by Clavin, Tom
Bell’s first stationary business was a livery stable, and it would become the biggest in Dodge City. Other endeavors included operating a furniture store and mortuary business (he made sure every casket was adorned with a bouquet of flowers), and he constructed the first women’s restroom on the Santa Fe Trail. The industrious and farsighted Bell would go on to own the first car dealership in southwest Kansas, and as proprietor of an ambulance service he introduced the first motorized ambulance in Dodge City. And in case that transportation had not always gone swiftly enough, Bell also introduced the first motorized hearse. When he died, in 1947 at ninety-four, he was operating a pet shop. (During World War II, an Army Air Corps plane featuring his handprint was named for Ham Bell.)
Ida Rath, daughter-in-law of the businessman Charles Rath, once reminisced about Bell that he “had the bluest of blue eyes and brown hair, was spare of build but broad shouldered. He had a decided Roman nose and a very determined chin.” His distinctive looks had to help him during forays into politics, which included two terms as mayor of Dodge City and two terms as a Ford County commissioner.
But it was as a lawman that many people came to know Ham Bell, considering he spent thirty-six years at it. In Great Bend he had served as a deputy. There was a lengthy break while he established himself in Dodge City, and in 1880 he would be appointed deputy U.S. marshal there, a position he would hold for twelve years. (More than a few Dodge City residents insist it was Bell, not Wyatt Earp, who was the model for Matt Dillon on the popular TV show Gunsmoke.) He also would be the sheriff of Ford County, first elected in 1888 and continuing to be reelected despite being a Democrat in a heavily Republican county. Bell left the office in 1910 to become the head of Dodge City’s police department. At various other times he pitched in as deputy marshal and deputy sheriff. During the decades as a police officer he never shot a man, because he was so quick on the draw that the other man froze before he could clear leather. Bell once explained, “If I’d never drawn a gun, I wouldn’t have lived a week.”
About the cancan: Another of Ham Bell’s ventures was a dance hall on Front Street. He had read about the dance that was the rage in Europe and had learned that a troupe performing it was touring the western half of the United States. He thought the citizens of and visitors to Dodge City were ready for such exotic entertainment, so he booked the dance company. The first performance of the lovely high-kicking ladies was on July 4, 1878. Suddenly, the frontier did not seem as far from the sophisticated East Coast and Chicago.
Another sign that Dodge City was more on the map to the folks back east is that well-known entertainers began to include it on their tours. There would be enough of an audience to make it worth the effort, and the presumption—or at least the hope—was that by the summer of 1878 the entertainers would be safe there, that the frontier represented by Dodge City was no longer Wild West enough to put their lives in jeopardy.
The most famous entertainer yet arrived in July, when Eddie Foy, Sr., first set foot on the dry streets that the wind turned into tiny tornadoes of dust. He found it was true that there were plenty of people willing to buy tickets to see him perform. He found it was false that he would be completely safe.
The future father of the Seven Little Foys (who would be portrayed by Bob Hope in the 1955 film with that title) had been born Edwin Fitzgerald in 1856 to Irish immigrants in New York City. He was only six when his father died in an insane asylum, and his mother took her four children to Chicago, where she found work that years later included caring for the mentally ill Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s widow. Right away, to help put food on the table, Eddie began singing and dancing in Chicago saloons and on street corners. At fifteen, he began touring with various stage partners, one of whom was Edwin Booth, brother of the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
In 1878, beginning when the weather allowed, the twenty-two-year-old Foy and performing partner Jim Thompson offered song-and-dance shows in the larger cow towns and mining camps on the western frontier, and that brought them to Dodge City. Perhaps Foy had not been sufficiently reassured about the more effective law enforcement, because when he looked out the window as the train entered the station and saw a large pile of buffalo bones nearby, he thought that men were being killed in the city faster than proper graves could be dug. He had to think this was not a promising place to be for the next few weeks.
Once off the train, Eddie Foy was an odd duck to both Dodge City citizens and cowboys alike. There was little difference between his on- and offstage behavior and appearance—cracking jokes, mugging, a sudden dance step, loud clothes. His partner, Thompson, figured out right away that not being noticed when out and about was best, but Foy was a relentless performer.
And, fortunately, he was quick-witted. In his autobiography, Clowning Through Life, Foy recounted that his second day in Dodge City was almost his last—or at least for a few moments it looked that way. Foy was strolling along the Front Street sidewalk, conspicuous in a colorful outfit. Suddenly, a group of rough-looking men cornered him, tied his hands behind him, and dragged him across the street. They pushed the petrified performer up onto a horse, which happened to be under a tree, and he noticed that from one of the thick branches a rope dangled. Once that rope was around his neck, Foy was asked, “Any last words?”
Where was the marshal? Anyone with a badge? Foy found one standing just a few feet away. It turned out to be Sheriff Bat Masterson, who was grinning. Then it dawned on the newcomer, who called out, “Anything I have to say can better be said at the Long Branch Saloon.” Bat nodded his approval, the group of men hurrahed, and a relieved Foy bought everyone a round. There would be a few other times that chuckling citizens roped and tied him to a railing or post until Wyatt or Bat helped him get free. (In his autobiography, Foy described Bat as a “trim, good-looking young man with a pleasant face and carefully barbered mustache,” who wore a hat “with a rakish tilt and [who had] two big silver-mounted, ivory-handled pistols.”) The entertainer treated such actions as being all in good fun.
Foy was fascinated by Dodge City, and his eyes soaked in as much as they could. He noted that the rear ends of the buildings on the south side of Front Street “were not far from the bank of the Arkansas River—a shallow, quiet stream which went on a tear once in a while and did some damage. Spanning the river was a ramshackle wooden bridge. That way the cattle men crossed when they rode back toward Texas. When they were coming in with their herds and the river was low, they rode with them right through the stream.”
As he strolled down Front Street, Foy observed that every few yards there “was a whiskey barrel which it was the duty of the police force to keep filled with water for fire protection. Many a boozer put them to similar use by sticking his head into one here and there and cooling his own super-heated interior. Most of the stores had wooden awnings or porches extending across the sidewalk. Between the posts at their outer edge was a seat for loafers, and just outside that was usually a horse trough. Of course, there were plenty of hitching posts, usually with horses stamping or dozing beside them.”
If his demeanor was part of a strategy to win over his new hosts, it worked. Foy and Thompson were booked to play the Theatre Comique and right away their combination of dancing, jokes, impressions, poems, and songs, especially Foy’s signature “Kalamazoo in Michigan,” was a smash. The packed house included many cowboys, seeing a show they could not even have imagined during lonely nights on the trail, and they laughed and clapped for a man who was a pure entertainer onstage and showed gumption when off.
Shows could last until well after midnight. The Theatre Comique had a first floor filled with chairs and above it a mezzanine of private boxes, where those who could afford it looked down through the haze of cigar smoke at the stage while eating and drinking. A hallway led to the gaming room, which was full of men drinking and smoking at the tables, and from time to time the audience watching the show could hear the sounds of poker chips, dice, and shouts of joy as well as argument
s coming from the room. After a show was over, chairs on the first floor would be pushed aside to clear enough space for dancing, with a local fiddler and other musicians playing for tips. Some nights, the last note wasn’t played until the pink light of impending dawn layered the edge of the eastern prairie.
Though the effervescent Foy won over the theater audiences in Dodge City and the citizens in general, every so often he was reminded that this was a frontier cow town and anything could happen—especially when someone like Ben Thompson was involved. Because of his friendship with Bat Masterson, while in Dodge City Thompson was on his best behavior, content to gamble and not wanting a confrontation with the county sheriff or his fellow lawmen. But one night proper decorum failed him, and Foy almost paid the penalty.
Who knew where the drunk Thompson was heading when he left the gaming room, but he wound up backstage at the Comique during a background-scenery change between acts. It suddenly seemed like a good idea to shoot out one of the lights. The problem was that where Foy stood, his head was between it and Ben’s six-shooter. Swaying and trying to sight his gun, Thompson told the actor to get out of the way. Foy, “suddenly seized with a sudden foolish obstinacy,” refused.
Thompson told him again. When Foy still didn’t move, he added, “If you want it through yer head, too, all right.”
Thompson pointed his pistol at the comedian, who by then was so filled with fear that he couldn’t have moved even if he’d wanted to. Would the drunken gambler have pulled the trigger? We’ll never know, because it was Bat Masterson to the rescue. He suddenly burst in backstage, sized up the situation, and pushed the pistol up so it pointed at the ceiling. If it had been any other man, even a lawman, who had interfered in his fun, Thompson might have reacted angrily. But it was his friend Bat, who by now had a good hold of Thompson and was leading him stage left and eventually out of the theater.
“When they had gone, I found my hands shaking so hard that I couldn’t put on my makeup,” Foy recalled. “I was limp for the rest of the evening.” (In a fun and authentic bit of casting, in the 1939 film Frontier Marshal, with Randolph Scott playing Wyatt Earp and Cesar Romero as Doc Holliday, Foy is transported to Tombstone and is played by his son Eddie Jr.)
Ultimately, where did those Seven Little Foys come from? A year after his first appearance in Dodge City, Foy married another entertainer, Rose Howland. Sadly, in 1882 she died while giving birth, as did the baby. Two years later, he met Lola Sefton in San Francisco, and they were together for a decade, until her death in 1894. Two years later, and while becoming a star on Broadway and in other major cities, Foy married a dancer, Madeline Morando. Until her death in 1918, they produced eleven children, and the seven who survived childhood formed the vaudeville act with their father. Foy, ever the relentless song-and-dance man, died in 1928 at seventy-one while performing in Kansas City. The last of the Seven Little Foys was Irving, who died at ninety-four in 2003.
TWENTY-ONE
There is none so brave as he who stands in front of what belongs to him.
—LOREN D. ESTLEMAN, “Stuart Lake: Frontier Mythmaker”
Dodge City took a step back in its progress when another peace officer was killed that same year. Harry T. McCarty would not go down in the annals of the American frontier as a legendary lawman, but his death from gunplay was a reminder that despite the efforts of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the others sworn to uphold law and order, there was still plenty of wild left in the West.
Ben Simpson was the U.S. marshal for the district that included Dodge City, and in April he had arranged the appointment of McCarty to the post of deputy U.S. marshal. As a surveyor, McCarty knew the surrounding area well, and like Ed Masterson had been, he was well liked. And as with Ed, this did not do him any favors.
Given that July 13 was in the middle of summer and thus the peak of the cattle-drive season, the Long Branch Saloon was still open at four in the morning, serving the last few cowboys who hadn’t yet reached their saturation point. One of them was Thomas O’Haran, who also answered to the name Thomas Roach or even Limping Tom. He was a cook for an outfit that had just brought a herd up from Texas. He was known for unpredictable behavior, and he tended to be a tad more unhinged when he had a lot to drink—like on that night.
McCarty, assigned by Simpson to help local law enforcement at its busiest time, had been making the rounds, and he stopped in at the Long Branch to check in with the regular late-night barkeep, Adam Jackson. Suddenly, O’Haran got up from a table and lurched toward the bar. Engaged in conversation, McCarty had his back to him and wasn’t aware of the cowboy’s approach until he felt his six-shooter leave its holster.
McCarty turned to find O’Haran weaving from side to side with one arm in the air waving the pistol. Maybe he was about to hand it back when he lowered his arm, but he jerked the trigger and the gun went off. Hit, the federal peace officer fell to the floor. Someone in the saloon fired at O’Haran, striking him in the head, though not a fatal blow. “I am shot!” he cried out, and fell beside the other man.
McCarty, leaking blood, was brought to an adjacent room. The bullet had struck him in the right groin and come out the other side of him, later to be found in the floor. Worse, though, was that during its passage it had severed the femoral artery. A doctor was dragged out of bed, but he could not prevent McCarty from bleeding to death.
The top priority later that morning for Marshal Charlie Bassett and his assistant, Wyatt, and Sheriff Masterson and his deputy, Bill Tilghman, was to prevent a lynching. O’Haran, with a powerful headache (though the bullet had only creased his skull), was in the city jail. As the morning went on, crowds continued to form outside of it, with a few angry citizens brandishing lengths of rope. McCarty had been murdered, and for that crowd, the wheels of justice would grind too slowly. But with the lawmen standing firm with shotguns resting on their crooked arms, no one made a move toward the jail. Onlookers came and went, a few looking more threatening than others, coughing on the dust kicked up by passing wagons on what was turning out to be another blistering hot summer day on the prairie.
They were further dissuaded from mob violence when Doc Holliday arrived and was deputized. Wyatt, perhaps, had sent him a message that got him out of bed, because otherwise Doc’s morning was everyone else’s afternoon. He had no desire to wear a badge, and he certainly had no interest in being that respectable, but he wouldn’t refuse a request from Wyatt to help in a tight spot. And maybe not from Bat, either. Biographer Gary L. Roberts writes that as the year went on, Doc “deepened his sense of belonging with the gambling and saloon crowd.… Bat Masterson and their associates accepted him in a way he had never known in Dallas, Fort Griffin, Denver, or any of the other places he had traveled. He had found a congenial place, and he apparently had decided to stay.”
That same day a coroner’s inquest was held, and before a judge O’Haran was bound over for trial on the charge of first-degree murder. Ford County District Court eventually held the trial. O’Haran managed to save his life by pleading guilty to manslaughter and was taken east to serve twelve years in the Kansas State Penitentiary.
That Bat became an expert practitioner of buffaloing implies that he and Wyatt were quick to crack skulls, and that constituted most of their peacekeeping. But both were bright men, more intelligent than most, certainly those who ran afoul of the law. Sometimes, effective policing was simply being smarter. Bat’s reputation for cleverness expanded when the story made the rounds of how he captured an escaped prisoner without leaving Dodge City.
A man named Davis had been in jail in Fort Lyon, almost two hundred miles to the west in Colorado. He escaped and managed to elude the local authorities. Thinking that Davis was on an eastbound train, they telegraphed marshals and sheriffs along the route, one of whom was Bat. There was no description of what Davis looked like, so it was rather discouraging to read that the fugitive was carrying weapons and was prepared to use them if cornered.
When the next eastbound train steame
d into Dodge City, Bat was waiting at the station. He climbed aboard at the rear of the train so that he could walk through the cars glancing at the passengers, all of whom faced away from him. By this time Bat had developed a pretty good lawman’s instinct; when he observed a man who appeared a tad jittery, Bat thought it worthwhile to pull his coat closed over his badge and stop by the man’s seat. With a grin and a twinkle in his blue eyes, he greeted the man: “Hello, Davis. How are you?”
Though he was a crook of some kind, at that moment Davis was more concerned about being polite and that his memory was not adequate enough to recall what must be an old acquaintance. He grinned back, and when Bat offered his hand, he shook it. Next thing Davis knew, he was on his feet and his wrists sported a pair of handcuffs. The next day, Bat welcomed a deputy from Fort Lyon, who escorted the dumbfounded Davis back to jail.
As bright a man as Bat was, the fact was that he had been forced to kill a man in the line of duty. In July 1878, it was Wyatt’s turn.
George Hoy was a familiar face in town. He was an experienced drover, and when a cattle drive from Texas was done, he was as enthusiastic as anyone in enjoying Dodge City’s pleasures. On this particular night, July 26, with the first glimpse of “rosy-fingered dawn,” as Homer described it, still hours away, Hoy and his pals were a tad too enthusiastic. They left a saloon, got on their horses, guns raised in the air, and, reeling around, they began firing. The few people left on the street dove for cover, and above the street, windows shattered and occupants screamed.