Saturday, Oct. 30, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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Bat Masterson, buffalo hunter, Army scout, lawman and gambler, died at his desk 100 years ago. He was writing his column for the old New York Morning Telegraph when his heart gave out at age 66.
Tributes poured in. Fellow columnist Damon Runyon crafted a memorable paragraph about how Masterson lived and died.
“The end came suddenly but peacefully, a strangely quiet closing to a strangely active career that will always figure largely in the history of the early West.”
In many ways, Masterson was a leading figure in the news business. Few people were the object of more irresponsible and fabricated stories than Masterson. From that backdrop, he turned himself into a columnist who often wrote about the world of sports, especially boxing.
Masterson as a young man didn’t complain about even the most outrageous inventions of his exploits as a sheriff and gunfighter. One rumor-filled story in 1881 by a correspondent for the New York Sun claimed former peace officer William Barclay “Bat” Masterson had killed 27 men before his 26th birthday.
Newspapers were king of the media then. The publicity, inaccurate though it was, turned Masterson into a national figure.
It also spawned more wild and inconsistent accounts of how he wiped out desperadoes in Kansas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and who knows where else.
The Wichita Beacon in 1887 praised the Sun story as a groundbreaking triumph but altered the statistics about Masterson’s homicides. In its unexplained accounting, the Beacon claimed Masterson had killed 21 lawbreakers in 21 years.
“Unlike most other border heroes, Masterson is unstained by any act of recklessness or cruelty,” the Kansas newspaper intoned.
Masterson would confide to friends that these stories were fiction, but he didn’t try to correct the record while working in the West. Let them write what they want, he would say. Besides, trying to keep pace with false stories about his career might have been a full-time job.
He first spoke up about media excesses while under courtroom duress. On arrival in New York City in 1902, Masterson was arrested on suspicion of operating a rigged faro game while aboard a train. All the romanticized stories about him became a liability.
“I never killed a man in my life,” he said after being charged. “These stories about me gunning people are all moonshine.”
He would change his account a decade later. But Masterson’s short-term prospects brightened when his accuser declined to proceed with the case.
After settling in New York, Masterson cashed in on his name. He also became more concerned about his overstated reputation for violence.
He sued the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser in 1913 over a story claiming he had burnished his reputation as a stern lawman by shooting minorities in the back.
Under cross-examination by future Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, Masterson said he might have killed three men in his lifetime, each a justifiable homicide.
Jurors ruled in Masterson’s favor. The newspaper appealed, and he accepted $1,000 to drop his lawsuit.
By then a columnist, Masterson dressed in bowler hats, suits and fine neckwear. He favored an ornate cane when he walked busy streets. The New York press called him a dandy.
Masterson was more protective of his name by then, but he couldn’t control how others used it.
Unidentified people in Clovis advertised 10-cent shares in a wildcat drilling operation with a suspicious pitch.
“The Bat Masterson well has roared in right beside us, wet with gasoline and promising untold riches to those who invest in this awakening field,” it said.
He’s still a big name in the region. Readers from Trinidad, Colo., wrote me in advance of the 100th anniversary of Masterson’s death. He was briefly Trinidad’s town marshal in 1882, a fact the locals never tire of mentioning.
Runyon, who also had roots in the West, was a pal of Masterson’s. Runyon, in writing the obituary of the famous lawman, took care to avoid inaccurate clichés about Masterson that clogged old stories in the name of selling papers.
But when Runyon later wrote his book “Guys and Dolls,” one of his characters was a gambler named Sky Masterson.
No matter what the newspapers said, the original character had staying power. It’s lasted a century.
Milan Simonich is a columnist for The Santa Fe New Mexican.
