7 minute read
Bat Masterson and the Early Days of Dodge City
Seventeen-year-old Bat Masterson and his nineteen-year-old brother Ed had been working in western Kansas as buffalo skinners.
In the spring of 1872, the Santa Fe’s route was abuzz with railroad contractors and workers. The Santa Fe was paying top dollar to get the tracks laid in time. A member of a work gang could make two dollars a day, which was good pay in those days. The gangs were averaging more than a mile a day of track laid.
Bat and Ed, along with family friend Theodore Raymond, were looking for work. The Santa Fe contracted with a Topeka business, Wiley & Cutter, to grade the railroad track bed. Wiley & Cutter subcontracted with Raymond Ritter for some of the grading. Ritter offered Bat, Ed, and Theodore good pay to grade a five-mile section of track bed from Fort Dodge to Buffalo City. They accepted the offer, and, starting at Fort Dodge, they worked long hours through the spring and summer until they reached Buffalo City in July, finishing their job.
The town was booming when they got there. A. A. Robinson, the Santa Fe’s chief engineer, was laying out the town’s streets, and its name was changed from Buffalo City to Dodge City. The town was right in the heart of prime buffalo hunting territory, and now that trains could reach it, hides could be quickly transported east. The first train to town experienced a two-hour delay due to a threemiles wide and ten-miles long buffalo herd crossing the tracks. Not only did the trains haul buffalo hides east, but they also brought west saloonkeepers, gamblers, and sporting gals. Soon Dodge City acquired additional names: “Hell on the Plains” and “The Wickedest Town in America.”
Raymond Ritter met Bat, Ed, and Theodore in Dodge, and he paid them a small amount of the money he owed them for their efforts. He toldthem he needed to get the balance of three hundred dollars from Wiley & Cutter. Ritter headed east, promising he would return shortly with the cash. Bat, Ed, and Theodore, low on cash, realized after several weeks that Ritter had duped them.
Short on cash due to Raymond Ritter’s dishonesty, Bat and Ed Masterson, along with Theodore Raymond, needed to earn a livelihood. They left Dodge, returning to the buffalo range. Riding southeast to Kiowa Creek, they joined hunting partners Tom Nixon and Jim White ’s large and experienced buffalo hunting camp. Late in November 1872, Jim Masterson , Ed and Bat’s younger brother, and Henry Raymond , Theodore’s younger brother, joined them. Henry kept a journal for 1872 and 1873, recording events in and around Dodge.
Ed and Bat had now graduated from skinners to buffalo hunters while the Raymond brothers and Jim worked mainly as skinners. Not only did they skin the buffalo for their hides, but they also butchered the carcasses and sold the meat in Dodge. Bat met and became friends with frontiersman and buffalo hunter, Billy Dixon, who later described Bat. “He was a chunk of steel, and anything that struck him in those days always drew fire.”
Henry Raymond’s journal entries are sparse but interesting. Here are a few:
Saturday, November 30, 1872: “Ed and Bat and me killed and butchered 17 buffalos. [sic] Jim pegged.”
Wednesday, December 11, 1872: “Bat, Abe, Ed, Jim, Rigny and me went to Indian camp to trade.”
Friday, December 20, 1872: “very cold day. Shook snow off hides. The[odore] and Bat went to Big Johns. Started to town. 4 bull whackers here to spend eve. Sang songs and played violin. Snowed.”
Wednesday, December 25, 1872: “Christmas day. Shot at a mark to see whos [sic] treat. Ed and me best.”
The buffalo disappeared from around Kiowa Creek. Tom Nixon headed back to his wife and ranch on the outskirts of Dodge. Bat, Ed, and the others decided to follow his example and rode back to town on January 1, 1873. The Raymond boys, Ed, and Jim all boarded the train for home, but Bat stayed in Dodge. On nice winter days, he rode out buffalo hunting with Tom Nixon and Jim White. In the spring, he resumed full-time buffalo hunting. Henry Raymond and Ed Masterson returned to Dodge toward the end of February. Henry continued buffalo hunting and skinning, but Ed found a job in town working at Jim “Dog” Kelley’s Alhambra Saloon. Kelley’s nickname was “Dog” because he was known for his pack of racing greyhounds.
After the Santa Fe railroad came through Dodge City on its way to the Colorado territorial line, the town boomed. It rose from a tent city servicing off-duty soldiers to more permanent frame buildings serving as a booming marketplace where buffalo hunters sold their hides to be loaded onto freight cars and shipped east. The hunters bought supplies and ammunition. They spent their money on drinking sprees, gambling, and women. Within a year of its existence, fifteen men had been killed and buried in the new Boot Hill cemetery. Residents formed a vigilance committee arbitrarily dispensing justice as they saw fit. Henry Raymond, still journaling and writing detailed letters, witnessed killings sanctioned by the vigilance committee and murders committed in the open. For instance, on Thursday, March 13, 1873, hearing gunshots, Henry ran into the street to see a crowd gathering around Charles Burns , who had been shot and was trying to crawl away from Tom Sherman . While holding a large-caliber revolver, Sherman ran after Burns, caught him, then stood over him, saying to the crowd, “I’d better shoot him again, hadn’t I, boys?” Sherman shot Burns in the head, blowing out his brains. Henry wrote in a letter, “All I could learn was Sherman had killed a friend of Burns and thought it would be safer to have him out of the way.” Dodge City would remain a wide-open lawless town. It would not be incorporated until November 5, 1875.
A friend of Bat’s arrived in Dodge from Granada, Colorado, the Santa Fe’s current end of the line. He told Bat that Raymond Ritter, the contractor who never paid Theodore, Ed, and Bat for grading the railroad bed, was in Granada but would be leaving with three thousand dollars in cash. He was expected to be on the next eastbound train, and that train would be making a stop in Dodge. The news spread through town that the man who stiffed the Masterson boys and Theodore Raymond would be passing through. Everyone wondered what the Mastersons would do.
On Tuesday, April 15, 1873, the eastbound train pulled into town. A crowd gathered, watching Bat as he boarded the train searching the passenger cars. The crowd saw Ritter emerge onto the platform of one of the cars. Bat then walked onto the platform. Bat’s six-shooter was cocked and leveled on Ritter as he demanded the three hundred dollars Ritter owed them. Ritter appealed to the crowd that he was being robbed, but no one came to his defense. Bat told Ritter he was not leaving town alive if he didn’t hand over what he owed them. Ritter said the money was in his valise inside the car. Bat called to Henry Raymond in the crowd to fetch Ritter’s valise. Bat asked Henry to hand Ritter the valise and then told Ritter to count out three hundred dollars and give it to him. After Ritter complied with Bat’s order, Bat allowed him back into the railroad car with the remainder of his money. The jovial crowd cheered as Bat led them to the Alhambra Saloon, where Ed worked and bought them a round of drinks.
After distributing their share of the money to Ed and Theodore, Bat teamed up with George Mitchell in May and left Dodge on a long buffalo hunt.
—BILL MARKLEY’S Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson: Lawmen of the Legendary West won a 2020 bronze nonfiction Will Rogers Medallion. A Western Writers of America member, Bill has written for True West and Wild West and ten books. In 2015, he was sworn in as an honorary Dodge City Marshal.
