Here, after undue delays, is the capstone to my series about the Wild West—cowboys mostly imaginary, conjured up in the twentieth century to provide idealized heroes from the nineteenth.
Unlike the fictional cowboys I followed as a child, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were real, historical figures. They were authentic Western lawmen. The most cursory reading of their eventful lives will show that their fame was deserved.
Also unlike the fictional cowboys, Earp and Masterson did not cease to exist after the 1870s and 1880s. Both men lived well into the twentieth century, into the era of automobiles and radio and motion pictures. Each, in the new century, tried to package his own image.
Though very different men, they had some things in common. Both were born east of the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War. Too young to become soldiers—though Wyatt tried unsuccessfully to enlist at age thirteen—they were drawn, by circumstance or interest, into the great American West in the years after the Civil War.
Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were rough, complicated men with checkered careers. They gambled, operated on both sides of the law, and pursued affairs or common-law marriages with multiple women.
They also excelled at law enforcement in the wildest towns of the frontier—places like Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone. Each man took part in numerous gunfights and showed himself cool and resourceful under fire. Their lives were hodgepodges of romance, self-interest, irresponsibility, responsibility, and violence.
Earp and Masterson were friends from their time serving together as Dodge City lawmen. They liked and respected each other.
It was remarkable they came through all their adventures unscathed. Masterson did walk with a cane, the result of a pelvic wound in his first gunfight.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, both men drifted into other pursuits—not instead of, but at first in addition to, law enforcement. After the famous 1881 gunfight at O.K. Corral and a flurry of retaliatory raids that followed it, Wyatt met up with Bat Masterson at Albuquerque and both men repaired to Trinidad, Colorado. There, Masterson became, first, a faro dealer in a saloon and later, the town marshal.
Earp soon left Trindad for other challenges. Over the next quarter-century, the footloose Wyatt roamed the west, with his third and final wife Josephine “Sadie” Marcus, blazing his way through law enforcement jobs, saloon ownerships, gambling and sporting interests—he refereed the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey heavyweight championship fight in San Francisco in 1896—and mining ventures, including a flyer in the Klondike gold rush of 1898.
In 1911, when Earp was 63, he and Josephine began living in Los Angeles part-time while also working a mine in the California desert. They continued that pattern of life until his death eighteen years later.
Since he spent time in L.A., Wyatt befriended actors and directors in the nascent Hollywood film industry, serving as an unpaid consultant on several Western films. He became close friends with cowboy actors William S. Hart and Tom Mix and with director John Ford. He exercised a formative influence on the young John Wayne, who met him at Mix’s ranch and by his own admission copied Earp’s walk, talk, and style.
Wyatt wanted his story told on the silver screen. “If the story were exploited on the screen by you,” he wrote to William S. Hart, “it would do much toward setting me right before a public which has always been fed lies about me.” In 1925 he began working with a friend, mining engineer John Flood, on a biography. Unfortunately, Flood was a poor writer, and the project went nowhere.
At the time of his death in 1929, Wyatt Earp’s public reputation was smudgy, due partly to his ambiguous role in the gunfight at O.K. Corral and partly to a public perception that as referee in the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight, he had thrown the fight to Sharkey by an improper ruling. Only in 1931, with the publication of Stuart N. Lake’s extremely flattering biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, did Earp’s reputation begin to soar. Josephine, by hiding unsavory details about his life, played a part in this redemption.
In 1955, 26 years after his death, Wyatt Earp received the distinction of having his own television show, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O’Brian. According to the show’s theme song, sung by the Ken Darby Singers:
Well, he cleaned up the country,
The old Wild West country.
He made law and order prevail.
And none can deny it,
The legend of Wyatt
Forever will live on the trail.
Oh, Wyatt Earp! Wyatt Earp—brave, courageous, and bold—
Long live his fame, and long live his glory,
And long may his story be told.
IMDB lists fifteen feature-length films about Wyatt Earp, ten of them made since the debut of the TV show, the other five earlier—but none made before the 1931 Lake biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall.
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Then, what of Bat Masterson?
Bat spent the 1880s and 1890s dabbling in law enforcement, journalism, dalliance with married women, and the world of prizefighting—not as a fighter but as a second, a timekeeper, and a friend of fighters and promoters.
Eventually, in 1902, he moved to New York City with his wife, Emma.
The day after his arrival, Bat was in trouble, scooped up by New York police who took him for an accomplice of a man they were arresting for bunco. He got the charge dropped but had to pay a ten-dollar fine because of the concealed weapon he was carrying.
A friend got Bat a job as a columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph. His column, “Masterson’s Views on Timely topics,” appeared three times a week from 1903 till his death in 1921. It concerned boxing and other sports-related topics.
Alfred Henry Lewis, the friend who had gotten him the job, also published a fictionalized biography of Bat called The Sunset Trail. He encouraged Bat to write sketches about his adventures, which Lewis published in Human Life magazine. In the same magazine, Masterson provided biogaphical studies of several famed gunfighters, men he had known—Ben Thompson, Wyatt Earp, Luke Short, Doc Holliday, and Bill Tilghman. Other, similar articles were to follow, but Masterson apparently tired of the exercise, and Lewis wrapped up the series with his own article, “The King of the Gun-players: William Barclay Masterson.”
Lewis introduced Bat to President Theodore Roosevelt, who took an immediate liking to him. TR got him appointed deputy U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of New York, with a respectable $2,000 annual salary (equivalent to about $70,000 today). He admonished the former frontier roughneck: “You must be careful not to gamble or do anything while a public officer which might afford opportunity to your enemies and my critics to say that your appointment was improper. I wish you to show this letter to Alfred Henry Lewis and go over the matter with him.” The president was on guard against Masterson’s known propensity to go off the rails. Bat kept the deputy marshal’s job until 1909, when Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, relieved him of that responsibility.
Bat continued writing his boxing column in the Telegraph. He was prominent in the crowd at the Johnson-Willard fight in Havana, Cuba, in 1915, serving as timekeeper or possibly as one of Jess Willard’s seconds.
He died of a heart attack in 1921, at age 67, while sitting at his desk working on his column for the Telegraph. About five hundred people attended his funeral. Attendees included writer Damon Runyon, a friend, who delivered the following eulogy: “He was a 100 percent, 22-karat real man. Bat was a good hater and a wonderful friend. He was always stretching out his hand to some down-and-outer. He had a great sense of humor and a marvelous fund of reminiscence, and was one of the most entertaining companions we have ever known. There are only too few men in the world like Bat Masterson and his death is a genuine loss.”
The epitaph on his tombstone at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City says, “Loved by Everyone.”
Eleven years after Bat’s death, Damon Runyon published a collection of his distinctive New York influenced short stories under the title Guys and Dolls. The stories were later adapted into a hit Broadway musical by Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling, and Abe Burrows. The central character of the stories, and of the musical, was a high-rolling gambler from Colorado named “Sky Masterson.”
And now you know, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.
Next Week: Something Completely Different.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
