Dodge City

by Clavin, Tom

  As summer approached, Wyatt and Mattie remained in Deadwood. Wyatt took on a side job riding shotgun on stagecoaches. He would have been safer if he were back wearing a badge in Dodge City.

  With the mines in the area thriving, gold had to be regularly shipped out of Deadwood. Outlaws and would-be thieves caving in to temptation knew that. And men taking on the job of guarding the shipments knew they knew that. The pay had to be very good, especially for Wyatt, who with every trip was taken away from wood-hauling and some faro dealing. He signed up as a guard with the Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express, a subcontractor working for Wells Fargo.

  Legend has it that because Wyatt Earp was on board, his stages traveled unmolested. However, while he had experience lawing in Wichita and Dodge City, Wyatt would not have been well known beyond those cities, where he had not even been the marshal but an assistant. He might have struck some fear in an inebriated cowboy who fired off a shot on Front Street, but not among the larcenous likes of those in the hills surrounding Deadwood. He had to take his chances, just like any other driver and guard.

  During a robbery of a stage, a man with the prescient name of John Slaughter was shot dead, becoming the first driver killed along the Cheyenne-Deadwood Trail. On a Monday morning soon after this ominous event, Wyatt rode shotgun on a stage that was to follow the same route. The report that it carried two hundred thousand dollars in gold was most likely an exaggeration, but no doubt the stage still had enough to make any successful self-respecting bandit happy.

  Wyatt was armed to the teeth—a short-barreled shotgun, a Winchester rifle, and two Colt revolvers. The stage had gone only two miles when Wyatt noticed movement, and then it became clear that there were several men on horses riding parallel to the road. They worked their way out of the hills and drew closer to the stagecoach. Now the driver saw them, too, but his job was to keep the horses moving in the right direction. Just like with buffaloing a man who could be dangerous, Wyatt didn’t wait for the other guy to make his play: He raised the Winchester and fired. He continued to fire until a horse went down. That display of aggression and firepower was enough to persuade the men to wait for easier pickings, and the stagecoach made it to Cheyenne.

  The Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express did not want to depend on the bravery or mortality of drivers to safeguard their cargo. They built two new stagecoaches with steel-plated compartments and named one the USS Monitor after the ironclad submarine that had fought the CSS Virginia to a draw in March 1862. The other special coach was named Slaughter. The fortified vehicles dissuaded robbers, except for one gang that attacked the Monitor in September 1878 and made off with its treasure. Over time, all of the gang, except for its leader, Charles Carey, were caught. Carey and the ten thousand dollars in his saddlebags were never found.

  Wyatt continued to ride shotgun as the days grew longer and the chilliness of spring in western South Dakota softened. Wyatt’s absence from Dodge City had made his heart grow fonder for it.

  Just in time, too. The town was gearing up for an even more active cattle-drive season. And after the cattle business, the best money in Dodge City was found in gambling and liquor, so no wonder every few months another saloon or dance hall with gambling facilities opened on Front Street or Railroad Avenue or the dicey area across the Dead Line. As Robert Wright noted in his memoir, “Gambling ranges from a game of five-cent chuck-a-luck to a thousand-dollar poker pot. Nothing is secret, but with open doors upon the main streets, the ball rolls on uninterruptedly.”

  The bigger the game and the players, the better the payoff. One example was Thomas Carney. A wealthy resident of Leavenworth and a former governor of Kansas, in March 1877 he came to Dodge City to buy buffalo hides and, he thought, to make some easy money off the local yokels at the gambling tables. The Dodge City Times reported with a touch of glee that Carney thought he was sitting down with three businessmen ripe for the taking, but Robert Gilmore, Charles Ronan, and Charlie Norton (who had relocated from Sweetwater) were actually professional gamblers who were more wolves than hens. As the drinking continued, the stakes in the poker game increased.

  Finally, the former governor had what he believed was an unbeatable hand: four kings. He was delighted as the other men kept matching and raising his raises. When he had exhausted his chips but not his excitement, Carney upped the ante again by tossing his watch and gold chain and cuff links on the table. It was showtime. Norton placed his cards on the table. What they revealed to the visitor “caused his eyes to dilate with terror, and a fearful tremor to seize his frame, and his vitals to almost freeze with horror.” Norton had four aces.

  It was time to bid farewell to the abruptly destitute governor, and “dragging his feet over the floor like balls of lead, he left the room, sadly, tearfully.”

  * * *

  When Bat left Dodge City the previous year, he had traveled by train to Cheyenne. Though not adjacent to the Black Hills, where men and women hoped to get rich from gold, it was a place to purchase supplies and get outfitted for exploring. Inflation ran rampant, as the hotels, restaurants, stores, saloons, and other establishments were tripling and quadrupling their prices. This didn’t dissuade more people from coming. The Wyoming Weekly Leader had commented rather indelicately that so many “gamblers and sneaks” had arrived from Denver that “the dying town seems to be ‘taking a puke.’” Wild Bill Hickok had been in Cheyenne but left right before Bat arrived—for his date with destiny in Deadwood.

  Because he was on a winning streak at the gaming tables, Bat stayed in Cheyenne into the fall. It is not known, when he finally did leave, whether it was because his hot hand had turned cold or he was wise enough to quit while he was ahead. Instead of purchasing a pick and a mule to go prospecting, Bat returned to Dodge City, but he did not stay long. It seems that Bill Tilghman and Neal Brown had experienced enough lawing for a while and wanted to see if there were any buffalo herds left to hunt. Bat agreed to accompany them.

  The trio were joined by a teenager named Fred Sutton. Tilghman had known the Sutton family during his early days in Atchison, and he promised to look after the boy during his search for adventure. Mostly, it was the adventure of living out on the prairie that they got, because there were far fewer buffalo to hunt, skin, and sell than there had been just a couple of years earlier. Most of Bat’s shooting involved rabbits and other game to feed the hunting party as it endured winter. Tilghman told his wife, Zoe, many years later (twenty-six years younger than her husband, she wrote the memoir Marshal of the Last Frontier, and died at eighty-four in 1964) that Bat also used his guns to conduct shooting contests, until his companions resisted losing any more money.

  Like Wyatt, Bat certainly had an entrepreneurial streak—he was just better at it than his friend was. He apparently had saved some of his winnings at the gaming tables in Cheyenne, because back in Dodge City, after tiring of buffalo hunting, Bat invested in the Lone Star Dance Hall. It was on the south side of the Dead Line and was set up with everything any self-respecting, or nonrespecting, cowboy would want—faro and roulette and other gaming tables, a mahogany bar, a stage wide enough to accommodate dancing girls with an actual orchestra pit in front of it, and rooms upstairs for the girls to provide other forms of entertainment.

  Bat was about to offer his saloon, or maybe just a portion of it, as a congenial place for an Earp family reunion.

  In the spring of 1877, Nicholas and Virginia Ann Earp, with their two youngest children, Warren and Adelia, were on the move again. This time, it was back to California. Nicholas had not been successful with several ventures, and there had been a few more legal skirmishes, so the promise of California glowed brighter than ever. They were joined by the equally restless Virgil and Allie. On the way west, the group stopped in Dodge City and visited with Wyatt and Morgan. James and Bessie were still in business in Dodge City, and Wyatt had returned from Deadwood. In its July 7 edition, the Dodge City Times reported that Wyatt “will accept a position on the force once more.” He pr
obably worked at it in some capacity, even if it was as a special deputy during the peak cattle-drive months, but he apparently did not make headlines. For a peace officer in a Kansas cow town in the 1870s, that was a good thing.

  According to Allie Earp’s reminiscences, as Nicholas drove his wagon through town, he spotted two of his sons, Wyatt and Morgan, walking down Front Street. Virgil hopped off his wagon and the three brothers greeted each other warmly. (Presumably, young Warren squeezed in there, too.) It stands to reason that the Mastersons and Earps hoisted a few together at the Lone Star. Allie also mentions that one night when Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan visited the wagons, they brought along a couple of friends: “One of them was a handsome young man I liked right away. His name was Bat Masterson.”

  Allie and the rest of the Earp family plodded on to a Quaker town in Kansas named Peace. Virgil, who had stayed behind to spend a little more time with his brothers, rejoined them there, and the travelers crossed the Plains and turned south to Arizona. Newton Earp and his wife had already relocated to Prescott in the middle of Arizona Territory from the farm in Kansas. Based on the reports they had mailed back, Virgil and Allie had considered settling there, with Virgil remembering it from the days when he and Wyatt were freight haulers.

  The town rested in a small fertile valley and there would be no Kansas-like or midwestern winters. He and Allie did decide to stay when Virgil was offered a job as a hauler of mail and other cargo in and out of Prescott, and Allie found work as a caretaker for a family with five children. By that fall, with Prescott having been designated the capital of Arizona Territory and the town enjoying some prosperity, Virgil and Allie planned to stay indefinitely. Nicholas and the other travelers had continued on to California.

  Like Wyatt had experienced, Virgil found that he was not done with lawing, no matter how far west he traveled. The sheriff of Yavapai County was James Dodson, a great-grandson of Daniel Boone, and Virgil became his deputy. Newton Earp, showing as much restlessness as any family member, and his wife tired of Arizona pretty quickly, and they packed up and headed back east, to Missouri. They were not in Prescott, then, to witness Virgil become involved in one of the more famous gunfights in the territory.

  On October 16, 1877, a man came running fast into the center of town waving a document. He was Colonel W. H. McCall, and the document was a warrant for the arrest of a fellow named Wilson, wanted in Texas for murder. McCall had just spotted Wilson and another man, John Tallos, on the edge of Prescott. Both were drunk, and they were taking turns trying to shoot a dog, seemingly not concerned that they might also hit the yelping woman who owned the dog. When a constable, Frank Murray, appeared, the two intoxicated men began directing shots at him.

  The two men wearing badges, whom McCall had run up to, were William Standefer, a U.S. marshal, and Ed Bowers, the new sheriff of the county. There was a buggy handy, and Standefer and McCall hopped into it. Bowers got on his horse and was soon joined by an unscathed Murray on his. Virgil had heard the commotion and come running, toting a Winchester rifle. Continuing on foot, he hurried after the other men. It is not known if the dog survived its ordeal, but when the five pursuers found Wilson and Tallos, they still held their pistols. With seven men holding weapons, guns began blazing.

  Within seconds, Tallos was dead from eight bullet wounds. Wilson had been shot in the head, a cigarette still sticking out of his lips, and he too would be dead within a few days. It was later learned that not only had Wilson been accused in Las Animas County in Colorado of killing a sheriff and deputy there, but in 1875 in Wichita he had defaulted on a debt involving a wagon, and the lawman who had forced Wilson to pay up was Wyatt Earp.

  Though all of the lawmen had drawn their guns in the free-for-all, Marshal Standefer was to credit Virgil and his Winchester with hitting both men. As word spread in the ensuing days and weeks, the most famous lawman in the Earp family was not named Wyatt.

  THIRTEEN

  The man has no future who makes himself round-shouldered stooping over a liquor bar.

  —Ford County Globe

  In May 1877, The Kansas City Times sent one of its reporters the 335 miles west to give readers a glimpse of the young city on the edge of the frontier that the people to the east were hearing more and more about. He stepped off the train at 8:30 A.M. “in the tranquil stillness of the morning. In this respect Dodge is peculiar. She awakens from her slumbers about eleven A.M., takes her sugar and lemon at twelve, a square meal at one P.M., commences biz at two o’clock, gets lively at four, and at ten it is hip-liiphurrali till five in the morning.”

  After having breakfast at the Dodge House, the correspondent clambered up to the top of the recently constructed courthouse. “A lovely prairie landscape was here spread out before us,” he informed readers. “As far as the eye could reach, for miles up the [Arkansas] river and past the city, the bright green velvety carpet was dotted by thousands of long-horns which have, in the last few days, arrived, after months of travel, some of them from beyond the Rio Grande.”

  As the summer of 1877 began, Bat was enjoying being back in Dodge City and the profits of his saloon, and leaving the lawing to his brother Jim or Ed, whichever one sported a badge at any given time. But his peace of mind was disrupted one day when he wound up on the wrong side of the law, even if it was for the right reason.

  In a rare display of authority, Larry Deger had pushed himself up from behind his desk to make the rounds. On Front Street he encountered a young and rambunctious cowboy. As the June 9 edition of the Dodge City Times described it, “Bobby Gill done it again. Last Wednesday was a lively day for Dodge. Two hundred cattle men in the city; the gang in good shape for business; merchants happy, and money flooding the city, is a condition of affairs that could not continue in Dodge very long without an eruption, and that is the way it was last Wednesday. Robert Gilmore was making a talk for himself in a rather emphatic manner, to which Marshal L. E. Deger took exception.”

  Finding Gill a tad too lively at that particular moment, Deger arrested him. Gill taunted the marshal by walking slowly, and the response was a boot in the butt, then another one. Bat and his cane were sauntering along the sidewalk, and he observed this. Thinking the cowboy was being treated too roughly, he went up to Deger and wrapped one arm around him. His ability to restrain a three-hundred-pound man is an indication of how strong Bat was. While Deger was occupied trying to separate himself from Bat, Bobby Gill saw his opportunity and took it, fleeing down the street.

  Deger shouted for help. Ed Masterson was a deputy marshal then, but understandably he took one look at the melee and changed direction. The other deputy, Joe Mason, did respond, and with the help of a couple of alarmed citizens he took Bat’s gun and freed Deger. The next chore was getting Bat to the jail, which took some doing, including the two lawmen bashing Bat with their pistols “over the head until the blood flowed. Bat Masterson seemed possessed of extraordinary strength, and every inch of the way was closely contested, but the city dungeon was reached at last, and in he went.”

  Bat was a man who did not anger easily, but he must have been pretty furious with Deger and his deputy, because the Dodge City Times concluded, “Had he got hold of his gun, before going in, there would have been a general killing.” Probably trying to keep his job, later in the day Ed found and arrested Gill, who became Bat’s cell mate.

  Fortunately, Bat had friends in high places. That April, James “Dog” Kelley, a prominent member of the Dodge City Gang, had replaced Hoover as mayor. He was forty-four years old and a veteran of the Confederate Army. After the war, he served as a scout for the 7th Cavalry Regiment commanded by Colonel George Custer. While the regiment was stationed at Fort Dodge in 1872, Kelley saw an emerging city with potential and decided to stay put. As a good-bye gift, Custer gave him some of his own greyhounds, and thus, a nickname. He and P. L. Beatty went into a partnership to open the Alhambra Saloon and soon opened a restaurant next door to it. Kelley would also operate an opera house, and in addition to bec
oming mayor, his political career would include serving in the Kansas House of Representatives.

  After Bat was tried, found guilty, and fined twenty-five dollars, Kelley made him an offer. Charlie Bassett, who in November 1875 had been reelected as Ford County’s first sheriff, was looking for a deputy. If Bat signed up, Kelley would cancel the fine. This seemed like a profitable direction to take, so Bat went to find Bassett.

  As a result, he became Undersheriff Masterson. Bat wasn’t done with Deger, however. It is not known what transpired between the two men, but a few weeks later the Dodge City Times reported that at Masterson’s request, Deger had resigned his side job as one of Bassett’s deputies.

  Bat didn’t put all his eggs in the lawman basket. As undersheriff, he wasn’t making Wyatt Earp money, so he continued as a partner in the Lone Star Dance Hall and Saloon. As such, he wouldn’t have to wait to get a seat at any of the games, and he probably imbibed discounted drinks.

  Bat soon became a familiar and distinctive figure on the streets of Dodge City while on patrol, alternating shifts with Bassett and Bill Tilghman. Though he limped, he was described as a dashing figure with a red neckerchief and Mexican sash and a gray sombrero sometimes replacing the bowler hat. Bat wore two six-shooters and both had ivory handles. Given that he rarely was involved in gunplay during this time, his eye-catching appearance alone may have had a pacifying impact on potential lawbreakers.

  And there were plenty of those. In the 1877 cattle-driving season, over two hundred thousand longhorns were brought to Dodge City from Texas, requiring a steady stream of cowboys to escort them. Though Bat may not necessarily have intended to be a lawman again, he would do his part to make sure that the law enforcement of the previous year was not an aberration but the way Dodge City would operate from then on. Fortunately, to help keep the peace going, that summer of 1877, Wyatt Earp was back to lawing.