Return of Little Big Man (10 page)

M
OST OF WHAT YOU
ever heard about Dodge City took place along a couple of blocks of Front Street, which run parallel to the Santa Fe tracks: the Alhambra Saloon, another of them combination barroom-gambling-hall-eateries, this one owned by Pete Beatty and “Dog” Kelley, formerly called “Hound,” both names coming from the greyhounds he raised; the Dodge House hotel; the famous Wright and Beverly general store; the Long Branch and Alamo and Lady Gay saloons, and the Opera House. This was the fancy side of the tracks. On the south or wrong side was the lowdown part, consisting of rougher kinds of saloons and gambling joints, cheaper hotels, and of course whorehouses, one of the more famous of which, from the colored glass in its doorway, giving its name to the type everywhere else, namely, the Red Light.

Now in the late ’70s the cowboys had the town to themselves or would of had not the local businessmen decided that though they desired the money of them Texans just in off the trail and thirsty and in need of entertainment, they wanted it to be handed over peaceably and not accompanied by the lethal exuberance of earlier times, so the lawmen hired or elected included at one time or another many of the noted names with the exception of Wild Bill Hickok: Bat Masterson and his brothers Ed and Jim, Charlie Bassett, Bill Tilghman, Mysterious Dave Mather (supposed to be a descendant of some preacher named Cotton who burned witches back in Massachusetts in the old days), and to be sure, Wyatt Earp, though the last-named while getting most of the subsequent attention of history was probably the least of the bunch, never killing a soul while he was in Dodge and never holding a higher job than assistant town marshal, but his accomplishments was usually greatly exaggerated by them who wrote about him on the basis of his own claims.

Now Bat was good as his word, and when him and Ben Springer opened up their Lone Star Dancehall, they give me a barkeep’s job, and I wore a striped shirt with sleeve garters and sprouted a handlebar mustache, which come out slighter redder than my naturally ginger hair. The Lone Star, as could be told from the name, was designed to attract the cowboys that come up from the state of that designation. Not every single man who herded cattle for a living was a native Texan—and amongst them you could find Mexicans, Indians, breeds, and even some colored fellows what had been born slaves—but it was a convenient handle for all concerned, and sometimes them who had originated someplace else was more sentimental about the Alamo, Sam Houston, and suchlike than those with a natural right to be so, especially if they was drunk, which of course is more or less the only way you seen them if you worked in a place like the Lone Star. They also tended, ten years after the fact, to be still displeased by the outcome of the War Between the States, and as usual not all of them with such strong feelings had even been involved in it.

Bat had gotten some ideas from the McDaniels in Cheyenne, and the Lone Star was one of the more ambitious of the establishments south of the tracks, offering a big dance floor, all kinds of gambling games, a stage for variety shows, an orchestra stand decorated with bunting, and quite a number of girls who might dance on the stage, showing their garters, or with the customers on the floor, and/or entertain privately in their rooms on the second story. Though whoring was not a requirement for a female who worked there, you might say it was a recommendation and the only way to make a decent income. But what I mean to say is, there wasn’t no compulsion or white slavery.

There was those who disapproved of the selling of flesh as a degradation of the fair sex. Aside from preachers, it was a rare man who held this opinion unless it come to his own daughter, sister, wife, or mother. Out West in the time of which I speak, there was the usual distinction between good girls and bad, but if you didn’t consort with a soiled dove you might never have no women at all, there being not that many of the respectable type. So Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, and most of the others had intimate associations of more than a night at a time with sporting women, and the same was true of Wyatt Earp.

Working at the Lone Star, I come to know the girls on the premises well enough, and not all was what if you enjoyed full sight you could call pretty, but all seemed to know how to appeal to a man, and this was sometimes most true of them who was the least attractive in feature or form, like Cockeyed Kitty, Iron-Jaw Tillie, and Liz Big Bottom, for a turn at any of who there might be a waiting line. I expect they could make a fellow live up to a better idea than he normally had of himself, and you can’t ask more of a woman than that.

I was making a nice income tending bar at the Lone Star, where in addition to the wage, a cowboy who had won at faro or chuck-a-luck might ask you to drink on him, and you’d swallow from a glass of cold coffee but credit yourself for what he was paying for whiskey, and there’d be some who would tip generously if you would listen to how they was a-going to skin alive the next greaser they encountered because one cheated them on the sale of a horse, or how no Yankee lived who could put a head on John Wesley Hardin, a famous Texas gunfighter of the day, though I do believe he were in prison down in Texas at this time, so he never had the chance to lock horns with Bat or Wyatt, though there was a claim by Hardin’s admirers that once in Abilene, years before, he had got the drop on none other than Wild Bill “Heycox,” as they called him. If so, that was the first I heard of such, but I’m not saying it couldn’t of happened, not having been at that scene, which was the only way you could test the truth of anything you heard by way of gunfighting. You’d hardly get it from some whiskeyed cowboy with his talk of “John Wesley,” like he was his best friend.

Back to the Lone Star girls, I guess the ones most popular was them that would make a fellow like this think maybe, for as long as he were in bed with them, he
was
J. W. Hardin or maybe his cousin Manning Clements, another with a big rep as a troublemaker.

There was some girls pretty enough to make you wonder why they was doing that, until you considered how good the money was and then the alternative, marrying some sodbuster like their Pa and between childbearing and all the heavy-labor chores, dying young, or staying in a city tenement (for some was Irish from Boston and New York, come West for new opportunities), ditto as to disadvantages as well as breathing bad air. The Lone Star, under Bat Masterson’s ownership, was not the kind of place where a man no matter how much he spent could abuse or mistreat a member of the fair sex just because he was hiring her favors.

I was on good terms with all the girls, and even had a couple I felt especially friendly towards, one because she was so young-looking and the other on account of she seemed so old and tired (though as it turned out, the little one had turned thirty and the other was only two years older and eventually had put by enough money to open her own brothel down the road), and to either of them two I might direct a cowboy who had not yet spent his roll at the bar or in a game of monte or poker. These women seemed more like sisters to me than persons towards who I felt lustful, so for a while there I was amidst all that carnality, being a teetotaller in flesh as well as in alcohol, for pouring all that whiskey, I couldn’t stand the smell when it came to drinking any myself. I reckon I was cleanest of all indulgences there for a while as I ever been my life long, a-working in a den of same, drinking only coffee and with enough money to eat good beef and pay for a nice lodging, I instead lived at a leaky-roof shack of ten rooms, in the red-light district, calling itself a hotel, and unless I could grab a free meal at the Lone Star, I ate hog-and-hominy, as if I was near down and out. I was saving my money for better things.

I decided if I was ever going to make anything of myself, it was more than time, else I’d continue to wander around the country from one plight to the next, as I’d been doing all my life up to that point, with nothing to show for it, meanwhile civilization was settling in. At ten years younger than me, Bat Masterson was half owner of a thriving business. He also run for sheriff of Ford County in the fall of ’77 against Larry Deger, who had been town marshal, a real mean three-hundred-pounder who had arrested him once when Bat sided with some little fellow Deger was beating up in the street. Here was another example of how Bat handled himself the smart way, instead of what a hotter-headed man might of done: the revenge he got on Deger was not shooting him but whipping his fat arse in an election.

These was the years when Dodge was the cattle capital of the West, with the drive of ’78 setting a record at better than a quarter million longhorns, drove up from the Texas range by fifteen hundred men. Crowds like that could mean trouble, not only as to the unruly cowpunchers, but the money they brung to town was alluring to real criminals. Having said which I should add that with a lot of miscreants of them days the situation was real complicated. A fellow might be a thief and even a murderer at one point, but then at another, and by different people, be thought a credit to the community. For example there was a man named Dave Rudabaugh, who had a rep as a desperado and robbed some trains, for which Bat and a posse tracked him down. Rudabaugh escaped punishment by informing on the other members of his gang, after which he swore he was going straight, and he removed to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he up and become a policeman! But then he turned bad again a little later and lived a life of crime till, down in Old Mexico, an outraged mob cut off his head and mounted it atop a pole in the town square.

Bat was sheriff of the whole of Ford County, which included Dodge, but the primary job of keeping peace in the town itself was that of head marshal, formerly fatso Deger, but just as Bat had beat him for sheriff, Bat’s brother Ed got the marshal’s post when Deger was fired, and as his younger brother Jim was an assistant marshal, law enforcement was pretty much dominated by the Masterson family when Dodge was at its height, and not Wyatt Earp, the way you might of heard.

When he worked as only another assistant marshal, Wyatt was best known for beating up disorderly cowboys, either with his fists or by bending the barrel of his Colt’s over their head (like he done to me that time on the buffalo range). But no doubt that was better than killing.

Another thing I want to set the record straight on: given all the commotion that could be caused by big crowds of rowdies under conditions like those, during Bat Masterson’s time in and around Dodge, only seven homicides occurred. Them showdown gunfights happening every few minutes in movie versions of the frontier begun with the make-believe of Eastern scribblers like Ned Buntline, a confidence man, and in fact the tradition has continued ever since by more or less the same type. But you take people like Wyatt Earp, they ain’t going to object when they’re made heroes in print, and a Bill Cody will know how to build a profitable business on it.

Having said as much, I should make it clear that every once in a while there was real bloodshed and somebody got hurt, and now and again they died, but never as the result of a fair and equal draw. Take my word for it, when what’s at stake is one life or another, fair and equal don’t play no part.

Now I’m going to tell you about two of the violent deaths that took place in Dodge during my time there in the late ’70s, for they affected me most personally. Once I become an employee of Bat’s, and especially after he got to be sheriff, I didn’t hang around with him as much as I done in Cheyenne, for he had better things to do, and for a time I saw more of his brother Ed, who was a year older than him and real easygoing. As assistant town marshal and then chief, Ed was one of them genial policemen who smile at passing kids and stop to chew the fat with the storekeepers on their beat. Everybody liked Ed, but that would be better in a place run for the sake of decent women and children, like Dodge City not so many years later, when temperance came and the saloons was turned into soda fountains, if you can believe it, about 1885.

In the Dodge of ’78 it was preferable to be respected over being liked—and for that matter, over being feared, because if a man is scared of another he might get drunk enough to take him on, and someone will get hurt. Whereas if you was held in high respect, like Bat, nobody knew what you was capable of; you had imagination going for you, and a normal man’s fantasy except for sex is mostly about force: who’s got it and who ain’t.

There was a few rules regarding public conduct in Dodge. No horses allowed on the sidewalks, and none could be rid onto the premises of a business, namely into a saloon; firearms could not be carried by anybody not a peace officer or on Army duty, unless they was entering town, when all was obliged to check their weapons at the first place of call, saloon, shop, hotel, et cetera, or after picking up their guns on the way out of town. The public discharge of firearms was prohibited except on the Fourth of July, Christmas, New Year’s Day, and the eves thereof. Public intoxication was taken seriously only if a man in that condition tried to reclaim his weapons or committed an offense against order and decency, like taking a leak in one of the whiskey barrels full of water kept at intervals along the wood sidewalk in case of fire.

If you was to break one of these ordinances after calling Ed Masterson’s attention to it, he would surely do something, but unlike some peace officers, he never went about looking for an excuse to make an arrest. Ed was a live-and-let type of fellow, in a place that was kill-or-be. He ended up shedding more blood, of his own and others’, than did his brother Bat, who nevertheless is the famous one, while Ed has been forgot, and you will see, the same was true with Virgil Earp and his brother Wyatt.

Ed Masterson dropped in frequently to the Lone Star, both on his marshal rounds and off-time, and I got to know him well enough, by which I mean we talked about the usual subjects men cared for, the old days of buffalo hunting, the latest gold or silver strikes, horses, firearms, whiskey, and women.

As to the last-named, you might gather from my previous remarks that every single female to be found in Dodge was a harlot. Now with regard to Deadwood, that wouldn’t of been far wrong, but there was others in Dodge City. It’s just that in my situation it was not usual to run across the trail of schoolteachers and church-women, who didn’t patronize saloons. Respectable females of that time was not supposed to like strong drink or know much about sex even after having ten kids. And a man wasn’t supposed to enjoy himself with them: for that there was whores.