siblings became orphans. Five years later, after living with an uncle, he set off on his own. When he was nineteen, he was a restless jewelry-store salesman in Pennsylvania. In 1865, the newspaper editor Horace Greeley had exhorted, “Go west, young man”—borrowing from an earlier editorial in an Indiana newspaper, which had suggested, “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country”—and in 1872, the year Greeley was unsuccessfully running for president against the incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, here was another young man taking that advice. One of the skills Bell had acquired was cleaning clocks, and doing so paid his way to Kansas.
En route, he changed his name to Hamilton Butler Bell. His first stop, a brief one, was in Lawrence; then he moved on to Abilene and Ellsworth and Great Bend. He worked several jobs, including driving freight wagons and delivering ice. Not surprisingly, given the heat of west Kansas summers, there was a great demand for ice on the frontier, and by the summer of 1874, Bell had a contract to deliver ice, railroad ties, and other material to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad as it steadily worked its way through Kansas and into Colorado. He made Dodge City his headquarters, and it would be home for the rest of his life. His future there was confirmed that summer when he married Josephine Dugan, the daughter of a local farmer.
Bell’s first stationary business was a livery stable, and it would become the biggest in Dodge City. Other endeavors included operating a furniture store and mortuary business (he made sure every casket was adorned with a bouquet of flowers), and he constructed the first women’s restroom on the Santa Fe Trail. The industrious and farsighted Bell would go on to own the first car dealership in southwest Kansas, and as proprietor of an ambulance service he introduced the first motorized ambulance in Dodge City. And in case that transportation had not always gone swiftly enough, Bell also introduced the first motorized hearse. When he died, in 1947 at ninety-four, he was operating a pet shop. (During World War II, an Army Air Corps plane featuring his handprint was named for Ham Bell.)
Ida Rath, daughter-in-law of the businessman Charles Rath, once reminisced about Bell that he “had the bluest of blue eyes and brown hair, was spare of build but broad shouldered. He had a decided Roman nose and a very determined chin.” His distinctive looks had to help him during forays into politics, which included two terms as mayor of Dodge City and two terms as a Ford County commissioner.
But it was as a lawman that many people came to know Ham Bell, considering he spent thirty-six years at it. In Great Bend he had served as a deputy. There was a lengthy break while he established himself in Dodge City, and in 1880 he would be appointed deputy U.S. marshal there, a position he would hold for twelve years. (More than a few Dodge City residents insist it was Bell, not Wyatt Earp, who was the model for Matt Dillon on the popular TV show Gunsmoke.) He also would be the sheriff of Ford County, first elected in 1888 and continuing to be reelected despite being a Democrat in a heavily Republican county. Bell left the office in 1910 to become the head of Dodge City’s police department. At various other times he pitched in as deputy marshal and deputy sheriff. During the decades as a police officer he never shot a man, because he was so quick on the draw that the other man froze before he could clear leather. Bell once explained, “If I’d never drawn a gun, I wouldn’t have lived a week.”
About the cancan: Another of Ham Bell’s ventures was a dance hall on Front Street. He had read about the dance that was the rage in Europe and had learned that a troupe performing it was touring the western half of the United States. He thought the citizens of and visitors to Dodge City were ready for such exotic entertainment, so he booked the dance company. The first performance of the lovely high-kicking ladies was on July 4, 1878. Suddenly, the frontier did not seem as far from the sophisticated East Coast and Chicago.
Another sign that Dodge City was more on the map to the folks back east is that well-known entertainers began to include it on their tours. There would be enough of an audience to make it worth the effort, and the presumption—or at least the hope—was that by the summer of 1878 the entertainers would be safe there, that the frontier represented by Dodge City was no longer Wild West enough to put their lives in jeopardy.
The most famous entertainer yet arrived in July, when Eddie Foy, Sr., first set foot on the dry streets that the wind turned into tiny tornadoes of dust. He found it was true that there were plenty of people willing to buy tickets to see him perform. He found it was false that he would be completely safe.
The future father of the Seven Little Foys (who would be portrayed by Bob Hope in the 1955 film with that title) had been born Edwin Fitzgerald in 1856 to Irish immigrants in New York City. He was only six when his father died in an insane asylum, and his mother took her four children to Chicago, where she found work that years later included caring for the mentally ill Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s widow. Right away, to help put food on the table, Eddie began singing and dancing in Chicago saloons and on street corners. At fifteen, he began touring with various stage partners, one of whom was Edwin Booth, brother of the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
In 1878, beginning when the weather allowed, the twenty-two-year-old Foy and performing partner Jim Thompson offered song-and-dance shows in the larger cow towns and mining camps on the western frontier, and that brought them to Dodge City. Perhaps Foy had not been sufficiently reassured about the more effective law enforcement, because when he looked out the window as the train entered the station and saw a large pile of buffalo bones nearby, he thought that men were being killed in the city faster than proper graves could be dug. He had to think this was not a promising place to be for the next few weeks.
Once off the train, Eddie Foy was an odd duck to both Dodge City citizens and cowboys alike. There was little difference between his on- and offstage behavior and appearance—cracking jokes, mugging, a sudden dance step, loud clothes. His partner, Thompson, figured out right away that not being noticed when out and about was best, but Foy was a relentless performer.
And, fortunately, he was quick-witted. In his autobiography, Clowning Through Life, Foy recounted that his second day in Dodge City was almost his last—or at least for a few moments it looked that way. Foy was strolling along the Front Street sidewalk, conspicuous in a colorful outfit. Suddenly, a group of rough-looking men cornered him, tied his hands behind him, and dragged him across the street. They pushed the petrified performer up onto a horse, which happened to be under a tree, and he noticed that from one of the thick branches a rope dangled. Once that rope was around his neck, Foy was asked, “Any last words?”
Where was the marshal? Anyone with a badge? Foy found one standing just a few feet away. It turned out to be Sheriff Bat Masterson, who was grinning. Then it dawned on the newcomer, who called out, “Anything I have to say can better be said at the Long Branch Saloon.” Bat nodded his approval, the group of men hurrahed, and a relieved Foy bought everyone a round. There would be a few other times that chuckling citizens roped and tied him to a railing or post until Wyatt or Bat helped him get free. (In his autobiography, Foy described Bat as a “trim, good-looking young man with a pleasant face and carefully barbered mustache,” who wore a hat “with a rakish tilt and [who had] two big silver-mounted, ivory-handled pistols.”) The entertainer treated such actions as being all in good fun.
Foy was fascinated by Dodge City, and his eyes soaked in as much as they could. He noted that the rear ends of the buildings on the south side of Front Street “were not far from the bank of the Arkansas River—a shallow, quiet stream which went on a tear once in a while and did some damage. Spanning the river was a ramshackle wooden bridge. That way the cattle men crossed when they rode back toward Texas. When they were coming in with their herds and the river was low, they rode with them right through the stream.”
As he strolled down Front Street, Foy observed that every few yards there “was a whiskey barrel which it was the duty of the police force to keep filled with water for fire protection. Many a boozer put them to similar use by sticking his head into one here and there and cooling his own super-heated interior. Most of the stores had wooden awnings or porches extending across the sidewalk. Between the posts at their outer edge was a seat for loafers, and just outside that was usually a horse trough. Of course, there were plenty of hitching posts, usually with horses stamping or dozing beside them.”
If his demeanor was part of a strategy to win over his new hosts, it worked. Foy and Thompson were booked to play the Theatre Comique and right away their combination of dancing, jokes, impressions, poems, and songs, especially Foy’s signature “Kalamazoo in Michigan,” was a smash. The packed house included many cowboys, seeing a show they could not even have imagined during lonely nights on the trail, and they laughed and clapped for a man who was a pure entertainer onstage and showed gumption when off.
Shows could last until well after midnight. The Theatre Comique had a first floor filled with chairs and above it a mezzanine of private boxes, where those who could afford it looked down through the haze of cigar smoke at the stage while eating and drinking. A hallway led to the gaming room, which was full of men drinking and smoking at the tables, and from time to time the audience watching the show could hear the sounds of poker chips, dice, and shouts of joy as well as arguments coming from the room. After a show was over, chairs on the first floor would be pushed aside to clear enough space for dancing, with a local fiddler and other musicians playing for tips. Some nights, the last note wasn’t played until the pink light of impending dawn layered the edge of the eastern prairie.
Though the effervescent Foy won over the theater audiences in Dodge City and the citizens in general, every so often he was reminded that this was a frontier cow town and anything could happen—especially when someone like Ben Thompson was involved. Because of his friendship with Bat Masterson, while in Dodge City Thompson was on his best behavior, content to gamble and not wanting a confrontation with the county sheriff or his fellow lawmen. But one night proper decorum failed him, and Foy almost paid the penalty.
Who knew where the drunk Thompson was heading when he left the gaming room, but he wound up backstage at the Comique during a background-scenery change between acts. It suddenly seemed like a good idea to shoot out one of the lights. The problem was that where Foy stood, his head was between it and Ben’s six-shooter. Swaying and trying to sight his gun, Thompson told the actor to get out of the way. Foy, “suddenly seized with a sudden foolish obstinacy,” refused.
Thompson told him again. When Foy still didn’t move, he added, “If you want it through yer head, too, all right.”
Thompson pointed his pistol at the comedian, who by then was so filled with fear that he couldn’t have moved even if he’d wanted to. Would the drunken gambler have pulled the trigger? We’ll never know, because it was Bat Masterson to the rescue. He suddenly burst in backstage, sized up the situation, and pushed the pistol up so it pointed at the ceiling. If it had been any other man, even a lawman, who had interfered in his fun, Thompson might have reacted angrily. But it was his friend Bat, who by now had a good hold of Thompson and was leading him stage left and eventually out of the theater.
“When they had gone, I found my hands shaking so hard that I couldn’t put on my makeup,” Foy recalled. “I was limp for the rest of the evening.” (In a fun and authentic bit of casting, in the 1939 film Frontier Marshal, with Randolph Scott playing Wyatt Earp and Cesar Romero as Doc Holliday, Foy is transported to Tombstone and is played by his son Eddie Jr.)
Ultimately, where did those Seven Little Foys come from? A year after his first appearance in Dodge City, Foy married another entertainer, Rose Howland. Sadly, in 1882 she died while giving birth, as did the baby. Two years later, he met Lola Sefton in San Francisco, and they were together for a decade, until her death in 1894. Two years later, and while becoming a star on Broadway and in other major cities, Foy married a dancer, Madeline Morando. Until her death in 1918, they produced eleven children, and the seven who survived childhood formed the vaudeville act with their father. Foy, ever the relentless song-and-dance man, died in 1928 at seventy-one while performing in Kansas City. The last of the Seven Little Foys was Irving, who died at ninety-four in 2003.