Legends of the Old West - ENCORE I DODGE CITY Ep. 4: “The Battle of the Plaza”

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

After a shocking murder in April 1878, another murder rocks Dodge City in October. Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and an all-star posse attempt to bring the killer to justice. A year later, Wyatt and Bat leave town for good. Bat gambles in Colorado, but he soon joins Wyatt in Tombstone, Arizona. But Bat’s time in Tombstone is brief, as he finds himself called back to Dodge to save his younger brother. Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the dead of night, a lone figure rode quietly through Dodge City. He stopped near a house on the north side of town. This was the respectable side of town, where the respectable types wanted to keep things respectable. It was not the side of town for him, even if he was the son of a Texas cattle baron. He paused his horse near a window at the front of the house. From his earlier reconnaissance, he knew his intended victim would be asleep on the other side of the glass. He fired shots from a.44 caliber Colt through the window. His bullets hit the mark. He made his kill. He got his revenge. Then he spun

his horse and kicked its flanks. He galloped out of Dodge before anyone knew what happened. He was on a dead run for Texas, but the weather turned bad. Rainstorms tore across the plains. He decided to stop and find shelter. He figured he could afford it. He had a huge head start on anyone who might have followed him, and the weather would have slowed them down. Or so he thought.

He was wrong. The next morning, he stared in amazement at a small group of men who'd found him. Even from a distance, he recognized two of them. One was shorter and stout. The other was tall and lean. The killer had almost made it back to Texas, but then he heard the crack of rifles and the whine of.50 caliber slugs as they flew by him. He was about to have a very bad day. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch, and organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform

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at shopify.com slash realm, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash R-E-A-L-M now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash Realm. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. This season, we're telling a five-part story about Dodge City and the duo of Bat Masterson and Wyatt Urban. This is Episode 4, Battle of the Plaza The year of 1878 wasn't done with Dodge City yet. The town had already seen a spike in violence through the spring and summer,

and now the fall had one more dark moment in store. As Dodge City had grown over the past six years, entertainment in town had improved substantially. In the early years, it had been mostly dancing girls stumbling through bawdy acts in loud, smoke-filled saloons. But then a couple of proper sit-down theaters had been established. Touring companies and resident professionals performed contemporary and classical works. And one of the most popular entertainers was Miss Dora Hand. Dora was a highly talented,

professionally trained opera singer who was rumored to have toured overseas. Everyone in town loved Dora. South of the tracks, her emotive singing voice brought even the most hardened cowboys to tears. North of the tracks, she was welcome in respected social circles. She was 34 years old, a woman of culture, and a regular churchgoer. She was a prominent member of the Ladies' Aid Society, which helped care for the poor and less fortunate.

member of the Ladies' Aid Society, which helped care for the poor and less fortunate. There must have been more than a few cowboys who were sweet on Dora Hand, but they all had to wait in line behind the mayor, Jim Kelly. He took her to dinner and to see shows at other theaters, and at the end of the summer, he got her a sweet gig at a joint on the north side of town. She would sing and dance five nights a week, and her salary made her the highest paid performer in Dodge. And the problems began when James Spike Kennedy fell in love with her. Spike was the son of a wealthy Texas rancher. His father had struck it big as a partner in the fabled King Ranch, and then bought his own massive spread near Corpus Christi.

Spike had money, privilege, and entitlement, and that was a bad combination. He spent far more time having fun than working, and when his fun got a little excessive, his father always bailed him out. Or better yet, the lawmen went easy on him because they were afraid of his father. As Spike spent more and more time in Dodge, pursuing Dora Hand or other forms of entertainment, he ran into lawmen who weren't so easily bought or frightened. In July, he was buffaloed by Wyatt Earp. In August, he was dragged into court by Charlie Bassett. Those incidents led to a confrontation between Spike and Mayor Kelly. Spike certainly would have been jealous of Kelly since Dora Hand was spending so much time with him.

But Spike was mad that he wasn't being treated with the privilege he felt he deserved, so he went straight to the top of the food chain in Dodge. And that was a big mistake. Spike found the mayor on the boardwalk and complained about his treatment at the hands of Wyatt and Charlie. The mayor was having none of it. He told Spike there would be no favors in Dodge. Spike attacked the mayor, and the mayor swiftly put the wealthy young man in his place. Mayor Kelly battered Spike and then dragged him into the street and threw him in the dirt for all to see. It must have felt gratifying at the time,

but it set up the terrible moment that ended Autumn in Dodge. After the humiliating rebuke by the mayor, Spike Kennedy was hell-bent on revenge. For weeks, he studied the mayor's routine. He learned that the mayor owned a little cottage in town, right off Front Street. It wasn't the mayor's primary residence, but it was a good place to crash. When the mayor stayed at the cottage, he slept in the front bedroom. Spike made a plan. He would sneak up on the house late at night,

shoot the mayor through the bedroom window, and then ride away. To make sure he would escape, he bought a racehorse. In October, Spike was ready. In the pre-dawn hours, he trotted up to the mayor's cottage. He paused by the window and fired in the direction of the bed. Then he kicked his horse and galloped out of town. Spike pushed the racehorse hard all day in an effort to put distance between himself and the lawmen of Dodge. He had a 10-hour head start, and with his racehorse, he was probably confident that he could make it to the safety of Texas without being caught.

He wouldn't find out until much later that he'd killed the wrong person. Mayor Kelly had been suffering from stomach pains for several days, so he went to the Army Surgeon at Fort Dodge. While he was gone, he allowed Dora Hand and her friend Fanny Gerritsen to stay at his cottage. They were asleep in the house when Spike Kennedy carried out his assassination. Instead of killing the mayor, Spike killed the girl he was infatuated with, Dora Hand. Wyatt and Jim Masterson ran to the cottage in response to the gunshots and found Dora dead in the mayor's bed and Fannie Gerritsen in hysterics. Spike Kennedy was immediately the prime suspect,

and the case against him grew stronger when a nearby saloon owner reported that he'd seen Spike galloping out of town from the direction of the cottage. Since Spike was out of town limits, the county sheriff, Bat Masterson, formed a posse. He took Wyatt Earp, Charlie Bassett, Bill Tillman, and Bill Duffy with him. The five men had a lot of ground to cover, and they didn't slow down for anything, not even a driving rainstorm that pelted them with hail. But the storm did slow down Spike Kennedy, whose racehorse was fast but wasn't used to the rough weather out on the raw plains of southern Kansas.

The next day, despite his head start, Spike rode over a hill and saw the five lawmen blocking the trail. They'd overtaken him in the night. When Spike saw the lawman, he started to flee. Bat Masterson fired a.50 caliber rifle, and the slug slammed into Spike's shoulder. Wyatt and maybe others fired as well, and Spike's horse was shot dead. The posse collected Spike and hauled him back to Dodge to stand trial. Along the way, they informed him that he'd killed Dora Hand. Spike was put on trial, but he wasn't convicted.

Maybe it was for a lack of evidence, or maybe it was because Spike's father allegedly paid the judge $25,000. Either way, Spike and his father hurried back to Texas to avoid frontier justice at the hands of an angry mob in Dodge. From there, Spike's bad behavior continued. Six years later, Spike killed a man on his father's ranch. As he sat in jail awaiting trial, or a bribe to get him out, he died of typhoid fever. or a bribe to get him out, he died of typhoid fever. Back in Dodge, at the end of October, the townspeople closed businesses for another big funeral.

The burial of Dora Hand bookended the burial of Ed Masterson and brought to a close the rough cattle season of 1878. The tragic season of 1878 was the beginning of the end for Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson in Dodge City. As winter set in, Doc Holliday moved south to New Mexico in search of better weather to help his worsening condition. And then in the first half of 1879, there were a few blips of excitement on the radar, but time was running short for the two stalwart peace officers in Dodge. In February 1879, Batt took a train to South Dakota to pick up eight Cheyenne elders. He was accompanied by his brother Jim and Charlie Bassett and two more deputies. Their mission was to bring the eight men back to Dodge City to stand trial for events that had occurred the previous fall.

In September 1878, the month before Dora Hand was murdered, a group of Cheyenne reached their breaking point on the reservation in Oklahoma Territory. They were tired of the awful conditions and they were homesick. They mounted an expedition to return to their ancestral lands in Wyoming. As they moved away from the reservation, their path brought them through Ford County and in the rough proximity of Dodge City. The group was mostly women and children and older men, but there were still some warriors, and the warriors took the opportunity to attack farms and cow camps in the area. Word reached Dodge that the Cheyenne were rampaging through the country and it was now being called an uprising. The Dodge City Times newspaper fanned the flames and made it sound like an army was on its way to wipe out the town. People boarded up their homes and businesses.

They kept guns close at hand. Wyatt organized local law enforcement to defend the town against an assault that never happened. The Cheyenne passed by without so much as a feint in the direction of Dodge. They were eventually caught by the army in western Nebraska, and now, five months later, the leaders of the uprising were supposed to stand trial in Dodge for the actions of their warriors. For two days, Bat Masterson and his team of five escorted the prisoners south toward Kansas. At every stop, people came to the train station to stare at the Cheyenne.

At several stops, they did more than stare. In numerous towns, Bat and his men had to push back angry people who wanted to drag the Cheyenne off the train and kill them. In Lawrence, Kansas, a mob nearly succeeded in overpowering the lawmen from Dodge. But the five lawmen and the eight prisoners made it to town intact. Bat deposited the prisoners in the jail, and there they sat until they were granted a change of venue. During that time, there were no outbreaks of violence against the Cheyenne and the leaders were eventually acquitted for lack of evidence.

In May 1879, as the cattle drives began in earnest, Batt and Wyatt supported each other against three tough guys from Missouri. After the initial confrontation, the Missourians tried to be sneaky and set an ambush for Batt, but Batt outsmarted them and ran them out of town for good. The next month, Batt himself left town for a short foray into Colorado for what became known as the Royal Gorge War. Leadville, Colorado had burst onto the scene as the home of the nation's largest silver mine. Two competing railroads fought for the right to lay tracks to the boomtown

and reap the benefits of all the silver coming out of the ground. But there was only one way to get there, a very narrow mountain pass known as the Royal Gorge. The railroads filed lawsuits against each other. Tensions flared and gangs of angry men from both sides took up their guns. They threw up barricades and faced off in the gorge. One of the two railroads was the Santa Fe Railroad, the line that had basically made Dodge City. The company sent word to Dodge for help. Bat Masterson had taken on the role of Deputy U.S. Marshal so that he could hunt cattle rustlers and thieves throughout the territory, not just in Ford County where he was the sheriff. and thieves throughout the territory, not just in Ford County where he was the sheriff.

As a deputy U.S. Marshal, he led a small team to Leadville that included his friend and gunfighter Ben Thompson, and possibly Doc Holliday. There was a very anxious standoff between the two sides that was a razor's edge from turning into a bloody battle. But then a federal court ruled that the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad had the right of way. The Santa Fe Railroad would have to abandon its efforts. As a federal law enforcement official, BAT delivered the news, and an actual war was avoided. And that was the last major action of the cattle season of 1879. There were certainly altercations with Texas cowboys and civil disputes to manage, but nothing like the gunfights and murders that plagued 1878.

And at the end of the season, Wyatt decided it was time to move on. He'd spent the better part of four years as a lawman in Dodge, and he'd seen the town through its peak years as the queen of the cow towns. But now he wanted to make easy money and live the good life. His older brother Virgil had been sending letters from Arizona that extolled the virtues of America's newest boomtown, Tombstone, and Wyatt wanted to see it. In September 1879, he resigned as assistant marshal in Dodge City. He said goodbye to Bat and Jim Masterson, Charlie Bassett, Bill Tillman, and all the others. He and his brother Jim packed up their families and began the trek to the Southwest.

They picked up Doc Holliday and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Kate Elder in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and rolled into Tombstone just before the new year. With Wyatt gone, Bat decided it was time to move on as well. He always enjoyed gambling, and he was damn good at it. He'd spent an off-season gambling in Colorado and Wyoming, so he knew the area fairly well. And after his trip to Colorado in June for the Royal Gorge War, he decided Leadville should be his first stop. Bat spent the next year or so working the gambler's trail. He made a good living in Leadville and socked away a fair bankroll.

After a time, he grew restless and moved on. He worked the tables of a couple other Colorado mining towns, and then eventually traveled back to the Midwest. He wound up in Kansas City, Missouri, where he continued his successful gambling. And he was there in early 1881 when he received an urgent message from Wyatt Earp. While Bat had been making relatively easy money at gambling dens from Colorado to Missouri, his friend Wyatt had been having a very different experience in the desert southwest. Wyatt had certainly been doing his fair share

of gambling, and he'd even acquired an interest in the Oriental Saloon. But Wyatt gradually fell deeper into the worlds of law and politics in Tombstone than he'd prefer. A loose-knit gang of outlaws called the Cowboys had been running the southeast quarter of Arizona for a while. And as the Earps settled into Tombstone, they increasingly found themselves at odds with the Cowboys. The conflicts between the Earps and the Cowboys escalated throughout 1880. It started to feel like one of two things would happen. Either the Cowboys would run the Earps out of town, or the Earps would run the cowboys out of town. It was building toward a bloody confrontation. The Earps were badly outnumbered and Wyatt needed more guns on his side.

He wired Bat Masterson and Luke Short and asked them to come to Tombstone. Luke Short was a professional gambler and a renowned gunfighter, and an occasional posseman for Bat and Wyatt. Both men responded to the call and made their way to town. Wyatt installed them as dealers at the Oriental. Shortly after Luke's arrival, and true to his reputation, he got into a gunfight. He had heated words with another of Bat's friends, Charlie Storms. Bat pulled them apart, and he thought Charlie had gone to his room to sleep. But Charlie reappeared and dragged Luke out of the Oriental and into Allen Street. Charlie challenged Luke's prowess with a gun. Luke pulled his pistol and shot Charlie through the heart before Charlie could utter another word. The episode certainly proved to the town of Tombstone that the two new dealers were not men to be trifled with.

But unfortunately, Bat had lost a friend in the process. A few weeks later, Bat rode with Wyatt and Virgil Earp in a posse to catch stagecoach robbers. The robbery had not been successful, but the bandits had killed the driver and a passenger. The posse ended up catching one of the bandits, but the other two escaped. Wyatt and Bat once again proved their doggedness and determination. During the pursuit, their horses died of exhaustion,

and the two friends were forced to walk 18 miles through the desert to get back to town. And that was the end of Bat's short time in Tombstone. Trouble was brewing back in Dodge, and his younger brother Jim was right in the thick of it. Bat received a telegram that forced him to leave immediately. It said, Come at once. Updegraff and Peacock are going to kill Jim. Jim Masterson was in trouble. With Batt and Wyatt gone, Jim had risen to the rank of city marshal in Dodge. And like his brother Batt, he'd gotten into the saloon

business on the side. Then, here in April 1881, Jim had been unceremoniously fired by the new mayor. The mayor had hired the bartender at his own saloon to be the new city marshal. The man's only qualification was that he was the bartender at the saloon owned by the mayor. qualification was that he was the bartender at the saloon owned by the mayor. Jim was naturally mad, and Jim was not mild-mannered like his older brother Ed, or outgoing and affable like Bat. Jim brooded over the slight. When Jim was fired, he focused on his saloon full-time. He was now co-owner of the Lady Gay with a man named A.J. Peacock. Peacock had hired his brother-in-law, Al Uptegraff, to be a bartender, and one day, Jim and Uptegraff got into an argument over a woman. Jim might also have accused Uptegraff of being crooked and incompetent,

and Jim fired him. Jim's co-owner, A.J. Peacock, rehired his brother-in-law immediately, which didn't sit well with Jim. Serious trouble was brewing between Jim and Peacock and Updegraff, and that trouble prompted an anonymous person to send an urgent telegram to Bat in Tombstone that said Peacock and Updegraff were going to kill Jim. Bat spent long, anxious hours riding the train from the southeast corner of Arizona to the southwest corner of Kansas. When he stepped off the train in Dodge at high noon on April 16th, he didn't know what to expect, but he didn't have to wait long to find out. Peacock and Updegraff were waiting

at the station with their guns strapped to their hips. Bat, as always, tried to talk to the two men first, but the two men ran from the station and took cover behind the jail. Bat made a move to follow, and they opened fire and initiated what became known as the Battle of the Plaza. Bat ducked behind the railroad embankment and returned fire. Very quickly, a full-on shootout erupted nearly in the middle of town. Shoppers and bystanders sprinted for cover as stray bullets slammed into buildings and shattered windows. The gunfire picked up fury, and then supporters of Peacock and Updegraff joined the fight. The shootout ratcheted up a notch. Bat was quickly outnumbered

and trapped behind the railroad embankment, and then gunfire erupted behind him, but it wasn't aimed at him. It was helping him. A few men had arrived to help Bat, possibly including Jim Masterson. The gunfight raged at full volume for a brief time, and then Updegraff suddenly straightened up and staggered into the middle of the street as if he were doing a badly exaggerated death scene in a movie. His collapse caused everyone to stop shooting. Updegraff had been seriously wounded, but he wasn't dead. Even so, the injury stopped the gunfight. The mayor rushed onto the scene with a shotgun and told Bat he was under arrest. But he also told Bat that Jim had not been hurt, and he certainly wasn't dead.

Bat had arrived in time to stop whatever might have happened to his younger brother. Bat went to jail willingly, but he didn't stay long. A hearing was held that afternoon, and Bat was fined $8 for firing a gun within town limits, and then he was released. The next day, Jim Masterson sold his interest in the Lady Gay Saloon. He and Bat boarded the train and left Dodge City. For the first time in five years, Dodge was devoid of Earps and Mastersons. But Wyatt and Bat would both be back soon enough for one last hurrah.

Next time on the season finale of Dodge City, Wyatt and his brothers engage in the most famous gunfight in American history. Wyatt seeks revenge for the tragic consequences that follow the shootout, And Bat Masterson plays a key role in resolving the situation And then, Bat and Wyatt return to Dodge City for one final tour of duty That's next week on Legends of the Old West This season was researched by Aaron Aylsworth and written by Aaron and myself. Audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. Original music by Rob Valliere.

I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Check out our website, blackbarrelmedia.com for more details and join us on social media or at Old West Podcast on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Thanks for listening. I'm Navy, Expedia, and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for free at rakuten.ca or get the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N.