The Buffalo Hunters

Bat Masterson, with James Elder, a fellow buffalo hunter. Before Canadian-born Bartholomew “Bat” Masterson was a famous lawman or sports writer, he was a rustic buffalo hunter. When just 17, he convinced a couple of his brothers to go with him to the great herds in western Kansas, and try their hand at the hide business. They were always game for whatever Bat was bent on doing, and went with him, and soon they were well acquainted with the messy business of massacring a doomed mass of wool-bearing bison, which blackened the plains as far as the eye could see.

It was 1870. There was no season on buffalo, no bag limit, the only limitation was a man's ambition. There was nothing illegal about wiping out a whole species. When Ed and Jim tired of it and took a job with a railroad contractor, Bat saw too much money left on the table, and stuck with hunting, teaming up with other determined hide entrepreneurs. This was where Masterson met several legends-to-be, opportunists also roaming North Texas, including Wyatt Earp and Billy Dixon.

It is believed that this photograph was made in Kansas during that period, when Bat was around 21. The other man in the tintype looks very much like a fellow buffalo hunter, known as James B. Elder, a good friend of future lawman Bill Tilghman, who was also a Texas buffalo hunter. In 1872 young Tilghman had negotiated a government contract to supply buffalo meat to the U.S. Army, and was photographed with Elder, with buffalo guns and flowing hair. You will soon observe how robust and handsome these men were in their earlier years. Many of my images of these western legends are tintypes, and made of them when very young, not the older, fatter versions of them we are accustomed to seeing in history books.

Bat was still on the plains in 1874, when the Comanches and Kiowas attacked Adobe Walls, Texas. Angry over the annihilation of the great bison herds, Quanah Parker led some 500 braves in a frontal assault of the buffalo hunters there, but with disappointing effect. Promised by a Kiowa mystic that their shields would make them bullet-proof, the Indians attacked the hunters wildly for days, but found the fortifications too strong, and the Winchester repeating rifles horrifyingly accurate. The Indians finally gave up, and it was considered to be a great battle and an important victory for the hunters, who were soon to be out of business anyway, as the bison herds were quickly disappearing.

Bat Masterson did not write so much about his own exploits, as he did others of his time, but left a trail of his presence in the gambling towns throughout the West, where today his name is bantered around as if he were a founder. After the buffalo had been nearly exterminated, Bat went to Dodge City where he began a brief law enforcement career, and where he was known to be fair and merciful. Ed and Jim Masterson soon joined him there as deputies, and the Masterson name became respected and even celebrated. But when brother Ed was killed in a senseless shooting with a drunk, Bat began to seek a less life-threatening occupation. Eventually Dodge City tired of gun play and elected less forceful peace officers, and Bat moved on to Tombstone and Denver and beyond.

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, and 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, corporate militia contractor, and finally syndicated sports writer... in New York!

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 and Urilla Earp. *(Above) 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. And looking upon their youthful innocence in this tintype, 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 a youthful reason for 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.

Many have observed that it seems “The good die young.” This dovetails with the Darwinist fatalism of the “two kinds found out West: the quick and the dead.” But perhaps it's just that we quickly immortalize our loved ones as we cleanse the memories of those who die “prematurely.” Still, those who survive usually live lives of toil and snare, struggle and defeat, forever missing those gentle young souls and the sweetness they brought to every crossroad. For Wyatt Earp his marriage was a short-lived perfection, a tiny season of wholesome happiness, and then he stumbled into a lifetime of confrontations and many unfortunate turns and ironic twists; turns which led him to become the most famous American gunman. ******* Sometimes working on the side of the Law- but always debatable was whether he was on the side of good or evil, or in the end, just reflecting the pain inside him, and thus merely satisfying himself.

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 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.