1 THE SWEETWATER SHOOTOUT
Bat Masterson was twenty-two years old and already a hero on the day he nearly died. He was sojourning in the hamlet of Sweetwater in the Texas panhandle when the trouble started. It was late January of 1876, and Masterson had recently completed his final season as a buffalo hunter. The best time to hunt buffalo was in the fall and early winter, when the animals’ coats were thick to protect against the dropping temperatures, and Bat had finished one last run as a hunter before his life took an unexpected turn.
Sweetwater was a rowdy town about seventy-five miles northwest of Amarillo. It was the social hub of the area for buffalo hunters and soldiers who wandered in from a nearby army outpost called Cantonment Sweetwater. Today, Sweetwater is the village of Mobeetie, whose population is significantly smaller than it was on the night Bat almost died in Charlie Norton’s saloon. In 1876, the town was booming. It quickly rose from a dirty buffalo camp to a bustling frontier community that boasted a shop, a restaurant, a hotel, a laundry, and a bevy of saloons. The most popular joint in town was the Lady Gay Saloon, owned and operated by Henry Fleming and Billy Thompson. Fleming doesn’t figure prominently into the history of the American West, but Billy Thompson and his older brother, Ben, crossed paths with some major players.
The brothers were born in England but grew up in Austin, Texas. They served with the Texas Mounted Rifles in the Confederate army during the Civil War, despite the fact that Billy was just sixteen years old at the time. After the war, Ben drifted down to Mexico as a soldier of fortune. Billy stayed in Texas and began a long career as a troublemaker. In March of 1868, he shot and killed the chief clerk in the U.S. adjutant general’s office in Austin following a drunken dispute. Two months later, he killed an eighteen-year-old stable hand in Rockport, Texas, after the young man slapped his horse. After two killings in as many months, Billy spent the next few years on the run.
While Billy lay low to avoid murder warrants, Ben returned to the United States and headed for the biggest cow town on the plains, Abilene, Kansas. In May of 1871, Ben teamed up with Phil Coe to start the Bull’s Head Tavern, a raucous saloon on the outskirts of town that became a favorite of Texas cowboys. Coe and Thompson likely met as mercenaries for Emperor Maximilian during the Mexican revolution and then reunited in Kansas. Coe was born and raised in Gonzales, Texas, about fifty miles southeast of Thompson’s adopted hometown of Austin. Like Thompson, Coe served with a Texas cavalry unit in the Civil War before heading to Mexico.
Tension began immediately between the saloon owners and the townsfolk of Abilene. The job of policing the cowboys in all the saloons rested with Abilene’s new marshal, Wild Bill Hickok. One month before Coe and Thompson opened their saloon, city leaders hired the famous lawman to replace the previous marshal after the man had been killed while trying to serve a warrant with the county sheriff. Throughout the summer of 1871, Hickok butted heads with Coe and Thompson, and the trouble peaked in the first week of October.
It was the final week of the cattle season, and the remaining cowboys in town staged a last hurrah in the form of an Old West bar crawl. Ironically, the bar crawl wasn’t the problem. While the cowboys celebrated at the Novelty Theatre, a shot rang out from a neighboring street. Hickok rushed to the scene and found Phil Coe with a pistol in his hand. Coe claimed he had shot a dog, but even if the claim were true and he hadn’t harmed another person, it was illegal to carry a firearm in town. Hickok seemed inclined to let the infraction slide to avoid a confrontation in the middle of the street, but Coe turned the gun toward the marshal. Without hesitation, Hickok pulled both pistols and fired. His bullets hit Coe in the stomach and knocked the saloon owner into the dirt.
Hickok then caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. He spun and fired at a man who ran into the street. The man died instantly. A few moments later, Hickok realized he had killed his friend and deputy, Mike Williams. The accidental killing deeply affected Hickok, and after the town fathers decided, at the end of the year, they no longer needed Hickok’s services, he never wore a badge again.
Phil Coe lingered in agony for four days before succumbing to his gunshot wounds. At that point, his business partner, Ben Thompson, decided it was time to move along. Two years later, Ben and his brother, Billy, clashed, to some extent, with soon-to-be marshal Wyatt Earp in Ellsworth, Kansas. Billy killed the county sheriff with a shotgun in an incident that was ultimately ruled a drunken accident. Two years later, the brothers were back in their home state of Texas. Billy co-owned the Lady Gay Saloon in Sweetwater, and Ben was a faro dealer. When Bat Masterson breezed into town in the summer of 1875, he spent plenty of time at the Lady Gay and became friends with Ben Thompson. A few months later, that friendship helped save his life.
After Bat spent the fall and early winter of 1875 hunting buffalo, he settled into a routine of gambling and merriment in Sweetwater. He had certainly earned it. It was an understatement to call the past year of his life an adventure. Since he left the family farm in eastern Kansas in 1871 at the age of eighteen, he had been hunting buffalo or working for railroad crews in the vicinity of Dodge City, the growing settlement that was destined to be the next big cow town in Kansas. In June of 1874, he left Dodge with a collection of buffalo hunters, and they traveled south to the abandoned trading post of Adobe Walls in the Texas panhandle. Almost exactly ten years earlier, famous frontiersman Kit Carson narrowly survived an engagement with the Kiowa and Comanche at Adobe Walls, and now Bat and the crew from Dodge were about to star in a repeat performance. The panhandle was the last stronghold of Comanche chief Quanah Parker, and it didn’t take him long to realize the buffalo hunters had set up camps in the area of Adobe Walls.
On June 26, 1874, Parker led an estimated force of seven hundred warriors in an attack on the hunters. A battle raged for two hours, during which Bat performed heroically. When the warriors broke off the attack and melted back into the dry, flat landscape, the hunters decided they needed to send a rescue party back to Dodge City. Bat Masterson and a handful of others slipped away from Adobe Walls and made the 150-mile trek to southwestern Kansas. When they arrived, they learned Colonel Nelson Miles was preparing to lead an army column down to the panhandle.
Bat and his friend Billy Dixon signed on as scouts for the campaign. When Bat, Billy, and a detachment of soldiers returned to Adobe Walls two months later, they found the hunters in fine shape. There had been no further attacks. Bat was happy for the safety of his friends, but he still had a job to do. The army’s mission had changed twice since Colonel Miles organized the campaign, and Bat agreed to stay with the soldiers for the long haul.
The initial goal was a basic punitive expedition against the remaining Kiowa and Comanche holdouts under Quanah Parker, who refused to move to reservations. Then Bat and his friends added a rescue component when they informed Miles of the situation at Adobe Walls. And then, just as the mission seemed to be complete, Miles learned that four sisters had been kidnapped by Cheyenne Dog Soldiers. The family of the four girls was headed to Colorado in search of its dream life. But in central Kansas, just east of Hays City, where Wild Bill Hickok had been the marshal four years earlier, the girls watched in horror as their parents, their brother, and their two older sisters were killed and scalped. Colonel Miles’s intelligence said the captors were moving south toward Texas with the sisters. It took seven months, but the army column recovered all four girls, and Bat Masterson played a critical role in the recovery effort.
Over the course of ten months, Bat rode hundreds of miles, fought in the second battle of Adobe Walls, and helped rescue the four kidnapped sisters. He was viewed as a hero, and he was just twenty-two years old. With his service complete in the spring of 1875, he mustered out of the army and returned to civilian life. He was in no hurry to return to Dodge City, so he drifted into the small community of Sweetwater, which was a decision he would narrowly live to regret.
Bat spent most of his time drinking and gambling at Billy Thompson’s saloon, the Lady Gay. Bat became good friends with Ben Thompson and developed a relationship with a girl named Mollie Brennan. Mollie ended up in Sweetwater courtesy of Billy Thompson. She had been in Ellsworth, Kansas, when Billy killed the county sheriff. She was married to a saloonkeeper named Joe Brennan, but she fell hard for the gunman from Texas. When Billy fled Kansas after the killing, Mollie went with him. She was a dance hall girl and possibly a prostitute, and by the time Bat arrived in Sweetwater, she was working as an entertainer in Charlie Norton’s saloon. Whatever the nature of her previous relationship with Billy Thompson, it didn’t get in the way of a budding romance with the dashing, dark-haired hero who was fresh off a campaign that saved four kidnapped girls.
But there was a problem. As Bat and Mollie spent more time together, their blossoming relationship angered “Sergeant Melvin King.” King was an unhinged, hot-tempered soldier who was stationed at nearby Cantonment Sweetwater. He was a Civil War veteran, a noted gunslinger, and a bully. He was said to have killed several men in barroom gunfights—gunfights he provoked. And his name wasn’t Melvin King, nor was he currently a sergeant. His real name was Anthony Cook, and he had risen to the rank of sergeant before he was dishonorably discharged after a host of problems that included drunkenness, brawling, insubordination, and assaulting a fellow soldier. Several months after he was kicked out of the army, he reenlisted under the name Melvin A. King, and by the time he was stationed at Cantonment Sweetwater, he was a corporal.
On the night of January 24, Corporal King was already drunk when he showed up at the Lady Gay Saloon and sat down at the poker table with Bat Masterson, and matters deteriorated from there. King lost several hands, and his mood darkened.
While the game was in progress, saloon owner Charlie Norton strolled into the Lady Gay with a few of his employees. Charlie’s joint was closed that night, and he escorted Mollie Brennan, Kate Elder (future girlfriend of Doc Holliday), and a few others to the Lady Gay for the evening. Corporal King continued to lose, and his irritation grew, no doubt fueled by seeing Bat and Mollie in proximity. When King lost all his money, he bowed out of the game and exited the saloon.
By midnight, Bat, Charlie, and Mollie decided they wanted a change of venue. Charlie offered to pour a couple of drinks at his place, and the trio headed for his saloon. Charlie unlocked the door, ushered the couple to a table, and closed the door behind them. He stepped behind the bar to produce their beverages, but before he finished pouring, the door shuddered loudly. Someone pounded on it and demanded entry. Bat opened the door, and Corporal King barged in with a pistol in his hand.
King raved and shouted, and before Bat could subdue him or even understand the problem, King pulled the trigger. The bullet bored into Bat’s groin and broke his hip. He crashed to the floor as King fired again. At the same moment, Mollie threw herself in front of Bat. She took the full impact of King’s second shot and collapsed to the floor next to Bat. Bat pulled his pistol and returned fire. He shot King in the chest, and King crumpled to the floor near Mollie.
The sounds of gunshots drew soldiers and civilians to Norton’s saloon. When they burst inside, they found Bat Masterson, Melvin King, and Mollie Brennan bleeding on the floor. Masterson and King were gravely injured, but alive. Mollie was not. The soldiers seemed ready to kill Bat for his role in the fight, but then the most hotly debated part of the night happened.
In a version of the story that was told years later by Wyatt Earp, Ben Thompson rushed into the saloon, leaped onto a table, pulled two pistols, and kept the soldiers back while friends carried Bat to his room at the nearby hotel. In other versions, Billy Thompson is credited with the daring act. Whichever Thompson came to Bat’s aid, he likely saved Bat’s life in the short term. But Bat’s prospects for survival in the long run were dim. The doctor from Cantonment Sweetwater examined Bat and informed him that only time would tell. If Bat didn’t develop blood poisoning, he had a chance to live. But many before him had died of similar wounds. Bat could do nothing but lie in bed and hope for the best.
The next day, January 25, Corporal Anthony Cook—alias Melvin King—succumbed to his gunshot wound and was buried at Cantonment Sweetwater. The next month, in February 1876, the outpost was officially named Fort Elliott in honor of Major Joel Elliott, the man who commanded a company of scouts for Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Washita in 1868. Elliott and his entire detachment were killed in the engagement, a tragedy for which Captain Frederick Benteen never forgave Custer. The deaths of Elliott and his men would factor into Benteen’s decision-making process in a historic battle exactly six months later. But to set the stage for the battle, the U.S. government needed to issue a declaration that had been in the works for months. In essence, it was a declaration of war.
* * *
On February 1, one week after the Sweetwater shootout, the U.S. Department of the Interior declared all Native Americans who were not on reservations “hostile.” The designation was largely the brainchild of General Phil Sheridan, the commander of the Department of the Missouri. Sheridan oversaw all the territory from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and from Texas to Canada. In essence, he supervised all the land of the Plains Indians. By 1876, virtually all the members of the tribes of the southern plains had been subdued and pushed onto reservations. But their northern brethren in the Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana Territories still maintained the ability to roam freely, though that was about to change.
The overarching goal was to obtain the Black Hills region that was on the border of Dakota Territory. There was gold in the Hills, and speculation ran rampant that the quantity could be unparalleled. Rumors of gold in the area had persisted for decades, but they were confirmed in the summer of 1874 when Custer led more than one thousand soldiers into the Hills. On paper, the mission was to scout a site for a fort. But the underlying reason for the expedition was to see if the rumors were true. In August of 1874, newspapers shouted the confirmation, and prospectors immediately headed for the Black Hills. For the next year and a half, the U.S. Army forcibly removed miners from the region because America didn’t own the land, but that was about to change, as well.
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 deeded the Black Hills to the Lakota for all time. But when the Panic of 1873 spread financial ruin across the country, and the existence of gold was confirmed in 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant tried to buy the Black Hills twice in 1875. He failed both times. By November of 1875, Grant felt he was out of options. He didn’t want to rip up the agreement, but the nation screamed for the annexation of the Black Hills, and prospectors were going to continue to flood the area regardless of treaties. Grant resigned himself to the course of action that General Sheridan had preached for years.
Whether or not Sheridan knew of the concept of Manifest Destiny or had heard the term, he was a believer. Newspaper editor John O’Sullivan popularized the idea in 1839 when he made the case for America’s expansion westward. He wrote an article called “The Great Nation of Futurity,” which eloquently explained the political, economic, and moral reasons why Americans should go forth and spread across the North American continent. The words destiny and progress are prevalent in the piece, and a central tenet of progress was to civilize the Native American tribes, who were seen as archaic and savage. The idea of civilizing the tribes seemed noble at the time, but it was destructive at its core.
O’Sullivan’s missive stated, in part, “… We are a nation of progress, of individual freedom … freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality.” The great irony of Manifest Destiny, of course, was that universal freedom applied only to the white population. Slavery still flourished in the South, and the only way to civilize the Native American tribes was to destroy their way of life and convert them to the white man’s customs and the Christian religion.
In 1845, six years after O’Sullivan wrote his article, he rallied support for the annexation of Texas and wrote the quote that gave a name to America’s guiding principle of westward expansion. O’Sullivan said that it was Americans’ “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
Westward expansion accelerated in the 1840s and 1850s with the addition of Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska to the Union, and the discovery of gold in California. After the Civil War, Americans raced to blaze new trails to and through the West, and then ditch those old wagon roads as soon as possible for the faster, safer, and easier mode of travel, the railroad.
All of that progress required the subjugation of Native American tribes and their removal from their ancestral lands. Naturally, they wouldn’t leave without a fight. And by the late 1860s, General Phil Sheridan and General William Tecumseh Sherman were advocating all-out war against the tribes. If the tribes wouldn’t submit peacefully and agree to live on the most desolate, undesirable pieces of land on the continent, they would be killed. To the generals’ way of thinking, violent conflict was inevitable. So America might as well be the aggressor and get it over with. The faster it was done, the faster America could say that the West was simultaneously safe and open for business.
While Red Cloud fought his war on the northern plains, members of the tribes of the southern plains signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. But, as always, the treaty did little to stop the fighting between the tribes and the soldiers who tried to secure roads to the West for settlers. By the autumn of 1868, General Sheridan was ready to take the first major, coordinated step toward removing or annihilating the Plains Indians.
Sheridan devised a strategy that used three army columns from three different forts on the southern plains. The columns would strike from different directions and use speed and surprise to kill or capture the enemy. But the first stage of the plan featured just one column in action: the Seventh Cavalry led by Lieutenant Colonel Custer. The other two columns, one of which included scouts Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody, were waylaid by early winter snowstorms.
Custer’s men still called him “General” to honor his brevet rank during the Civil War, but in the smaller postwar army, he was bumped back to lieutenant colonel. Less than a week after Custer’s column departed Fort Dodge in Kansas, his detachment of scouts, led by Major Joel Elliott, found the trail of a Cheyenne village that was led by Chief Black Kettle. Black Kettle had survived the Sand Creek massacre in southern Colorado four years earlier, an event that helped spark Red Cloud’s War. But he would not survive Custer’s assault.
On November 27, 1868, Custer’s men attacked the village along the Washita River near present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. The cavalry burned the village, killed combatants and noncombatants alike, and captured 53 women and children. But during the attack, Major Elliott’s detachment of 17 men advanced beyond the main assault force and ran headlong into a charging horde of more than one thousand Kiowa and Arapaho warriors. Black Kettle’s village was small, maybe 250 people total. But beyond his village, tucked into a loop of the Washita River, were two larger villages. Warriors from the Kiowa and Arapaho villages rushed toward the fight at Black Kettle’s village and swarmed Major Elliott’s detachment.
When Custer saw the wave of warriors racing toward his men, he withdrew across the Washita River and marched back to the camp that acted as a staging area for the attack. Custer claimed victory, but he made no attempt to rescue Major Elliott’s detachment or recover the bodies in a timely fashion, and those decisions infuriated Captain Frederick Benteen. Benteen was a close friend of Major Elliott, and Benteen believed Custer cared more for personal glory than the safety of his men. This campaign would seem eerily familiar to Benteen in the future.
Seven years after the Battle of the Washita, General Sheridan stood in President Grant’s office and said it was time to try the same tactic against the tribes of the northern plains who refused to sign treaties or set foot on reservations. Grant reluctantly agreed, but with a caveat: he wanted legal cover for the action. He needed to justify the campaign by saying the tribes broke the Fort Laramie Treaty.
Grant was in a tight spot. He seemed like a man who genuinely appreciated the destructive history of America toward Native American tribes. He didn’t want to continue the policies of previous generations that forced the tribes onto reservations or killed them in the attempt. But most of the country cried out for more land and more resources—namely, gold. And Americans had clearly proven that they were going to move west regardless of Grant’s feelings or opinions. So, Grant talked himself into approving Sheridan’s plan by finding a tepid middle ground. By 1876, it was clear that certain groups within a few tribes were not going to sign a treaty or live on a reservation. Grant could ask for all the legal cover he wanted, and his administration could state as many righteous goals for the campaign as it desired, but Grant had to know that there was a high likelihood of significant bloodshed. Grant had tried to buy the Black Hills, but failed. And he couldn’t hold back the flood of westward expansion. His only choice was to compartmentalize his inner turmoil and give Sheridan the green light.
Sheridan worked quickly. One week after the meeting in late November 1875, an Indian inspector in the Interior Department wrote a report that enumerated a list of grievances against the Lakota and Cheyenne of the northern plains. The list was full of exaggerations and outright lies. In fact, the year of 1875 had been the most peaceful in recent memory. Grant must have cringed when he read it, but he was past the point of no return. In late December, runners went out to the winter camps with a message: be on a reservation by January 31, 1876, or the U.S. Army would wage war.
Copyright © 2023 by Chris Wimmer
