by Clavin, Tom
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 Geor
ge 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.
TEN
I don’t like this quiet; it augurs ill. In 1875 I was in General Miles’ cantonment in Texas. Along with the government employees and soldiers there were 400 buffalo hunters. Everything was quiet, like this camp, for two or three months and then things went lickety-bang.
—BAT MASTERSON
On his way back to Dodge City in the spring of 1875, Bat Masterson made a detour that almost got him killed.
Mobeetie was located in the northeast corner of the Texas Panhandle. The rancher and cattle baron Charles Goodnight, who traveled the prairie and plains extensively, once characterized it as “patronized by outlaws, thieves, cut-throats, and buffalo hunters, with a large per cent of prostitutes. Taking it all, I think it was the hardest place I ever saw on the frontier except Cheyenne, Wyoming.”
After all that Bat had been through on many a hoof-beaten trail, this town probably seemed like a good place to slap the dust off his clothes, wet his whistle, and enjoy the company of good gamblers and not-so-good women. At that time, Mobeetie was known as Sweetwater. A year earlier, a band of hunters down from Kansas founded a camp near Sweetwater Creek. The camp was nicknamed “Hidetown” because the hunters used buffalo hides to construct rudimentary dwellings.
Bat either arrived in the camp in June 1875 or had arrived earlier and took up buffalo hunting again for quick cash. That month, a contingent of the 4th Cavalry commanded by Major H. C. Bankhead rode into the area to build a fort. With the Red River War over, the government wanted to make sure the Comanche and Kiowa stayed on their reservations and didn’t venture north out of Indian Country again.
With soldiers and supplies only a couple of miles away, Hidetown went through a bit of a boom period and was officially named Sweetwater City, and soon simply called Sweetwater. That name would stick until 1878, when the town applied to the U.S. government for its first post office, and with a Sweetwater post office already designated elsewhere, the place became Mobeetie.
As they had at Adobe Walls, several Dodge City merchants—particularly Charles Rath, Robert Wright, and Lee Reynolds—established a trading post to buy buffalo hides and sell supplies in Sweetwater, which bloomed to a population of 150 residents. The merchants later claimed that before the buffalo virtually disappeared from the Panhandle, the outpost had purchased over 150,000 hides. Such brisk business put money in the pockets of the hunters, offering businesses like saloons and brothels the opportunity to be established.
As the summer passed into fall 1875, Bat remained in the town, which was growing by leaps and bounds. The nearby garrison had been officially renamed, becoming Fort Elliott. As a result of all his exertions in tracking down the four German sisters, Bat was on the inactive list of scouts, meaning it was pretty much up to him when or if he wanted to ride out with the army again. With only a few renegades not confined to reservations, and with the army contingent at the fort dissuading the other Indians from straying, scouts were not in demand.
Rath’s store was open and thriving. A fellow named Tom O’Loughlin, with his wife, Ellen, had arrived in Sweetwater and opened a restaurant and hotel. When another man, W. H. Weed, pulled into town carting hundreds of barrels of whiskey, the first saloon was founded. There was even a laundry operated by a Chinese immigrant. Another saloon opened, and then others, with names like the Pink Pussy Cat Paradise, the Buffalo Chip Mint, and the White Elephant. (Two miles outside of town was the Ring Town Saloon, which catered only to the black buffalo soldiers at Fort Elliott.) One that also featured dancers and rose quickly to being considered the main saloon was called the Lady Gay. The owners were Henry Fleming and Billy Thompson.
There wasn’t any place calling to Bat except the Sweetwater saloons, and the tales of his rescue of the sisters—which grew taller with every telling—resulted in other customers and even barkeeps buying him drinks. Dodge City was another two hundred miles away, and he figured he’d get there eventually, when Sweetwater lost its charm. For now, life was good.
It was about to get even better: Bat fell in love, or something like it. Unfortunately, Bat’s first love was about to suffer a fate similar to Wyatt Earp’s first love, but under more dramatic circumstances … or as Bat would describe it, “Things went lickety-bang.”
After his Ellsworth adventures, Ben Thompson, sometimes accompanied by his troublemaking brother Billy, had moved back and forth to Texas and from one Kansas town to another, always willing to relieve cowboys and fellow gamblers of their money. He continued to dress the part of a successful frontier gentleman, with a touch of his native England: “He was what could be called a handsome man,” Bat later wrote about him. “He was always neat in his dress but never loud, and wore little if any jewelry at any time. He was often seen on the streets, especially on a Sunday, wearing a silk hat and dressed in a Prince Albert suit of the finest material.”
Bat and Ben Thompson may well have crossed trails before, more likely when gambling in saloons rather than in the buffalo hunting grounds. Some friendship may already have developed, but it was in Sweetwater that they became better friends—enough that one saved the other’s life.
In the summer of 1875, Thompson had come to Sweetwater to deal faro at his brother’s brand-new saloon. Faro is a card game at which Wyatt Earp was already proficient and one that was a lot more well known among the general population on the frontier than it is today. There was even a study done on it in 1882 showing that it was the most popular form of gambling in the United States, with the money wagered being more than all other games combined. The American version was based on a late-seventeenth-century game in France that was called pharaon.
The game was played on an oval table covered with a green cloth, with a cutout for the banker. One suit of cards was placed on a board atop the table, with the cards in numerical order—for example, thirteen cards, from the deuce of spades to the ace of spades. Each player put his money on one of the thirteen cards, and he could bet on more than one card. The rules get rather complicated after this, but the goal was, as in most saloon gambling games, to beat the bank by drawing higher cards. Cheating was rampant in saloons across the West, especially by the bank. Some manufacturers practically encouraged this by producing faro equipment in marked boxes that aided cheating. The time came when Hoyle’s Rules of Games warned readers that there was not one honest faro bank left in the United States.
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p; In addition to the Thompson brothers, the Lady Gay featured girls who would dance with customers and do a few simple stage routines. This was also true of a saloon down the street owned by a man named Charlie Norton. There, the dancers were known as the Seven Jolly Sisters. One of them was Kate Elder, who would later find fame on the frontier as the consort of Doc Holliday. (She had also been a soiled dove in Wichita, but ever after insisted that she had not known Wyatt Earp.) Another was Mollie Brennan, who had dark hair and blue eyes and a cheerful, lively disposition—much like Bat Masterson was often described at the time.
Mollie was most likely a player in a typical scenario: as a teenager she had traveled west from a city or left a farm behind to seek a more exciting life. What she found in Denison, Texas, was life as a prostitute. In 1872, she was in Ellsworth, Kansas, and she married Joe Brennan, a saloon keeper there. Who knows what the chances were of that marriage working, but they went to zero the following year when Ben and Billy Thompson hit town. Mollie fell for the latter and followed him to Texas after the killing of Sheriff Whitney. Two years later she was in Ellsworth again, and later that year, as the winter of 1875–1876 approached, Mollie was in Sweetwater. She was reported to be a popular performer at Charlie Norton’s place. She had the ability to dance with men, make them laugh, and persuade them to keep ordering drinks.
Mollie Brennan may also have still been a prostitute, because in frontier dance halls in the 1870s the line between that profession and singing and dancing was, at best, blurred. Many men who frequented such establishments accepted this without a moral qualm. Everybody had to make a living. Wyatt’s second and third “wives” worked as prostitutes, even during the years they considered him their husband. Bat would have had the same tolerant attitude, or none of it mattered: he found Mollie fetching and his heart expanded.