How Bat got possession of the prisoner without the payment of a reward and without a gubernatorial requisition will probably be explained in the pages of a yellow-backed storybook, which will detail the mysteries and crimes of the early settlement of this border.
—Dodge City Times
Bat Masterson was not back in Ford County from Colorado long when, in a way, he would have to take on Indians again. First, though, there were more thieving varmints to attend to as well as a visit from Frank and Jesse James.
After rounding up a group of horses that did not belong to him, one of those varmints made for Colorado. Conditions were such on the frontier in January 1879 that Bat did not expect the chase to be a long one: either the outlaw would not get far across the snow-choked and frozen landscape or the posse wouldn’t. There might not even be a posse. Once again, Wyatt was away for the winter, and even Bat’s brother Jim Masterson had left town. A tad desperate, when that hypocrite-hating Mysterious Dave Mather reappeared in Dodge City expecting to ride out the coldest months there, Bat deputized him.
It is not known if this time Bat got his man, but Mysterious Dave’s experience being in his posse must have raised the possibility that he had a future in lawing, because he kept pursuing it. He pushed on from Dodge City to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he somehow wangled an appointment as a deputy U.S. marshal in addition to being a member of the city’s police force. In the latter capacity, Mysterious Dave would have his first shoot-out, in January 1880, and it was a doozy.
The marshal whom Mather served under was a man named Joe Carson. There may have been a robbery under way or a warrant was being served when Carson encountered four men outside the Close & Patterson Variety Hall on the main street of East Las Vegas, and almost immediately there was gunplay. When he heard the shots, Mather ran toward them, but he was too late to save the marshal. Seeing Carson lying dead in the street, Mather jerked out his six-shooters and began firing. When the smoke cleared, one outlaw was dead, another was gravely wounded, and the two others, with minor wounds, had gotten on their horses and ridden away. It quickly spread through the New Mexico Territory that Mysterious Dave was quite the man killer.
It was not long before he burnished that reputation. Joseph Castello was a business owner in town, and one day a dispute with employees went completely off the rails. When Deputy U.S. Marshal Mather arrived, Castello had a gun out and was threatening to start filling the room with bullets. It may have been a bit painful for the closemouthed Mysterious Dave to try to talk Castello out of it. In any event, the tactic did not work, and when Castello began to squeeze the trigger, Mather drew his gun and killed him with one shot. After an inquest, the coroner ruled that the shooting was justified because lives were saved.
Las Vegas and its environs were turning out to be hotter than Mysterious Dave had anticipated. The breaking point for him came when the two men who had escaped after the January shooting that had killed Marshal Carson were captured and brought back for trial. The outlaws did not get to enjoy the accommodations of the San Miguel County Jail for very long: a mob broke in, grabbed them and the third outlaw still recovering from his injuries, and strung them up. Soon after, when two murders were reported in the area, Mysterious Dave determined he wanted his life expectancy to be longer than Carson’s, and he resigned.
He wandered throughout Texas, having several brushes with the law, including being charged with stealing a silk dress from a madam. One day, Mysterious Dave reappeared in Dodge City. He served for a year as an assistant marshal; then, after he shot and killed a man—even though he was acquitted of it—the citizens had tired of this kind of lawing, and he was replaced as assistant marshal with the old buffalo hunter Tom Nixon. This didn’t sit well, and the two men feuded. The dispute ended when Mysterious Dave shot and killed Nixon. An indication of how well liked Nixon was: the jury took just seven minutes to find Mather not guilty. A few months later, when he killed another man, it was time to leave Dodge City for good.
In subsequent years there were Mather sightings elsewhere in Kansas and Nebraska. His ultimate fate remains, yes, a mystery.
After the capture of Dull Knife and the remnants of his band of Northern Cheyenne the previous autumn, the old warrior had been held prisoner at Fort Robinson in Nebraska, where Crazy Horse had surrendered, then been murdered, a year earlier. Several months later, in January 1879, Dull Knife escaped one more time, taking his wife and son and a handful of followers with him. For eighteen days they walked west, braving the bone-chilling prairie winds of winter and cloudbursts of sudden snow with only tree bark for food. They arrived at the Pine Ridge Reservation just east of the Black Hills, in South Dakota, hoping to be given the protection of Red Cloud. Though only a decade removed from winning a war against the U.S. government, the Lakota Sioux warrior, now fifty-eight, had become a figurehead, and his wishes did not count for much with federal authorities.
It was decided that the leaders of the September 1878 uprising would be put on trial, and Bat Masterson would be the man to make sure Dull Knife and his captured associates Wild Hog, Old Crow, Nosey-Walker, Porcupine, Left Hand, Blacksmith, and Tangled Head would be there when the proceedings began.
Major General John Pope, who had not distinguished himself as the commander of the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War, was now head of the military district that included Kansas. He ordered that the prisoners be housed at Fort Leavenworth until the state of Kansas took jurisdiction. In February, the governor, John St. John, notified Ford County that Dull Knife and the others were ready to be transported west for trial. The deputies who accompanied Sheriff Masterson were his brother Jim, Charlie Bassett, A. J. French, and the exotically named Kokomo Sullivan.
They traveled by train, arriving on February 15. A large crowd had gathered at the station, with people curious to eye the Indians who had frightened so many on the frontier and killed a few while they were at it. The transfer of the prisoners was done right there on the platform, and adorned with shackles and handcuffs, the eight Indians were brought onto the next westbound train.
It may not have been anticipated that as the train made its way through Kansas, some people wanted to greet Dull Knife and his colleagues with something other than curiosity. There was enough lingering anger that when the train made stops, there were attempts to board it and show the prisoners a more immediate form of frontier justice. Bat and his deputies had to block the steps and push people off the train as it chugged out of each station.
There was an especially violent ruckus in Lawrence. The Ford County Globe would report that “the mob was almost overpowering, and our officers were involved in a fight which resulted in a victory for Dodge City.” The lawmen not only had to battle with vigilantes but even the “Mayor, City Marshal and a large portion of the able bodied braves of Lawrence undertook to capture Masterson and his outfit.” They were unsuccessful, and the train finally arrived in Topeka. There Bat and his men had to push their prisoners through a crowd estimated at a thousand people to the hoped-for safety of the Shawnee County Jail, where everyone spent the night.
There was some rough going at train stations again the next day, February 17, but the prisoners were safely delivered to the jail in Dodge City. Then, after all that, nothing happened. Dull Knife and the seven other Indians languished behind bars for four months. In June, the governor ordered Bat to bring the prisoners back to Lawrence for trial. After he deposited them there, another four months passed, and then the charges were dropped.
In 1883, at seventy-three, Dull Knife died. Little Wolf did not die until 1904, and both he and his former coleader were buried on the grounds of what is now Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer, Montana. A year after Dull Knife’s death, what was left of the Northern Cheyenne were finally allowed to return to Montana, to live on the Tongue River Reservation.
Surprisingly, in March 1879 there were still buffalo hunters showing up in Dodge City with a few hides in their wagons. One of them was Levi Richardson. He was viewed as a slow and awkward man, but no one was foolish enough to say anything derogatory about him within hearing range, because Richardson was known to use his guns on people as well as buffalo.
“He was a high strung fellow who was not afraid of any man,” Bat would later recollect of Richardson, who had been a companion during buffalo-hunting days. Wyatt Earp thought of Richardson as “one of the best shots with rifle or pistol” and “he had a touchy disposition that often got him into trouble.” A gambler named Loving—the same man who had lent Doc Holliday his gun the previous fall—found out about this one night at the Long Branch Saloon.
Given that he was known along Front Street as Cockeyed Frank Loving because his eyes were somewhat askew, it made sense that he was not a very good shot. No one felt sorry for him, though, because he made a decent living as a gambler and he had an attractive wife named Mattie—attractive enough to catch Richardson’s eye. He and Loving were actually friends and would good-naturedly gamble together after Richardson had sold a haul of hides, but once the hunter indicated he wanted to get to know Mattie better, there was more friction than friendship.
Matters first came to a head during the day. The two men encountered each other on Front Street, and an argument began immediately. Richardson socked Loving in the jaw. He didn’t have a gun but Richardson did, so Loving simply staggered away. Richardson shouted after him, “I’ll blow the guts out of you, you cockeyed son of a bitch!”
Perhaps the buffalo hunter thought he had overreacted, because on a chilly night in the first week of April he walked into the Long Branch seeking Loving, intending to work out their conflict and resume being friends. The gambler was not there, so Richardson bought a drink and sat in front of the potbellied stove to wait. Loving finally arrived at 9 P.M., and Richardson asked if the two of them could sit down at a table together. They spoke quietly, and others in the saloon assumed their feud was ending.
Suddenly, Richardson said loudly, “You wouldn’t fight anything, you damned…”
Loving yelled, “You try me and see!”
Both men drew pistols and began firing. As the percussion and smoke of gunshots filled the saloon, men dove under tables and behind the bar. Charlie Bassett was in the saloon owned by Dog Kelley and P. L. Beatty, and the instant the marshal heard the racket he bolted out the door and hustled down the street, marveling at how many shots were being fired. Entering the Long Branch, expecting a massacre, Bassett instead found in the clearing smoke just Richardson and Loving facing each other, both still standing, their guns emptied. Could the buffalo hunter be as bad a shot as the gambler?
Yes. Loving’s only injury was a scratch on one hand. Bassett took his gun and had him sit down. When he took Richardson’s gun, the man stumbled away, then collapsed. Loving had turned out to be the better marksman: his adversary was hit in the chest, side, and arm. Within a few minutes, Richardson was dead. Loving was arrested, but two days later he was released after the coroner ruled he had acted in self-defense.
Bat was tempted to intervene. While Loving was not unknown to him, Richardson had been a friend. But Bat was the elected sheriff, and he hoped to be reelected that November. “I have never stood for murder and never will,” Bat wrote about the incident, “but I firmly believe that a man who kills another in defense of his own life should always be held blameless.”
Instead, he consoled himself by seeing Richardson’s odd death as providing a lesson in being cool under pressure: “No one … who knew both men could truthfully say that Loving possessed a greater degree of courage than Richardson, or that under ordinary conditions he was a better marksman with a gun. He simply had the best nerve, which is a quality quite different from courage.”
After this, Loving had the reputation of a man dangerous with a gun. This must have gone to his head because, with gun belts on, he hit the trail, in the process leaving behind his two children as well as Mattie. He spent some time in Las Vegas, New Mexico, gambling and telling and retelling the tale of how he had gunned down the fearsome buffalo hunter Levi Richardson, and then he moved on to Trinidad, Colorado. There, his argumentative ways got him into trouble again, this time with the former Dodge City deputy Jack Allen. Gunfire was exchanged—one report claims there were sixteen shots—but neither man was hit.
Out of bullets, the two men went their separate ways. But the next day, April 16, 1882, when Allen encountered Loving on the street, he yanked out his pistol and let loose a single shot, ending Loving’s life.
Members of one of the cattle drives to arrive in Dodge City early in the 1879 season were the James brothers. Frank and Jesse were taking one of their periodic time-outs from robbing trains and banks, and one of the best ways to lie low was to ride hundreds of miles on a cattle drive up from Texas, the days spent in choking dust and the nights under a star-filled sky far from civilization and temptation.
But it was a different environment in Dodge City. With a few fellow trail riders, the brothers were wetting their whistles in the Long Branch Saloon that April. One of the drovers suddenly jumped up from a gaming table, insisting one of the gamblers at it had just cheated him. Gamblers and cowboys began to square off, with the brothers from Missouri having little choice but to go for their guns to back their Texas friend’s play. Then the Ford County sheriff entered, his intense dark eyes quickly scanning the room.
The Wild West would have been even wilder if its story could have included a gunfight between Bat Masterson and Frank and Jesse James. But it did not happen. Bat was a peace officer first and a gunman second. His six-shooters were in their holsters, and he kept his hands free of them as he approached the James brothers. There was a quiet conversation, and Frank and Jesse relaxed. They offered to buy everyone a drink, and the tinny piano music resumed and the tension dissipated.
The notorious brothers soon left Dodge City and returned to their criminal ways. But Bat and Frank James maintained something of a friendship, and they exchanged letters until the latter’s death. Wyatt could have a polarizing effect on people, but it was difficult to stay mad at Bat, or be mad at all.