Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Boot Hill
Near Dodge City, Kansas
In the cattle-town years, Dodge City needed law enforcement the way a leaky boat needs a bucket. The solution was to hire gunfighters as peace officers, and the arrangement produced some of the most famous names in western history. Bat Masterson was elected sheriff of Ford County in eighteen seventy-seven.
Wyatt Earp arrived that same year at the invitation of the mayor, who needed help managing thousands of armed Texas cowboys arriving each season with money and no patience for local ordinances. Earp served as assistant city marshal alongside Masterson, Charlie Bassett, and Bill Tilghman, among others. Together they enforced the deadline: north of the railroad tracks, no firearms; south of the tracks, the rowdy district, nearly anything went.
The system was practical rather than principled. The city needed the cowboys to spend their money, just not to shoot each other, or anyone else, north of the tracks. Boot Hill Cemetery occupied a slope north of town, where the unlucky ended up.
The name was a grim frontier joke: men buried there had died with their boots on. The cemetery filled fast in the early cattle years, but by eighteen seventy-eight it had to be cleared. A new schoolhouse was being built on Boot Hill, and the bodies were moved downhill to Prairie Grove Cemetery.
The hill became a symbol of the era; the schoolhouse was replaced by a museum that recreates Front Street as it appeared in the cattle years. Today the Boot Hill Museum occupies the original site and draws more than one hundred thousand visitors a year.
