Legends have to begin somewhere. Wyatt Earp had his O.K. Corral, Wild Bill Hickok his Rock Creek Station, Billy the Kid his Lincoln. For each it was a defining moment that established beyond doubt (for the legend at least) that the hero was brave, resourceful, skilled and in the right. Legends require villains as well–Clantons for the Earps, the McCanles gang for Wild Bill, the Murphy-Dolan faction for the Kid. Most often, the foils of heroes are shadowy figures, remembered only for their villainy, black-hearted men whose purpose is to serve as symbols of the brutish essence of the crude and tawdry side of frontier life.

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For Bat Masterson, the road to legendary status began at a backwater hamlet called Sweetwater, near Cantonment Sweetwater in the Texas Panhandle. For him, the moment of truth involved a gunfight with an obstreperous soldier of the 4th Cavalry known in the legend simply as 'Sergeant King.' On the night of January 24, 1876, King and a woman named Mollie Brennan were killed, Masterson was seriously wounded and the essential components of the legend were in place, lacking only the embroideries of time to grow from a senseless shooting into Bat Masterson's rite of passage to fame, replete with overtones of true love and the triumph of good over evil.

The legend would eventually insist that the Sweetwater shootout was the source of Mr. Masterson's nickname 'Bat.' Legend makers, pointing to the severity of his wound, concocted the idea that when the young Masterson pinned on a badge in Dodge City later that year, he was still relying on a cane, which he also used to 'bat' lawbreakers over the head. That he was called 'Bat' before he ever met Sergeant King did not limit a fiction too good to pass up. Bat apparently disliked the name his parents gave him, Bertholomiew, and he would eventually change it to William Barclay Masterson. The Anglicized version of his birth name, 'Bartholomew,' may have been the source of his ubiquitous sobriquet, although Masterson himself would testify that he was not called Bat until he was a young man. Writer Alfred Henry Lewis attributed the nickname to Masterson's compatriots on the buffalo range who compared Bat's skills as a hunter to those of an old-time mountain man, Baptiste 'Bat' Brown.

Despite his youth, Bat Masterson was already a seasoned frontiersman by the time he killed King. He was born on November 26, 1853, in St. George Parish, Quebec, Canada. Masterson's parents, Tom and Catherine, shared the wanderlust of many of that era and moved from Canada to New York to Illinois before settling in Sedgwick County, Kan., near Wichita. In 1871 Bat and his older brother Ed left home for the buffalo range. The next spring they took jobs as graders on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, even then stretching west toward a little camp called Buffalo City, later named Dodge City. Dodge, when they reached it, was the center of the buffalo trade and a genuine hellhole. The combination of a rough class of men, whiskey, whores, gambling and the absence of any real law enforcement made Dodge a particularly dangerous place in those days. More than a dozen men died violently there that first year, but the amiable Ed and the fun-loving Bat managed to stay clear of trouble. And they earned a measure of respect from the hard men of Dodge when they collected at gunpoint wages owed them from a contractor who tried to cheat them.

The Masterson brothers soon returned to the buffalo grounds to be a part of the great slaughter of the American bison. It was a profitable, if dirty, enterprise, and the U.S. Army actively encouraged the hunters as a means of destroying native independence. Of course, the Plains Indians reacted violently to the destruction of the herds until, finally, the buffalo slaughter, combined with raids on the horse herds of the southern tribes by thieves like Hurricane Bill Martin, precipitated the Red River War in 1874.

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