It was decided that if a fight was all that would satisfy the mayor of Dodge—a fight he would have.
—BAT MASTERSON
On a gleaming-bright morning in early June 1883, Bat Masterson was on a train bound for Dodge City. When he disembarked there, he expected to be greeted by Wyatt Earp. Neither man knew for sure, but they had a pretty good idea that whatever was to transpire that day—there were already national headlines about the “Dodge City War”—could mark the last time they would walk the streets side by side as men determined to do what was right. It was very likely that each would go his separate way, pursuing the myriad possibilities the American West offered … or on this day, their luck would finally run out.
The train, its plumes of puffing steam dissipating in the wide blue sky and dust-dry air above the prairie, traveled on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe line. This was the railroad company that had done the most to connect the Kansas cow towns more than a decade ago and had made Dodge City, especially, the keystone not just of Kansas but of the entire frontier.
Bat had a fondness for trains. He had traveled on a lot of them since he and his brother Ed had first come to Dodge City and labored to lay tracks for them. They had been buffalo hunters and skinners then, and still teenagers. Both had become lawmen in Dodge, and his brother had died as one, gunned down by cowboys who then had to face Bat and his blazing six-shooters. Two years earlier, Bat had been on another train to Dodge City, arriving just in time to prevent a second lawman brother, Jim, from getting bushwhacked. Now, once again, Bat might have to step off with his pistols primed for sudden action.
None of his three remaining brothers were at risk, yet there was still a sense of urgency—and one of unfinished business. When he and Wyatt had gone their separate ways out of Dodge City several years earlier, the job of peacekeeping had been carried on by other men, capable ones like Charlie Bassett and Bill Tilghman. The town was tamed, so to speak, at least quite a bit compared to when “wicked” was the most common adjective for it and tales were told far and wide about dead men being hauled out to Boot Hill faster than graves could be dug. But now hell really had broken loose all over again. That was why Wyatt and Bat and their friends, most of them good with a gun, were back.
What had come to be called the Dodge City Peace Commission was Luke Short’s doing, though he didn’t intend it. He was a friend from back in their Dodge City days, and afterward he had landed in Tombstone. After first Bat then Wyatt had left that infamous Arizona town, Luke decided to go back to Dodge City and make a living gambling there. His stature fit his name. Maybe because some people looked at him as something of a runt, or because he did so himself, Luke Short could be a stubborn and hotheaded man. Bat described him as “a small package, but one of great dynamic force.” He was a good and reasonably honest gambler and a hell of a dresser—the finest pants and shirt and vest, his head sporting a top hat, a diamond pin stuck in his tie—and he strode the streets of Dodge City with a gold-headed stick. More important, he had remained friends with Wyatt and Bat, and both men prized loyalty. That spring of 1883, their pal had been receiving the short end of the stick, and that had to stop.
However, Wyatt sure wasn’t looking for a fight. The twenty months since the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral had not been easy ones. In December 1881, his older brother Virgil was ambushed on the street and hit with shotgun blasts. He survived, but his left arm was permanently crippled. The following March, as Wyatt shot pool with him in a saloon, his younger brother Morgan was killed.
The attacks on the Earps inspired what became known as the Earp Vendetta Ride. Wyatt recruited a posse of Doc Holliday, “Turkey Creek” Jack Johnson, Sherman McMaster, and younger brother Warren Earp and set off after the killers. For the most part, they were successful, but for a long time Wyatt was in legal hot water, charged with murder and other offenses. Another high-profile gunfight was not going to make life easier—assuming he survived it.
But Wyatt’s code called for not letting a friend down. And he would be reunited with Bat. Already in the imagination of some of the American public back east they represented the toughest of the frontier lawmen, an undefeated duo who had been in any number of gun battles and had rescued the infamous Dodge City from being a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah filled with desperadoes, drunks, and fallen women. (All three remained; they just were better at behaving themselves.) By doing so, Wyatt and Bat, their respective brothers, and the men they rode with had created the blueprint for law and order and justice throughout the frontier. The “Wild West” being no longer nearly as wild might make it less fun for some, but it was a lot more livable for families and others pursuing manifest destiny.
Wyatt and Bat had accomplished this without quite realizing it and while still very young men. Both had received little formal education, and they did not have enlightened or religious upbringings. Their fathers had to scrape out a living—in Wyatt’s case, sometimes on the wrong side of the law—and their mothers bore and raised large broods of children, most of them boys. Somehow, Wyatt and Bat developed a rough sense of justice and how best to keep the peace. The Earp brothers and the Masterson brothers were, in a way, a gang who were tougher and more righteous than the other gangs in western Kansas and across the frontier. There were many setbacks, but as would later be portrayed in many Hollywood westerns, in the end the good guys won.
The ending in Dodge City had yet to be written. The six-shooters on the Peace Commission members’ belts might be the pens that would do it. After all, giving fair notice, Wyatt had told Mayor Lawrence Deger and his followers just the day before, “Bat will arrive at noon tomorrow, and upon [his] arrival we expect to open up hostilities.”
It had to be satisfying the way their faces had paled. Already, rumors had reached a fever pitch, that ruthless men including Dirty Sock Jack, Cold Chuck Johnny, Black Jack Bill, Dynamite Sam, Rowdy Joe, and Shotgun Collins had flocked to Dodge City when Bat and Wyatt had sent out a call to arms. The Kansas City Daily Journal had colorfully reported that Wyatt “is equally famous in the cheerful business of depopulating the country. He has killed within our personal knowledge six men, and he is popularly credited with relegating to the dust no less than ten of his fellow men.”
Adding Masterson to the mix—who the Journal had declared was “one of the most dangerous men the West has ever produced”—meant that local lawyers may have been kept extra busy that night drawing up wills for the rattled “reformers.” They had tossed Luke Short out so they could take away his gambling house, and increasingly that looked like a bad bet.
As Bat’s train pulled into the station, he had to have mixed feelings about returning to Dodge City. He had told a newspaper reporter that Wyatt was “the best friend I have on earth,” so he had to be looking forward to seeing him again. But he knew that corrupt tub of lard Larry Deger and his ilk were waiting for them. Gunplay was never Bat’s first option, nor Wyatt’s, but the scoundrels who had taken over the city might have different intentions.
When Bat stepped off the train, he had an ivory-handled six-gun on each hip and a double-barreled shotgun in his hands. Wyatt waited for him, along with Bassett, Frank McLain, Neil Brown, and several other men wearing pistols. Bat was curious as to the whereabouts of Doc Holliday, who he knew had joined Wyatt in Kansas City, but with the men already here—and this was just the reception committee; likely there were more in town—there was plenty of firepower.
Wyatt and Bat greeted each other. Though different men physically—Wyatt tall and slender, Bat of average height and stocky—their grins were the same, indicating pleasure to see each other, even though the reunion was to settle a matter that might risk their lives. Then they set off, natural leaders, the rest of the men flanking them, starting down the dusty streets of Dodge City, ready for one last showdown to preserve the peace.