Gunfighter/Lawman/Gambler Bat Masterson: He Forever Changed the West

This is Lee Habee with Our American Stories, and for the hour, we’re going to tell a great story about our past. Old West lawman Bat Masterson was as well known in his lifetime as celebrities are today. To Bat, gunslingers were hoodlums who killed for fun. He used guns to enforce the law or defend a friend. In the end, he’d achieved defeat. Almost none of the Old West legends it attained. He lived to see an old age. Here to tell the story of Bat Masterson is Roger McGrath. McGrath is the author of Gunfighters, Hioman, and Vigilantes. A U.S. Marine and former history professor at UCLA, McGrath is a regular contributor for us here at Our American Stories. Here’s McGrath.

One of the most widely traveled and greatest characters of the Old West was Bat Masterson. His first taste of the frontier game as a buffalo winner of the High Plains in the early 1870s, when he was still a teenager. He took part in the famous Battle of Adobe Walls. He served as a scout for the U.S. Army pursuing Indian war parties. He was a sheriff of Ford County, which included Dodge City. During the heyday of the cattle town, he was with the Earps in Tombstone, Arizona, for a time. He was a gunfighter and professional gambler, and eventually a sports promoter and journalist. Here’s Texas State historian Bill O’Neill, also Dodge City historian and narrator of the Wild West podcast, Brad Smalley.

There was a U.S. Postal stamp series that was aptly named. It was called Legends of the West. Twenty of them, in fact, and one of them was Bat Masterson on a 29-cent stamp. Bat Masterson was, a day, a legend of the West.

When you mentioned Bat Masterson, at least to the average person, by and large, the image that comes to mind is really that of Gene Barry from the 1950s TV show. You know, puff-tied derby hat, the silver-tip cane, just sort of walking the West being Bat Masterson without really any specifics. Canadian-born, farmed in New York, Iowa, he was about seventeen, eighteen years old when the family moved to Kansas. They lived around Wichita, or very near to Wichita, Kansas, for about a year before the two oldest brothers, Bat and the oldest Masterson—his older brother Ed—headed west really to seek adventure.

Mad and Ed, they’re proficient with firearms before they start buffalo mounting, but they now become expert marksmen with the Sharps rifle. I mean, buffalo at distances of five hundred yards or more. The town they haul the hides to is Dodge City, which will be a buffalo town for a decade before it becomes a cattle town. Dodge City will be called the Queen of the cattle towns and have a reputation for gunfights and rough characters, but it is rougher and more violent in its buffalo days. It’s in Dodge City that Bat begins making his name well known.

At that time, in the summer of 1872, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad was in western Kansas, and Ed and Bat were hired by subcontractor Raymond Ritter to help grade four miles of railroad track between Fort Dodge and the small settlements—a little boomtown that was to be known as Dodge City. Well, Mr. Ritter skipped out on paying the Masterson brothers, and probably the entire crew.

The debt is nearly a year old. When word reaches Dodge City that Ritter is a passenger on a train that will be stopping at Dodge, Bat heads to the station with a dozen or more men following him who are eager to watch what unfolds. Those in the crowds say Bat’s pale blue eyes are ice cold. When the train grinds to a halt, Bat springs aboard, enters the passenger car. Minutes later, he’s holding Ritter at gunpoint on the train’s rear platform. Ritter yells out that he’s being robbed. Bat tells him to produce the money or he’s dead. Ritter pleads that he doesn’t have it on his person, but that it’s in his valise back in the car. He left to go back to retrieve it. Bat doesn’t fall for the trick, and has Henry Raymond, who is standing below in the crowd, get the valise. Raymond quickly returns with the valise, and Bat has Ritter open it and count out the three hundred dollars owed them from several thousand dollars in the bag. With that, Bat allows Ritter to go back into the passenger car. Bat invites all those in the crowd to follow him to Kelly’s saloon so he can treat them to drinks. Bat is only nineteen years old, but his coolness and determination impresses everyone. Here’s the owner of Legends of America, Kathy Alexander.

Bat Masterson and the other buffalo hunters who were working in the Dodge City area. It didn’t take long for them to pretty much kill all of the buffalo in the area. But they got wind of the fact that in the Texas Panhandle, they still roamed large and free. The Texas Panhandle was ruled by the Comanches and the Kiowas, so there was a risk that he and several others just couldn’t resist.

They set up a camp about 150 miles southwest of Dodge City, near the ruins of an old trading post known as Adobe Walls. A camp grows day by day. A big kraal is built with a storehouse made of sod. Jim Hanrahan, a big, genial Irish immigrant, builds a saloon out of sod and logs. Tom O’Keefe, another Irishman, fashions a crude blacksmith’s shop. Shirley Rath builds a general store out of sod and logs. Bill Owles and his wife, Hannah, the only woman in the camp, opened a restaurant in the rear of Rath’s store. They are entirely unaware that on the Comanche Reservation in western Oklahoma, Ishatai, a medicine man, is calling for a war of extermination against the whites. He says he talks with the Great Spirit, and the Great Spirit tells him he will restore dead warriors to life, and that all warriors will now have magical protection against the bullets of the whites.

And you’ve been listening to Roger McGrath. Bat Masterson’s story continues here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war, to innovation, culture, and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Bat Masterson. Let’s return to Roger McGrath.

Ishatai’s message spreads to Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne on nearby reservations, and soon Ishatai has a large following. During June, warrior bands of Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne left their reservations and headed for the Texas Panhandle. Ishatai is riding along with them. In Texas, they joined forces with Quanah Parker, the chief of the Kwahadi band of Comanche, which had never been on a reservation. Quanah Parker is the son of a Comanche chief and a kidnapped white girl, Cynthia Ann Parker. Parker assumes command of the force of Indian warriors, about 700 strong. In mid-June, reports begin arriving at Adobe Walls Camp that whites here and there in the Panhandle have been killed and scalped and their bodies mutilated. Some of the hunters decide it’s time to pack up their wagons and head for Dodge City, but most decide to stay right. At sunrise in the morning of June 27th, hundreds of Indian warriors sweep down on the camp, both the Indians and their horses streaked in war paint. Some are firing their rifles, others are leveling their lances. The whites race inside whichever structure is nearest. Bat Masterson and nine others are in Hanrahan’s Saloon. A dozen more are in the storehouse and six in the general store, including the one woman, Hannah Owles. Two teamsters who are sleeping in their wagons are killed in the initial Indian assault. Since they outnumber the whites 25 to one, the Indians think they will make quick work on the whites of the camp. However, the Indians have picked on the wrong guys. Sharps rifles begin to crack, and Indians begin to fall from their horses at great distances. And in two hours of fighting, only one more white, Billy Tyler, is killed. In addition to the two teamsters caught on the wagons, in the immediate vicinity of the camp were the bodies of 15 Indians. The medicine man Ishatai, wearing nothing but body paint, watched the battle from a safe distance. The Indians remain in the area for two more days, but stay out of rifle range. On the third day, a band of them stationed on a rise about a mile away. They are just and taunting the whites. Billy Dixon decides to take a shot with a Sharps rifle. He reckons wind and elevation and squeezes off a round. A brief moment later, an Indian tumbles from his horse. The other Indians, so unnerved by the long-distance shot, they whirl their horses about and gallop off. The distance of the shot is later measured at 1,538 yards, about nine-tenths of a mile. Here again is Brad Smalley.

People still talking about that for years, years to come. Really cemented Billy Dixon’s fame on the frontier, as if he wasn’t already famous enough by that point.

Dickson becomes famous for the shot, but he himself is effusive in his praise of the youngest of the buffalo hunters in the fight. Bat Masterson should be remembered for the valor that marked his conduct, says Dixon. He was a good shot and not afraid. Following the Battle of Adobe Walls, Bat serves as U.S. Army scout with Colonel Nelson Miles, tracking down Indian war parties. Here’s Tom Claven, the author of Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West.

His most famous adventure as a scout later became a basis, not the only one, but a basis for the famous film, The Searchers, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, and a young Natalie Wood. There was a German family that was crossing Kansas heading for Colorado, and they were attacked by Indians. Both parents were killed. There were four daughters who were kidnapped, and soon after the kidnapping, the Indians divided into two separate bands, each taking two daughters, and off they went. Bat was one of the more prominent and eventually was the leader of a contingent of Army scouts who vowed to get these girls back. And they tracked down one of the bands and without too much trouble, found the girls and returned them to family members. But the other band was really hard to find. It took months and months and months of Bat searching and all kinds of weather, until he finally found the Indians, who by then were rather starving and the girls themselves had almost starved to death. Bat rode into camp. He rode in unarmed, because his goal was to not put the girls in danger, even though he himself was in great danger. But he went in unarmed and told—he worked out a deal with the Indians to provide them food in exchange for the girls, which was what was negotiated and successfully concluded. Bat retrieved the girls, returned them to their family, and it was one of his more well-known adventures, and like I say, it became one basis for the film The Searchers, which is the story of Ethan Edwards and his search for his niece who had been kidnapped by Indians after a family had been killed.

Let’s Go Home, Debby.

The army’s relentless pursuit of the Indians during the summer and fall of 1874 puts an end to Indian depredations for the time being.

Throughout this time he learned just about every trail hideaway in the entire Southern Plains from the Panhandle of Texas all the way up through southwest Kansas. He knew his way around, which would serve him very well in later years as a lawman, in which he became very adept at tracking down horse thieves. He knew all the hidey holes and places that they could gather, mostly because of this time.

Bat’s first recorded gunfight occurs in the Lady Gay Dance Hall in Sweetwater, Texas, on a night late in January 1876. Bat is with Molly Brennan when a soldier from a nearby post, Corporal Melvin King, confronts them in a rage.

King was not only wounded by his loss to Bat at the poker table, he was severely wounded by his jealousy when he saw the girl that he was after hanging on to his new found rival. Jealousy overtook him. He tore through the door, pulled his gun and started firing.

The bullet goes through Molly and into Bat, lodging in his pelvis. As Bat is falling to the dance hall floor, he draws his six-shooter and fires. Bat’s bullet drills King in the heart, and he collapses dead. Molly soon dies, but Bat hangs on the night and then recovers enough to have the bullet removed.

His wound was such that it actually punctured his intestine, and the doctor who examined him said that the only thing that saved his life was the fact that he hadn’t eaten anything because of that puncture. If any food was in his tract, he actually would have succumbed to an infection and most likely been killed.

Although he needs a cane to walk, two months later, Bat is on the back of a horse riding for Dodge City. In Dodge, Bat joins his younger brother Jim, as one of the city’s deputies. They’re both hired by Wyatt Earp, who is Chief Deputy under Marshal Larry Deger.

Now, in all fairness, you can tell the story of Dodge City without Wyatt Earp. It’s not nearly as good of a story, but it can be done. You cannot, however, tell the story of Dodge City without Bat Masterson. And starting in the spring of 1876, when Bat first pinned on a badge in Dodge City, that’s where the story really takes off.

A three hundred-pound Deger, the owner of a saloon, was appointed Marshal by the City Council principally for political reasons, and most law enforcement is left to Earp, the Mastersons, and other deputies.

And you’re listening to the story of Bat Masterson, and you’re listening to Roger McGrath, who’s the author of Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes, and what a storyteller he is. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, Bat Masterson’s story here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Bat Masterson. Let’s pick up where we last left off with Roger McGrath.

They try to avoid shooting and prefer to use their heavy revolvers. They club lawbreakers into submission. For clubbing, Bat uses the cane he has relied on while recovering from his gunshot wound. Here’s Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of True West Magazine, and Tom Clavin.

The cowboys coming out from Texas, who had been on the trail for three months.

They all got paid and they were going to spend it all in one night, which they usually did.

And so for Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp to be essentially bouncers in a biker bar, it was really intense. Go bump up and sleep it off.

So Bat’s first job was at Dodge City, and it was a really daunting challenge for Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, because Dodge City had gotten a reputation as the wickedest town in the American West. I mean, one example of the reputation it had was there was a story that went around that a very depressed man was sitting on a train and a conductor was concerned about it and went over and said, “So, buddy, what’s the matter?” And morosely the man said, “I’m going to Hell.” And after a pause, the conductor said, “That’ll be two dollars and get off at Dodge City.” That’s the kind of reputation it had. So with Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, this is where they really solidified, becoming best friends. Their job was to try and clean up Dodge City, but do it in a way that they were peace officers, not out-gunning the bad guys. They had Dodge City, you know, lawmakers had tried that. They’d hired a man as to be Marshal who just started shooting everything that everybody didn’t like, and they quickly realized that was not a way to have a civilized town, that people could raise their families. So, with Wyatt and Bat Masterson leading the way, they started to tame Dodge City. They started to arrest people. And one of the things that they can credit themselves with is taking the most wicked town in the American West and turning it into a place that people felt they could raise their families. What the Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson generation represented was a peace officer, and they took the word peace very seriously. And what was happening with these peace officers, they were forming police departments. They were forming ways of administering a law and order system that didn’t include shoot first and ask questions later.

In July 1877, Masterson is appointed Under Sheriff of Ford County, Kansas. The county’s principal town is Dodge City. Sheriff Charlie Bassett’s second term is up in November, and the state’s constitution prohibits him from running for a third consecutive term. Bat decides to run for sheriff. His opponent is Marshal Larry Deger, who is supported by much of Dodge City’s business community. On November 6th, Bat ekes out a narrow victory to become Sheriff of Ford County. Bat is only twenty-three years old. Here again is Bill O’Neill.

Goodness. He was elected by three votes, but he got after it. He was arresting train robbers and horse thieves, pursuing jail escapees and confidence men. As sheriff, he was responsible for the whole county.