Dodge City

by Clavin, Tom

  Emma was different. She hailed from Philadelphia, and her father had the distinction of being the first Civil War veteran buried in that city; he died not in battle, though, but of typhoid fever. There were many difficult years for Mrs. Walters and her three daughters. Six months shy of her sixteenth birthday, Emma saw a way out, and his name was Ed “Gopher Boy” Moulton. He had served in the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery, and after the war had become a professional foot racer. He ran away with Emma after the two married.

  The bride became an adept racer herself, competing in events with her husband, and she took up Indian-club swinging, too. When she turned twenty in 1877, Emma was getting booked into theaters to perform as the “Queen of Clubs,” demonstrating her dexterity with what were purported to be actual clubs taken from Indians in battle. She and Ed traveled throughout the Midwest and to New Orleans, and her popularity grew. She was especially popular with Frank Clifton, a performer on stages and in the circus. While the Queen of Clubs was in Chicago, Ed accused her of adultery. The affair ended, however, when it was learned that Clifton was married, and Emma returned to Gopher Boy.

  The marriage continued but it was a rocky one. Ed trained athletes, Emma branched out to singing and dancing, and she got into trouble with other performers, one time running off to Los Angeles with a blackface minstrel named Ed Sheehan. She was still married to Ed Moulton, though, in March 1889 when she played the Palace in Denver and met Bat Masterson.

  By then, Emma was no longer a show business ingenue but, at thirty-two, a veteran stage performer, adulterer, and soon-to-be bigamist. On November 21, 1891, five days shy of his thirty-eighth birthday, Bat married Emma. However, Emma did not file for divorce until June 1893. Ed, who was by then coach of the University of Michigan football team, did not contest it, and the divorce was granted in November. Given Emma’s track record, the marriage may not have appeared to be a match made in heaven, and Bat was not inclined to give up his night-crawling ways in theaters and saloons, but he and Emma would be together the rest of his life.

  For the couple, Denver soon paled in comparison to Creede, Colorado, after a huge silver strike there. Unlike Wyatt, Bat was not necessarily looking to get rich but to be where the action was and make a nice-enough living. In Creede, he managed a saloon and gambling hall and was a notable presence, sporting a lavender-colored corduroy suit and black tie. His reputation as a gunslinger, however inaccurate it was, came in handy when a tense situation developed, because a shout of “Here comes Masterson!” was known to calm down the potential combatants. Creede was a boomtown that appealed to some uncivilized elements, but in Bat’s place of business, most of the time all was serene.

  When the nearby silver mines began to play out, Bat and Emma returned to Denver. There, his next venture was as a boxing promoter. If Bat had only promoted and not bet on fights, he might have made out okay. But he wagered on the fighter who lost in John L. Sullivan’s next match, did the same against James J. Corbett, and then backed Corbett in his losing bout with the Australian Bob Fitzsimmons. To many people at the time, Bat Masterson was not a famous former peace officer but a boxing impresario who could also compose colorful prose out of pugilism. In 1893, The National Police Gazette saluted him as “king of Western Sporting Men” who “backs pugilists, can play any game on the green with a full deck and handles a bowie or a revolver with the determination of a Napoleon.”

  Despite the praise, various business ventures connected to boxing and gambling went south for Bat. When the twentieth century began, he found himself forty-six years old and broke. Then Teddy Roosevelt reached out to him.

  They had first encountered each other in 1884. Roosevelt, who had failed in a bid to be elected mayor of New York City, experienced the double tragedy of his mother and his young wife dying in his home on the same night, his wife during childbirth. He fled New York, heading to the Dakota Territory to take up ranching. While trying to scratch out a living in rough country, Roosevelt met Bat Masterson.

  “Although their backgrounds were worlds apart, their personalities were quite similar in many respects,” wrote Robert DeArment. “Both were extreme individualists who held firm convictions and were ready at all times to fight in defense of their beliefs, both were full of a love of adventure and were utterly fearless, both deplored sham and pretense in any form, and both were staunchly Republican in their political outlook.” Though Roosevelt would last only a couple of years as a rancher in the West, the friendship he formed with Bat “grew stronger with the passing years.”

  By this time, Bat and Jim Masterson had drifted apart. Jim would spend more years wearing a badge than Bat did, having begun as a teenager in Dodge City and continuing to 1895. He was often identified only as the brother of Bat Masterson, yet he was a very fine lawman in his own right.

  A year after Jim had become deputy in Trinidad, Colorado, he was a participant in the Maxwell Land Grant War, as a captain of thirty-five state militiamen, as undersheriff of Colfax County, and as a deputy U.S. marshal. The “war” was essentially a fight between two factions over who owned two million acres in northern New Mexico. Jim survived several close scrapes, and in 1885 he was glad to return to Trinidad.

  Jim, Neal Brown, and Bill Tilghman were part of the Oklahoma Land Rush in 1887, and when the town of Guthrie was founded, Jim and Tilghman were appointed its first peace officers, charged with clearing out squatters so that proper streets could be laid out. Guthrie became Jim’s home, and he served as deputy sheriff of Logan County. But sometime lawing or opportunities to make money took him elsewhere. In Cimarron in 1889, he was involved in a bullet-riddled battle over the courthouse as a deputy to Sheriff Tilghman, who was wounded. At one point, Jim and Neal Brown and several others were holed up and surrounded by their adversaries. The standoff continued until a telegram from Denver arrived with a warning from Bat Masterson that if the captives were not allowed to leave unharmed, the big brother would jump on a train and “come in with enough men to blow Cimarron off the face of Kansas.” The message proved persuasive.

  In August 1893, again as a deputy U.S. marshal, Jim was second in command in a posse organized to capture the Doolin-Dalton Gang, a particularly violent outfit of outlaws terrorizing parts of Kansas, including Dodge City. The first confrontation was the Battle of Ingalls in September, in which Jim survived, but three of his colleagues were killed, and most of the Doolin-Dalton Gang escaped. Between then and August 1896, when Bill Doolin was killed by a shotgun, the outlaws were either arrested or met their demise.

  By then, Jim Masterson had forged as fine a reputation as any frontier lawman, and it would outlast him. He was only thirty-nine in 1895 when he contracted galloping consumption while living in Guthrie, and he died there. An obituary seemed to describe a man who was a blend of his brother and Wyatt Earp: “He was considered here the bravest of the marshals. Every man has his virtues and his faults. Jim Masterson was a man who never went back on a friend, and never forgot an obligation. He never pretended to keep up the conventional social amenities; but yet there was a man whom money could absolutely never make break a trust.”

  His body was shipped to Wichita and was buried on the Masterson farm.

  In June 1902, acting upon a suggestion from President Roosevelt, Bat and his wife traveled to New York City. For many people coming from the frontier, even a reputed gunslinger, the tall buildings and rushing people and cacophonous clashing of sounds would have been too intimidating. Bat could simply have turned around and gotten back on the train, returning to the wide-open West, where he was a big fish in a large but comparatively shallow pond. But he liked what he saw. Always a man who sought action, Bat believed there was more action in New York than anywhere else. Maybe it was not too late to start over in the big city. There was little left for him but a penny-pinching retirement back in the West, and too many of his friends and acquaintances there, as well as two brothers, were by now six feet under.

  Bat’s ambitions received a jolt when barely clapping the dust
of the prairie off his clothes, he was arrested. The charge was grand larceny, and there was an additional charge when the New York City detectives found a .45-caliber gun holstered at his hip. An elder of the Mormon Church had reported that Bat had cheated him at a card game on the train between Chicago and New York. However, when the confused man recanted, the charges were dropped and Bat’s welcome to New York became a warm one.

  Bat and Emma rented an apartment at 300 West Forty-ninth Street. This offered easy access to the expanding theater district and its restaurants and saloons, which provided free sandwiches to those who purchased whiskey or beer at lunchtime. His traveling days were not completely over because from time to time he took the train down to Washington to accept Roosevelt’s invitation to visit. The former frontier buddies recalled mutual acquaintances, favorite boxing matches they had attended, and inevitably some of Bat’s adventures chasing down bad guys and tossing them in the calaboose.

  Roosevelt would make two offers. The first was for Bat to become the U.S. marshal for the Oklahoma Territory. This he rejected, claiming his gunslinging days were over but “some drunken boy” would not believe that and would try to make a reputation for himself by shooting Bat. The second offer Bat accepted: U.S. marshal for the Southern District of New York, which included a steady paycheck and the freedom to carry a weapon.

  During one later get-together, in April 1908, the election-challenged former sheriff urged Roosevelt to run for a third term. Upon his return to the city that would be his home longer than any other place in his life, Bat told The New York Times that the president “displayed the fact he was suffering from an attack of ‘third termitis’ in its most virulent form.” Apparently, Roosevelt overcame it because he chose not to run for reelection that year.

  By then, Bat had been a newspaperman, working for The Morning Telegraph. In 1903, he had renewed a friendship from days past with two brothers, William E. Lewis and Alfred Henry Lewis. The former was editor and general manager of the New York Morning Telegraph; the latter, a book and magazine writer, became a frequent carousing partner. Until Richard O’Connor’s book was published in 1957, Alfred Lewis’s book, The Sunset Trail, issued in 1905, would be the only biography of Bat, though it is more of a novel than nonfiction. When William Lewis offered Bat a job, he became the sports editor of The Morning Telegraph. At age fifty, the third act of his life began.

  Bat fully embraced the position and the events and social life that went with it. He did very little actual editing; instead, his duties were to write a column several times a week about sports, with many of them about boxing. “By W. B. ‘Bat’ Masterson” was his byline. He came to know and swap stories with many of the major sports figures of the day passing through New York. The baseball great Ty Cobb wrote of Bat that with his physique, despite the smart clothes and bowler hat, he “more nearly approximated the conception of a steamfitter’s helper on a holiday than the authentic person who’d helped to clean up Dodge City with a Colt forty-five for his broom.” His eyes, however, were “smoothed ovals of gray schist with flecks of mica glittering in them if he were aroused. And some of the men who faced him through the smoke fogs of cow-town melees hadn’t lived long enough to get a good look.”

  Before long, Bat’s column was a must-read for sports aficionados and rival columnists. He became known as the Wise Man of Longacre Square, referring to The Morning Telegraph’s headquarters at Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. He had a routine that suited him well: breakfast at home with Emma at noon, a meander to the office to write and file his column, off to Belmont Racetrack if the horses were running or to the Polo Grounds to watch a New York Giants game, then back to Manhattan to take in a boxing match or a play, concluding with a late supper, often at Shanley’s Grill at Broadway and Forty-third Street. This was followed by drinks with friends in the sports and Broadway worlds after the theaters had shut for the night, with a favorite haunt being the Metropole on Forty-second Street and Broadway. There and at adjacent watering holes Bat stood leaning at the bar and rubbing shoulders with George M. Cohan, Stanford White, John McGraw, Jimmy Walker, Arnold Rothstein, boxer and future actor Victor McLaglen, and, when his Wild West show was in town, his old friend Buffalo Bill Cody. Bat may have had to duck and cover like the other patrons on the night of July 16, 1912, when the gangster Herman Rosenthal was shot to death in the Metropole’s doorway; a police lieutenant friend of Bat’s and four other men went to the electric chair for the murder.

  Whatever useful material he gathered would go into the next column, which could sometimes be as much about the theater and its stars as sports. Bat was a respected and a bit feared elder presence who was quick to champion causes, especially the fleeting examples of honesty in boxing. According to Bat’s newspaper protégé Damon Runyon, “He gained a wide reputation for his fearless writing. Four square to all the winds that blew, he despised hypocrisy and dishonesty, and he had a forceful way of expressing his feelings.” When Runyon wrote the short stories that would be adapted into the huge stage success Guys and Dolls, he saluted Bat by naming his main character Sky Masterson.

  By the eve of World War I, Bat’s reputation as a Wild West gunslinger had ballooned to legendary proportions, and it was believed that even at sixty he could slap leather as quick as any murderous outlaw. Bat did not encourage this outlook, but he didn’t go out of his way to discourage it, either. It intrigued people, and more potential sources eased into his orbit. And there was a profitable part of it, too. It was generally reported that Bat’s trusty Colt .45 had twenty notches in it, each representing a man who deserved killing. An article that appeared in The New York Sun years earlier had been headlined A MILD EYED MAN WHO KILLED TWENTY-SIX PERSONS. Every so often an awestruck visitor would beg Bat to sell his gun and it would be honored and protected as a collectible. After careful consideration and with some reluctance, Bat would give in, negotiate a price, and turn over the coveted pistol. The next day, he would stop at a pawnshop, buy a Colt .45, and cut twenty notches in it.

  From time to time, his reputation helped Bat avoid fights. One day a former lawman whom he had known in Creede, Richard Plunkett—mostly known for arresting the man who had killed Bob Ford, who had killed Jesse James—arrived in New York. He and a man named Dinklesheets hit the saloons, boasting they would settle some old grievance against Bat Masterson. They finally found him in the crowded café at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Dinklesheets went at Bat first and was knocked to the floor for his trouble. Bat went to his pocket, then drew and pressed something against Plunkett’s stomach. As the petrified ex–peace officer trembled, the crowd raced for the doors, shouting for the police and that Masterson was about to put another notch on his six-shooter. When the cops arrived, no one was more grateful than Plunkett, who had run out of prayers to say. Bat took his hand away and displayed a package of cigarettes.

  Having left the showgirl life behind long ago, Emma busied herself with reading and housekeeping. A reporter who had interviewed her in 1905 wrote, “If anyone expects to see in her a typical Westerner, he will be much mistaken. Of medium height, Mrs. Masterson is a woman of retiring disposition.”

  There was very little interruption to Bat’s daily life and his contented marriage to Emma during the World War I years and immediately after. He had kept up a lively correspondence with the cowboy matinee idol William S. Hart. In September 1921, creating quite the commotion and sending secretaries swooning, Hart visited Bat at The Morning Telegraph. “I play the hero that Bat Masterson inspired,” he told Louella Parsons. “More than any other man I have ever met, I admire and respect him.” Bat had recently entertained another visitor, Bill Tilghman, who had come to New York to see the heavyweight championship bout between Jack Dempsey and George Carpentier. The staff marveled at two legendary lawmen in the same New York building.

  That October, Bat was approaching his sixty-eighth birthday and thirtieth wedding anniversary. He held a senior administrative position at The Morning Telegraph, which also employed aspiring
actor John Barrymore and the reporters Heywood Broun and Stuart Lake, and Bat mentored such new young staffers as the future writer and activist Dorothy Day and Parsons, who would become one of Hollywood’s most powerful gossip columnists. It was estimated that in the eighteen years since he had begun his column, titled “Masterson’s Views on Timely Topics,” he had written at least four million words. Life had been full during his New York years, and even with mobsters, such as Al Capone and the precocious Dutch Schultz, taking over some sections of the city, it was a safe existence compared to the Dodge City of a half century earlier.

  Around noon on October 25, after the usual breakfast with Emma, Bat walked down to his office at the newspaper, greeting familiar faces along the way, tipping the white short-brimmed hat he had exchanged for his bowler to ladies and children. Seated at his wooden rolltop desk, he wrote a column on the previous night’s bout, which, coincidentally, had seen Rocky Kansas defeat Lew Tendler. Perhaps thinking of his father, Thomas, Bat wrote about the disparity between boxers making thousands of dollars per fight while a hardworking farmer labors “from daylight to dark for forty of the best years of his life, and lucky if he finishes with as much as one of these birds gets in an hour. Yet there are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours.”

  He continued, “I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I can’t see it that way.”

  Moments after concluding his column, Bat Masterson slumped over and his broad forehead rested gently on the scarred desktop. He was dead from a heart attack.

  His passing was front-page news. Runyon’s tribute that Bat was “a 100 percent, 22-karat real man” was typical of the tributes. He was one of several friends and admirers who remained by Bat’s casket as hundreds of mourners filed past it at the Campbell Funeral Home on Broadway. The funeral service was attended by five hundred people. Among the pallbearers were Runyon, William Lewis, saloon owner turned boxing promoter Tex Rickard, New York Giants owner Charles Stoneham, and William S. Hart, back again after having made the round-trip from Los Angeles only the month before. The former sheriff of Ford County was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. His headstone reads WILLIAM BARCLAY MASTERSON and LOVED BY EVERYONE.