Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West

I decided to read something a little on the lighter path this week, following the rather heavy book on cults last week, and so I went with a different kind of cult, the cult that glamorizes the old west, making this week’s book of the week Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West by Tom Clavin.

In the introduction, Clavin goes over the difficulty in sorting fact from fiction when dealing with such legends of the old west. And it’s actually not just Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Dodge City itself is treated as a character in the book, and rightly so. Without Dodge City to tame, would history even remember Earp or Masterson? But not just the three main characters, the entire supporting cast of Dodge City reads like a who’s who of wild west history, with the whole Earp and Masterson clans figuring in the telling, along with the James and Younger gang, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickock, Doc Holliday and Kate Elder, Eddie Foy, Nat Love…all were in this book, and Clavin included a brief history for some, a more detailed history for others, depending on their closeness with the main characters, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Dodge City herself.

So, let’s start with Dodge City. Dodge City rose up out of the ashes of prior military forts in the area, first established to protect travelers on the Santa Fe trail, but ultimately growing up by nearby Fort Dodge. Dodge City was basically a nexus of where the buffalo herds roamed naturally, where cattle drovers would drive their cattle, and where the railroads came. It’s probably the latter more than anything that helped Dodge City come in to being, because without the railroads, the buffalo hunters and cowboys would have bypassed Dodge City in favor of someplace with a railroad, as the rails were the fastest way to transport the product east.

Now, one of those misconceptions I seemed to get stuck in my head…right up there with the Civil War was fought in Virginia….is that the buffalo were hunted nearly to extinction to make room for the cattle. This is not the case. It’s actually almost worse, if you can believe that. Buffalo were hunted so perniciously, and yes to the brink of extinction, because people in the east had developed a taste…no pun intended…for buffalo tongue and buffalo hides. So, these enormous herds of buffalo were shot and killed just for the tongue and skins, then left to rot in the sun. It was so bad that the aforementioned Buffalo Bill started spearheading conservation efforts. I had also heard that the buffalo were hunted as part of a targeted attempt at wiping out the primary food source of the Native American tribes. This does not appear to be the case, although the outcome was effectively the same. It was just unbridled greed and the belief that the herd would be there forever…there were just so many of the beasts, how could it ever dry up? But it did and by the time Bat Masterson gave up the buffalo hunting, conservation efforts were underway.

So, the buffalo hunters were one of the rowdy bunches that would come through Dodge City, making it a not so safe place to live. The other leg running this race towards perdition were the cowboys driving the herds in for transport to eastern slaughterhouses. Between these two groups of men and, doing their part to ensure the good times kept rolling, were the soiled doves…. aka prostitutes. Now…not saying being a prostitute is by any metric an easy life. But in the 19th century, more often than not, it was the women running the joint, with bouncers to help with the really rough customers. Being a prostitute allowed women agency and a steady income in the 19th century. And in Dodge City, business was booming.

Next up was a quick history of Wyatt Earp and what brought him in to law-ing in Dodge City. Earp was born on March 19, 1848, in Monmouth, Illinois to Nicholas Porter Earp and Virginia Ann Cooksey. He was the 6th child of Nicholas, and 4th child of Virginia Ann, who was Nicholas’s second wife. James, Virgil, Morgan, Warren, Martha, Virginia, and Adelia were all Wyatt’s full brothers and sisters, with Newton and Mariah being half-brother and half-sister. So, this was a large clan. Nicholas was a restless man, and he moved the family around quite a bit, taking them all the way to California before looping back to Missouri. In that time Nicholas tried farming, mining, cooper, constable, soldiering, teaching, and leading a wagon train, which I believe is what he was doing when he moved the family to California. I think it even said he brought the whole train in, which was not at all usual for the time, and means he was probably very efficient. We know he at several points in life ran his own saloon because at one point he offered Tom and Jerry’s year-round, even though it is typically a holiday drink only.

Once they hit California, Wyatt determined he did not want to be a farmer, and he took up riding shotgun on a stagecoach his brother was driving, and the two of them drove all over the west, eventually landing in Dodge City, Kansas, where Wyatt did some buffalo hunting before being assigned marshal. Now, prior to Dodge City, Wyatt had been a lawman in Lamar, Missouri, where he met and married his first wife, Aurilla Sutherland Earp. Sadly, she died in childbirth about 9 months after they married, and Wyatt left Lamar, never to return, and also never to talk about it again. So, I think she likely was the love of his life and her death left him utterly heartbroken, because the three women who were associated with him after that, were all known prostitutes. And at least two of the three, IF they were married, were common law only, never legally in church.

Now onto Bat Masterson. Bat Masterson as born Bartholemew William Barclay Masterson…no wonder he changed it to Bat… on November 26, 1853, in Henryville, Quebec, Canada. The Masterson family moved to the US when he was a child and I believe mostly stayed in the mid-west. Masterson was a buffalo hunter, highly proficient with the Sharps rifle he carried, and when he got tired of the dirty bloody business of buffalo hunting, he switched quite easily to gambler and to railroad grading. Although his job in the railroad was shortened when the guy who had hired him, Raymond Ritter, bugged out without paying him. Masterson hung around Dodge City expecting Ritter would have to come back through eventually, and when he did, Masterson boarded the train, sat next to him, and forced Ritter to pay Masterson, his brother, and a third guy who had also been swindled by the railroad man. Masterson’s character was such that the crowd was fully on his side.

Now, Wyatt was sort of taciturn, was not much of a drinker, preferring coffee or an occasional beer, and while he did like gambling and had no qualms with prostitutes, he by and large was pretty sure that being outside a jail cell was better than being inside one. And he was fair. He firmly believed the law applied to all and should be equally applied to all. There was at least one story in the book about a cowboy who got rowdy in town and so Wyatt jailed him for a night by means of buffaloing…which basically means pistol whipped the dude, which sucks, but is arguably better than being shot…and then while the guy is still reeling from the smackdown, Wyatt would throw him in jail. When the guy’s boss and the owner of the herd showed up, a guy by the name of Robert Wright I believe, Wright tried pull the big swinging dick move of “do you know how much money I bring in to this town!” to get his guy released. So, Wyatt unlocks the jail cell and shoves Wright in with his guy, leaving both to cool their heels overnight.

Buffaloing sounds bad, and lord knows when such tactics are used today, people rightly scream about police brutality. But here’s the thing. First off…completely different time. These matters happened between 1873 and 1883. So over 100 years ago. Second, everyone carried guns. Not just the law men, the cowboys, the buffalo hunters, hell Belle Starr is mentioned in Dodge City, and she was definitely known to carry guns. So, if everyone is armed, then either everyone starts shooting, or you find a way to de-escalate. Sometimes, de-escalation includes pistol whipping a mother fucker. Sometimes, if you’re Bat Masterson, who was not taciturn and had quite the tricksters’ spirit in him, you de-escalate by talking people down, as he did when Nat Love tried to steal a cannon from nearby Fort Dodge. When he was caught in the act and advised he was facing execution for theft of government property, Love asked that they call in Bat Masterson, who at the time was Sheriff of the county. And Masterson’s reputation was such that the soldiers didn’t want to pick a fight with him if they didn’t have to, so they sent a runner for Masterson, who said “Send the prisoner to me, I’ll take care of it.” Love recalled “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 then fined Love by making him buy everyone a round of drinks at the nearest saloon.

Eventually, between Bat and Wyatt, Dodge City became downright civilized, which Wyatt found boring, and he moved on to Tombstone, which is touched on in this book, but not in depth, and I know the author wrote a book specifically on Tombstone and the events that happened there, because I have that book too. Masterson left when he lost his re-election, not because he was a sore loser, but because his feelings were hurt. His opponent ran an attack campaign against him, which Masterson felt was ridiculous and that he didn’t need to respond to, since the good people of Dodge City had years of good service from him to pull on and see the attacks were bogus. Instead, the good people thought “why ISN’T he responding?” and voted him out. So, he left Dodge City, eventually joining Wyatt in Tombstone, although I don’t believe he was there for the OK Corral.

What pulled Wyatt and Bat back to Dodge City was an event that never happened. Their mutual friend, Luke Short, had opened a saloon and dance hall in Dodge City. The current sheriff, disliking Short because of his connections to the former lawmen Earp and Masterson, started harassing Short, basically shutting him down for bogus violations, for which other saloons, notably those with connections to corrupt mayor Larry Deger, were allowed to operate with impunity. So Short reached out to Wyatt and Bat and asked for their help. They reached out to Kansas governor George Washington Glick and advised they were going to head over to Dodge City to ensure this bit of uneven corruption didn’t spread, and Glick okay’ed this, and sent his own emissary, Thomas Moonlight, to ensure Mayor Deger cooperated. So, Wyatt shows up, advises the sheriff that he’s here to ensure the law is equally applied and why doesn’t the sheriff just deputize him right now. Which the sheriff did then basically skedaddled. Bat shows up, and the mayor folded like a bad poker hand. The fight Bat had expected never materialized. The Dodge City Peace Commission was put into place on June 10, 1883, and law and order reigned supreme in Dodge City.

This book was an entertaining read, it sort of whipsaws back and forth across the west, but every character and story mentioned, all of it leads back to Dodge City. Every thread you think is a tangent, weaves back into the main story. Clavin has a definite way with words that brings these larger-than-life characters back to reality and grounds them in history.

This review was originally posted on YouTube on November 13, 2022, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.