“Doc” Barton’s trade was meat, not medicine. Honored as the first cattleman to drive a herd from Texas to Dodge City, back in the summer of 1872 (to be precise, he’d driven his herd through Dodge, having arrived a tad ahead of the AT&SF railroad’s track-laying crews), Barton was now tasked with bringing in a dozen bulls fit to face Moore’s matadors. He curry-combed the cow camps south of town, searching the inbound herds for the fiercest, fightingest bovines the Texas drovers could muster. Texas bulls were available, and they’d appeal equally to the cowboy element and to pleasure-seeking dudes fascinated with the Cowboy Capital’s image. By one account, Barton’s decision was clinched by a cowboy’s remark that by nature a Texas bull is “all the time as mad as he can get.” After scouting out 12 of the roughest customers, Barton returned with his dirty dozen in late June. His arrival was met with much ballyhoo from the Dodge press. The Ford County Globe even christened the critters with suitably colorful names: Ringtailed Snorter, Cowboy Killer, Iron Gall, Lone Star, Long Branch, Opera, Ku Klux, Sheriff, Doc, Rustler, Loco Jim and Eat-Em-Up Richard. The paper also detailed their “pedigrees,” lest anyone doubt their fitness for the appointed task.

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Press coverage by the locals was somewhat divided. The Globe treated the bull fight as the grand spectacle Webster and his cohorts intended, though with tongue unquestionably in cheek. Likewise the Kansas Cowboy, a relatively new weekly which, as the name implied, was the voice of the cattle interests. By contrast, the Dodge City Times, published by reform booster “Deacon” Nicholas Klaine, looked upon the bullfight as an embarrassment at best, an abomination at worst.

Out-of-town papers were a mixed bag; some expressed outrage, some elation, but nearly all (particularly in rival Kansas towns) gloried in Dodge’s reckless image. The neighboring Jetmore Reveille decried the spectacle as “brutal and degrading sport.” The Medicine Lodge Index asked, “Are we retrograding or advancing in morals?” In Kansas’ capitol city, the TopekaCommonwealth expressed sorrow to see that “such a brutal proceeding” was to take place in the home state and hope that “the sober second thought” of Dodge’s citizens would convince them to abandon the scheme.

But Webster and company had no time for second thoughts, sober or otherwise. Such fretting mattered little. Any publicity suited their purpose, and they gleefully stoked both sides of the debate. Some accounts of the forthcoming fight promised a rough and bloody affair, befitting an untamed cow town; others downplayed the event as merely an “athletic exhibition.” Moore played to both camps. In a single interview he promised the bulls “are not tortured, the only weapons of offense used by the men being small darts,” then went on to admit that one animal would be put to the sword. It was a canny tactic; such equivocating only provided more red meat for the ravenous public and press. One paper in Gunnison, Colorado declared, “ ‘The contest will be to the death’ says the advertisement.” This left to the reader’s imagination just whose death was guaranteed.  The New York Herald went one better, predicting fatalities to at least some of the matadors. Overall, press coverage and word-of-mouth led spectators to expect a bloodbath, and whether the blood was the bulls’ or the matadors’ was probably irrelevant. One opinion the Herald probably had pros and cons alike nodding in agreement: “Where is there another town in the country that would have the nerve to get up a genuine Spanish bull fight on American soil?”

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