Of course everyone has heard of wicked Dodge; but a great deal has been said and written about it that is not true. Its good side has never been told. Many reckless, bad men came to Dodge and many brave men. These had to be met by officers equally brave and reckless. As the old saying goes, “You must fight the devil with fire.”
—ROBERT WRIGHT
Many of the myths about the Wild West are connected in some way to Dodge City. During what some writers and public relations practitioners have labeled the “golden decade” of Dodge City, that being the years from 1872 to 1882, some of the frontier’s most famous and infamous characters passed through. Quite a few of the stories about people and events evolved into myths or began their lives as tall tales. Thankfully, some of them are true or at least contain a solid kernel of truth.
Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, of course, were two of those famous characters, and shortly we’ll pick up where we left off with them. Doc Holliday will be along soon enough. There was Wild Bill Hickok, until he was shot in the back in Deadwood, South Dakota. We’ll visit again with Ben and Billy Thompson. The actions of that decade in the American West, related to Dodge City one way or another, made or enhanced the reputations of many a gunfighter, whether he be a lawman or an outlaw.
The word “gunfighter” in America can be traced back to 1874, but it wasn’t until around 1900 that it was more commonly used. The term that most people used in the 1870s was “shootist,” or the more specific “man killer.” An example of one was John Wesley Hardin.
Hardin spent some time in Dodge City, but he was more associated with Texas and another Kansas city, Abilene, where he had been photographed before escaping the long gun of Wild Bill. By then, the son of a Methodist preacher was already a veteran man killer. In 1867, his precocious criminal career had begun at age fourteen, when he was expelled from school for knifing a classmate. The following year he gunned down a former slave on an uncle’s plantation in Moscow, Texas. Three army soldiers were dispatched to arrest him. Hardin ambushed and, depending on the account, killed one or all of them.
The saying “I never killed a man who didn’t need killing” has been attributed to Hardin, and he obviously lived in needy times because he is “credited” with sending as many as thirty men to the hereafter. A few were killed while he worked as a cowboy on the Chisholm Trail; there was that one man dispatched in the hotel in Abilene; and he had a run-in with some lawmen in Texas. But then he seemed to go straight, marrying a Texas girl in Gonzales County, and they had three children.
But for Hardin, domestic bliss didn’t last. A killing spree ended the lives of four men, and he was arrested in Cherokee County by the sheriff. He escaped from jail, fled to Brown County, where he killed a deputy sheriff, and, after collecting his wife and kids, he went east, to Florida. It wasn’t until 1877 that Hardin was located and arrested, in Pensacola by Texas Rangers. He was found on a train, and when he grabbed his pistol it got caught in his suspenders. His companion, nineteen-year-old James Mann, was less clumsy but also less of a marksman. His bullet went through the hat of Ranger John Armstrong, who shot Mann in the chest, killing him.
After being convicted it was hard time for Hardin, seventeen years of it in the state prison in Huntsville, where among other occupations he studied law and headed the Sunday school. When released, he was admitted to the Texas bar and opened a law practice. During his incarceration his wife had died, so he was free to marry, which he did to a fifteen-year-old, but the union was short-lived. So were the rest of his days.
In 1895, Hardin was in El Paso to testify in a murder trial. One day he was standing at the bar shooting dice with a local merchant. John Selman, a man with a grievance—and who the year before had killed the appropriately named Bass Outlaw—came up behind him. Right after Hardin said, “Four sixes to beat, Henry,” Selman shot him in the head. While Hardin was on the floor, Selman shot him three more times in the chest, just to be sure. Enough hometown jurors believed Selman’s ridiculous claim of self-defense in killing Hardin that he was released. He was slain the following year by lawman George Scarborough, who in turn was killed in 1900 while pursuing outlaws in Arizona.
Jesse James passed through Dodge City from time to time, and he certainly enhanced the reputation of the entire frontier as a place where legendary gunmen came to live and die. Born in Missouri, he was only seventeen when he joined Quantrill’s Raiders in 1864, riding alongside the likes of Bloody Bill Anderson as they made Kansas bleed, following up on a massacre in Lawrence the previous year that killed 150 people. In the early 1870s, Jesse, too, was glad to see the railroads expanding westward because that meant more targets that he and his brother Frank and the Younger brothers could rob.
What can be gently labeled an “innovation” by Jesse was being an early prairie practitioner of public relations. He did this by creating a press release about himself and his gang in advance of robbing a train in 1874. The train was in Gads Hill, Missouri, and the robbery resulted in a good haul of cash and jewelry. Before leaving the train, Jesse handed the conductor a written message and told him to have it telegraphed to the St. Louis Dispatch. The “press release” was titled “The Most Daring Train Robbery on Record!” It described what had just taken place, and ended, “They were all mounted on handsome horses. There is a hell of an excitement in this part of the country.”
A bank was the gang’s downfall, the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota. The attempt to rob it in September 1876 was a disaster, with brothers Jesse and Frank James barely escaping and Cole, Bob, and Jim Younger captured. (When Cole was finally paroled twenty-five years later, he and Frank James entertained audiences with a Wild West show.) Jesse and Frank went on the run, with sightings reported all over the frontier.
What most of the men who came to Dodge City in the 1870s had in common were horses and guns. Few feared the former, but the latter could cause a lot of harm. Cowboys carried sidearms, as did the lawmen, who also often shouldered shotguns when making their rounds. The weapon found in many holsters was the Colt revolver.
Samuel Colt’s fascination with guns began when he was a child in Hartford, Connecticut, and his maternal grandfather, a former officer in the Continental Army, bequeathed to him his flintlock pistol. In 1830, at the age of sixteen, Colt went to sea on a brig bound for Calcutta. It was on this voyage that he observed that the spokes in the ship’s wheel, no matter the direction it was spun, always synchronized with a clutch to hold the wheel in place.
Colt was familiar with the multibarreled, if cumbersome, handgun called a “pepperbox revolver,” which required the shooter to rotate the gun’s cylinder, like a pepper grinder, after each discharge. He became transfixed with the idea of eliminating that time-wasting step. Using scraps from the ship’s store, he built a wooden model of a five-shot revolver based on the movement of the brig’s wheel, wherein the cocked hammer would rotate the cylinder, and a pawl would lock it in place on the tooth of a circular gear.
Back in the United States two years later, Colt secured American and European patents on his invention, founded the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, New Jersey, and set about raising funds. He was spectacularly inept. He toured the eastern United States and Canada with what can only be described as a carnival act that incorporated nitrous oxide, wax sculptures, and fireworks in his demonstrations. He gave theatrical speeches and threw elaborate dinner parties awash in alcohol, to which he invited wealthy businessmen and military officers in hopes of luring investors and securing army contracts. The problem was, Colt usually ended up outdrinking them all. His sales did spike briefly when the army ordered a consignment of five-shot Paterson Colts during the Second Seminole War. It was not enough. In 1842 the assets of the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company were sold at public auction in New York City.
Colt tried his hand at other inventions—underwater electrical detonators and, in partnership with Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, a cable waterproofing company to run undersea communication lines. Then Colt returned to his revolver. At about the same time he was tinkering with its original design, and had even scraped together the money to hire a New York gunsmith to begin limited production, lightning struck when a veteran of the Seminole War knocked on his door with an order for one thousand guns. The man’s name was Samuel Walker, and he had recently been promoted to captain in the Texas Rangers. Walker’s Ranger company had used the five-shot Colt to great success against marauding Comanche Indians, and he proposed adding a sixth round to the cylinder. Their collaboration produced the Walker Colt, the template for a generation of western handguns.
President James Polk approved succeeding editions of Colt’s handgun, most famously the Navy Revolver, as the official sidearm of the U.S. Army. It would be said after the Civil War that “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” By then, however, Walker was long dead—killed in a skirmish during the Mexican War in 1847—and the fifty-seven-year-old Colt, wealthy beyond description, had only five more years to live before he, too, died, of gout. But his gun lived as the six-shooter that participated in many a confrontation across the American West.
Especially in Dodge City. That fifteen men would be gunned down there in a year beginning in the summer of 1872 surely did not indicate that a golden decade had begun, unless it was for the undertaker. However, the outbreak of violence should have surprised no one. Business was booming in Dodge City. “And such a business!” exclaimed Robert Wright, reminiscing in an article written five years later. “Dozens of cars a day were loaded with hides and meat and getting supplies from early morning to late at night.”
Being on the edge of the buffalo hunting grounds and connected to the big cities back east and to the north meant that hides were shipped as soon as they were hauled in. When the hunters, many of them retaining the foul odors and wretched stains of their gory work, were in town, they wanted whiskey and women. Good manners would only result in them having to wait longer for both.
The hunters’ work remained hard and dangerous, and not just in the summer. The winter of 1872–1873 was an especially harsh one for those men camped or traveling out on the prairie. In December, as Wright and a group of teamsters he had hired were hauling twenty wagons loaded with corn to Fort Dodge, they were hit with a blizzard. After two days, it was still raging. To stay alive in their makeshift shelters, the men had begun to burn the wagons. Finally, two men set off on mules for the fort. Almost immediately they became lost in the blinding snow. However, the mules found their way to Fort Dodge. The two men arrived frozen in their saddles, but alive. They told about the stranded party, and Wright and the others were rescued. During the entire winter the surgeon at the fort amputated the frostbitten arms or legs of seventy hunters, and Colonel Richard Dodge estimated that as many as a hundred men froze to death.
Like the hunters, when the cowboys came to Dodge City, they wanted their entertainments, too. Filled with energy and pockets filled with their pay, they enjoyed riding down Front Street firing their pistols, sending citizens diving under their beds, and shopkeepers behind their wooden counters. It had been a long, dusty journey guiding thousands of cows to the cattle pens adjacent to the Dodge City railroad station, and the drovers’ thirst and appetites had to be satisfied without delay. No one, not even a lawman, was to get in their way.
Prospectors, new settlers, would-be settlers heading farther west, men on the run from some trouble back east, and outlaws looking for more trouble were in Dodge City, too. Violent urges percolated in the kind of melting pot that the former Buffalo City had become. In his colorful memoir Our Wild Indians, Colonel Dodge considered such men “the most reckless of all the reckless desperadoes developed on the frontier” and “the terror of all who come near” them. Their arrival in town was “regarded as a calamity second only to a western tornado.”
A few of these reckless desperadoes did not leave town alive. North of the city was a treeless bluff that became one of the most notorious sites in the West. One night, two cowboys were camping up on that bluff and a quarrel began. It escalated to the point that one of the cowboys drew his gun and shot the other one. The killer hurried down the slope to his horse and rode away. The body he left behind was discovered the next morning. No one knew what else to do with the anonymous cowboy, so a grave was dug there and he was dropped in it with his boots on. The grassy knoll became known as Boot Hill.
It became the final resting place of those who didn’t pull the trigger fast enough. And occasionally, an odd place to find humor. On the marker of a man who had been shot dead had been carved, DIED OF LEAD POISONING.
In the face of all this rampant incivility, many of the citizens of Dodge City were trying to construct a civilization. The railroad had officially arrived that late summer of 1872, when a locomotive hauling banana-yellow cars chugged into town. The line carried in people looking for a fresh start and carried the buffalo hides and cattle out. The downtown area was growing. Tents had been replaced by wooden buildings that contained, in addition to the rapidly multiplying saloons, grocery stores, a barbershop, a gunsmith and a blacksmith, a drugstore, and dry-goods stores.
In November, a visiting reporter from a newspaper in Leavenworth counted between sixty and seventy buildings. Front Street and Bridge Street constituted the main intersection. The unpaved streets allowed for dust storms to kick up when the hot winds blew from the south, and during rainstorms horses, wagons, and pedestrians sank into the slick mud. Merchants banded together to construct wooden sidewalks on Front Street that were eight feet wide, and when there was enough mud, foot-wide planks were extended from one side of the street to the other.
Visitors to the city had two choices for accommodations. One was the Dodge House and its thirty-eight rooms. It had been the hotel J. M. Essington owned until his cook killed him. The other was the Great Western Hotel. One advantage was that the latter hotel had wild game on its menu, but a disadvantage for thirsty travelers was that no alcohol was allowed. There soon would be a building that served as a church for several denominations, a schoolhouse, a boot shop, a butcher shop, a courthouse, and restaurants such as Delmonico’s; and two newspaper offices, one each for the Dodge City Times and the Ford County Globe, would open within the next few years.
It was in 1872 that the first doctor set up shop. Thomas L. McCarty had studied medicine at Rush Medical College in Philadelphia, then at the tender age of twenty-two had traveled west to visit a relative in Indian country. The following year he was in Dodge City, opening up an office in Herman Fringer’s pharmacy. The appearance of Dr. McCarty and his wife, Sally, was a benefit to the town in another way, too. The first baby born after Buffalo City became Dodge City represented the tenuous nature of the new community.
One morning a man who had been serving as a sawbones came into the drugstore and said, “I did something last night that I never thought is possible to fall to my lot and I am so ashamed. I delivered an illegitimate child from a notorious woman in a house of prostitution.” Fortunately for local moralizers, not long after, Claude McCarty was born, and soon after came Jesse, the son of Charles Rath and his wife. Sadly, Jesse Rath died as an infant, but still, the number of “legitimate” babies was soon in the majority.
Robert Wright, Rath, A. J. Peacock, Frederick Zimmerman, Jim “Dog” Kelley, A. J. Anthony, Peter L. Beatty, and Henry Beverley were among those merchants who envisioned a future for Dodge City as a place to make a good living and raise a family. In this regard, it was representative of a frontier community, inhabited by people who shared that dream of a new American West. But this dream was endangered by the eruptions of lawlessness. In his memoir, Wright estimated there were two dozen unlucky occupants of Boot Hill.
Taming such lawlessness in Dodge City would create a blueprint for establishing a system of law and order everywhere in the West. Its reputation had sunk quite low. A story was told of a despondent man riding on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe line; a curious conductor tapped his shoulder and asked where he was going. “To hell, most likely,” the man muttered. The conductor responded, “That’s two dollars, and get off at Dodge City.”
Another tale was told of a wagon train that had come to a stop just east of Dodge City. The migrants were exhausted and a few were injured. The canvas atop the wagons had a porcupine appearance, with dozens of protruding arrow shafts, evidence of the Indian attack the travelers had just endured. They climbed down out of the wagons and got on their knees, circling their minister, who pleaded, “Oh Lord, we pray thee, protect us with thy mighty hand. On our long journey thy divine providence has thus far kept us safe. We have survived cloudbursts, hailstorms, floods, thirst, and parching heat as well as horse thieves and raids by hostiles. But now, oh Lord, we face our gravest danger. Dodge City lies ahead and we must pass through. Help us, save us, we beseech thee.”
There was an inauspicious beginning to law-and-order efforts. In 1873, a group of men banded together to form the Society of Vigilantes. They tried to keep their identities secret, but it was known the leader was the prolific buffalo hunter Tom Nixon. Never mind that a few of the members of the group were barely a cut above the ones who needed taming; it was time to try something. As it turned out, this was not it.
One day Colonel Dodge had his servant, William Taylor, travel into town to pick up some supplies. While he was in a dry-goods shop, two of the Society members tried to steal his wagon. He came running out hollering, and the two men opened up and shot him dead. The Fort Dodge commanding officer was furious. He received permission from the governor to ride into the city and arrest the murderers. Nixon declared that he and his men wouldn’t allow that.
Undeterred, Colonel Dodge and his Bluebellies saddled up and thundered across the prairie. Waiting for them were fifty armed vigilantes. The colonel had faced armed men before and he didn’t hesitate. With bugles blowing, the 4th Cavalry charged through the streets of the city named after his predecessor, rifles and six-guns blazing. The Society of Vigilantes had never counted on this, and its members ran in every direction, diving behind saloons and under haystacks. The killers were cornered, and Colonel Dodge dragged them back to the fort for trial.
A more promising approach was possible that same year when Ford County was incorporated. Dodge City was made the county seat, and when Charlie Bassett was selected to be the county sheriff, that meant for the first time Dodge City had a lawman closer than Hays City. Bassett had a reputation as a steady, levelheaded man, not dramatic at all—which is what the county needed, with plenty of others available to provide fireworks. He would become one of the more well respected lawmen of the frontier, come through several confrontations unharmed, and not turn in his badge and retire until the late 1890s.
But beginning that June 1873, when he was appointed (he would be elected to the office in November), Bassett had a whole county to cover and couldn’t be expected to spend all his time and energy slowing down the Wild West chaos in Dodge City. But if he only had some help.… Merchants and other citizens passed the hat and collected enough money to pay a marshal’s salary.
But this approach had its problems, too. One was that although Dodge City had been declared the official name in October 1872, it was not yet an incorporated city, so it could not have an appointed or elected peace officer. Another was that Bill “Bully” Brooks was the man hired as the first “marshal” of Dodge City. The qualification that he had played that role in Newton, Kansas, overrode the fact that Brooks was responsible for one of the graves on Boot Hill, after he had killed a railroad employee. This quickly was regarded as an ill-advised hire. Brooks’s lawman strategy was to shoot them before they could shoot him, and during his first thirty days he killed or wounded at least a dozen men.
Violence begets violence. Tom Sherman operated a saloon, and he had a dispute with one of his customers, who ran out the door when Sherman pulled a gun. The proprietor chased him and shot him in the street. As the man writhed on the muddy ground, Sherman called out, “I’d better shoot him again, hadn’t I, boys?” He did, putting a bullet in the man’s brain. Brooks declined to arrest him.
Another disturbing incident occurred when one of the faux marshal’s victims had four brothers, and they went gunning for Brooks. He learned of this and waited for them on Front Street, each hand gripping an unholstered six-shooter. As the brothers turned the corner onto the street, without warning Brooks opened up. By the next day, all five brothers resided at Boot Hill.
The citizens of Dodge City discovered that having a psychopath as a marshal would mean more and more killing, and that sure wasn’t moving the dream of civilization any closer to reality. The final straw was when Brooks became smitten with Lizzie Palmer, who worked at one of the new dance halls. But she already had an admirer, Kirk Jordan, who was almost on the same level as Nixon as a buffalo slayer. Jordan did not believe in sharing, and one day he went looking for the marshal. When he found Brooks on Front Street, the startled lawman dove behind a water barrel. Jordan shot several holes in it, and thinking those holes were in the marshal as well, he left town. Brooks at first believed he was drenched in blood, but the wetness was water from the barrel.
The citizenry concluded quickly that it was worse to have a coward than a killer as marshal, and Brooks, too, left town. He would have a short, unhappy future. Bully returned to a previous occupation, as a driver for the Southwestern Stage Company. By June 1874, a rival company put it out of business and Brooks lost his job. Bitter about that, he and two confederates stole several mules and horses belonging to the rival company. All three were caught and thrown in jail. As an indication of how much Brooks had rubbed people the wrong way in Kansas, on July 29, while awaiting trial, a mob dragged him out of the jail and lynched him.
A man named Billy Rivers became marshal, but for unknown reasons he did not last long in Dodge City. It appeared that the violence would. Two factions formed in the town. One, which become known as the Dodge City Gang, included Wright, Rath, Beatty, and the others with interests in saloons, gambling, restaurants and music halls, and brothels (though never officially), as well as the cowboys, hunters, and other men whose wages supported their enterprises. They were not in favor of drastic change, because there was more money to be made that way. Their opponents were George Hoover, Ham Bell, Dan Frost, and others who saw the gang’s view as shortsighted, believing Dodge City would wither and possibly die if it depended on quick profits from sordid ventures.
With Dodge City having become incorporated in November 1875, the following month a committee of business leaders set municipal elections for the next April. In the interim, Beatty would be the acting mayor. When the ballots were tallied in April, law-and-order champion George Hoover was the winner.
His mandate was to enact laws to reduce the violence—exactly what Beatty hadn’t bothered doing during his four months in office. That was the easy part. The next goal was to enforce those laws. The man Hoover chose was Lawrence Deger. (Though of questionable character, he could be effective at tracking down outlaws, and decades later Deger was suggested as the model for Rooster Cogburn in Charles Portis’s True Grit.) Though a big and physically imposing man, he was not a gunfighter. A man named Jack Allen was known as a fast draw, and Deger appointed him as his deputy.
This approach looked more promising, but still there was a problem. It is not known where Deger was at the time, but one day when a particularly rowdy gang of cowboys got to town, instead of confronting them, Allen hid out at the railroad station. He cowered there as the cowboys fired their pistols and roped dance-hall girls like cattle. The cowboys were still at it when the next train came through, and Allen jumped on it, probably not caring if it was heading east or west.
Deger already knew that taming Dodge City was not a one-man job, and it wasn’t a two-man job, either, if he didn’t have the right man. Finding him was now his and the new administration’s top priority.