That June, Bat was one of the small party of hunters who stood off 500 Comanches at the Adobe Walls fight in the Texas Panhandle. After surviving the siege, he signed on with the Army as a civilian scout and served in some of the sharpest fighting of the war. Later he divided his time working as a teamster for the Army out of Camp Supply, in the northwest part of Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), and hunting buffalo in the Texas Panhandle. It was there, in Texas, that he had his fateful encounter with the soldier King.

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Sweetwater began as a buffalo hunter’s camp called Hidetown on Sweetwater Creek deep in the Texas Panhandle. In 1874, Charles Rath, a Dodge City merchant, established a supply store there in partnership with Albert Reynolds, of the firm of Lee and Reynolds at Camp Supply. At first, Hidetown was little more than a rendezvous for hide hunters. Rath, Reynolds & Co. dominated the buffalo hide trade from the little hamlet.

In 1875, the Army established a camp nearby known as Cantonment Sweetwater (designated Fort Elliott the following year). The Dodge City-Camp Supply trail was extended to the cantonment, and when the military began to construct a permanent post there, Hidetown was found to be on the military reserve. As a result, the settlement was moved two miles closer to the cantonment, and its name was changed to Sweetwater. Local tradition says that Bat Masterson surveyed the new town site of 40 acres. After Rath and Reynolds relocated their store, Henry Fleming built a stone building across the creek, and Sweetwater grew into a town of about 150 persons.

Tom O’Loughlin opened a restaurant and boardinghouse. W.H. Weed built the first saloon, but Henry Fleming’s place, the Lady Gay, was considered the best. Kate Elder, later Doc Holliday’s consort, said that Colonel Charlie Norton, a Dodge City businessman, built a dance hall there as well and brought in a bevy of girls from Dodge. Other sources credit Billy Thompson (the brother of well-known gunman Ben Thompson and a fugitive from Kansas justice at the time for the murder of Chauncey B. Whitney, the sheriff of Ellsworth County, two years earlier) with establishing the dance hall. Most likely, Thompson and Norton were partners. A Chinese laundry opened, and several cabins were thrown up to complete the camp. The nearest town was Dodge City, 200 miles away in another state. There was no law enforcement. It was the perfect milieu for trouble.

The ‘Sergeant King’ of the Western legend was a man with a formidable reputation as a gunfighter. ‘He was dark of brow, with cruel mouth and furtive secret eye,’ Alfred Henry Lewis wrote of King in The Sunset Trail, his fictional biography of Masterson published in 1905. Lewis was the first writer to actually give King a history, declaring that he had been driven out of Abilene as the result of ‘an enterprise wherein he combined a six-shooter with a deck of cards–the latter most improperly marked–which resulted in the demise of a gentleman then and there playing draw poker against him.’ But worse than being a cheat and a murderer, King was that ‘most detested and soonest to die’ of Western wretches, ‘a blusterer and a bully.’ His braggadocio was so despicable that ‘no one wanted his company and but few his gold.’

Stuart N. Lake added to King’s reputation as a frontier badman in 1931 with the publication of Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. Lake dubbed King ‘the United States Army’s most noteworthy contribution to the ranks of Western gunmen’ and averred that he was ‘a finished artist with the six-shooter and a cold-blooded killer’ who terrorized the Kansas cattle towns in ‘a number of authenticated instances.’ In fact, Wyatt Earp claimed to have arrested him in Wichita, Kan., only months before King’s death at the hands of Bat Masterson, but the ‘authenticated’ record of his exploits is thin indeed.

Yet, if King was not the terror of the cow towns that the legend made him, he was a man with a checkered past. He was born Anthony Cook, not Melvin A. King, in 1845–apparently, like Masterson, in Quebec, Canada, though some records indicate he was born in Ireland. Like the Mastersons, Cook’s parents emigrated to upstate New York from Canada. Cook grew up on a farm near Canton, N.Y., the eldest of three sons and two daughters. In October 1863, the month he turned 18, Anthony Cook enlisted in Company E of the 14th New York Heavy Artillery. He served continuously with his regiment until he was captured before Petersburg, Va., on March 25, 1865. He was paroled on March 31 and reported to Camp Parole, Md., where he was furloughed on April 7, 1865. A month later he briefly returned to active duty before being discharged in August.

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