Dodge City

by Clavin, Tom

  FIFTEEN

  City Marshal Masterson contemplates the organizing of a tramp brigade for the purpose of clearing the streets and alleys of the filth and rubbish that has been accumulating for a year or so. There are about thirty tramps now sojourning among us, all of whom have no visible means of support and are liable to arrest under the vagrant act.

  —Dodge City Times

  In November 1877, Wyatt again left Dodge City. As usual, he wanted to make more money than off-season lawing offered, but instead of returning to Deadwood to deal faro, Wyatt wound up in Texas. That is where the trail of a gang of train robbers took him, men he had been hired to find.

  While Wyatt was hunting outlaws, there was a rearrangement (as often happened) of the local law-enforcement personnel. Ed Masterson was named Dodge City marshal. Even though he did not have a reputation equal to Bat’s, he had been a capable assistant. According to Robert Wright—who certainly had a better relationship with the Masterson brothers than he did with the Earps—Ed was “in every way well qualified to fill this position. He was a natural gentleman, a man of good judgment, cool, and considerate. He had another very important qualification, that of bravery. In those days, a man with any streaks of yellow in him could have accomplished nothing as such officer in Dodge.”

  Ed had courage and, like his brothers, he was good with a gun. But only a few days after Ed’s appointment there was a demonstration of the different approaches to lawing that he and his brother had.

  On a chilly mid-autumn evening, shortly after sundown, the two older Masterson brothers were standing outside the saloon owned by P. L. Beatty and Dog Kelley. They weren’t expecting trouble, because there were few cowboys in town. One of them, though, a Texan named A. C. Jackson, thought it was too dull a night, even after spending some of it drinking whiskey. As the cowboy staggered toward his horse, he pulled out his pistol and fired five shots. He either intended to shoot in the air or was too drunk to hit anything.

  Whatever Jackson’s intent, he had just committed a crime. Both Bat and Ed went to arrest him, but the cowboy had managed to climb up onto his horse and was not inclined to climb back down. He was not impressed by the sudden appearance of so much law on an otherwise calm evening, and, in defiance, he fired off another shot, then turned and galloped away. Ed essentially said, “Let him go,” pointing out that no one had been hurt and the drover couldn’t cause any damage except maybe to himself on the trip to his outfit’s camp on the other side of the Arkansas River.

  But Bat was of a different bent on such matters. It rubbed him wrong to be flaunted. He jumped on a horse and gave chase. He fired until one of his six-shooters was empty, but the elusive Mr. Jackson made it safely across the bridge. With full night descending, a red-faced Bat returned to the downtown area. He was more worried about Ed and his mild disposition than he was angry at his older brother. For good reason, as it turned out.

  Bat soon had another opportunity to get his man. A telegram was received from Big Springs, Nebraska, informing that a Union Pacific train had been held up near there. The robbers were believed to be riding southwest, perhaps heading to the Panhandle or Indian Territory. The leader of the five-man gang was Sam Bass. It was anticipated that the outlaws would cross the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe tracks near Lakin, Kansas.

  Instead of climbing on their horses, Charlie Bassett, Bat, and a deputy sheriff, John Joshua Webb, caught the next westbound train out of Dodge City. They wanted to catch Bass so badly they could taste it. In the annals of frontier villains, he was an all-star bad guy.

  Samuel Bass had been born in Indiana in 1851. When he was a young child, both his parents died, perhaps from exhaustion after having ten children. Bass was given to a mean-spirited uncle, who treated him like an indentured servant, forcing the boy to spend long days out in his fields. The farm was right by the Mississippi, and Bass took advantage of this when he was eighteen by building a raft and escaping down the river. He stayed first in St. Louis, then Mississippi, and eventually Denton, Texas. There he made good money racing horses, but drinking up most of the proceeds seemed to erode whatever moral fiber Bass may have acquired during an abusive upbringing. After a fight in Denton and a warrant for his arrest in the summer of 1875, Bass fled to San Antonio.

  He met Joe Collins there, a fellow who liked to raise hell and had a penchant for taking instead of earning money. They teamed up and recruited a gang. (Some accounts say a member was the buffalo hunter Tom Nixon, but this is unlikely.) They headed north to South Dakota. The Black Hills area was no longer defended by the Oglala leader Red Cloud and his warriors, but it became a dangerous place all over again when the Bass-Collins Gang robbed seven stagecoaches going to and from Deadwood. Armed men were concealed in the seventh stage, and they opened up when the bandits rode down on it. During the gun battle the stage driver was killed. With a murder charge hanging over their heads, the gang decided it was time to relocate. This time they headed south, to Nebraska.

  One of the outlaws, Jack Davis, shared his belief that Union Pacific trains carried gold shipments that would wind up in banks back east, and the best way to find out was to rob one. One night he, Bass, Collins, and three others (one more than the five reported) boarded the train that was stopped at a water station near Big Springs. Davis was right in a big way. As passengers cowered in fear, facing six-shooters with the hammers cocked, Bass broke into the mail car and found a gold shipment—sixty thousand dollars in twenty-dollar coins, a jaw-dropping jackpot. They had been lucky enough to find a shipment that was being sent east from the U.S. Mint in Denver.

  On their way back through the train, the gang took a total of thirteen hundred dollars from the petrified passengers. Splitting up in pairs, and with ten thousand dollars in gold coins in each man’s two saddlebags, they hurried off.

  Bassett, Bat, and Webb arrived in Lakin in plenty of time, their guns loaded and ready. But Sam Bass and his gang didn’t cooperate by showing up. After a day of fruitless waiting, the lawmen returned to Dodge City, where a telegram notified them of five men who had been seen thirty miles west of the city, heading south. This time the three lawmen did saddle up, and Ed Masterson and a deputy were sent west by train. Once again, all were thwarted.

  Whoever those five men were, they weren’t the six outlaws, who were still traveling in pairs in different directions. While the subsequent adventures of the cowboy A. C. Jackson, after eluding Bat, have been lost to history, that is not true about the larcenous life of Sam Bass.

  First, though, about his outfit of outlaws. A week after the robbery, Joe Collins and one of his criminal colleagues, Bill Heffridge, were found near Buffalo Station on the Kansas Pacific line by a posse led by George Bardsley, the sheriff of Ellis County, Kansas. With the prospect of jail and probably a hanging not all that appealing, Collins and Heffridge tried to shoot their way free. They failed. Both men were killed, and the posse recovered the thieves’ share of the gold coins. Another of the outlaws, James Berry, obviously not having planned ahead very well, returned home to Mexico, Missouri. Lawmen found him there in October. He, too, put up a fight but was not killed, just wounded. Hoping for leniency, he gave authorities the names of the other gang members and details about the robbery. Davis apparently got away, as did one other outlaw.

  Bass wound up deep in Texas, where he formed a new gang and returned to robbing trains, beginning with one on the Houston & Texas Central line in February 1878. They took on another train on the same line in March, then had some bad luck in April. Bass and the gang boarded a Texas and Pacific Railway Company train unaware that it contained convicts and armed guards escorting them to prison. Passengers dove for cover as shotguns and six-shooters blasted away. The gang managed to escape, and Bass, with a growing reputation of being untouchable by the law, lay low in a remote hideout in Denton County.

  June Peak, who had once served as a deputy sheriff in that county, was appointed a captain in the Texas Rangers. He formed a company of thirty men under his command, with one purp
ose: bring in Sam Bass, dead or alive. In June, they found the Bass gang’s camp at a place called Salt Creek. After Peak had sent men to the other side of the camp to secure the gang’s horses, he and his men attacked just before dawn. In the gunfight three deputies and one outlaw were killed. Incredibly, though vastly outnumbered, Bass and the rest of his gang escaped on foot and made their way to a nearby ranch, where they stole horses and fled as the sun rose.

  Authorities and surrounding residents were apoplectic that the Bass gang got away. The outlaws stayed hidden; then in July they planned to rob a bank in the Texas town of Round Rock. Bass was unaware that the newest member of his gang, James Murphy, was about to betray him. Murphy and his father had been arrested months earlier for helping Bass hide out, and the authorities said the charges would be dropped if the younger Murphy could deliver the gang leader. He got word to lawmen about the Round Rock raid.

  However, they were not alert and waiting on July 19, when Bass, Murphy, and two others rode into town, because the thieves had moved their plans up a day. Instead of a company of Texas Rangers spotting the outlaws, that fell to Sheriff Hoke Grimes and a deputy, Morris Moore. They approached the gang members as they tied up their horses next to the bank. A word was barely spoken before Bass, Seaborn Barnes, and Frank Jackson jerked out their guns and started shooting. Filled with lead, Grimes died immediately. Moore was hit twice in the chest but managed to get off one shot, hitting Bass in the hand.

  Suddenly called into action, from every corner Rangers converged. The outlaws took off on foot, with a petrified Murphy separating himself to hide in a doorway. During the running gun battle, one of the lawmen giving chase was Dick Ware. The Ranger had been in the barbershop, and after hearing gunshots he had emerged from it with shaving cream on his face and a striped bib around his neck. But he had a six-shooter in each hand, and when he found Barnes mounting a horse, Ware pulled the triggers. Barnes was struck in the head and killed. When he saw Sam Bass on a horse, Ware fired again. A bullet got Bass in the back, and another got him in the arm. Jackson, though wounded in the shoulder, began firing at Ware and the Rangers hurrying up behind him, then grabbed the reins of Bass’s horse, and they rode away, out of Round Rock.

  When the pain and loss of blood became too much to bear, Bass begged Jackson to stop. He got off the horse and slumped down against a tree. He urged Jackson to go on without him. After some resistance, Jackson did and was never heard from again. Sam Bass was soon found by Texas Rangers, who carted him back to Round Rock, where he died on July 21, his twenty-seventh birthday.

  James Murphy, though relatively rich thanks to the generous reward, was not viewed as a hero, rather he was vilified as a traitor, with even the Texas Rangers calling him “Judas.” He became a Round Rock recluse, expecting that friends of Bass would avenge his death. He endured a lonely, paranoid existence until the following June, when he poisoned himself.

  There had been a different outcome for Bat when he encountered train robbers, thanks to Wyatt Earp and the new acquaintance he made, Doc Holliday.

  In October 1877, a gang of thieves had robbed a Santa Fe Railroad construction camp. The gang was led by Dirty Dave Rudabaugh, a twenty-three-year-old Illinois native. As a youngster, his family had moved to Kansas and to Colorado, and then he had struck out on his own for Texas, turning to a life of crime while still a teenager. He earned the nickname naturally, by bathing infrequently and wearing clothes that even by frontier standards were quite filthy.

  The October robbery had taken place in Kansas, and it was believed the thieves had escaped into Texas, so a U.S. deputy marshal was required to do the chasing. That job was given to Wyatt. This would be lonely, dangerous, and exhausting work. Certainly, Wyatt could have made more money at the gaming tables. It can only be conjectured that the challenge appealed to him. If there wasn’t enough action in Dodge City to make lawing worthwhile there, Wyatt would bring it with him on the road.

  Day after day, for four hundred miles, he tracked Dirty Dave and his gang through Kansas and the Panhandle and deeper into Texas. Along the way he was buffeted by the late-autumn winds, his face swept by sand and grit, traveling from one watering hole to the next, being told tales of the gang having passed through, some of them being true.

  When Wyatt arrived in Fort Griffin, he came to a different sort of watering hole, the Bee Hive Saloon. A honeysuckle-bordered sign out front offered, WITHIN THIS HIVE WE’RE ALL ALIVE, GOOD WHISKEY MAKES US FUNNY, SO IF YOU’RE DRY COME UP AND TRY, THE FLAVOR OF OUR HONEY. Wyatt would have enjoyed the faro games inside more than the whiskey, but the reason he entered the saloon was that he knew it was owned by John Shanssey, whom he had met before during a detour to Wyoming.

  Shanssey revealed that Rudabaugh had been in his establishment several days earlier but was gone, destination unknown. He suggested that Wyatt ask the man sitting by himself at the table in the back corner, because the man had somehow managed to hold his breath long enough to play a few hands of cards with Dirty Dave.

  Doc Holliday invited Wyatt Earp to sit down. When Wyatt declined, Doc poured a shot of whiskey just for himself. Holliday, though only twenty-six years old, had a haggard face and a chronic cough. He dressed well, and his face showed some spark thanks to his deep-set blue eyes and neatly trimmed mustache.

  Sitting at the table idly dealing cards, Doc couldn’t say for sure where Dirty Dave Rudabaugh and his fellow outlaws were, but he suspected from a few comments made that they had doubled back to Kansas. Word had traveled faster than Wyatt’s horse that the former Dodge City lawman was trailing the gang into Texas, and doing what was not expected might enhance their escape.

  This made sense enough to Wyatt that he headed over to the telegraph office and sent a message to the sheriff of Ford County that the gang of thieves might be back in the area. Upon receiving the telegram, Bat Masterson put together a posse.

  It was his responsibility now because Bat had become the top lawman in southwest Kansas.

  SIXTEEN

  Bat Masterson was Dodge’s favorite, a calm, well-dressed, blue-eyed man, an artist with a Colt forty-five and a veteran buffalo hunter.

  —DEE BROWN, Trail Driving Days

  The previous November, soon after Wyatt left Dodge City, there was an election for a new sheriff. Charlie Bassett could not run for reelection as the sheriff of Ford County because the Kansas Constitution allowed for only two consecutive terms. One would think county voters would turn to his undersheriff to take his place, and indeed Bat wanted the job. But if he ran, he would have stiff competition from a familiar face in Dodge City: Larry Deger, the man Ed Masterson had replaced as marshal.

  “At the earnest request of many citizens of Ford county, I have consented to run for the office of sheriff,” Bat wrote in a letter published in the Dodge City Times, announcing his candidacy. “While earnestly soliciting the sufferages of the people, I have no pledges to make, as pledges are usually considered, before election, to be mere clap-trap.”

  Several Dodge City officials and businessmen endorsed him, as did the newspaper’s editors. They opined that Bat “is well known as a young man of nerve and coolness in cases of danger”—he was still three weeks from his twenty-fourth birthday—and that he “knows just how to gather in the sinners, and if elected will never shrink from danger.”

  Deger was not nearly as eloquent, and perhaps that made a razor-sharp difference, because after short but vigorous campaigns conducted by both men, Bat won by only three votes. He was set to be sworn in as sheriff on January 14, 1878, and his territory would include not just Ford County but all the unincorporated territory between it and the Colorado line. Reporting on the election outcome, the Dodge City Times noted that “Bat Masterson is said to be cool, decisive, and a bad man with a pistol.”

  His first decision had been to fill out his staff. He appointed Charlie Bassett as undersheriff, meaning that he and Bat had simply switched offices. At various times when he needed them, Bat deputized his brother Jim, Bill Tilghm
an, John Joshua Webb, “Prairie Dog” Dave Morrow (he had acquired the nickname thanks to his pointy ears), and Wyatt, after he returned to Dodge City. The two top lawmen in Dodge City and Ford County were now Ed Masterson and Bat Masterson.

  When Ed had become the marshal, Robert Wright had referred to his bravery. It is not clear how he had previously demonstrated the lack of a yellow streak, but he made Wright’s comment prescient in an incident in November, right around the time that Bat was being elected sheriff. But in doing so, the Mastersons almost lost a lawman brother.

  An argument had erupted at the Lone Star Dance Hall that Monday afternoon. Having drinks there was Bob Shaw, who accused another imbiber, Texas Dick Moore, of stealing forty dollars from him. As the insults and threats escalated, one of the employees was dispatched to go find a peace officer. Marshal Ed Masterson was the first to arrive at his brother’s saloon.

  Entering the Lone Star, he saw Shaw bleeding from a head wound, holding a pistol on Moore, and looking furious enough to fire. A hotheaded lawman might have tried to fire first, but Ed was no hothead, and the law-enforcement culture had changed since the days of Bully Brooks. Ed told Shaw to put the gun away. Even better, Ed suggested as he stepped toward the bar, would be for Shaw to hand the six-shooter over. Shaw did not agree. When he turned his attention back to the trembling Texas Dick, Ed whipped out his gun and, by applying it to the top of Shaw’s head, buffaloed him.

  Though this was seemingly the second blow to his head, Shaw remained upright. He turned toward Ed and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet entered his side, broke one of his ribs, bounced off it, and emerged from the back of his right shoulder. Ed felt his gun hand going dead. His legs buckled, and as he fell, he pushed his pistol into his left hand and opened fire. He struck Shaw in the left arm and leg, and while Ed was at it, he shot Texas Dick in the groin. One citizen observed that “for a time, it looked as though the undertaker and coroner would have something to do.”