“We’re going to do well here, Caroline,” Pa said. “This is a great country. This is a country I’ll be contented to stay in the rest of my life.”
Laura knew what he meant. She liked this place, too. She liked the enormous sky and the winds, and the land that you couldn’t see to the end of. Everything was so free and big and splendid.
—LAURA INGALLS WILDER, Little House on the Prairie
Portrayals of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral do not include Bat Masterson. That is as it should be because although he was in Tombstone in 1881, Bat went off to a different adventure before the iconic fight took place that October. But many portrayals in books and movies and television episodes of Wyatt Earp’s adventures and activities previous to Tombstone also don’t include Bat, even if he was present. When he is there, he’s usually portrayed as being little more than a comic foil or coat holder to Wyatt in favor of giving Wyatt himself or even Doc Holliday more attention. Doc and Bat were not fond of each other, and if the latter could see into the future of American culture, this subservient role would only have given him even more reason to dislike the dissolute dentist.
The fact is, Bat Masterson was no one’s Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, or Slim Pickens. Nor was he a retiring personality who let others do the talking, with their mouths or their six-shooters. His life was as adventurous as Wyatt’s, probably even more so when one includes his cosmopolitan days in New York City, but Bat did not have a gunfight in Tombstone to burnish his legend to an iconic glow.
Most accounts of his life have had him born, like Wyatt and Wild Bill Hickok, in Illinois. He was not. Bertholomiew Masterson was born in Quebec, Ontario, Canada, on November 26, 1853. When his supposed Illinois birth was reported during his lifetime, Bat did not try to correct it. Perhaps he didn’t think it was important enough to make the effort, or as with the twenty or more men he was alleged to have killed in gunfights, the fallacy was more interesting and he simply went along with it. But here is an instance when the truth would have been at least as intriguing as the legend: if Bat never formally became a U.S. citizen, as a Canadian he never should have voted or held a federal office. William Barclay Masterson, the name he later claimed as his, did both.
On the other hand, the fact of how he acquired his nickname “Bat” is not as intriguing as the various published explanations. One was that as a child he was an especially talented baseball player and swung a good bat, as unlikely as this explanation was for a youngster in the 1850s. Another reason came about years later, when he was wounded in a gunfight, and thereafter walked with the aid of a gold-topped cane that he wielded as a weapon. But what is believed the most accurate explanation was that as a youngster his parents and siblings shortened the Anglicized “Bartholomew” to “Bat.”
Thomas Masterson would live a life even longer than Nicholas Earp did, dying on his farm in 1921 at ninety-six. Also like Nicholas, there was some wanderlust, but only up to a point. Once he and his wife, Catherine, settled on a farm fourteen miles northeast of Wichita in the 1860s, they stayed put. After leaving Canada, the Mastersons had farmed in Upstate New York, in Illinois, then in Missouri after the Civil War ended, and then moved on to Kansas.
Bat was the second child, with Edward having been born in 1852. Bat would be closest to him and, though younger, was protective of him. Ed’s gentle and unassuming nature may have made him the family favorite, and possibly by default it was Bat who grew up more eager and able to handle the rough-and-tumble life on the frontier. Ed was not a leader but a follower.
There were seven Masterson children in total, five boys and two girls. After Bat came James, then Nellie, Thomas Jr., George, and Minnie. From early on, Bat stood out from the bunch. According to the younger Thomas’s recollections (interviewed late in life, in 1931) as well as his brother’s own, Bat had a boisterous sense of humor, enjoyed practical jokes and teasing, was quick-witted and decisive, and had a strong constitution. In his 1957 biography, which was the basis for the Bat Masterson television series starring Gene Barry and which repeated some of the untrue stories about him, Richard O’Connor wrote, “He was the eternal Huck Finn, and the scant provision for education among the sod huts of the Kansas homesteaders did not dismay him in the least. Self-education and a resourceful mind later supplied much that should have been instilled by a prairie schoolmarm.”
The youngster enjoyed the trips he took with his father by wagon from the farm in Sedgwick County to Wichita. It provided Bat with his first exposure to an emerging frontier town. There he observed the saloons, gambling houses, dance halls, theaters, more saloons, a variety of one-story wooden shops, and the people who frequented all of them—cowboys, girls who were dancers or singers or prostitutes or all three, gamblers on hot streaks in their new fine clothes, bloodstained buffalo hunters, travelers shaking the prairie dust out of their clothes, store owners and clerks, tough men and those trying to look that way wearing gun belts and pistols, and farm boys like himself spending a few precious hours away from the hoe and the plow. As would soon be proven, Bat much preferred town life.
In 1871, after another summer of working the farm with his father and before he turned eighteen, Bat determined to strike out on his own, or almost on his own. Ed was not so inclined, but the affable older brother pretty much did what Bat wanted him to do. Together, the teenagers headed south to a small settlement where buffalo hunters bought supplies, a town that would soon become Caldwell. Here, the brothers signed on with a hunting party. Roaming in search of large animals to kill must have seemed to them more adventurous than farming.
Much of the story of the American West and the long chapter of the decline of Indians is the story of buffalo—first their abundance, then the destruction of their population. The 1840 U.S. Census clearly underreported that there were seventeen million American bison on the prairies and plains west of the Missouri River, but as mentioned earlier, as the years went on, estimates expanded. Explorers returned east or sent back stories of buffalo covering the land the way we might see ants covering an anthill. One frontiersman came upon a herd that he insisted he had measured as seventy by thirty miles.
In 1846, Francis Parkman, the young explorer from Boston who was living with the Oglala Sioux, recorded an encounter with “one vast host of buffalo. In many parts they were crowded so densely together that in the distance their rounded backs presented a surface of uniform blackness.”
While some tales were most likely exaggerated, there was every expectation that buffalo would be an almost overwhelming presence in the West for decades. And then they weren’t.
Buffalo were a necessary source of food and clothing for dozens of Indian tribes. They ate the organs, stomach, tongue, intestines, and bone marrow in addition to the meat; the hides were used for tepees, robes, and shields; and other body parts became bowstrings, eating utensils, and glue. Even with this consumption, however, over the decades the hunting by the tribes had had no impact on the animals’ population. They took as much as they had to and left the rest, and thus the harvest did not outpace the breeding of more animals. Each buffalo was fully exploited, and the meat could feed the tribe year-round, especially when thin strips of it were dried and pounded with berries or other ingredients to create pemmican, or pimihka·n, a Cree word for a high-protein food that could be stored for the winter and that would sustain Indians while traveling to and from hunting grounds.
Early white explorers pretty much did the same, perhaps not so thoroughly, as a way to survive while traveling far from settlements and other food sources. But stories that drifted eastward about the strange, hulking bison caused a new market to spring up: buffalo tongues. They were viewed as something of a delicacy by diners in St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Suddenly, as early as the 1830s, there was a demand for tongues, and after they were cut out the rest of the beast was left to rot. The frontier artist George Catlin was at Fort Pierre on the Upper Missouri and observed a keelboat off-load barrels of whiskey and the captain announce that he would trade them for buffalo tongues. (Actually, he would trade only the whiskey, as the tongues would be soaked in brine and loaded into the emptied barrels.) A large Sioux hunting party went out, found a herd of buffalo, killed hundreds of them, and severed their tongues. Such incidents not only changed the Indians’ relationship with the buffalo but began a pattern of repeated slaughter on a grand scale.
That relationship, for most Indians, was a source of increasing conflict between them and white hunters. “The Indians claimed they only killed for meat or robes, and, as soon as they had sufficient, they stopped and went home,” Robert Wright explained. “Whereas, the [white] hunter never knew when to quit or when he had enough, and was continually harassing the buffaloes from every side, never giving them a chance to recover, but keeping up a continual pop-pop from their big guns.”
The near eradication of buffalo did not happen overnight in the 1860s and early 1870s. For example, in the mid to late 1820s, hundreds of thousands of robes made from buffalo hides the Indians themselves had tanned were shipped to New Orleans and its eager white consumers and manufacturers. But it was a sensational decline, considering that in only a few decades a population in the tens of millions was reduced to thousands. Still, as late as 1870, the army estimated that as many as fifty million buffalo remained on the prairie and plains west of Fort Dodge. That same year, though, the introduction of a new technology spelled doom for the beasts: their hides could be tanned more efficiently and turned into high-grade leather products. More than ever before there was a rush of killing buffalo.
Buffalo Bill Cody, of course, became the popular image of the great white hunter perusing the prairie and plains for herds to harvest. His boast that he had once killed over four thousand buffalo in eighteen months was astounding to the people back east, some of whom wanted to believe that they were wearing an item that originated from an animal that Bill himself had shot. But Cody was easily surpassed by a new breed of buffalo hunter bearing a Sharps rifle and the knowledge that just one hide would earn him $3.50. Even the least educated frontiersman could calculate that felling ten buffalo a day would equal $35, an amount many men west of the Missouri River could not make in a month.
For some hunters, $35 was the floor, not the ceiling. One of the more well known and obviously ruthless hunters was Tom Nixon. During a thirty-five-day hunt in 1873, his rifle sent 3,200 buffalo to their deaths, and this included a banner day of shooting 120 of the overmatched animals in forty minutes. Demonstrating a preindustrial flair for mass production, Brick Bond had fifteen skinners in his employ and he kept them busy by killing 250 buffalo a day. With the prizes being the hides and the tongues, most of the meat was left on the ground, providing belly-bursting feasts for wolves and coyotes at night and putrefying during the hot summer afternoons.
Slaughtering buffalo became easier thanks to the .50-caliber Sharps rifle. It was a hefty weapon, weighing nine and a half pounds unloaded, and a bit heavier when containing a three-inch-long cartridge, 120 grains of black powder, and a bullet that was a tenth of a pound. The rifle made a loud bang when fired, and the bullet could travel with accuracy—especially when the rifle was perched on a couple of rest sticks—over a thousand yards.
By the time that Bat and Ed Masterson decided to take up buffalo hunting, the population was in severe decline, but little thought was given to conservation of what remained. In the winter of 1873–1874 alone, more than 1.5 million buffalo hides were carried by train from the western hunting grounds to eastern buyers. The first winter that Dodge City was being served by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe line, Wright and fellow businessman Charles Rath had shipped over 200,000 buffalo hides “besides two hundred cars of hind quarters and two cars of buffalo tongues.” Sights like hundreds if not thousands of buffalo skulls piled high and bleaching in the sun near railroad stations did not deter the hunters from killing the beasts nor such getting-rich-quick entrepreneurs from buying the hides and body parts.
The obvious reason for such deliberate slaughter was greed: kill and harvest as much as you can as rapidly as you can or earn less than the next guy. Another reason was a mixture of fascination and disrespect: the animals were just so damn stupid and appeared to be begging to be killed. With most animals on the prairie and plains, getting shot at, and especially having one of your own killed, resulted in flight as fast as their paws or hooves could carry them. Not so the buffalo. A hunter could walk to within a hundred yards of a feeding herd, stretch out on the ground, aim, and fire. A good kill shot was through the lungs. After the animal collapsed and died, the others kept eating as though nothing had happened. If the herd began to move—and at full tilt, buffalo can run more than thirty miles an hour—the hunter killed the lead buffalo, which stopped the followers in their tracks.
On the farm where the Mastersons lived, though Ed was the oldest, Bat had been the one in charge of herding the children to and from the nearest one-room schoolhouse, which was several miles away. From time to time there were reports of Indians nearby, and every frontier town had stories (some of them accurate) of white children being kidnapped. One afternoon, leading his siblings, Bat spied an Indian who appeared to be hiding in the tall grass, studying them. It was for this reason that Thomas Masterson had gone along with his son’s request for a rifle, trading for an old musket. The local blacksmith straightened out the barrel, and after hours of practice in the fields, the boy was able to hit just about anything he aimed at.
So with some buffalo still blanketing the prairie—though in smaller and fewer herds—especially during the late-spring northern migration, and with prices high and Bat by his late teens being a crack shot, it made sense to go hunting as the Masterson boys’ first attempt to earn real money. Though a hardy and confident young man, Bat may not have been prepared for how grim a job this was. One had to stomach the constant carnage along the Arkansas River, particularly what happened after an animal was killed. Despite his prowess with a rifle, Bat did not begin his hunting career as an actual hunter but as a skinner. His and Ed’s job was to slice the hides off, stretch them out using stakes on the ground so the sun would dry them, cut the tongues out, and in the process dismember some of the carcasses, which resulted in wallowing all day in blood and other noxious fluids.
There was the danger of Indian attacks, more so than before. The tribes had woken up to the fact that by allowing and even participating in the mass murder of buffalo, they had robbed themselves of their basic source of survival. White hunting parties faced an increasing risk of being pounced upon by angry Indians. That anger was stoked by the waste. The stripped carcasses left to rot in the harsh sun were a form of disrespect beyond that shown just to the buffalo. They fouled the landscape that had more meaning as a homeland to the native peoples than it did to the white interlopers.
Bat was not concerned with the larger issues; he simply wanted to earn a living and keep his scalp while at it. He and Ed joined a hunting outfit typical on the prairie in 1871. It consisted of several wagons and their drivers, a cook and his wagon, hunters, and skinners. Not all hunters carried Sharps rifles; some had Hawken, Henry, or Springfield rifles and whatever other rifles had been lugged home from the Civil War, but the one that became the bane of the buffalo was the Sharps rifle because of its unique combination of power and accuracy.
The hunting party that Bat and Ed belonged to worked an area of Kansas called the South Fork that fall of 1871 and again the following year. There were other hunting parties in camps on the prairie, and around them buffalo carcasses piled up by the hundreds, then thousands. The hides were hauled to the nearest train station, where they were lifted into railroad cars and shipped north and east. The hunting parties were not necessarily rivals, because there were still plenty of buffalo to go around. It was more like each encampment was its own little squadron, led by a top man who sold the buffalo hides and tongues and paid out the wages. Bat and Ed probably took a few breaks to visit their family in Sedgwick County, and it’s likely that Bat was the one who was less hesitant about returning to the bloody, nasty work, especially when his shooting abilities earned him a promotion to hunter, at higher wages.
According to some accounts, it was during one of these buffalo-hunting trips that Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp first met. In an essay written in the early 1900s, Bat wrote, “I have known Wyatt Earp since early in the seventies, and have seen him tried out under circumstances which made the test of manhood supreme.” He describes Wyatt as “weighing in the neighborhood of one hundred and sixty pounds, all of it muscle. He stood six feet in height, with light blue eyes, and a complexion bordering on the blonde.” In contrast, Bat was five feet nine with a slightly stocky but muscular body, broad shoulders, dark eyebrows and hair, and his mouth was quick to turn up into a grin, unlike the taciturn Wyatt.
Wyatt was to tell the biographer Stuart Lake that he first met Bat when both were working for buffalo-hunting outfits. And in his 1957 biography of Bat, O’Connor takes both Bat and Wyatt at face value and goes on to write that Bat was so impressed by “the tall, blue-eyed, and steadfast man six years his senior” that “Masterson made a conscious effort to pattern himself after Earp, cultivating a quietly confident manner and learning to hold his tongue.”
Bat may indeed have acquired these traits at that time, but not from associating with Wyatt, who was actually five years older, was still having trouble being steadfast, and other, more-recent accounts claim that in 1871–1872 he was not off buffalo hunting. Here is a case of choosing to believe the recollections of the two men who contend their fast friendship began on the blood-soaked prairie or the speculation of others reading the tea leaves of conflicting documents.
Bat was no stranger to Buffalo City and then Dodge City during this time. It was there, along with many other hunters and trail-riding cowpunchers, that he acquired a lifelong taste for gambling and alcohol. Suppliers of whiskey could readily be found at the camps themselves, and Bat probably took advantage of this “room service,” but more enjoyable was to drink while socializing in a saloon. And he could play cards. There is no indication that Bat ever became addicted to alcohol or gambling, but both activities would be a big part of his life, and he had a high tolerance for and took much pleasure in both.
It was during one trip to Buffalo City that Bat and Ed decided to give up buffalo hunting, at least for a while. The prospect of another summer roasting under the prairie sun and surrounded by gore may have been too dismal. In 1872, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe was getting closer to Buffalo City, close enough that the railroad and its subcontractors always needed workers. Bat and Ed were hired to grade land near Fort Dodge where tracks would eventually be laid. They were joined by Theodore Raymond, a friend from Sedgwick County who brought with him a wagon and a team of horses. The three young men went to work.
It was hard-enough work that maybe Ed, at least, thought fondly of being back at the farm, where Jim, George, and Tom Masterson had taken over their routine chores alongside their father. On the blistering hot prairie the three new railroad workers choked on dust all day, the air shimmering around them as though about to reveal a mirage. A milestone was achieved when they worked their way to Buffalo City, and Bat, Ed, and Raymond were able to witness the streets being laid out by the engineer Robinson. Then it was back to work.
As it turned out, the pay promised them was the mirage. A fellow named Raymond Ritter had hired them, then left, claiming he had to get the money owed them from the company to the east that had hired him. It was only then that the exhausted trio learned from people in town that this particular subcontractor was known to take a trip when a job was done. Ed and Raymond, despondent, returned to Sedgwick County and home-cooked meals and beds under roofs that offered protection from the sun and rain. Maybe farm life wasn’t so bad after all. Bat was furious. The young men were owed three hundred dollars, and he decided he’d stay put and find a way to collect it.
He found enough work as a teamster to eat and sleep out of the autumn rains as the railroad extended beyond the new Dodge City to the west, toward Colorado. But as much as Bat enjoyed the drinking and gambling pleasures of Dodge City, the real money was still in hunting buffalo, especially with railroad-related work moving on. That fall, when he was offered a job as a hunter with an outfit camped on Kiowa Creek, led by Tom Nixon and Jim White, Bat took it.
Nixon was already a legendary hunter. White had had a more exciting and less one-sided experience than hunting a few years back, during what had become known as Red Cloud’s War. In 1866, over two thousand warriors from several tribes, led by the Lakota Sioux warriors Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, had vowed to stop any incursion into Pahá Sápa, the “Black Hills,” which straddled the border between South Dakota and Wyoming and was considered sacred territory by the Sioux. The construction of Fort Phil Kearny by a U.S. Army force led by Colonel Henry Carrington was indeed an incursion.
On December 21, 1866, one of Carrington’s officers, Captain William Fetterman, led eighty men in an attack on what he thought was a small group of Indians riding with Crazy Horse. He fell into the trap planned by Red Cloud, and the army contingent was wiped out. The following year there was another battle, this one called the Wagon Box Fight, in northeast Wyoming. It wasn’t as fierce or as deadly as what had become known as the Fetterman Massacre (to the Sioux, it was the Battle of the Hundred Hands), but it was a close call for Jim Wilson and the others pinned down by attacking Indians for much of a hot August day. The next year, Wilson and another man got into trouble in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and the incident included killing four men. To try to hide his violent past, when Wilson showed up in Kansas to hunt buffalo, he was “Jim White.” (Mayhem would always follow White, who was killed in 1880 at his hunting camp in Wyoming.)
From Dodge City west into Colorado there were dozens of hunting camps operating at a brisk and bloody pace into 1873. Tens of thousands of buffalo were felled and skinned. Though some buffalo meat was sold to the railroad to feed its construction crews, the harsh, hot breezes scouring the frontier carried the smell of rotting carcasses. Hunters were looked at with some disgust when they came to town because of the gagging scents they carried and their unkempt, gore-stained appearance. But everyone was making money and would continue to as long as the population of the animals held out.
Before 1872 ended and around the time of Bat’s nineteenth birthday, Jim Masterson arrived in Dodge City. At seventeen, he too had had enough of farming and he wanted to experience the adventures his brothers Bat and Ed—who had returned to hunting with Bat—were having. Skinning the hides off animals his brothers shot might not have been Jim’s idea of adventure, but he made more money than on the farm because the hunting was good right up until Christmas, when the last of the buffalo that had remained that far north with winter coming on were killed. The first week of January 1873 saw the brothers break up, with Ed and Jim heading to Sedgwick County and Bat staying in Dodge City.
Ed returned the following month. The brothers signed up again with the Nixon-and-White outfit even though there was little hunting to be done between snowstorms. Ed spent more time in town, working at a saloon, and probably served his brother drinks, when Bat rumbled in with a wagon full of hides. It was around this time that the patient and persevering Bat exacted his revenge on Raymond Ritter.
A friend who had been laying tracks in Colorado arrived in Dodge City and informed Bat that Ritter was on his way east, possibly on the very next train. Grabbing his six-shooter, Bat headed to the Dodge City station.
When the train pulled in, Bat got on board. He went from car to car until, sure enough, there was Ritter, who had to be shocked to see the young man who had become hardened by hunting since the last time Ritter had seen him. Bat hadn’t been pointing a pistol at him last time, either. Bat hauled the scoundrel out onto the platform. Word of the confrontation spread quickly, and a crowd gathered.
When Bat demanded the three hundred dollars, Ritter called for help, claiming he was being robbed. But he hadn’t left a good reputation behind, and in the time that Bat had lived in Dodge City, people had come to know a hardworking, reliable, and personable young man. No one came to Ritter’s aid. Instead, Bat was encouraged to pull the trigger, but he’d seen enough blood every day on the prairie and he just wanted the money he and his two companions had earned. Bat pressed the gun into Ritter’s ribs and tried to appear as menacing as his nineteen-year-old face would allow.
“I’m only collecting what you owe me, and everybody here knows that,” Bat said. “You ran out on me and Ed, but now you’re going to pay up.”
This explanation coupled with the pistol was persuasive enough for Ritter. He produced a round roll of bills, peeled off three hundred dollars, handed those bills to Bat, and boarded the train, which to his mind couldn’t depart fast enough.
Another thing the people of Dodge City had discovered about the young Masterson man was that he could hold his liquor and could be friendly and outgoing. He proved this all over again when he led the crowd to the Front Street saloon where Ed tended bar and dipped into the three hundred dollars to buy everyone a round of drinks.