by Clavin, Tom
She may well have felt the same way about him, the dark-haired, twinkle-eyed, dashing rescuer of kidnapped girls. They laughed and drank and danced together, and did whatever else together after hours because Bat had been given a key to the Lady Gay by Billy Thompson, implying his relationship with Mollie by then was purely professional, or Bat and his brother Ben being friends trumped everything else. With the key, Bat could come and go at all hours, and it was a better place to be than the poorly constructed boardinghouse that O’Loughlin called a hotel. Mollie had to continue laughing and drinking and dancing with other men to keep her job at Norton’s saloon, but it was understood that she was the object of Bat Masterson’s affections. What were the chances of a buffalo hunter / scout / gambler and a dance-hall girl / fallen woman making a go of it?
Betting against it was Sergeant Melvin King. He was a member of the 4th Cavalry, and in January 1876 the unit was still stationed at Fort Elliott. King was infatuated with Mollie and jealousy was eating away at him. He was not someone you wanted as an enemy. He had fought in the Union Army during the war and in postwar Indian battles along the frontier, and he fought in bars and saloons, too. He was older than Bat by eight years, and just from having a lot more experience as a brawler, King may have been better with his fists than the lovelorn twenty-two-year-old.
He certainly had been in a lot more trouble. The man who would go down in American frontier lore as Melvin King was born Anthony Cook, in Quebec, as was Bat. He was the oldest of five children and his family farmed in Upstate New York. When he turned eighteen in October 1863, he joined the Union Army. During one battle Cook was taken prisoner, but fortunately it was in March 1865 near Petersburg, and he was free weeks later when the war ended.
He tried farming, didn’t take to it well, and in July 1866 he was back in the army. Stationed in Georgia, he was court-martialed for shooting at a dog and hitting another soldier instead. Cook received a light punishment, but a harsher one of hard labor was meted out after he beat up his commanding officer. There were more drunken brawls and the punishments escalated, until Cook was dishonorably discharged in August 1869.
Two months later in New Orleans, as Melvin King he enlisted in the 4th Cavalry. He pretty much kept his nose clean and became one of the unit’s best wranglers. For some of 1875, he had served as Colonel Ranald Mackenzie’s orderly. King had apparently gotten some control over his drinking, and in any confrontations he brandished only his fists.
However, the confrontation he and Bat had was fought with more than fists. On the night of January 24, a drunken Sergeant King showed up at the Lady Gay. Norton’s saloon was closed that night, and Mollie, Kate, and a few other girls decided that they would join their boss and drink and be entertained at Billy’s place. Bat was there playing cards with three men, and when one of them dropped out, King took his place. After a few losing hands the sergeant, now even more irritable, left the Lady Gay.
Around midnight, Bat, Mollie, and Norton strolled over to the latter’s saloon. The owner went behind the bar and the young couple sat at a table. Suddenly, there was pounding on the front door. When Bat opened it, a drunken Sergeant King burst in shouting and waving a gun. Before Bat could make any attempt to placate him, King fired. The bullet entered Bat’s groin and traveled to where it broke his hip. King fired again, but this time Mollie had flung herself in front of Bat and she took the bullet. As both of them fell to the floor, Bat yanked his six-shooter clear and shot King in the chest. He, too, fell to the floor.
Having heard the gunshots echoing in the empty confines, people were piling into the saloon. They were joined by a squad of troopers, who found their sergeant mortally wounded. With Bat on the floor near death, it wouldn’t take much to finish him off and avenge King. What happened next has been the subject of much debate over the years.
Ben Thompson, distracted from dealing faro at the Lady Gay, had gone to Charlie Norton’s place to see what the commotion was about. Seeing that the soldiers were about to kill his friend Bat, Thompson drew his pistols and leaped atop a gaming table. Wyatt gave this description many years later to Stuart Lake, which some have considered at the very least embellished: “Blue eyes snapping, legs spread wide, a six-shooter in either hand, he held King’s trooper friends at bay until Bat had been moved to safer quarters.”
The commotion had also attracted Henry Fleming, Billy Thompson’s saloon partner, and he had the presence of mind to send a messenger to Fort Elliott to rouse the 4th Cavalry’s commander. He in turn ordered the fort’s doctor to hurry to Norton’s saloon. He did, accompanied by a contingent of soldiers charged with keeping the peace. When the doctor arrived, he pronounced Mollie dead. But both King and Bat were still alive. After examining the sergeant, the doctor had his comrades prepare to bring him to the fort hospital. Maybe he had a chance to survive.
Bat’s prospects were gloomy. Initially, the doctor directed that he be made as comfortable as possible. There was no hospital in Sweetwater to bring him to, and it would not have been too smart to put him up in the surgery at the fort. Bat was brought to his room at O’Loughlin’s hotel. Since no bullet could be found, it was assumed that it had exited. The army doctor said that ultimately the only way to be certain was if Bat did not develop blood poisoning. And it wouldn’t matter to him at all if Bat simply died, as many men before him had done after being so grievously wounded.
But Bat’s strong constitution and youth combined to keep him alive. It was a slow and painful fight, but he survived. Sergeant Melvin King died the morning of January 25 and was buried at the fort the following day.
When Bat was able to get up and move around, he walked with a limp, and would do so for the rest of his life. The walking stick he often used out on the street would erroneously be credited with giving “Bat” his nickname.
A few accounts credit Billy Thompson as the man who jumped up onto a table and faced down the angry soldiers. However, recollecting later in life, it was Ben Thompson whom Bat cited among his personal pantheon of heroes, along with Wyatt, Wild Bill Hickok, Charlie Bassett, and Bill Tilghman. “Those men,” he wrote, “all of them, lived and played their part and played it exceedingly well on the lurid edge of our Western frontier at the time Ben Thompson was playing his, and it is safe to assume that not one of them would have declined the gauge of battle with him had he flung it down to any one of their number.”
Thompson, alas, did not live to an age when he could spend much time recollecting, though he tried. Later in 1876, when he tired of Sweetwater, Ben returned to Austin and opened his own saloon, called the Iron Front. A man named Mark Wilson owned the Capital Theater and viewed Thompson as a competitor. Apparently, Thompson was not aware of any ill feelings, because on Christmas Eve he took friends there for a drink. A fight erupted involving other patrons, and when Thompson tried to play peacemaker, Wilson appeared with a shotgun and fired. He missed Thompson, who, wasting no time, whipped out his six-shooter and killed Wilson. The bartender fired a rifle, hitting Thompson in the hip, and then he, too, was shot by Thompson. A judge decided both shootings were in self-defense.
Ben Thompson then led a relatively quiet life, until 1881, when he was hired as marshal of Austin. Trouble arrived in the person of another theater owner, Jack Harris, while Thompson was visiting San Antonio. Once again things escalated fast, Thompson and Harris reached for their guns, and moments later the latter was dead. Thompson was tried and acquitted, and he rode back to Austin.
If he had only stayed there. Back in San Antonio in March 1884, Thompson was ambushed. No longer a lawman, he was in San Antonio on private business and ran into King Fisher, a rancher of his acquaintance. They decided to see a show that evening at the Vaudeville Variety Theater. Obviously, it did not bother Thompson that it had been owned by Jack Harris.
At the theater, the friends were invited upstairs to sit with Joe Foster, who had been a friend of Harris’s. Also seated in the box were Jacob Coy and Billy Simms, who had also known the dead former owner of the the
ater. Suddenly, when Coy and Simms moved away, guns blazed in an adjoining box. Fisher, though shot thirteen times, managed to get off a shot, hitting Coy and crippling him for life. Thompson had collapsed to the floor, where Foster finished him off with a shot to the head. Somehow, he’d also managed to shoot himself in the leg. It later had to be amputated, and shortly after the operation, Foster died.
Ben Thompson’s body was returned to Austin, and his grave can be found in the Oakwood Cemetery there.
Eight or so weeks after killing Sergeant King, when Bat was able to ride again, he decided to put some distance between himself and Sweetwater. He went home to the family farm outside Wichita and remained there until he felt fully recovered. Then, in the spring of 1876, he traveled to his once and future home, Dodge City.
ELEVEN
Bat’s gun-hand was in working order, so I made him a deputy. He patrolled Front Street with a walking-stick for several weeks and used his cane to crack the heads of several wild men hunting trouble; even as a cripple he was a first-class peace officer.
—WYATT EARP
Dodge City had to pull together a police force that would uphold the law—and do it before Marshal Lawrence Deger wound up like his predecessors. He had the advantage of the support of the new Hoover administration, which wanted an end to the rampant lawlessness. The first appointment, in May 1876, was to make Wyatt Earp the deputy marshal. Another step toward a more civilized city that month was the founding of its own newspaper, the Dodge City Times, by the brothers W. C. and Lloyd Shinn.
Wyatt later claimed that the mayor himself had sent him a telegram in Wichita offering him the marshal’s job. Half of this is true. Hoover, not Deger, had the authority to choose Deger’s right-hand man, and because of the good reports about Earp that had drifted west from Wichita, the mayor may indeed have sent off the invitation. But Hoover already had a marshal, even though Deger might end up being nothing more than a rather rotund figurehead.
Wyatt, with Mattie, also came to Dodge City because James and Bessie were there, in the brothel business. (A month after Wyatt arrived, they would be joined by Morgan.) This would seem to set up a conflict of interest, with Wyatt charged with enforcing law and order in the city. But prostitution, while not condoned, was not high on the list of sins as long as the soiled doves were not flaunting it on the streets. The killings and other forms of violence, especially by the cowboys—with “cow boy” being a derogatory name given to the trail riders, devoid of the romantic image of today—instilled more fear in the citizens and those businesspeople who did not depend on selling alcohol. It was beginning to get crowded up on Boot Hill, with grave markers informing that recent additions included Horse Thief Pete, Pecos Kid, and Toothless Nell.
Dodge City needed an enforcer who was not going to cross the line into lawlessness himself, as the soon-to-be-lynched Brooks had. And that man had to get to work right away because all indications suggested that the summer of 1876 would be the biggest and busiest and therefore rowdiest cattle-drive season the city had ever seen. That did not bode well. The word “stinker” was first applied to buffalo hunters due to the odor they spread through Dodge City, and another word recently introduced into the American language was “stiff,” attributed to dead men found lying in the streets. (A third slang word, “joint,” was what the Dodge City Times was calling a saloon.) The more civilized element did not want any more of such vocabulary entries.
While Hoover could not appoint Wyatt to the top job, he did allow him to select the deputy marshals. Deger had inherited a man named Joe Mason from what was left of the previous police force, and perhaps for continuity’s sake, Wyatt kept him on. His first new hire was Jim Masterson. Bat’s brother was three years younger and thus was only twenty in 1876. He could not have had much lawman experience at such a tender age, so most likely he was appointed because of Wyatt’s regard for Bat and seeing potential in him—potential that would be well fulfilled. Wyatt said that Bat’s brother was “a good, game man who could handle himself in a fracas.”
There was one more opening on the force, and that was filled by Bat himself. He was still limping from the gunfight with Sergeant King when he arrived in Dodge City. Bat already had an older brother, so it is probably a stretch that Bat saw Wyatt in that role, but Wyatt was someone he respected as well as being a good friend. However, and as far as other friends went, Bat counted several among members of the Dodge City Gang, given his enjoyment of spirits and gambling during his previous sojourns there. Still, Bat signed on to become a peace officer.
Thus, for the first time, and in the nation’s centennial year, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson would be frontier lawmen together. One question to be asked: Why do this?
Wyatt had experienced “lawing,” as he preferred to call it, in Wichita, so he had some taste for it. And there was the money—many years later, he claimed that in Dodge City he had been paid more than the marshal. This may have been true because added to the monthly salary was $2.50 for every arrest made by Wyatt, who, unlike the deskbound Deger, spent much of his time out on patrol. Still, what a frontier lawman made paled in comparison to what could be made as a full-time faro dealer or as a saloon enforcer, especially in the most booming cow town in Kansas.
But the better answer probably goes back to Lamar. When he and Aurilla were newlyweds with a baby on the way and Wyatt was working as a peace officer, he was approaching respectability. Maybe he could go places. Maybe of the six Earp brothers he could make a name for himself by upholding the law, especially having a father who some viewed as a restless ne’er-do-well with a reputation as a welsher. That piece of his life had ended tragically and shabbily for Wyatt, but then in Wichita, especially, he had distinguished himself as being a man with more sand than a brothel bouncer. Wyatt didn’t necessarily aim to be a saint in Dodge City, but being less of a sinner could be a more satisfying life. There was more of a future in it, and the same for the American frontier. If he didn’t get killed upholding the law, the Earp name might mean something more reputable.
For Bat Masterson, there was loyalty to Wyatt and the opportunity to watch over his younger brother. And for an adventurous young man, “lawing” offered a challenge and a different kind of excitement. Bat had already experienced quite a bit of the frontier and its harsh realities. Maybe staying put and trying to build something good in Dodge City would make for a full life in a different, more enriching way … as long as he didn’t get shot, again, doing it.
Wyatt and Bat were intelligent but not necessarily educated young men, yet they and Charlie Bassett, the Ford County sheriff, were now responsible for enforcing the rudimentary and flawed system of justice trying to take hold on the frontier. If it worked in Dodge City, it could spread to the rest of the Wild West. And Wyatt and Bat were indeed still young men. In early July 1876—as the nation tried to swallow the astonishing news circulating about the Little Bighorn debacle—Wyatt was twenty-eight and Bat only twenty-two. They could not possibly have had any grand design about how to bring law and order to the wickedest town in the West. If there was any kind of plan, it was to get going with the lawing and see what came of it.
It helped the effort that both men made a good impression on others. Built into Wyatt’s lean, six-foot frame was a lot of taut muscle. When he wasn’t wearing a hat, people could better see his dark-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. His chin jutted in a determined way under a bushy dark mustache. He didn’t scare easily, and according to many who encountered him, he didn’t scare at all. As Bat would tell The Tombstone Prospector in 1910, “I think it was the distinguishing trait of Wyatt Earp, the leader of the Earp brothers, that more than any man I have ever known, he was devoid of physical fear. He feared the opinion of no one but himself and his self-respect was his creed.”
Much of this was true for Bat, too, who had already survived several tough scrapes. His hair was darker than Wyatt’s and his shoulders were wider, and he was mostly muscle, too. He appeared a bit dapper with a brown bowler hat and an
occasionally twirled cane. Wyatt wore a white shirt, but otherwise his hat, pants, and boots were black. What Wyatt and Bat had come to know about each other included courage, not backing down, and loyalty to friends. For that time and place on the frontier, if any two men could lead a town-taming effort, those men were Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson.
They would not be alone, of course. There were Joe Mason and Jim Masterson, and Bassett, who now had Bill Tilghman as undersheriff. For him, this was where and when one of the longest and most successful careers as a lawman began.
Tilghman was even younger than Bat, born on Independence Day in 1854 in Fort Dodge—the one in Iowa. He was hunting buffalo on the frontier before he turned sixteen, and it was during the next couple of years that he first encountered Wyatt and Bat. Like the latter, Tilghman was accompanied by an older brother, Richard. They, like other young men in hunting parties, worked long, hard days in difficult conditions and tried to stay away from Indians—but the Tilghman brothers were not successful, in that Richard was killed during a raid on their hunting camp. Bill was finished with hunting after that and went to work in a saloon in Dodge City. The owner didn’t have to worry about profits draining down Tilghman’s throat, as he was a teetotaler.
Tilghman would hold several significant law-enforcement positions over the years in Dodge City; then in 1889 he moved to Guthrie, Oklahoma, to become a lawman in Logan County, which was booming thanks to the land rush. Though wounded, he survived the Battle of Cimarron that year—fighting alongside Jim Masterson—the most famous gunfight of the Gray County War. With other colleagues, Tilghman tracked down the Wild Bunch and the Doolin-Dalton Gang, the latter a notorious band of brothers. (Theodore Roosevelt once stated, “Tilghman would charge hell with a bucket.”) In 1900 he became sheriff of Lincoln County, also in Oklahoma, and eleven years later he was appointed the chief of police in Oklahoma City.