Masterson was a frequent visitor at the White House during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who was fascinated by Western men of action, particularly the ‘two-gun man.’ As a New Yorker who became a Westerner, Roosevelt had a special interest in Bat Masterson, the Westerner who became a New Yorker. Teddy and Bat shared another bond, the love of prizefighting. Washington papers reported that during his White House sojourns Bat regaled the president with inside stories of early ring battles while statesmen cooled their heels in waiting rooms.

On the recommendation of Alfred Henry Lewis, Roosevelt in early 1905 ordered Masterson’s appointment as deputy U.S. marshal for the southern district of New York. Assigned to the office of the U. S. attorney, Bat held his commission for four years and four months, a singularly lucrative period for him. The duties of the position, which consisted primarily of maintaining security in the grand jury room when that body was in session, did not interfere with his newspaper work, and he reported to his boss, Marshal William Henkel, only on payday. This sweetheart sinecure was worth $2,000 a year. William Howard Taft, who followed Roosevelt to the White House in 1909, ordered Masterson’s job abolished. Bat, a seasoned gambler who knew that no run of luck lasts forever, shrugged, pocketed his winnings and moved on.

In the West, Bat Masterson had warred fiercely with his enemies, firing verbal and written salvos and resorting on occasion to fists, cane and pistol. His battles in New York mostly were confined to published harangues, but there were a few physical clashes. One was with Richard D. Plunkett, a man Bat had known in Creede, Colo., where Plunkett gained some frontier prominence as the lawman who arrested Ed O’Kelley, the man who killed Bob Ford, slayer of Jesse James.

In 1906 Plunkett came to New York and, with a man named Dinklesheets, toured the Broadway watering holes, denouncing the city’s famous Western gunfighter, Bat Masterson, as a fraud and a phony. When this calumny reached Bat, he confronted Plunkett and Dinklesheets in the cafe of the staid Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. After an angry verbal exchange, an inebriated Dinklesheets swung clumsily at Masterson and missed. Bat knocked him down. Thrusting his hand into a side pocket, Masterson then shoved something against Plunkett’s stomach. Somebody yelled: ‘Look out! Bat’s going to flash Betsy!’ and there was a general rush for the exits. Police arrived, separated the combatants, and sent them on their way. No one was arrested. A reporter later cornered Bat and asked to see the gun that had panicked the hotel patrons. Bat smiled and pulled a package of cigarettes from his pocket.

For years Masterson feuded with sports editor and cartoonist Bob Edgren of the New York Evening World. Following some fairly innocuous sparring in their respective columns, Edgren on December 10, 1909, reviled Bat and Wyatt Earp in a column headed, ‘Why Gunfighters Fail as Referees.’ After ridiculing Masterson’s journalistic ability and ring knowledge, Edgren attacked Earp for his controversial referee’s decision in 1896 when he awarded Tom Sharkey a victory over Bob Fitzsimmons on a foul, and repeated the charge that Earp took a bribe to ensure a Sharkey victory. Bat sent the column to Earp, who responded with a letter vehemently denying Edgren’s allegations, including one that Wyatt notched his pistols to mark his murder victims. Earp concluded by saying he would like to cut 12 neatly carved notches on Bob Edgren’s lying tongue.

In 1911 Edgren’s brother Leonard, sportswriter for the New York Globe and Advertiser, included in a column an allegation by fight manager Frank Ufer that Bat’s gunfighter reputation had been gained by shooting drunken Mexicans and Indians in the back. Bat quickly brought suit for $10,000 against Ufer, charging him with false and defamatory remarks. Settlement for an undisclosed amount was reached out of court. Bat also filed suit against the publishers of the paper for $25,000. When that case went to trial in May 1913, Benjamin N. Cardoza, later a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, represented the newspaper. He grilled Masterson at length regarding his gunfighter reputation. Bat heatedly denied shooting anyone, drunk or sober, in the back. He admitted shooting Indians in battle, but could not say if any were drunk. He said he never shot a Mexican in the front or in the back. The jury agreed that Masterson had been defamed and awarded damages of $3,500, plus court costs. Masterson never reconciled his differences with either Bob Edgren or his old Denver enemy, Otto Floto. When Jack Dempsey came on the ring scene, Edgren was an early votary of the sensational Colorado heavyweight and Bat learned that Floto had once managed Dempsey and reportedly still owned a piece of him. Contempt for his enemies clouded Bat’s judgment, leading him to badly underestimate Dempsey’s remarkable ring prowess.

Bat even disparaged a racehorse who had the misfortune, in his view, of being named Otto Floto. ‘How could a horse win any kind of race,’ he asked, ‘with that sort of a name wished on him?’ But this horse-name business cut two ways. When a nag named Bat Masterson dropped dead one day on the back stretch, Floto wrote a column titled ‘Poetic Justice,’ opining that even an elephant could not bear the weight of both a jockey and a bad name.

Masterson also waged a vendetta against New York boxing commission chairmen he felt were detrimental to the sport and finally succeeded in getting two of them ousted. A new commissioner named Walter Hooke was appointed in 1921. Bat deemed him unqualified and said so in his column. A few nights later as Bat sat at his usual ringside seat at Madison Square Garden, an angry Hooke upbraided him in stentorian, foul-mouthed terms. The reaction of a younger Bat Masterson would have been swift and violent, but at 67, Bat was too old, too tired and too wise. He retaliated instead with his pen, calling the governor’s attention to the commission chairman’s unprofessional behavior and demanding his immediate dismissal. Soon the governor gave Hooke the hook and appointed William Muldoon, one of Bat’s oldest and closest friends, as chairman.

Bat and William S. Hart, the era’s top Western movie star, were longtime friends. Openly in awe of Masterson, Hart told Louella Parsons: ‘I play the hero that Bat Masterson inspired. More than any other man I have ever met I admire and respect him.’ On October 7, 1921, Hart and Masterson were photographed together on the roof of the Morning Telegraph building and also in Bat’s office, with the actor sitting at Bat’s desk, the old Westerner standing behind. Eighteen days later, seated in that chair at that desk, Bat Masterson would breathe his last. On Tuesday morning, October 25, he wrote his final column. When it was finished, he was seized by a sudden heart attack, collapsed over his desk and passed on without a sound. It was, as Damon Runyon put it, ‘a strangely quiet closing to a strangely active career.’

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This article was written by R.K. DeArment and originally appeared in the June 2001 issue of Wild West.

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