Ep. 09: On Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp's Wingmen

Come along with author Bryan Burrough as he dives into the odd back stories of Wyatt Earp’s hot-blooded wingmen, Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson. Thank you to our sponsor, Tecovas tecovas.com. Follow now on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu?si=56a282df832a4bd2, iHeart, and YouTube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O&si=TG3vGnVvFhznWz0g. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  I've always thought the hype around Dodge City, Kansas, supposedly the most violent town in the Old West, was strange. Lots of writers want to paint it as this ultra-violent place overrun by bad guys and, you know, chaos and craziness. And really, sorry, it was never that, not after its first years. The real appeal of Dodge, I've always suspected, one of the reasons it's connected so deeply with the American psyche, has to do more with the story that took place there. A story not of chaos and evil, but of friendship and connection. If you think of those years as a movie, and yeah, lots of Hollywood producers obviously have, it's an ensemble drama built around this one shining character, Wyatt Earp, but

• 2:21Speaker 04

  with strong supporting roles. And by support, I mean actual support, because Wyatt Earp doesn't become Wyatt Earp, and Dodge City doesn't become Dodge City without the two friendships Earp forged there with his two best pals, Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson. Both of them saved his life, but they couldn't have been more different men. One of them sickly and endlessly cranky, quarrelsome, unpopular, argumentative, not well-liked. The other, affable, a bro, a guy to drink beer with. One would die alone, far from all he'd ever known. The other would go on to international fame, not to mention friendships with the biggest

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  names of the era, Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt. He would sleep in the White House. The only thing Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson had in common was a loyalty to Wyatt Earp. In a way, it's almost like a platonic love story. How that happened, well, it's one of the great tales of the Old West.

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  Hey, y'all, it's Brian again. Thanks for joining us. Let's talk about Doc's story first, because it's, well, unique. There is no other gunfighter quite like him. He's gone down as one of the Old West's great oddballs, a Georgia-born consumptive who wandered the frontier in hopes the climate might improve his health. His illness left him weak, sometimes even unsteady, often with a violent cough. Bat Masterson once said he was so weak, a child could beat him up. No doubt aware of his weakness, Holliday probably resorted to weaponry more often than most. Either the Colt he wore on his right hip, a Derringer he usually hid somewhere on his

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  body, or most famously, this massive knife he also carried, which he dubbed "the hell bitch," which I just love, because it suggests a well of playfulness beneath his famed quarrelsome streak.

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  Physically, Doc is usually described as 5'10" and thin. His weight went healthy, maybe 170, but late in life, when his health began to fail, it could have been as low as 120. A Denver newspaper termed him, quote, "a delicate gentlemanly man." He was neither. John Henry Holliday was born in 1851 to a well-educated family in northern Georgia that during the Civil War fled Sherman's March to the southern town of Valdosta, way down by the Florida border. Doc's father served in the Mexican War and as a major in the Civil War.

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  He served as mayor in Valdosta, so this was a pretty prominent family, but also kind of cursed by disease that struck so many in those years. Tuberculosis, sometimes called consumption, or the white death. Tuberculosis bacteria, spread through airborne droplets typically by coughing, settled in the lungs and commonly led to a long, slow, wheezing death. Doc's mother succumbed to it in 1866, when he was 15. He had an adopted brother who died of it, too.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Up to that point, Doc seems to have been an unremarkable kid, smart certainly, and, as we said, well-educated. He attended Valdosta Institute, where he was taught grammar, rhetoric, and classical languages, including Latin and ancient Greek. When his mother died, his father remarried, and that's when Doc's biographers say, he began to act out. There were standard adolescent hijinks, but sometimes with a hint of menace. The one that sticks with me was when an angry classmate challenged him to a mock duel, and Holliday insisted on using an actual loaded gun. His friends had to explain to him the whole duel idea was just a joke.

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  In 1870, when he was 19, Doc was packed off to dental school in Philadelphia. Afterward, he joined a practice in St. Louis, then quickly moved to another in Atlanta, probably because he wanted something closer to home. But then, something happened. Exactly what is still a matter of debate to this day. Years later, Bat Masterson wrote that Doc was obliged to flee the state of Georgia after he'd murdered two black soldiers who refused to leave a favored white swimming hole back in Valdosta. No one's ever found documented evidence this was true, but it's pretty clear something happened, because after this story made the rounds for a while, decades after Holliday

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  was gone, in fact, his relatives actually acknowledged it. Their spin, predictable, I guess, was that Doc had only fired over the men's heads and hadn't actually shot them. Me, I kind of trust Bat Masterson on this. He obviously heard it from Doc, and around that same time, we do know Doc did leave the state and his shiny new job in Atlanta. This time, he moved to Texas, to Dallas, where he joined a dental practice run by one of his father's old friends. And whatever happened at that swimming hole, there was now another pressing reason to head west, because in 1873, when he was 22, Doc himself was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

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  Was given only months to live, in fact. Back then, it was widely believed that those with TB could live longer, fuller lives in a dry climate, so the move to Texas was, on its face, an effort to extend his life, and it did. For a time, it looked like Doc would thrive in Dallas. He and his partner won awards for their dental work at the county fair. Best Set of Teeth in Gold ran one of the awards, but they dissolved the practice soon after, I'm guessing because of the hacking cough Doc had developed was not ideal for dealing with patients close up, you know? For a hot moment, Doc opened his own practice, but that doesn't seem to have lasted very long either.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  Neither did a practice he opened in the North Texas town of Dennison. What was going on, it appears, was that, like a lot of tuberculosis patients in those days, consumptives, they were sometimes called, Doc was turning to alcohol to self-medicate his pain. In time, he became a heavy drinker, and when he drank, he liked to gamble. In fact, over the next two years, between Dallas and Dennison, he accumulated an impressive number of gambling arrests. In 1875, whether to dodge the consequences of those arrests, or just because he had a certain wanderlust, Doc hit the road. There would be no more dental practices after this, at least none he pursued seriously.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  He now became a full-time professional gambler. He was apparently pretty good at it. According to the foremost historian of gambling, the great Herbert Asbury, Doc, quote, "dealt a very tricky game of Pharaoh, and at short cards, this was the practice of stealthily removing a few cards from the deck before dealing." He was, quote, "regarded as a veritable wizard." For the next three years, we know, Doc roamed the West, drawing wherever there were tables. In Denver, he worked as a Pharaoh dealer under an assumed name, suggesting someone, I'm guessing someone back in Texas, was looking for him. Then he was on to Cheyenne, Wyoming, then Deadwood.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  His illness left him weak, but he also radiated a feral intelligence and a growing reputation for erratic and violent behavior. As he roamed, he left behind a series of stories that, taken together, suggest his ornery nature was turning into a taste for violent confrontation. In one story, he was said to have shot and killed a black soldier at a gambling table. In another, he used that knife, his hell bitch, to slash a rival's throat in Denver. Wyatt Earp himself once told of hearing Doc kill someone in Texas with it, quote, "stabbing him just below the brisket." I'm not sure what that is, but it sure sounds awful.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  We can't know whether any of these tales are actually true, but it does speak to his dawning reputation. Doc, after all, was a Southerner, one who'd already been accused of murdering black men back home in Georgia. And like many other Southerners across the West, he had a hard time cooling off when he felt his honor was challenged, even in minor disagreements, and especially at the gambling table. In the words of Bat Masterson, and I quote, "He was hot-headed and impetuous and very much given to both drinking and quarreling."

• 11:35Speaker 05

  And among men who did not fear him, very much disliked. He would no sooner be out of one scrape before he was in another. And the strange part of it is, he was more often in the right than in the wrong, which has rarely ever been the case with a man who is continually getting himself into trouble.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  In 1877, Holliday washed up back in Texas. There, on July 4th, in the North Texas town of Brackenridge, he got into an argument with a gambler named Henry Kahn, and beat him up pretty badly with his walking cane. This actually happened twice in one day. The second time, Kahn showed up with a gun and shot him. We don't know where on his body. All we know is that the newspaper said the wound was serious. One article said incorrectly that he died in time. In fact, he recovered. By that October, 1877, in fact, he had moved on to Fort Griffin, Texas, a U.S. Cavalry fort originally built to fight the Comanche.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  This is north of Fort Worth, who is now known for a very rough gambling district alongside it called The Flats. The Flats' most notable customers now were Texas cowboys heading north on the trail drives to Kansas. Fort Griffin turned out to be a crucial moment in Doc's life. He was here, while dealing cards in John Chauncey's saloon, that he began the two most important relationships of his adult years. One was with a Hungarian-born prostitute named Mary Catherine Heroni, known to one and all as Big Nose Kate. She would be with him during his most eventful years. The two of them quarreled incessantly, it

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  appears, like all the time, like screaming, hollering, shouting matches that emptied entire wings of hotels, followed naturally by exuberant exclamations of their undying love.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  The picture Big Nose Kate would later present in her recollections of Holliday is of a lost soul, adrift, hard-drinking, argumentative, moralistic, sensitive to slights, thin, wan, clean-shaven, with reddish hair, a deep Southern drawl, and a 41-caliber Derringer tucked in his vest pocket. The second relationship Doc began there at Fort Griffin was with Wyatt Earp. Law enforcement was seasonal work in the cowtowns in those days, so in the winter Wyatt tended to take odd jobs, sometimes as a bounty hunter. That fall of 1877, he was chasing a pair of train robbers down into Texas. And when he arrived at Fort

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  Griffin, someone suggested talk to the thin, oddball, consumptive, dealing cards. Doc knew nothing of the train robbers, but he was intensely curious about Dodge City, peppering Wyatt with questions. The town was growing fast, and it was full of gamblers. This was Holliday's kind of place. Doc and Big Nose Kate decided Dodge might be worth a try, and so they did. By the following summer, the summer of 1878, Doc was even advertising his new dental practice there. It's not clear the thing ever really got off the ground, but still. When Doc arrived, Dodge was nearing the zenith of its time as the last of the

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  great Kansas cowtowns. Two years earlier, when it first began accepting Texas cattle, it had grown from a collection of tents selling liquor to buffalo hunters and railroad workers to an actual town, decent size, with a railroad line and depot, a series of sprawling saloons, a grid of ramshackle houses, and maybe three hotels, all on a bluff overlooking the Arkansas River. The town was bisected by the railroad tracks running along Front Street downtown. The respectable side of Dodge was north of the tracks. The vice district was to the south. We don't know too much about that first cattle season, but it seems like the

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  town's main police officer had been scared off by a first wave of invading Texans. Wyatt was the man hired to replace him. And after that first season, there were no gunfights in Dodge, no real drama at all we know of. There weren't any gunfights in 1877 either.

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  As a lawman, Wyatt always preferred using fists to guns. If a drunk tried to pick a fight, he might draw his pistol and then brain his opponent. You'll remember, he pioneered a move that came to be known as buffaloing. The civic leaders had seen what happened to all the other cattle towns that came before, and they understood that shooting people, you know, was bad for business. Wyatt had the discipline and the fighting skills to avoid pulling the trigger. He and his men policed the vice district south of those tracks with a firm hand. Carry a gun, pee in public, or otherwise cause trouble, and you could expect an arrest, or a fine, or the butt of a pistol. The Texas cowboys constantly

• 18:39Speaker 04

  carved about this, but no one much listened. I mean, why should they? Wyatt's tactics worked. This all sounds nice enough, but not exactly the kind of thing Western legends are made of, right? If things stayed like this, we wouldn't be talking right now about Wyatt Earp in Dodge City. But of course, things did change. And it began when Wyatt reconnected in Dodge with an acquaintance of his, William Barclay Masterson, known always by his nickname, Bat, Bat Masterson. When I was a kid, back in the 60s and 70s, Bat Masterson was still a household name, or close to it, mostly because he'd had a TV show during the 1950s and was portrayed in a few movies. If you're a musical aficionado,

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  maybe you remember the character Sky Masterson from Guys and Dolls, named after him. In his day, in fact, Bat Masterson was more famous than his pal Wyatt Earp, and it wasn't even close. As I said, he was probably the only frontier gunfighter to ever sleep over in the White House. Bat was born in Canada in 1853, the second of seven children whose parents were Irish immigrants. The family moved early and often, to farms in New York, then Illinois, Missouri, before finally settling outside Wichita, Kansas. In his teens, Bat and his brothers Ed and Jim left home, working first grading a stretch of the new

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  railroad. In time, they moved into western Kansas to hunt buffalo, a dying profession at the time, given the great herds were fast being killed off. Somewhere along the line, they met Wyatt Earp. The most famous version of their meeting is that they met when Wyatt hired Bat to skin the buffalo he killed, which I guess is possible. In his own memoir, which I kind of believe, Bat says actually, they hadn't met before joining Dodge City Police Force in 1876. By that point, Bat was already pretty famous around Dodge, largely because of what had happened two years earlier in 1874. He'd been one of the 28 buffalo hunters to survive the infamous Battle of Adobe Walls,

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  when a swarm of 700 or so Comanche and Kiowa warriors surrounded the hunters at a remote trading post in the Texas Panhandle, south of Dodge City. What ensued was one of the more famous sieges of the Old West. When the attackers finally withdrew after six days, four of the hunters were dead, as were dozens of tribesmen. Bat Masterson, then all of 20 years old, rode into Dodge as a minor celebrity. After that, he spent a year as a scout for the Army, then took up buffalo hunting again. Along the way, he spent a winter at an isolated Panhandle settlement called Sweetwater, today's Mobiti, near the Army's Fort Elliott.

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  This matters because it's there, he got a second dose of fame, his first civilian gunfight. It's a good story, too, in part because it gives you a sense of how hard it can be to figure out what happened in some of these old gunfights. You know, all the different versions you have to sort through, kind of like detective work. Anyway, so with this one, the soldiers at Fort Elliott, which had been set up to fight the Comanche, were a pretty rough crew. Among the roughest was a 28-year-old corporal known as Melvin A. King. His real name turned out to be Anthony Cook, who would brag nonstop about all the men he'd killed in saloon gunfights. He was bullshit, of course, but a pretty common kind of bullshit on the frontier. I doubt anyone believed the guy.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  Anyway, late on the cold night of January 24th, 1876, Bat borrowed a key to let himself into the Lady Gay Saloon, which was empty at that hour. He was sneaking in, not for a drink, but for a private moment with a prostitute named Molly Brennan, who's well-known to gunfighter enthusiasts as the one-time girlfriend of Ben Thompson's brother, Bill, which kind of matters in a moment. Try and stay with me here. As it turns out, the blowhard Corporal Melvin A. King also favored Molly Brennan's charms, and, out on his nightly bender, learned what Masterson was up to. He stalked toward the dance hall, murder in his heart, as they say. Now, there's several versions of what happened next.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  One was offered 60 years later by one of Masterson's brothers. In this version, Corporal King banged on the door to the saloon. Not expecting visitors at that hour and probably otherwise involved, Bat stepped over and opened the door. King stepped inside and drew his Colt. Molly Brennan screamed and jumped in front of Bat just as King fired. His bullet flying through Brennan, killing her instantly, and then struck Bat in the pelvic region. Bat fell, but drew his own gun and got off a shot before King could fire again. It struck King in the heart. That's version one. A second version comes from Bat himself, related in testimony for a lawsuit in 1913.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  In his own telling, King shot him at the door without warning. The bullet struck him in the stomach and knocked him back five or six feet where he fell. King then fired a second time, but the shot went wild, killing Molly Brennan. Bat then drew his own gun and shot and killed King. Coming from Bat Masterson himself, I got to think, this one is the most likely account. But that's not the most famous version. That would be version number three, which comes secondhand from, yes, of all people, Wyatt Earp, who, as I've said before, told it later in life during the 1920s, when his memory of things was not particularly great. You can actually still find this version in some otherwise decent histories of the period.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  In any case, in this version, Corporal King stalked into the Lady Gay Saloon in the middle of a roaring dance party. Inside, he was infuriated to find Bat sashaying across the floor with Molly Brennan. Surrounded by this crowd, which included a number of soldiers, Corporal King's pals, King drew his pistol and fired, killing Brennan and wounding Masterson, who then pulled his own pistol and shot King dead. The best part about Wyatt's version, though, is that after Bat shot Corporal King, the crowd of King's Army pals loomed around the hall, ready to exact revenge. Bat was saved, Wyatt claims, by the sudden appearance of another marquee Old West gunfighter,

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  the Texas gambler Ben Thompson, who jumped up onto a fay road table, we're told, pulled his own Colt, and covered Bat as he ran for the door. It's a great story, but not a chance it was true. Reputable biographers, in fact, roll their eyes at the version that puts Thompson in the room for this moment. I think it speaks to Wyatt's unreliability in his later years, especially with events he didn't witness firsthand. And yet, there is evidence the Lady Gay was either owned or co-owned by Ben Thompson's no-account brother, Billy. I think if anyone saved Bat's life that night, it was probably Billy Thompson, not

• 25:51Speaker 04

  Ben, but it's more likely no one did, and that Bat shot King in an empty saloon, exactly as he claimed. No matter how it happened, though, the story of that night in Sweetwater also became well-known around Dodge City, enough so that Masterson enjoyed a reputation in town as an accomplished gunfighter, whether he'd really earned it or not. And it's also true that Bat was badly wounded in the gunfight. He took a bullet to the pelvis. It's said he went back to his family's original homestead outside Wichita to recover. But for the rest of his life, he walked with a cane. It became his trademark and a convenient tool of his policing, too. When Bat and his brother Jim took jobs working as Wyatt's deputies in Dodge, he used that

• 26:36Speaker 04

  cane to buffalo any number of Texas cowboys. The following year, Bat ran for sheriff, and he won by all three votes. He and Wyatt then became partners of a sort, the town marshal and his sheriff. They were a mismatched pair. There was Wyatt, lean, taciturn, unsmiling, tightly wound, and by his side around town, there was Bat, five years younger, thickly built, dark and garrulous, the kind of guy you'd want to drink with. People tended to love or hate Wyatt, but Bat always made friends easily. On a frontier where too many lawmen were corrupt, drunkards, or both, the two of these guys, they were disciplined, professional, and hardworking.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  And as with Doc Holliday, Wyatt and Bat's friendship became one of the most famous in the Old West. All of which sets the stage for the story of Dodge City's signature season. I'll tell you about the 1878 season in the next episode, but for now, I want to jump ahead and share the story of Masterson's life after Dodge City. Because it's Bat's life after Dodge, the jobs he took and the stories he told, that are really the main reason we know about most of what happened in Dodge. It's the major reason Dodge was so famous, just the fact that Bat was there to witness it all. So anyway, after a visit or two with Wyatt in Tombstone later in Arizona, Bat goes

• 28:01Speaker 04

  on to have a long career that ends up as maybe the gunfighter era's most important storyteller, the man who probably did more to make Wyatt Earp and his pals famous as anyone. After Dodge, Masterson was briefly the marshal in the town of Trinidad, Colorado, then settled down for a few years in Denver, where he made a nice living gambling and running saloons. In time, he got interested in professional boxing and became a fixture at bouts around the country, sometimes serving as a timekeeper. He became a sought-after expert on the sport, one of the very first, in fact. Finally, in 1902, he moved to New York City, where he capitalized on this expertise to

• 28:43Speaker 04

  take a job as, of all things, a sports writer. The Morning Telegraph newspaper gave him his own column. They called it Masterson's Views on Timely Topics, and it ran three times a week, from 1903 all the way until 1921. Emerging as a stylish man about town, Bat became a well-known character in society, and even became friends with President Theodore Roosevelt, who shared his love for boxing and, of course, the frontier. Along the way, Bat wrote about Wyatt Earp and other gunfighters. In a memoir and in a magazine series published in 1907, Bat finally died of a heart attack at his death in 1921. He was 67.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  After his death, his fame only grew. He regularly appeared as a character in movies and on television, starting in the 1940s. He had his own NBC television series from 1958 to 1961, when the actor Gene Barry portrayed him as a roving, do-gooding, dandyan ladies man. He sported a gold-top cane in this show, that much was at least accurate, along with a black derby and ornate vests, more of a Wild Bill Hickok fashion plate type than Bat ever really was. And Bat's pal, the writer Damon Runyon, even used him as the basis for the rakish gambler Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  It was, all in all, quite the life. I'm Brian Burrow, and this has been episode nine of Gunfighters. Thanks for coming in. I hope you'll check out our next episode, too. This is the one that sits at the very core of the Dodge City legend, the story of the 1878 cattle season, and a fateful showdown between Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, on one hand, and the man who was probably the scariest gunfighter of them all, on the other. That's next time on Gunfighters.

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