Dodge City

by Clavin, Tom

  But this new occupation did not go smoothly. Even with Curly Bill not accompanying them in Tombstone, the cowboys were an increasing source of trouble, wanting to treat the Oriental just like any old saloon. And rival gambling operations sent yahoos into the saloon to disrupt the games. Patrons leaving the Oriental were being robbed in the alleys. Even with Morgan’s help as a bouncer, Wyatt was concerned about keeping a secure saloon.

  He decided to send for some help, someone he could trust, someone like … Bat Masterson.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The years rolled back on my shoulders, and my friends departed. I was alone—alone in the dark hotel room, looking out to the drug store where Wyatt Earp had once been an owner of the luxurious Oriental gambling palace.

  —JOSEPHINE MARCUS EARP

  In the months after Bat Masterson had left, Ford County in Kansas did not descend into chaos. But there were troubles aplenty to keep the local lawmakers and their peace officers busy.

  The death of Dora Hand had not dimmed the political prospects of Dog Kelley. He had continued as mayor of Dodge City and was reelected in April 1880. George Hinkle had settled in as the Ford County sheriff. The city council voted Jim Masterson to be the city marshal, the position once held by his late older brother, Ed. Another indication that Bat could not harbor angry feelings for long was that in March he returned to the area to attend the Ford County Republican Convention and then the state version in Topeka. Colorado became his new home that spring. Bat traveled to Leadville to enjoy the robust gambling scene there, and when he felt like a kid in a candy shop, it was good-bye to lawman responsibilities.

  He was soon making the rounds in search of a saloon to invest in. With all the money being poured into Leadville and Gunnison County to the south, he wanted to be more on the receiving than giving end. However, in May, he was on another short visit to Dodge City—not so short, though, that he escaped the census takers.

  Ever since the death of Mollie Brennan in Sweetwater, Bat had not been linked with any particular woman. Not being as domestically inclined as Wyatt, and certainly more of a lover of the nightlife, Bat took his pleasures in temporary doses. That may have changed by the time the 1880 census was conducted, because listed as sharing Bat’s home was Annie Ladue, a nineteen-year-old whose occupation was reported as “keeping house” for the twenty-six-year-old former sheriff. That was also the occupation of sixteen-year-old Minnie Roberts, who the census found lived with Jim Masterson.

  Whatever opportunity there was for domestic bliss was quashed when Ben Thompson buttonholed him: His brother was in big trouble with the law in Ogallala, Nebraska, 250 miles away. Maybe only another lawman could get him out of it, even if he had removed the badge four months earlier.

  Billy Thompson had really done it this time. Thanks to the Union Pacific, the Nebraska town on the South Platte River had, like a few of its Kansas cousins, become a profitable cattle-shipping site. As such, Ogallala was a good town for gambling and drinking and whoring. All this appealed to Billy. One night in a saloon with the wry name of Cowboy’s Rest, he and the owner, Bill Tucker, got into a dispute over a local soiled dove. Billy stormed out, got drunk at a rival saloon, and returned to the Cowboy’s Rest with a gun. He fired at the bar, aiming for Tucker. The bullet found him, more specifically, his left hand, where it removed three fingers and the thumb. Billy then left.

  He was followed out into the street by Tucker, whose right hand held a sawed-off shotgun. Forgoing the courtesy of asking Billy to turn around, Tucker jerked the trigger, and a swarm of pellets penetrated Billy’s back. Billy staggered to his room at the Ogallala Hotel, and a few hours later he had a message sent to his brother in Dodge City. Ben was informed that the good news was that his brother’s wounds were not mortal, but the bad news was they might as well be because Billy had been told by the deputy standing outside his door that he would soon be dangling at the end of a rope for blowing off half of Bill Tucker’s left hand. Worse, Billy was further advised that if his brother showed his top hat in town, his neck would be stretched, too.

  So Ben was begging an old friend, one whose life he had saved, and of course Bat could not refuse. He set off on what would be perhaps his wildest adventure.

  When Bat got off the train in Ogallala and went to the hotel, he found that the back-shot Billy was indeed under arrest. Tucker’s friends were fixing to tie a rope to a high branch as soon as Billy was well enough to walk to the designated tree. Obviously, the justice system practiced in Dodge City to the south had skipped over Ogallala. In his career as a lawman, gentle persuasion had worked before, so Bat went to practice it on Tucker, whose left hand was swathed in bandages. The saloon owner agreed to ask that Billy be released without further harm—then named an exorbitant sum of money for being so forgiving. Bat later reported that “my conference with the thumbless one was at an end.”

  Plan B was to sneak Billy out of Ogallala to the safety of either Kansas or Texas. As Bat developed this plan, he decided to enlist the assistance of Buffalo Bill Cody.

  Bat had never hunted with the living legend, but he had raised a glass or two with Colonel Cody when the hunter had passed through Dodge City. He thought the former army scout, who lived in Nebraska, would be keen on such an escapade. The two biggest challenges were slipping Billy, still too injured to ride a horse, out of town, and finding Buffalo Bill at his home in North Platte fifty miles to the east when chances were he was gone on some escapade of his own. The badgeless Bat may not have fully considered that if he was caught helping a prisoner escape, his body could sway in the prairie breeze next to Billy’s.

  The Bat Masterson luck held. The bartender at the Ogallala Hotel was a man named Jim Dunn, who had served Bat many a time when he worked in Dodge City. Bat learned that coming up on Sunday night a dance would be held at the local schoolhouse, and even the sheriff would be there because he was the town’s only fiddler.

  When Sunday night arrived, the sole obstacle remaining was the deputy guarding Billy’s room. Once the dance was under way and the fiddling and the stomping on the hardwood floor were in full swing, Bat remarked that there was probably a lot of drinking going on at the schoolhouse, and wasn’t it a shame they—and especially the deputy—were missing out on all the fun.

  Well, one drink wouldn’t hurt, the dutiful deputy allowed. Bat offered to buy, and on cue Dunn arrived with a couple of drinks. The deputy was still smacking his lips when he slumped to the floor. As Bat had remembered, one of Dunn’s talents back in Dodge City was doctoring drinks.

  Offering the now-dreaming deputy a drink had to have been timed just right so that the eastbound train would be arriving a few minutes later. Bat carried Billy out of the hotel and across the street to the station. The reliable railroad was on schedule, and as soon as the train slowed to a stop, Bat and Billy climbed aboard. At 2 A.M., they were climbing back down—in North Platte. In another stroke of luck, when Bat and his fragile friend entered the only saloon open, one owned by a man named Dave Perry, sitting within a circle of rapt listeners was Buffalo Bill Cody, just finishing up another tall tale.

  Bat reported, “We were given a royal welcome,” and Cody “found a safe place for us to remain until he could outfit us for the trip across the country to Dodge City. We slept quite comfortably.”

  The fugitives wouldn’t remain comfortable if they overstayed their welcome in North Platte. They had to assume that at dawn or even before, the befuddled deputy would report the escape to his fiddle-playing boss and a posse would be gathered. The sheriff would not necessarily figure out that Bat and Billy had left by train and had disembarked in North Platte, but he could get lucky. And Buffalo Bill teaming up with Bat Masterson would set tongues to wagging.

  Soon after sunup Bat went to Cody’s house. There he was given, without Louisa Cody’s knowledge, a horse attached to a carriage that the former hunter had just purchased for his wife’s riding pleasure. Cody also provided a plan. A group of about twenty Europeans, honored guests of William Te
cumseh Sherman, were soon to arrive, and Buffalo Bill was to take them on a trail ride to a ranch that was on the route to Dodge City. Bat and his friend should travel with them. No sheriff would dare interfere or even think that such distinguished company would be harboring outlaws. This made sense to Bat, as long as the sheriff and his posse did not arrive in North Platte first.

  They did not, and Cody led the contingent of carriages and wagons south. A small ocean of alcohol had been brought along to keep everyone loose and convivial: “The caravan would stop every little while and liquor up,” Bat recalled of the journey. At one point Buffalo Bill, having imbibed his limit, got off his horse and into Bat’s wagon, where he passed out. A few miles later the mess wagon wandered off the trail a bit and it “was tipped completely upside down,” wrote Bat. “I was pitched out on my head in the prairie, while Cody was buried beneath the wagon and its contents.” Bat jumped up and got hold of the horses, while “other members of the party came and rescued Cody, who hadn’t received as much as a scratch.”

  All arrived tipsy but safely at the ranch, and the next morning, in Mrs. Cody’s buggy, Bat and Billy left for Dodge City. As luck would have it this time, the buggy and its occupants were battered by storms during most of the two-hundred-mile trip. The two travelers arrived in Dodge City soaked, exhausted, hungry, and bruised in a vehicle that was barely sticking together. Bat wanted to head immediately to a saloon for drinks and a meal followed by a sound sleep, but Billy persuaded him to stop by the telegraph office. There, he sent a message to the sheriff “notifying him of his safe arrival and inviting him to come and get him.” There was no response from Ogallala.

  Bat later reported being informed by Buffalo Bill that in the interests of domestic tranquillity, he presented Mrs. Cody with “a much more expensive outfit [buggy] than the one he had given us.”

  Supposedly, Billy was in San Antonio in 1884 when Ben Thompson and King Fisher were murdered. One would think this would have set Billy off on a rampage of revenge, but apparently the death of his beloved brother had the opposite effect. He was seen weeping as he wandered the streets of San Antonio, and then one day Billy Thompson was gone. There were rumors that he killed a man in Corpus Christi and later was spotted in El Paso. In 1888, word spread that Billy, age forty-three, had been gunned down in Laredo.

  Bat used this time back in Kansas to visit the Masterson homestead; then he moved on east to Kansas City. He remained there into early 1881, visiting Dodge City a couple of times to bend the elbow with friends there. It was during one of those visits, in February, that Bat received a wire from Wyatt informing him that he would appreciate his old friend’s help in Tombstone. Bat paid off any gambling debts and bar tabs he had accrued and boarded a train at the Dodge City station. He traveled west and south, occupying a stagecoach for the last leg of the journey. It was during this trip that the man riding shotgun filled Bat in on the troubles the Earp clan was confronting in Tombstone.

  Finally, Bat was reunited with Wyatt himself, who explained that he needed a loyal man who was good with a grin and a gun. Wyatt had also requested help from another old Dodge City friend, so right after Bat arrived in Tombstone, Luke Short did, too.

  The two men went to work at the Oriental as well-armed faro dealers. Bat soon learned that there was more to the friction in Tombstone than trying to put the saloon out of business. He was filled in on the faction of rustlers, smugglers, thieves, and cowboys who not only outnumbered the Earps and their law-and-order allies but seemingly had the protection of the sheriff’s office and the Tombstone Daily Nugget newspaper. Such odds did not faze Bat. He was probably more bothered by having to rub shoulders again with Wyatt’s other loyal friend, Doc Holliday, who anchored one of the gaming tables with a pistol under his vest.

  It was Luke Short, however, who caused the most immediate trouble. One morning in late February, Bat walked into the Oriental in time to break up a confrontation between Luke and Charlie Storms. The latter was a well-known gambler originally from New Orleans who had been involved in previous bouts of gunplay. According to Bat, he and Storms “were very close friends—as much so as Short and I were—and for that reason I didn’t care to see him get into what I knew would be a very serious difficulty.”

  Bat did not know what the dispute between his two friends was about, but it was clear that they “were about to pull their pistols when I jumped between them and grabbed Storms, at the same time requesting Luke not to shoot.” Luke could be a hothead, but not enough of one to risk shooting Bat. He kept his six-shooter holstered as Bat hustled Storms out of the saloon. “I advised him to go to his room and take a sleep, for I then learned that he had been up all night, and had been quarreling with other persons.”

  He left Storms in his room at the San Jose House. When Bat was back at the Oriental, he found Luke standing outside it on Allen Street. Bat was in the middle of explaining that Storms was sleeping it off when Storms suddenly appeared with a Colt .45 in his hand. Saying, “Come go with me,” he yanked Luke off the sidewalk into the street. “Are you as good a man as you were this morning?”

  Luke jerked his gun, pressed the muzzle against his assailant’s chest, and replied, “Every bit as good,” as he fired. The bullet tore through Storms’s heart. He was dead before he hit the dusty ground. But Luke shot him again for good measure.

  The killer was arrested, and a couple of days later a hearing was held. The chief witness was Bat, who described the sequence of events, and as a result, the ruling was self-defense and Luke was freed. Bat had lost a friend, but at least he hadn’t lost two. An upside to the incident was that word went around Tombstone not to trifle with the fellows from Dodge City.

  Soon after, Wyatt and Bat were working as lawmen again. The stage from Benson was nearing Tombstone on the night of March 15, 1881, when as many as half a dozen men emerged from the desert darkness and began firing. The men driving the stage, Eli “Bud” Philpott and Bob Paul, returned fire, with Paul yelling, “I hold for no one!” The robbers were chased off but left two dead behind—Philpott and a passenger in the coach named Peter Roerig.

  Within minutes of the stage arriving in Tombstone, two posses were formed. Sheriff Johnny Behan deputized several cowboys and, with them and his regular deputy, Harry Woods, set off in one direction. Going in another was Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp accompanied by his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and Bat was deputized, too. Before long, one of the bandits, Luther King, had been run down. An interrogation that probably involved the butt ends of pistols revealed that at least three of the would-be robbers were Harry Head, Bill Leonard, and Jim Crane, all known cowboys.

  Virgil and his posse returned to Tombstone and handed King over to Behan to be jailed, then set off again. They spent days trying to track the outlaws but were at a distinct disadvantage in that as their supplies and water ran out and their horses wearied, the bandits were being aided by fellow cowboys and allied ranchers. When Virgil telegraphed Behan to rendezvous with a new posse and bring fresh horses and supplies, it should have been no surprise to Virgil that Behan did not come through.

  That night, instead of the posse’s preparing to renew their search, one horse died. Wyatt and Bat set off for Tombstone, but they had to stop at a ranch along the way and leave their exhausted mounts. The two friends had to hike the eighteen miles remaining to Tombstone, most likely with Bat talking away and Wyatt contributing the occasional brief response. Virgil and the others tried to continue the search, but there was no sign of the other outlaws.

  Finally, they, too, were back in Tombstone, having gone without water for the previous thirty-six hours. Not only were none of the other outlaws caught, but upon their return they learned that King had simply walked out of Behan’s jail and disappeared.

  Bat’s opportunity to recuperate in Tombstone from the tough trail riding was a brief one. Having been away from Dodge City for quite a while, he might not have been aware that by then, troubles had returned there and reached the point at which factions were
at war with each other, with those wanting stiff law and order pitted against the side who wanted a return to the Wild West. A letter to the editor asserted that Mayor Kelley was “a flannel mouthed Irishman and keeps a saloon and a gambling house which he attends to in person. The city marshal and assistant are gamblers and each keep a ‘woman’—as does the mayor also. There are many good people here, but the bad ones are so numerous we almost lose sight of the good … the yellow fever, measles, smallpox and seven year itch combined would all be preferable to a civilized county to residence in this town.”

  That April, voters tossed Kelley out and voted A. B. Webster in as mayor. One of his first acts was to fire Jim Masterson and replace him with Fred Singer, whose qualifications included being a bartender at Webster’s saloon. Stung, Jim turned his focus full-time to making money at the Lady Gay, which he now owned with A. J. Peacock. This effort did not get off to a smooth start when one of his own bartenders, Al Updegraph, picked an argument with him over a woman. Jim fired him. Peacock rehired him: Updegraph was his brother-in-law.

  It should be pointed out that if this had been Bat instead of Jim, tempers probably would not have flared. Jim’s personality was not as easygoing as Bat’s and especially not like his late brother Ed’s or the youngest’s, Tom’s, who did not find lawing more appealing than working on the family farm north of Wichita. Jim’s personality was more like Wyatt’s, a dour disposition, and he was less likely to nip a dawning dispute in the bud by buying a couple of drinks. Jim brooded over losing his lawman job and wasn’t about to take any guff from an employee.

  It was, presumably, a friend of Jim’s who sent an anonymous telegram to Bat in Tombstone: “Come at once. Updegraff [sic] and Peacock are going to kill Jim.” He showed the telegram to Wyatt, who noted that it “didn’t say what kind of trouble Jim Masterson was mixed up in.” Bat, he said, “took the first stage out of Tombstone to go back to Dodge City,” no doubt praying that he would not again be too late to save a brother’s life.