8 minute read
Six-Gun Justice by Paul Bishop
DODGE CITY...
Despite their wild west cachet, Tombstone, Abilene, Wichita, and any other legendary gunfight and cattle drive destination lacked the same depth of instant association with the Western as Dodge City. While Tombstone may arguably come in a close second, Dodge City—renowned as The King of the Cowtowns or reviled as The Sodom of the West—was unmistakably the world-wide touchstone that instantly evoked every aspect of the Wild West burned into our brains by uncountable Western movies and television shows. In Dodge City, the legendary Wyatt Earp walked boldly alongside the equally legendary Matt Dillon, with popular culture seeming to make no discernable dividing line between the real and the fictional.
I wasn’t raised on iconic Dodge City-centric Westerns such as Gunsmoke, Bat Masterson, or The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. The closest I came to Westerns growing up was watching after school reruns of The Rifleman. However, despite the coolness of Lucas McCain’s rapid fire rifle work, once the pseudo-espionage world of James Bond and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. took over the movie theaters and TV channels, I happily embraced the era of suave spies, deadly gadgets, megalomaniacal villains, and girls.
While The Magnificent Seven and The Professionals kept the door to Westerns open for me, it wasn’t until the proliferation of streaming channels that I discovered the joys of the aforementioned Western series as well as so many others from Wanted Dead or Alive to Rawhide, Have Gun Will Travel, The Wild Wild West (my cross-over drug), and the amazing proliferation of so many other shoot-em-ups and horse operas.
Gunsmoke, Bat Masterson, and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp also played their part in what, in my case, has become a bone deep obsession with the Western genre in all its forms. It was that obsession that is at the heart of the Six-Gun Justice Podcast and has sustained my enthusiasm for over 200 episodes.
The year before COVID turned the world upside down, I had the opportunity to travel to Wichita to deliver the keynote address at the annual Kansas Writers Conference. The gig was also the excuse my wife and I needed to make a very roundabout pilgrimage from Lawrence, Kansas, where we have family, through Abilene, and then on to Dodge City, before winding our way to Wichita and the conference.
I didn’t know what to expect in Dodge City. Would it now be just another city, or would it retain something of its Wild West, or in actuality, Wild Mid-West history. I was concerned when
I learned The Boot Hill Museum was the main tourist attraction. However, my anxieties proved unfounded as the museum was everything I could have hoped it would be. And since we visited, it has been expanded to almost twice its size and would be well worth a trip back. In the city itself there was enough of a Western legacy to make the road trip worthwhile, and as touristy as it was, there was indisputably a special Western connection standing next to the larger than life statues of Matt Dillion and Wyatt Earp at the city center.
With this issue’s focus on Dodge City, I thought I would move on from reminiscences to see what
Dodge City-related books I have in arm’s reach on my bookshelves. First up was Tom Calvin’s seminal Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West. This was a fascinating and very readable story of true friendships, romances, gunfights, and adventures shared by a remarkable cast of characters, including the titular Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, as well as so many other recognizable names such as Wild Bill Hickock, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, and Theodore Roosevelt. If I had to pick one Dodge City book to recommend, this would be it.
A close second, however, would be another title from my shelf, Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West. Authors Robert R. Dykstra and JoAnn Manfra looked through the lens of how cultural myths arise to see how Dodge City, of all the violent cities associated with the Wild West, was the only one to spawn a specific warning sobriquet—as in, Get outta Dodge.
One of my favorite books with a connection to Dodge City is Richard O’Connor’s Bat Masterson biography, which provided the basis for the Bat Masterson television show starring Gene Barry. While there were various editions of this book, the most highly sought after (and therefore expensive) is the paperback tie-in to the TV show featuring Gene Barry in his Bat Masterson garb on both the front and back covers. While a bit of a slow read by today’s standards, and having little to do between the covers with the actual TV show, I found it intriguing enough for me to seek out O’Connor’s other biographies of Western legends, such as Wild Bill Hickok and Pat Garrett.
As I am an aficionado of Western TV tie-in novels, I couldn’t pass up the chance to talk about the show that has done the most to cement Dodge City in the public consciousness—Gunsmoke. As benefits the longest running and arguably most popular TV Western, Gunsmoke, along with Bonanza, generated substantially more TV tie-in novels than any other Western TV shows.
The first Gunsmoke tie-in appeared in 1957. Simply titled Gunsmoke, it was a collection of ten show scripts novelized by Don Burns. This was followed in 1970 by an original Gunsmoke novel—also simply titled Gunsmoke—written by Chris Stratton . Next came The Man from Alberta in 1973, a standalone Gunsmoke novel written by Canadian journeyman hack, James Moffatt. Published in England only, this one is strictly for completists as it’s obvious from reading the book Moffat had never seen an episode of the show and was probably working strictly from character sketches of the main participants. Copies can be found, but you’ve been fully warned.
In 1974, Award Books published four authorized Gunsmoke novels written under the pseudonym Jackson Flynn. To the best of my knowledge, the second book in this series, Shootout, was written by top Western writer Gordon D. Shirreffs with the other three books, The Renegades, Duel At Dodge City, and Cheyenne Vengeance written by Don Bensen about whom I know nothing. However, what’s unusual about this tie-in series is the books written by Bensen are all novelizations of Gunsmoke scripts—the first book being adapted from the 1973 two-part episode, “A Game of Death an Act of Love,” by Paul F. Edwards—while the book written by Gordon Shirreffs is an original tie-in novel. This is the only example of a series of TV tie-ins of which I’m aware that is a mix of both novelizations and original novels. It’s usually one or the other.
First run episodes of Gunsmoke appeared on CBS for twenty years, but currently, at any given moment, there is an episode of Gunsmoke being rerun somewhere in the world with Matt Dillon keeping the streets of Dodge City safe. This has kept Gunsmoke fandom thriving. In 1999, twenty-five years after Gunsmoke was cancelled by CBS, Boulevard Books commissioned a three-book series of original Gunsmoke novels, Gunsmoke, Dead Man’s Witness, and Marshal Festus, written by the prolific and always readable Gary McCarthy These can be easily tracked down at a reasonable price on eBay or from other sources and are all worth reading.
Whitman Publishing also jumped on the Gunsmoke bandwagon with two of their “board book” TV tie-in novels for young readers. The first, again simply titled Gunsmoke, was written by Robert Turner and appeared in 1958. Gunsmoke: Showdown on Front Street, written by Paul S. Newman , was published in 1969, over ten years later, showing the enduring popularity of the show. For completists, there was also a 1958 juvenile Big Little Book, also simply titled Gunsmoke, written by Doris Schroder.
However, the latest iteration of Gunsmoke tiein novels hit the bookshelves in 2005. The six books in the series, Blood Bullets and Buckskin, Blizzard of Lead, The Last Dog Soldier, Dodge the Devil, The Reckless Gun, and Day of the Gunfighter, were published in paperback by Signet and written by respected Western stalwart Joseph West. Each entry in the series contained a forward by James Arness voicing his appreciation of the novels, which was a unique touch for a tie-in series. It’s also notable that the name Gunsmoke emblazoned across each cover was followed by the trademark symbol for the first time. This series was my favorite of all the Gunsmoke tie-ins, and I highly recommend it.
That’s it for the Dodge City-related books I can quickly lay my hands on from the bookshelves nearest me. They all provided excitement and have the ability to transport readers to the dusty and dangerous streets walked by legends we all know.
—PAUL BISHOP is a well-known novelist, screenwriter, and Western-genre enthusiast, as well as the co-host of the Six-Gun Justice Podcast, which is available on all major streaming platforms or on the podcast website: www.sixgunjustice.com/
