
Bat was known in later years to often circumvent the law, when it did not serve his own vision of justice. He became a “sporting man,” a professional gambler, moving like a cat from boom-town to boom-town, always pouncing on those foolish with their money. This was nothing illegal, and Masterson's reputation with his handgun kept complaints to a minimum. He also dabbled in boxing promotions in Colorado, and managed "Kid" McCoy, one of the most famous boxers of his day. The tintype above is believed to be a rare original photograph of Masterson posing with two of his boxing associates, Kid Mccoy and William Muldoon. His fame brought him all kinds of professional opportunities. Masterson even managed small armies of gunmen who enforced railroad sovereignty, when guns were the only solution. The very idea of the presence of Masterson and company was enough to quell most confrontations.

Buffalo hunter, Sheriff, gambler, boxing trainer and promoter, corporate militia contractor, and finally syndicated sports writer... in New York! Above is a cabinet card portrait from my collection which I believe to be of Bat Masterson. Cabinet cards were more expensive, but were made from negatives and copies could be ordered at the customer's convenience. Tintypes remained the standard on the frontier, however. The tintype below is another portrait of Masterson I have acquired, probably made while he was gambling in Colorado.

The celebrated Western gunman used his fame to establish a very respectable journalism career, where eastern dandies bought him drinks and begged to hold his pistol. Whenever he was short on cash, he would sell another one of his double action revolvers, releasing dozens of such handguns among deep-pocketed but unsuspecting fans, making many a tipsy collector a devoted admirer of the living legend; the man who tamed Dodge City.

Well, they were his pistols. Even if he had just acquired them. There was nothing illegal...

Wyatt Earp. Above is a majorly Photoshopped image, which I also colored- of an Earp doppelganger. (It might be Virgil his older brother). But admit it, this is what you want to see! Unfortunately I have only found one image so far of Wyatt Earp, and it will be shown elsewhere, in the Lawman section. But back to the buffalo hunters. It was 1870, and Illinois-born Wyatt Earp had many hard and spiritually dark years in front of him. After the Civil War the Earp tribe had migrated in wagons from Illinois to California and then back to the Midwest. There was a restlessness about them. After following his family to Missouri, he was 22 when he married pretty Urilla Sutherland. Wyatt may still have harbored hopes then of living a fairly “decent” and pastoral lifestyle like the one he had grown up in. Urilla and his union with her have rarely been acknowledged in Wyatt Earp's many biographies, but her death may have been the turning point in his life as well as a continued source of discontent and the reason behind his reckless behavior.

There are cryptic legends surrounding the circumstances, but all we know for sure is that their marital bliss was made tragically brief when Urilla died nine months later, during childbirth. Losing a wife and child together is devastating for anyone. And they say everyone deals with grief differently. But something was birthed in those dark days, something freeing, yet capable of super human resolve. Wyatt Earp no longer gave a damn. He had nothing left to lose, nothing to gain, no dream to build, no cherished home to preserve. ******* This kind of heartbreak was not that uncommon in those times, when women often had birthing complications and medical services were lacking or incompetent. Urilla was laid to rest in the cemetery in Milford, Missouri, and along with her were buried any aspirations Wyatt Earp might have entertained of stability or propriety.

There are uncharitable speculations that Urilla's and the baby's death were blamed on Wyatt, because afterwards his in-laws were angry with him for whatever he did or failed to do on their behalf. Our imaginations could provide many explanations of what might have transpired, but it would be unfair to form conclusions. ******* Bat Masterson claimed to admire and know Wyatt Earp well, and observed a rare kind of courage in the man, which among his peers there was found no comparison. Masterson said that most men displayed what was interpreted as courage when they were actually only striving to meet other's expectations of them. ******* But Wyatt Earp acted to meet his own inner standard, only caring to maintain his self-respect. Masterson said that he “knew no braver, no more desperate man” in all the American West, that he was “absolutely destitute of physical fear.” And that fierce character was born, if not finished and freed upon Urilla's passing.

Whatever happened, Wyatt's path from then on betrayed a wild side, determined to forget that wholesome life and its painful memories, as he seemed to enter into a period of depression, hedonism and dysfunction; Constantly moving, taking chances, flirting with danger; a man unafraid to risk everything, his life included. Wyatt decided to enter law enforcement like his father, and bizarrely ended up running against his own brother Newton. He beat him handily, proving that he was popular and trusted at that point to “keep the peace.” But he was soon in trouble for collecting taxes and failing to turn them over to the County. Here we may get a foreshadowing of one of Wyatt Earp's serious flaws- that of embarrassingly poor accountability, or downright irresponsible behavior as a public servant. We can try to justify his actions, or lack of them, but the point was that Wyatt Earp, ever self-satisfied, never cared whether others approved of him or not, and rarely gave arguments in his own defense.
Wyatt Earp was accused of malfeasance and sued by the county, and one town even confiscated a county mowing machine to recoup their lost funds. Lamar County, Missouri was in an uproar. Perhaps indignant, but certainly unappreciated, Wyatt clammed up and decided to move on. But this early failure had terrible consequences, and would require years to recover from.

Hence began a manic-depressive pattern which provided deeps ruts for Wyatt to wallow in. He fell into reckless company and sought easy money. A year later he was arrested along with some accomplices for horse stealing in the Indian Territory of Arkansas, where government horses were provided to the Native Americans. The Indians or their corrupt Indian agents would illegally barter or sell these horses to traders and “entrepreneurs,” like Earp. Anyone caught with government horses besides U.S Cavalry or Indians was considered a horse thief. Since the Indians had gotten them free, and they were supplied by the U.S. Government, these were considered soft crimes, like bootlegging alcohol to the same Native Americans, the kind of lucrative swindling which lured many young men, like the Daltons during their brief law enforcement careers. ******* But this kind of predatory opportunism indicates that Wyatt was in the process of throwing his life away, after scandal and depression began to make Urilla's death the central and crippling event of his life.

Wyatt managed to escape from the jail, and being hung for horse stealing, and when he was through running, he landed in Peoria, Illinois. It was going to get a lot worse before it got any better. Wyatt and his brother Morgan were running together in Illinois at this time, a lifestyle saturated with booze, prostitutes and seasonal bison massacres in western Kansas. The early 1870's were a messy blur, until Wyatt was arrested a couple of times in a brothel, and labeled in the newspaper as the “Peoria bummer.” Later the impression would be created that he was gainfully employed hunting for buffalo in north Texas, where he first met Bat Masterson. Much later his various biographies would always choose to emphasize his part in the mindless extermination of the American Bison, rather than how he spent his time whore-mongering or pimping in the off-season.

All of this debauchery may sound like a slippery slope, but in those days it was a veritable police academy, as many famous Old West characters spent their youth harvesting buffalo hides, or gambling in saloons, or dating or even managing prostitutes. Sometimes all of the above. The Masterson brothers, the Earp brothers, Billy Dixon, Bill Tilghman, Wild Bill Hickok, and of course Buffalo Bill were just a few. They were living hard and playing hard in a wasteland of lawlessness and butchery, an unforgiving home of the “quick and the dead.” These were the pillars of Hidetowns. ******* Soon the Peoria Bummer would move to Wichita, Kansas to start again, where his brother James operated a brothel, and he brought his woman “Sarah,” alias Sally Heckel with him, where they joined James's wife Bessie Ketchum in running a brothel from 1874 to 1876. The rigor and depravity of buffalo hunting made James Earp's family business seem magnetic and luxurious. Wyatt Earp had lots of choices to make about his life, and whether he would ever do anything to return to the man who was once the apple of Urilla's eye.
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