There is none so brave as he who stands in front of what belongs to him.
—LOREN D. ESTLEMAN, “Stuart Lake: Frontier Mythmaker”
Dodge City took a step back in its progress when another peace officer was killed that same year. Harry T. McCarty would not go down in the annals of the American frontier as a legendary lawman, but his death from gunplay was a reminder that despite the efforts of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the others sworn to uphold law and order, there was still plenty of wild left in the West.
Ben Simpson was the U.S. marshal for the district that included Dodge City, and in April he had arranged the appointment of McCarty to the post of deputy U.S. marshal. As a surveyor, McCarty knew the surrounding area well, and like Ed Masterson had been, he was well liked. And as with Ed, this did not do him any favors.
Given that July 13 was in the middle of summer and thus the peak of the cattle-drive season, the Long Branch Saloon was still open at four in the morning, serving the last few cowboys who hadn’t yet reached their saturation point. One of them was Thomas O’Haran, who also answered to the name Thomas Roach or even Limping Tom. He was a cook for an outfit that had just brought a herd up from Texas. He was known for unpredictable behavior, and he tended to be a tad more unhinged when he had a lot to drink—like on that night.
McCarty, assigned by Simpson to help local law enforcement at its busiest time, had been making the rounds, and he stopped in at the Long Branch to check in with the regular late-night barkeep, Adam Jackson. Suddenly, O’Haran got up from a table and lurched toward the bar. Engaged in conversation, McCarty had his back to him and wasn’t aware of the cowboy’s approach until he felt his six-shooter leave its holster.
McCarty turned to find O’Haran weaving from side to side with one arm in the air waving the pistol. Maybe he was about to hand it back when he lowered his arm, but he jerked the trigger and the gun went off. Hit, the federal peace officer fell to the floor. Someone in the saloon fired at O’Haran, striking him in the head, though not a fatal blow. “I am shot!” he cried out, and fell beside the other man.
McCarty, leaking blood, was brought to an adjacent room. The bullet had struck him in the right groin and come out the other side of him, later to be found in the floor. Worse, though, was that during its passage it had severed the femoral artery. A doctor was dragged out of bed, but he could not prevent McCarty from bleeding to death.
The top priority later that morning for Marshal Charlie Bassett and his assistant, Wyatt, and Sheriff Masterson and his deputy, Bill Tilghman, was to prevent a lynching. O’Haran, with a powerful headache (though the bullet had only creased his skull), was in the city jail. As the morning went on, crowds continued to form outside of it, with a few angry citizens brandishing lengths of rope. McCarty had been murdered, and for that crowd, the wheels of justice would grind too slowly. But with the lawmen standing firm with shotguns resting on their crooked arms, no one made a move toward the jail. Onlookers came and went, a few looking more threatening than others, coughing on the dust kicked up by passing wagons on what was turning out to be another blistering hot summer day on the prairie.
They were further dissuaded from mob violence when Doc Holliday arrived and was deputized. Wyatt, perhaps, had sent him a message that got him out of bed, because otherwise Doc’s morning was everyone else’s afternoon. He had no desire to wear a badge, and he certainly had no interest in being that respectable, but he wouldn’t refuse a request from Wyatt to help in a tight spot. And maybe not from Bat, either. Biographer Gary L. Roberts writes that as the year went on, Doc “deepened his sense of belonging with the gambling and saloon crowd.… Bat Masterson and their associates accepted him in a way he had never known in Dallas, Fort Griffin, Denver, or any of the other places he had traveled. He had found a congenial place, and he apparently had decided to stay.”
That same day a coroner’s inquest was held, and before a judge O’Haran was bound over for trial on the charge of first-degree murder. Ford County District Court eventually held the trial. O’Haran managed to save his life by pleading guilty to manslaughter and was taken east to serve twelve years in the Kansas State Penitentiary.
That Bat became an expert practitioner of buffaloing implies that he and Wyatt were quick to crack skulls, and that constituted most of their peacekeeping. But both were bright men, more intelligent than most, certainly those who ran afoul of the law. Sometimes, effective policing was simply being smarter. Bat’s reputation for cleverness expanded when the story made the rounds of how he captured an escaped prisoner without leaving Dodge City.
A man named Davis had been in jail in Fort Lyon, almost two hundred miles to the west in Colorado. He escaped and managed to elude the local authorities. Thinking that Davis was on an eastbound train, they telegraphed marshals and sheriffs along the route, one of whom was Bat. There was no description of what Davis looked like, so it was rather discouraging to read that the fugitive was carrying weapons and was prepared to use them if cornered.
When the next eastbound train steamed into Dodge City, Bat was waiting at the station. He climbed aboard at the rear of the train so that he could walk through the cars glancing at the passengers, all of whom faced away from him. By this time Bat had developed a pretty good lawman’s instinct; when he observed a man who appeared a tad jittery, Bat thought it worthwhile to pull his coat closed over his badge and stop by the man’s seat. With a grin and a twinkle in his blue eyes, he greeted the man: “Hello, Davis. How are you?”
Though he was a crook of some kind, at that moment Davis was more concerned about being polite and that his memory was not adequate enough to recall what must be an old acquaintance. He grinned back, and when Bat offered his hand, he shook it. Next thing Davis knew, he was on his feet and his wrists sported a pair of handcuffs. The next day, Bat welcomed a deputy from Fort Lyon, who escorted the dumbfounded Davis back to jail.
As bright a man as Bat was, the fact was that he had been forced to kill a man in the line of duty. In July 1878, it was Wyatt’s turn.
George Hoy was a familiar face in town. He was an experienced drover, and when a cattle drive from Texas was done, he was as enthusiastic as anyone in enjoying Dodge City’s pleasures. On this particular night, July 26, with the first glimpse of “rosy-fingered dawn,” as Homer described it, still hours away, Hoy and his pals were a tad too enthusiastic. They left a saloon, got on their horses, guns raised in the air, and, reeling around, they began firing. The few people left on the street dove for cover, and above the street, windows shattered and occupants screamed.
Even being indoors didn’t insure safety from a good hurrahing. The tireless Eddie Foy was wrapping up his last performance of the night, which meant reciting “Kalamazoo in Michigan.” Bat, not on duty, was sitting at one of the tables inside the Theatre Comique. According to Foy’s recollection, Sheriff Masterson was playing cards with Doc Holliday. As both were night owls, this is not far-fetched, but most of the time Bat and Doc kept their distance from each other. Wyatt and Jim Masterson had been on patrol, and before all the fireworks began they had paused outside the Comique, perhaps trying to hear Foy’s big finale. One of the cowboys took the hurrahing to a dangerous level by firing three shots at the lawmen as he galloped by.
A brief pause: There have been accounts, including one by Wyatt himself in later years, that Hoy or all of the cowboys deliberately fired at Jim Masterson and Wyatt, especially the latter. The claim was that there was a bounty on Wyatt’s head. Because he had made life so difficult for cowboys in Dodge City, cattle-herd owners and possibly local businessmen conspired to put the assistant marshal out of the way, permanently. But this does not make a lot of sense. Essentially, assassinating Wyatt Earp would still have left Bat and Jim Masterson, Bassett, and Tilghman to toss troublemaking cowboys into the calaboose, no doubt in a more vengeful manner. And there would have been more effective ways to get a good shot at Wyatt, without other peace officers around. The story adds to the legend of Wyatt Earp but does not fit with the reality of the summer of 1878, when he was not the top lawman in Dodge City. Possibly, from the viewpoint of later years, Wyatt believed he was the only peace officer in the city who deserved a bounty.
As Bat later told the tale, the bullets from the cowboy’s Colt .45 pierced the wooden walls of the theater and sent the people inside diving for the dirt-strewn floor. Foy was one of them, and he reported that he was impressed “by the instantaneous manner in which [the audience] flattened out like pancakes on the floor. I had thought I was pretty agile myself, but those fellows had me beaten by seconds.”
Outside, there was more shooting, and Wyatt and Jim yanked their six-shooters out. The cowboys controlled their horses enough that they could direct them south and get out of town rather than wind up in the jail. The one who had just missed hitting the two lawmen outside the theater was among them. Whether to encourage their departure or actually wound one of the hell-raisers, Wyatt and Jim fired after them. While crossing the bridge over the Arkansas River, Hoy, wounded, fell from his horse.
Wyatt contended that he most likely hit Hoy because he had sighted him against the star-filled night sky. It may well have been his bullet, but other ones were fired in a flurry as the drovers left town. None of this mattered to poor George Hoy: he may or may not have been the one who fired at Wyatt, but he was the one who ended up with lead in his arm. And, it turned out, there was a price on his head. Marshal Bassett learned that Hoy was wanted in Texas for cattle theft.
The wound in his arm was a very bad one, and doctoring being what it was in the 1870s, gangrene began to eat away at it. A surgeon from Fort Dodge amputated the arm, but the damage to Hoy’s system had been done, and after suffering for weeks, he died on August 21.
Bat always believed that the escapade of the cowboys was no more than drunken fun that ended badly for the unfortunate George Hoy. He did not consider Wyatt a target because of his vigorous policing. He thought differently, though, a few weeks later when Clay Allison came to town.
A postscript to the shooting of George Hoy was that, deserved or not, Wyatt received his first exposure in the press beyond the frontier and the Midwest. The National Police Gazette, which could be found in every barbershop, offered an account to its readers, most of whom lived east of the Mississippi River. Wyatt Earp, it contended, was a marshal to be reckoned with in the Wild West. But Clay Allison did not care about what was in newspapers.