Dodge City

by Clavin, Tom

  He moved on to Otero County, which the inexorable Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe had by then reached. He once again opened a dental practice (it is doubtful that he was dragging the same chair from Texas around with him), and he befriended two men, Hurricane Bill Martin and T. O. Washington. One was the town marshal, the other was a physician. With the protection of the former and the care of the latter, Doc planned to resume his gambling ways.

  But unlike with old friends Wyatt and Bat, he had not chosen his new friends well. The Otero administrators claimed that Hurricane Bill was too often drunk and always incompetent, and they fired him. The not-very-good doctor got into an altercation with a man and carved him up with a knife. Washington fled the murder charge to a nearby railroad town, Raton. His attempt to establish a medical practice was very short-lived because he tried to fondle a female patient, her fiancé alerted the local law, Washington was tossed in jail, and even before he could be formally charged, the physician was hauled out of his cell and hung from a water tower.

  No longer finding Otero to his liking, Doc again headed south, back to Las Vegas. He opened a saloon with Jordan Webb, a younger brother of John Joshua Webb. A thirsty customer was Mike Gordon, a former army scout whose appearance was distinctive because in a fight his adversary had bitten his nose off.

  Gordon had been on a bender for several days when on the night of July 19, 1879, he was in Doc’s saloon and threatened to kill a prostitute who would not accompany him to another saloon. He then stepped out into the street, took out his gun, and fired. A Mexican standing near the entrance to the saloon was wounded slightly. Gordon fired off a few more shots. Aggravated, Doc appeared and fired back. The disfigured former scout staggered away. Later that night, he was found inside a tent, a bullet in his chest. Gordon was brought to the prostitute’s room at Doc’s saloon, where early the next morning he died. The coroner, Hoodoo Brown, who would later be a prominent personality in Dodge City, did not accuse Doc, and no witnesses testified about the incident.

  Doc’s next adventure was much less violent but, in hindsight, of greater interest. He had to have been one of the few gamblers to play cards with Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Both arrived, separately, the last week of July and visited Doc’s saloon. Possibly in the company of the dentist, they visited the Montezuma Hot Springs and ate dinner together at the Las Vegas Hotel, which had just opened there. The Kid had visited Las Vegas before, and the owner of the hot springs, Winfield Scott Moore, had known Frank James and his brother since their childhood days in Missouri. Because no one wrote about the intersection of Billy the Kid, the James Brothers, and Doc Holliday, one has to imagine their conversations and that they apparently got on well enough that their pistols stayed in their holsters.

  Sometime during his travels Doc and Kate Elder were reunited. It may have been simply the established scenario that when Doc was healthy and going good, he did not need her around, and when there was trouble, Kate showed up. They considered returning to Dodge City, where Wyatt was. Doc found out, however, that was not true when one afternoon in September 1879, while Doc was crossing the downtown plaza in Las Vegas, he found Wyatt standing there.

  TWENTY-SIX

  What made Dodge City so famous was that it was the last of the towns of the last big frontier of the United States. When this was settled, the frontier was gone, it was the passing of the frontier with the passing of the buffalo, and the Indian question was settled forever.

  —ROBERT WRIGHT

  During the summer of 1879 in Dodge City the surrounding prairie was exceptionally dry. It put people on edge, especially the cowboys up from Texas. They, of course, were accustomed to hot, dry, dusty conditions, but Dodge City, even with the heat of a typical prairie summer, was the end of the trail and was not supposed to be as brutal. There was still an abundance of liquor to soothe dry throats, but what had become a drought reduced the number of cattle drives to the city—there were more lush grazing areas elsewhere, including to the north in Nebraska—cutting into the drovers’ pay and good times. This in turn cut into the peace officers’ pay, because they made extra money per arrest, and fewer cowboys hurrahing the town meant fewer occupants of the calaboose.

  For Wyatt, it was the slowest summer since he had come to Dodge City in 1876. He almost made up for it all in one day when, finally, in early September, there was a melee big enough to rival previous brawls. A number of proper citizens had organized a festival to put the best face on a desultory summer, and the festivities irritated some already surly cowboys. Words were exchanged, friction escalated, and suddenly fists were flying.

  By now, Wyatt probably welcomed the action. When the assistant marshal arrived on the scene he got right into the thick of things, buffaloing the more extreme combatants and displaying his talent for fisticuffs. In its report on the wild scramble in the streets, the Ford County Globe commented that the “finest work and neatest polishes were executed by Mr. Wyatt Earp.”

  As Wyatt’s actions demonstrate, it was more than the weather keeping a lid on lawlessness. Effective policing was having a big impact, aided by the reputations of the area’s leading lawmen. Those reputations were not anything like what they would be after decades of dime-store novels, but they at least made troublemakers hesitate to go too far and risk being the victims of buffaloing or a bullet.

  People had already begun to pass the word that Wyatt Earp was a tough, sober, and serious lawman, and then the story about the Clay Allison confrontation made the rounds. When newspapers associated him with sidewalks that streamed with blood, that made an impression, even though the only man Wyatt had killed to date—and that was iffy—was George Hoy.

  Bat held the higher position of being a county sheriff, and he, too, was finding his reputation, some of it true, bandied about. In September 1879, he was still two months shy of his twenty-sixth birthday, yet he was one of the most feared lawmen on the western prairie. One writer would report that in “rough” Dodge City there was “a string of slaughters headed by ‘Bat’ Masterson, whose hands were red with the blood of no less than a score of his fellow-men.” However, “a good majority of these men deserved killing.” Another writer claimed that when “the main street echoed with the roaring of firearms … Bat Masterson subdued the rebels” and when “killing was done he did his full share.”

  Most of what was written and said about Bat outside of Dodge City was hogwash, but having a reputation as a tough gunslinger could be a good card to play. Nat Love found that out during one of his Dodge City adventures.

  Born in 1854 in Tennessee, Love learned to read and write even though his family had been slaves. But he didn’t take much advantage of his literacy until decades later when he wrote an autobiography. As a teenager after the Civil War, he wanted to go west and become a cowboy, so he did, working his way to the Dodge City area, where he was given a job at a nearby ranch. Depending on the season and the cattle drives, Love—given the nickname “Red River Dick” by other cowhands—split his time between Dodge City and the Texas Panhandle. A detour to South Dakota, where he won several rodeo contests, earned him the new nickname of “Deadwood Dick.”

  The color of his skin did not seem to have an impact on Nat Love’s ability to make a living and ride with the other cowboys. He enjoyed his times in Dodge City with the rest of them, and he was befriended by Bat Masterson, who admired Deadwood Dick’s riding and roping abilities, friendly disposition, and aversion to getting into trouble. But the trail rider admitted to imbibing “more of the bad whiskey of Dodge than anyone,” and one day Deadwood Dick did find trouble.

  He had recently been slightly wounded in a run-in with a rogue Indian band on his way up from the Panhandle, and his idea of revenge almost doomed him. Dick and several cowhands were riding past Fort Dodge—after a stop in the city to wet their whistles—when Love determined that when he returned to Texas he wanted to teach those Indians a lesson. What better way than to blast the lot of them with a cannon? Dick rode up to one side of the fort and displayed
his roping skills by lassoing one. The dilemma Dick faced was that the cannon was much heavier than he’d anticipated. While he was pondering this, an officer alerted to the odd activity just outside the walls led troopers out to the drunken cowboys, and a few minutes later Deadwood Dick was in the guardhouse.

  The prisoner was informed that he faced federal charges of attempted theft of government property, and he was to be transported to the nearest U.S. district court for arraignment. Dick was sobering up fast and begged the officer to contact his friend Bat Masterson. In case the prisoner was telling the truth, and not wanting to irritate the Ford County sheriff, a messenger was sent. The response was, “Send the prisoner to me, I’ll take care of it.” Soon, Dick was back on his horse and being escorted to Dodge City.

  As Nat Love would recall, “Bat asked me what I wanted with a cannon and what I intended to do with it. I told him I wanted to take it back to Texas with me to fight the Indians with; then they all laughed. Then Bat told them I was all right, the only trouble being that I had too much bad whiskey under my shirt.”

  Bat told the soldiers that Deadwood Dick was under his protection now and to go on back to the fort. They did. The former prisoner did have to pay a “fine,” though, of buying drinks for all at the nearest saloon.

  Love worked as a cowhand for many years, until his bones became a bit too brittle and the jobs too few. He spent the rest of his life as a porter on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad and died in 1921 at the age of sixty-seven in Los Angeles.

  Dodge City was growing. It was reported in 1879 that there were seven hundred residents, fourteen saloons, two dance halls, and four dozen prostitutes. Yet a reporter for The Atchison Champion who visited the city focused on other aspects in his article: “Another evidence of the permanence of Dodge City is the fact that many elegant residences and large, commodious business houses are in the course of construction at the present time. Looking through many of the business homes, and counting three and six in each, all busy, if indicative of good times, certainly Dodge cannot complain. ‘Dull times’ is scarce heard in Dodge; they are happy, good-natured and prosperous.”

  There was certainly no written code among the marshals and sheriffs of various jurisdictions on the frontier on how to cooperate as law enforcers. Some peace officers were corrupt or gunslingers protected by badges, but many were advocates or at least custodians of the justice systems taking hold throughout the West. This probably explains why Bat went on another rescue mission.

  This time it was to help out the marshal of Hay City. A gathering of troopers from the 7th Cavalry—George Armstrong Custer’s old outfit—at a saloon was getting out of hand, and the bartender sent a messenger to go fetch the marshal. His appearance was resented by the Bluebellies, and the situation escalated to the point at which guns came out and shots were fired. The marshal was outnumbered, but he was apparently not outgunned, because when the smoke cleared the troopers were clearing out, leaving two dead comrades behind.

  That the marshal had just been doing his job and forced into a violent confrontation did not dim the anger of General Philip Sheridan, the commander of the army in that district. He had two dead soldiers, and the man who killed them was to be punished, preferably by being hung at the nearest fort. Sheridan ordered that the marshal be found immediately.

  The marshal sent a telegram to Bat, telling him where he was and to please come find him before the army did. When Bat arrived in Hays City, he rented a wagon and casually steered it out of town to where the marshal was hiding out. Bat had brought a large blanket, and he wrapped the marshal in it. Most likely, the marshal never envisioned leaving Hays City this way, alive.

  They got as far as Junction City before the wagon was stopped by roaming members of the 7th Cavalry, who asked what the cargo was. Bat told them his brother had just died, and he was about to bury him. When asked what his brother died of, Bat replied, “Smallpox.” The troopers set records riding away. For several weeks, the marshal enjoyed the hospitality of Dodge City until Bat brokered a truce between him and General Sheridan.

  * * *

  The Atchison Champion reporter had written, “‘Dull times’ is scarce heard” in the ever-more-civilized city, but he apparently had not spoken to Wyatt. The restless Earp blood still ran in him, and even though his stays in Dodge City had not been continuous, he had never called anyplace else home for as long in his adult life. The frontier had moved farther west, and Wyatt was beginning to itch to move with it. Later in life he recalled to an interviewer that by 1879 Dodge City “was beginning to lose much of the snap which had given it charm to men of restless blood.”

  Combine this with what Virgil had been writing him about, and there was a whole lot to consider. By that September of 1879, Wyatt had made up his mind. As he put it, “I was tired of the trials of a peace officer’s life and wanted no more of it.” That month, he resigned his position in Dodge City.

  He bid farewell to Bat, hoping they would meet up again soon, and to Jim Masterson, Bill Tilghman, Charlie Bassett, and the other local lawmen. His eventual destination was to reunite with Virgil in Arizona. Mattie would accompany him every step of the way, but for her they were increasingly stumbling steps.

  Perhaps believing it was a healthy switch, or simply no longer caring, Mattie had replaced some of her intake of whiskey with more drops of laudanum. How she obtained the opiate-based painkiller is unknown, but she would often complain of headaches and no doctor was going to refuse the increasing demands of Wyatt Earp’s wife. She continued to function well enough in public, but Wyatt, who disliked intoxication in himself and others (with the notable exception of Doc Holliday), spent as little time with her as possible. When not on patrol or manning the marshal’s office, he could be found in a saloon, drinking coffee or allowing himself an occasional small beer.

  He had grown tired of this routine. It was time to pull up stakes and go. According to Casey Tefertiller, “The Wyatt Earp who left Kansas had matured markedly from the boy who found himself in trouble in Indian Territory. He had become a most self-assured man who stoutly believed in right and wrong—and in his ability to determine which was which. He loved to be amused, yet almost never laughed; his dour countenance covered an air of supreme confidence in his ability to deal with just about any problem.”

  Wyatt had probably heard reports that Doc Holliday had spent the summer in Las Vegas, and he had never been there himself, so that was how it happened that on that hot late-summer afternoon in New Mexico Wyatt, allowing himself a rare smile, was standing before his friend. He brought Doc to the outskirts of town where the Earp party was camped. There was a lot of catching up to do. Wyatt and Mattie were not traveling alone. James and Bessie Earp had also thought it was high time for another family reunion.

  Wyatt may have believed that at least for the near future he was done with lawing. The West offered opportunity, as it had when he was younger, for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit. He was not interested in simply making a living; he wanted to become wealthy. Surely a man with his experience and fortitude would make progress toward that goal.

  Apparently not seeing it as the troubled town that Doc did, the Earps remained in Las Vegas for almost a month. Wyatt may have lingered there because he was on the job. A newspaper account hinted that he was working for Wells Fargo and might be investigating the recent robberies of the stagecoaches. When in October there was another robbery, this time of a train, outside Las Vegas, a moonlighting Charlie Bassett showed up leading a posse hired by the Adams Express Company. Whatever investigating Wyatt was doing he turned over to Bassett, and he and Mattie and the others in his party pulled up stakes and headed for Arizona.

  When they stopped in Tucson, Wyatt picked up some extra money by riding shotgun on stagecoaches. This lasted until he was approached by Charlie Shibell, the sheriff of Pima County, who asked Wyatt to be his deputy. He agreed, further delaying the reunion with Virgil.

  Before he had left Dodge City, Wyatt had had a last get-toge
ther with Bat. Maybe by now Sheriff Masterson had grown equally weary of being a peace officer. Neither one of them was getting any younger, and opportunities to make good money might be passing them by. Well, in Bat’s case, he would soon turn only twenty-six to Wyatt’s thirty-one, but the point was that with more people and activity in the West, an enterprising man could be confined by wearing a badge and surviving on a lawman’s modest salary and maybe catching a bullet while he was at it. Bat was welcome to come along to Arizona with the Earps.

  However, he was not ready for that yet. Kansas was still home. He felt like his job was unfinished. When Wyatt rode off into the sunset, Bat had waved farewell.

  If Bat’s plan was to remain in Dodge City for as long as he wore a badge, the next step was to keep the badge by getting reelected in November 1879. As autumn began, it looked likely that his opponent would be George Hinkle. The bartender in George Hoover’s saloon was a popular presence in Dodge City. Though eight years older than Bat, he did not have nearly the same amount of law-enforcement experience, but he had worked a variety of jobs that had toughened him up, including as an army scout, prizefighter, railroad worker, and teamster.

  In mid-October, the Independent Party in Ford County officially—and unanimously—nominated Bat to run for reelection. This action was greeted enthusiastically by the Dodge City Times, which contended that he was “acknowledged to be the best Sheriff in Kansas. He is the most successful officer in the State. He is immensely popular and generally well-liked. Horse thieves have a terror for the name of Masterson.”

  Hinkle was nominated by the People’s Ticket, and the campaign swung into high gear. Bat reasonably relied on his solid reputation and experience and that he knew many of the voters. When opponents spread rumors that he was careless with county taxpayers’ money and had even gambled with it in the local saloons, Bat ignored them, confident no one would believe such ridiculous lies. This was not a sound strategy. Citizens began to wonder about Bat’s silence on the matter. There was also renewed criticism about his association with less-savory citizens, such as Ben and Billy Thompson and Doc Holliday. The sheriff assumed that if there was any defending to do, his associates and the Dodge City press would do it. They didn’t.