Bat Masterson: From Dodge City Gunfighter to New York Sportswriter

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In late October 1921, a 67-year-old sports columnist finished a piece on boxing at the New York Morning Telegraph and died of a heart attack at his typewriter. He was Bat Masterson, born in Quebec in 1853, a former buffalo hunter who survived the five-day siege of Adobe Walls in 1874, took a bullet to the pelvis in Sweetwater, Texas, and walked with a cane for the rest of his life. This episode follows how a frontier survivor became a Manhattan celebrity.

Masterson won election as Ford County Sheriff by three votes, lost his brother Ed to a cowboy's bullet in April 1878, and then began treating his reputation as something he could sell. He worked as a hired gun in a Colorado railroad war, dealt faro in Tombstone beside Wyatt Earp, and helped stage the Dodge City Peace Commission, a show of force that never fired a shot. In 1902 he moved to New York, wrote three columns a week for nearly two decades, and befriended Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1872 Masterson tracked a contractor who had skipped out on his wages for nearly a year, then took the $300 at gunpoint on a Dodge City train platform while a crowd cheered.
At Adobe Walls, 28 buffalo hunters held off hundreds of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne warriors led by Quanah Parker, thanks to long-range Sharps rifles and thick mud walls.
He ran for sheriff against the same 315-pound city marshal he had grappled with in the street months earlier, and won.
On his second day in New York he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, paid a $10 fine, and complained about the mush-headed police.
Roughly 500 people attended his funeral, where Damon Runyon gave the eulogy, and his gravestone in the Bronx reads: Loved by everyone.

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