“Courage to step forward and fight with a gun to the death is one of the three qualities a man must have to last long in this dangerous business. A man can have as much courage as he can get and still be a pathetic failure as a ‘gunfighter,’ as men in the West who have earned a reputation as ‘killers’ are often called. Courage is of little use to a man trying to handle a confrontation with a gun if he is inexperienced in using the weapon he is about to use. Moreover, he may have both courage and experience and still continue to make mistakes if he lacks decision-making skills.”
– W.B. Masterson, 1907
In the city, where almost every confrontation took place at close range, Bat wore his Colt cross-mounted rig with the stock covered and carried on the front, making it virtually impossible for anyone to disarm him from behind. He had seen several representatives of the law get shot dead, some with their own weapons taken from behind and used against them. Note the particular width of the front sight requested from Colt by Masterson.
By the time Bat Masterson received this fantastic nickel-plated six-shooter from Colt he was already a legend, as famous as his friend Wyatt Earp, Charlie Bassett and Bill Tilghman. While many knew Masterson only by his reputation as a Dodge City lawman, or as a high-class gambler, old friends like Earp and Tilghman, who had known Bartholomew Masterson in his youth, remembered him as a buffalo hunter in buckskin, skinner and cavalry scout long before his days as sheriff in the Queen of Cowtowns, and a full decade before he wrote the letter to Colt in July 1885, in which he ordered the seventh of eight single-action revolvers he would own.
Born in Quebec, Canada, in 1853, the Masterson family moved to Kansas at the time of the War of Secession, and both Bat and his older brother Ed would eventually end up in Dodge City as law enforcers, but long before Dodge City they made a name for themselves as buffalo hunters; Bat in particular distinguished himself as a Sharps rifle shooter defending the small hunting settlement of Adobe Walls in 1874 against a combined Comanche and Cheyenne attack led by the notorious Quanah Parker.
After a five-day siege, Bat and 27 other hunters prevailed and the Indians retreated. Adobe Walls, an old trading post in the Texas Panhandle, was already famous for an earlier battle a decade earlier that took place during the War of Secession in which Col. Kit Carson and the men of the expeditionary party had foiled a Comanche attack on U.S. Cavalry forces sent west to protect settlers on the frontier. Masterson’s settlement at Adobe Walls was just a mile and a half away from where Carson emerged victorious in 1864.
It was in the early 1870s that Bartholomew decided to change his name to William Barclay Masterson. At that time most crowds already knew him as Bart (short for Bartholomew), but he preferred Bat, and the nickname stuck.
Still in their early twenties, Bat and Ed Masterson became friends with several other famous buffalo hunters who would also be destined to make a name for themselves in Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, William Tilghman, and Neal Brown. Their lives would be intertwined for decades, particularly Bat and Wyatt’s.
The buffalo trade in the early 1870s eventually led the Masterson brothers to an emerging camp in Kansas called Buffalo City, where the Santa Fe Railroad would soon pass through to pick up shipments of buffalo hides heading east. A. A. Robinson, the chief engineer of the Santa Fe Railroad, had laid out roads for the small Kansas tent city Hells on Wheels in the summer of 1871 and renamed it Dodge City.
It became a meeting place for buffalo hunters in summer and a safe haven from the wild plains in winter. It was here that Bat learned another trade, gambling, and in this, too, he excelled.
Scouts and lawmen
By the early 1870s Bat had tested himself with both Sharps rifles and Colt revolvers, and his experience as a buffalo hunter and Indian adversary had made him the ideal choice for American Cavalry Scouts. In 1874 he was hired by Col. Nelson A. Miles.
Bat Masterson returned to live in Dodge City in 1885 although his role as representative of the law was “occasional,” as he delegated to the needs of city or county sheriffs. On July 24, 1885 Bat sent an order to Colt for two revolvers, which according to factory records were completed for shipment on July 30, 1885.
Return to Dodge City
In the time away from Dodge City (now part of Ford County in Kansas) this/the city had grown from a crude buffalo camp to a bustling cow town. When Bat returned in the late spring of 1876 he found a lawless city with few law enforcement representatives, a city that Hays City Sentinel had christened it as “the death of Kansas…Its structural limitations are represented by the fact that it is the meeting place of all unemployed rascals within a seven-state radius.
The chief is polygamy, its code of honor consists of thieves’ sense of morality, and it knows no decency…” The masthead The Kinsley Graphic was somewhat less kind, calling Dodge the “beautiful biblical Babylon of the frontier.” And it was in Dodge that Earp, Charlie Bassett, and the Masterson brothers would early on earn their reputations as lawmen by settling this place on the rocks.
It has been written that Bat first served as a policeman in Dodge City in 1876 under Wyatt Earp, but if so, it was for a short time as Masterson spent the first part of that year in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where it is likely that he acquired the J.C. Collins gun belt and holster that were one of the many tools he wore as a lawman. Bat’s interest in Cheyenne, however, was strictly in the gambling tables where he had raked in a nice haul before heading to Dodge. On the way he ran into Wyatt and Morgan Earp in Sidney, Nebraska.
They raised the stakes in Dodge, and Wyatt suggested that if Bat went back he should run for county sheriff, but he had not yet arrived that Bill Tilghman and Neal Brown asked Bat if he would like to make another run as a buffalo hunter. He agreed to join them by taking his faithful Sharps off the retirement nail and putting his new Colt six-shooter on his belt.
It was during this hunting trip that Masterson demonstrated his skills with both revolver and rifle to the delight of Tilghman, who was also getting good results with a six-shot revolver. “I saw Bat shoot at a tin can thrown in the air, with a six-shot revolver, for twenty-five cents a shot, and he managed to make some money from it.” Since he enjoyed performing tricks with the gun, Bat took his gunfighting skills very seriously and put them down in black and white in one of his 1907 articles that “…looking through the sights is essential when shooting at an opponent who is returning fire.”
The fact that Masterson was convinced that using the sight was a better choice than firing while holding the weapon at hip height, as he was often reported to have done, finds support in the first of many written requests for weapons sent to Colt. In 1879 he requested a custom-engraved, single-action revolver that, in addition to being silver-plated with Mexican eagles carved into the mother-of-pearl grips, had a front sight that was slightly higher than normal, in keeping with his personal taste.
Article continues in next issue….
