. >> when you arrive to the surroundings you get very comfortable in the situation so you want to continue to earn those converts and so you spend more money whether they are efficient or effected of. so many of the members are here. is the best job i have ever had and it is a job they don't want to kill a full of

[inaudible conversations] >> barack committed is my great pleasure to introduce our author u.s. written a book about digested the kansas andrea thrilled about that. to have some of the accolades someone said it

must have for history buffs and other critics said fans or lovers of larry should cover the non-fiction block for the for the former mayor and historical preservation i think it is high-priced issues city would enjoy it. did just flows one. and tom is the number one b. york times best selling author it is the magazine writer and reporter for the new york times. receiving awards from the marine corps heritage foundation and the national newspaper association.

to be at the heart the for everything there is and as this flows so well with the narrative because his of plug surprise winner so it is my great pleasure to welcome tom. [applause] . .

>> being in a room by yourself most real life and then coming out and interacting with people. i do the best i can, one of the things that helps in that situation is to make notes. i made all kinds of notes the notes stuck in here, but then sitting here thinking in wichita and i'm gonna take these notes throw them down there. i will tell you the story and tell you how the book came about. what it's about who the characters are and will make it informal and loose and go from there. i've done several books who is a wonderful writer and best

friend. we had done a book called the heart of everything there is. you might be familiar with it. it's about the indian lakota sioux indian leader who is the only american indian leader to defeat the united states in the war. not just a battle, but that is really what the book was about. we are very fortunate that the book sold very well. and when we did the book i wanted to go right back into another book about the american west of 1860s and 70s. my co-author and publisher both said, we're really looking to come back into the 20th century. and do you have any good world war ii stories? we actually did. that was less book we did. but while we're looking on that

i cannot shake the idea of the frontier of the west. sometimes you find out just by trolling around. i remember reading something once about the dodge city war. it was my fault, i didn't know anything about it. it is somewhat significant. i also remember a couple things and i started researching the life of bat masterson. that intrigued me because i would say the majority of people in this room there is an immediate name recognition. how many of you really know what his life was like? some of us may have remembered that masterson is maybe being pretrade in a couple of hollywood pictures and usually

he was the second banana. he was the supporter of the real sure. it was almost a foolish bat masterson. so i started doing research into his life and i found out that he had this amazing life full of adventure. and yet it's really hard to find that kind of information. then comes to wider. i did not want to do a book about wider because i do not think it would work. some of you may be familiar about a book that came out about 20 years ago. a terrific book. so why do another one. everything is in there that is been in there. there's another book called inventing wider that takes a look at a different tactic. it's also talking about all of the myths that have been perpetrated over the years.

i did not think there is room for that. i started to put some of these together. the wyatt earp that most of us know or think we know is the tombstone wider. the gunfight at the okay corral. because when you think about the movies that have been done you go back to my darling clementine, henry father plays wyatt earp and there in the 40s when i made that picture. doc holliday has played wider. more recent years you have kevin costner played wider, kurt russell played wider. so it's almost like wyatt earp was born in tombstone. a few weeks before the okay corral. he wasn't. i started to fit these pieces together of bat masterson wonderful adventures and wyatt earp, why did he end up, forget

tombstone, what was his like before that it turned out that he had bat masterson in their 20s were at the same time in dodge city. i'm not saying nothing has been written over that. you can certainly find aspects of it. but i started to get more into it. fortunately the great folks at saint martin's press said what you did this book on your own, if this is the story want to tell let's tell it. and i said great that began a three-year project. the reason it took three years as the writing was the easy part. once i started writing it went very swiftly. because a lot of the information my fingertips and i wanted to tell one story after another. and have it read if not fiction but have it read like a novel. you attend the chapter was something interesting so they

would start the next chapter. the research and the big reason why the research was so laborious and time-consuming is that there is so much out there not true. there's a lot of tall tales about the iconic western figures that is easy to find. if you just want to do a book quickly and easily just take what is perpetrated over the decades and take that and put it together in a book. one thing that was remarkable to me happening was the real story of wyatt earp and bat masterson, the pre-tombstone was just as exciting if not more exciting than a lot of the myths that have been perpetrated. i will jump quickly about the myths. bat masterson, in his later

years all of these novels have been done. and referred to as bloodthirsty bat because they had killed 22 men not true. that's the kind of guy who would be reluctant to burst anyone's bubble. most people don't know that it was so remarkable. the last 15 years of his life he spent as a newspaper reporter in new york city. that was his occupation. as a reporter for the columnist, he wrote about sports. he wrote three columns week about boxing. loved boxing. so he get out his calm in the office during the day and it night he go to the ballgame into the boxing match and home-court.

people out of town, very quickly one of his protéges at the newspapers was a man named david runyan. that name might be familiar. the stories he wrote became guys and dolls. close the characters doll? sky masterson. that became his idol. so, that -- every so often he had someone come to new york and they would want to me the bloodthirsty bat masterson his hands were dripping with blood from all the guys he killed. who always carried his 45 with 22 notches on it. the out-of-town guys would say please sell me your gun. imagine what it be like if i went back home and i have begun that team to the west. that killed all the outlaws.

i bet would be reluctant and say you can't do it. finally he got to the place where okay don't tell anybody i did this but let's do that. they fork over the money, on the next train back home they go to a pawn shop by another one, 22 notches in. so it's always fascinating to me and i started doing the research and decided i wanted to tell the story about how the lives of young wyatt earp and bat masterson and then they intersected in dodge city. as young men who are not exactly quiet boys. they had to figure out, am i gonna be a goodbye guy or bad guys. a lot of guys are wearing badges at that time.

i also discovered that wyatt earp is mostly pretrade in the popular culture as a guy who is without doubt. he knew what right from wrong and he was going to enforce it. and i found out the other wyatt earp was a rather tragic figure. until he got to wichita which i'll get to in a bid which is where he redeemed himself. he started on the road to being a good guy. before that he had just come out of prison. he was gonna get into more trouble for things to turn around for them. the maturity his story. he was one of ten children, his father had two wives. his father was very familiar with the law and the inside of a jail cell. one of his occupation was moonshiner.

there i was going back and forth looking for someplace to call home. three of his brothers knew, james and virgil all served in the civil war. wyatt ran away several times in his father always straight to back. after the civil war white virgil went west to work as a teamster. they would haul freight and work for the railroad company. they'd work for the wagon companies. it was a great life in a way. one method about him is people like him is he's pretrade as a guy who could walk into a bar and knocked down the shot of whiskey. him and doc holliday would not come back together. why didn't drink. whiskey made him sick. so despite repeated attempts by virgil to get a mac committed to whiskey it didn't take. he finally gave up.

coffee was his drink. he would occasionally let himself have a glass of beer but he is not a drinker. but then the herb family the others were living in missouri. wyatt decided to take a break and go back, visit his family. his mother, father and siblings. while he was there a job opened and he took the job. it was something good and interesting. he made a few dollars and the other thing is he fell in love. a woman that he fell madly in love with. the courtship was very brief and they got married. wyatt brought a piece of property for $75 and she got pregnant. i was going to be his life. he's going to live in missouri for the rest of his life and maybe become something else in law-enforcement. and his wife was about a months pregnant she died and the baby

died with her. wyatt was crushed by grief. everything was stashed. he went on a downward trajectory. got into trouble and was arrested for robbery. he was arrested for not replaying alone and getting into fights. his brothers had to go find him and bill amount. and then he got arrested for being a horse thief and thrown into jail. if we had ever known him because he became a famous outlaw.amen. but he came to wichita and two there is one passage i want to read, i don't normally read from the book because i refer to tell the story. because of this one i want to do it. this is where wyatt's life turned around. >> when wyatt finally arrived in

wichita in 1874, the town was at its peak and transporting cattle. with one reasonable estimate being 80000 and packed into railroad cars and sent off to the slaughter houses, some years before the site had been little more than a tall prairie grass on the bank of the river and now was a bustling, noisy even for ranchers selling their animals. wyatt's older brother james terry to bessie settled in wichita working in a salute. betsy operated a brothel. in a sentence taken the following year, betsy's activation was listed as sporting. with a steady flow of cowboys into town saloons were springing up on every corner. officials went so far as to post signs leading in that red anything goes in wichita. at night going to the dry air and with the stench of the pent-up cattle with a sense of beer and whiskey, horses,

cheaper fuel and men had gone too long between baths. the tingling of pianos came from the background for the laughter and the location crashing sound. it took a lot to put a cowboy jail where he cannot spend his money. in addition to alcohol that money was taken by the card players as they glued the chairs to the gaming tables. young woman and fluffy dresses offered songs another favors. prostitution was legal as long as the ladies were license. the city would get a reputation that be reapplied as dodge city. wichita resembled the brother hell after sundown. brass bands will open it up, words and had drivers yelling and cursing. dogs yelping, pistols going off saloons open wide their doors in females with pianos. they would invite the boys in. there you have it wichita.

>> what happened? >> there's a lot of people in wichita who they could see the advantages of that kind of economy. but they also worried about wichita descending into chaos and lawlessness. and there is a guy named mike who became a marshall. jim smith, wyatt had opportunity to work for the police force in wichita. he did a part-time and then he became a full-time member of the police department. this was a redeeming event for wyatt wichita. he started to see himself is not this bad guy who was okay because he lost his wife he didn't care about anything anymore. then he started to care. he started to take serious penal law man.

he took seriously the idea that he wanted to be on the right side of the law and work his life doing that. it wasn't a quiet boy. he was also a bouncer and a brothel along with one of his brothers. but he started to see a different way of life. it was at that time there is an election going on, both smith and mike were vying to become the new marshall. and smith, during the campaign insulted wyatt's brothers and white beat him up. then ev got reelected and then at city council they said you have to get rid of her. you can have someone who is going to beat people up in the street. so he was fired. that is when he got the offer one of his brothers has gone to

dodge city and said come here and check it out. this is a happening place. that's how i got there. back out to dodge city, it's interesting, one of the things i liked about the book was that there is six herb brothers and five masterson brothers. most of them became lawmen. a lot of times they work together. one would be in dodge city years later, ed masterson was the marshall walt bat was the sheriff of the county. jim masterson also worked as a law man. bat was one of seven children. it's always been reported that pat was from illinois. he was canadian, but he never admitted to or confirm because if you never became an american citizen he should have not run for office, which she did more than once. so many years later that

detective found out he was a canadian. but his family ended up in kansas, think about 12 or 14 miles outside of wichita. his father tom was the one who ran the farm. his brother was oldest brother who came back. i was very protected and his older brother was a very likable guy. the family always thought he was too nice to survive. that always looked after his brother. the time came where he wanted to be a farmer when you could make a lot of money. so they went and became buffalo hunters which was dirty filthy, hard work. but, it paid well. at that time there is a lot of buffalo as fast as you could kill them you could make some money. it was during one of those early years that he met wider. there are some disputes about

both wide and bad later years would say that's when they met each other and became friends as buffalo hunters. bad to buffalo hunting for a while and then decided to become an army scout. one of the stories in the book is if you're familiar with the searchers with john wayne. it's kind of inspired by bat masterson had when he was only about 20. there is a family attack by indians the parents were killed and their four daughters were kidnapped. and then it split up into two bands. one took to of the daughters. beth went after them they track

down indians and recovered all four daughters and brought them back. you never heard that story before. another adventure they have they had a battle they had attacked a group of comanches and this took place in texas. but ten years later that was part of the people going down and they are hoping to put a settlement there and use it as a trading post for people who are buffalo hunting. they set up there about 30 of them. what they didn't quite realize is there any treated territory, remember the empire by sam greene, those part of the great comanche leader.

so they got together with some other allies and so we have to wipe out the settlement because we cannot let them take root here. they attacked in this huge battle and bat masterson was one of the survivors of it again he stayed in texas and ended up in a town firm obd taxes that later became -- and likewise he fell in love. one girl named molly brennan and they are totally smitten with each other. the problem is there is an army sergeant who thought he was in love. he was extremely jealous.

it is in the army and kicked out for being violent. and he saw the two dancing and bursting with a gun. he shoots that and wins him in the groin. and that's why he ever walked with a limp and carried a cane because of his injury. that probably should've died. so they throw in front of back, takes the bullet and his skill. that takes his gun out and kill surgeon came. he almost died. that was a guy with a very strong constitution. it took him a few months of recovering and then he said he was a grieving guy. one of his brothers said come to dodge city it's a happening place so he goes to dodge city and basically that's where he is

reunited with his friend when they call each other best friend with wyatt earp, and their career in dodge city began. what was happening was when the railroad came in 1872 dodge city started to explode because these texas ranchers could have their cattle drives go up there. the railroad was there, they could put their cattle on the trains. there is a lot of money to be made. suddenly dodge city was expanded by leaps and bounds. and they could cater to the cowboys there. the saloon, the brothel, people were starting businesses there because so many people are coming out of there.

dodge city became a place where people are coming to her passing through including outlaws. it became a dangerous place because the violence is breaking up. inevitably because people carrying guns and liquor being consumed. people from different walks of life worth thrust together in a small place like dodge city. more forward thinking people said we have to do something about this. the first year after dodge city became the railroad there were 15 people killed. you can't have that. people are not going to want to raise their families, and got the reputation news newspapers in san francisco and chicago there is one story published in a train a guy was sitting there and a conductor came up there and said they said to hell, get

out of dodge city. that's the reputation it had. so the first time they took a guy named billy brooks to be the marshall of dodge city. that they did not understand they didn't understand it be a psychopath. sees that it could backfire so they came in and they hired a sheriff. lawrence steger was his name and he was actually a reputable guy and some say he was a big guy and he was good at tracking people down. some say it was a model.

he wasn't a marshall who would go out on patrol. he had heard about a guy named wyatt earth and he contacted wyatt earp and said would you be interested in being an assistant marshall. wyatt was looking for a fresh start. basically he said sure. i will try. he became the assistant marshall. soon after who comes into town but bat masterson they needed another deputy so wyatt said let's work together. that's where this other phase of the book begins. it is wyatt and bat, they're not the only ones. they're really representative, there's other good law men.

what i found fascinating about bad is that their best friend who had each other's back. they trusted each other completely they're both in their 20s, when bat was elected a few years later he was 22 years old. what intrigued me was that here two guys not educated men, intelligent to some extent but they basically found themselves at the forefront of creating law and order whatever they could do and if they could work elsewhere if was in dodge city could happen elsewhere too. they were not, there is no marshall school. there's no sheriff's academy.

they basically had to find within themselves and support each other reason to do the right thing. that was to do the right thing because they wanted to make dodge city a place where people can school and build churches that businesses could thrive. i don't think they could even articulated. but apart realized that what they could do is look at the future of the american west. if you wanted to write an essay about this, they started to enforce the law. sometimes it doesn't exist, but the way if there higher not to kill people i get hired to not kill people. they took very seriously the

word peace officer. the idea was that they had to do and make dodge city a peaceful place. you do not do that by killing people. the myth that spun up later which is completely untrue. as you can imagine being a lawman did not pay very well. there's no ira, no medical benefits, but they supplemented the income by paying $2.50 per arrest. you do not get paid if the guy died. you had to arrest somebody and put them in jail and then he got paid. but they had to do was figure out how to make money and do the right thing and enforce the law. there's a practice called buffalo in. and why it was an expert at it.

wyatt was about 6-foot tall which we considered particularly tall now but in the 70s that was taller than the average person. he thought something might go the wrong way. he whipped out the gun he knocked the guy out in before the judge and paid his fine enough he went it was actually quite rare that there is gunplay that there is an actual shootout. one exception that happened, two stories there is a guy named george, cowboy who was shooting up a town and wyatt and one of bats brothers to masterson confronted him and told him to get out of town. he didn't listen and then he headed out of town and white shot at him and hit hit him.

he later died. the only time is a lawman that wyatt earp ever killed somebody was this one time. klassen was called the shootist. some of us know there is a john wayne movie by that name. but they called certain government expert once in that day. clay had a terrible reputation and he came to dodge city to kill wyatt earp in revenge for his friend. so he is walking around town and wider here's he's in town so he finds them and confronts him. there's a standoff there basically the conversation was clay said i'm here for you i and why it's a think the best thing you should do is get on your horse, turn around and leave.

this is not going to end well. what neither one of them knew is that bat had heard about this and if you building stone he had a shotgun and he later said if he had killed wyatt, he was, killed him. clay allison got on his horse and rode out of town. the idea that a mac and let you shoot out this town was a turning point. there is a different way to view things but he had a shotgun too. the other thing the time that there is actually shoot out and it was a major event in dodge city one of the biggest funeral dodge city had seen at that point is that when bat was sheriff of four counties his brother ed was made marshall of dodge city.

he was actually a shoot out and was barely wounded and took several months to recover. when he was on the job again there was shots fired on the center front street. so add masterson ran over there. there was a bunch of drunken cowboys in a couple of them had guns. by this point they impose no guns. you leave your guns outside or if you come in with a gun you have to give it to the bartender and when you leave you'll get the gun back. so as head skew regard to the bartender. i look like there could be a standoff. meanwhile someone had gone back and said this could be a problem. so bat went running over the.

add left the store and turned around and two guys have their guns again. they put the gun right up and he was so close he not only shot him, but his vest caught on fire. he staggers away on fire, and turned to the corner and sees what's going on. he takes out his gun and shoots him down. one guy and the others survived but died five months later. they buried edward. i was rare example. that was a turning point because there's a total of five cowboys who were a part of that. the other three were right there. that could turn his gun on them too. he realized that he has a

responsibility even though my brother is lying dead. so they put him in jail before the judge. that was the turning point. it wasn't going to be murder in dodge city. even though nobody said he was justified. that and wyatt had each other's back. one of the things is more like a ground zero. people from all over the front tier has a connection passing through. that is why you'll find in the book there are detours about buffalo cody, billy the kid, the famous outlaws. she had a very memorable entrance to dodge city. and that was talked about over the years.

theater roosevelt even makes an appearance in the book. the time came when both bats and wyatt basically they said our job is done here. they still want to go out to make more of themselves out the world. wyatt still wanted to go out and get rich. but he never found it. he got restless. he and his brothers decide to go to arizona where they're going to start a business in a place called tombstone and make a lot of money. bat masterson decided to go to colorado into gambling and wander a bit which is what he did. so they went their separate ways. i cannot say they stayed in touch with each other. it's interesting to note that when wyatt earp battled the okay corral and docket isn't in the

book because doc and wyatt did not meet tombstone. doc and wyatt met when wyatt was in dodge city. doc came to dodge city looking for protection because he had a posse after him. him and his girlfriend, big nose to kate, it's explained in the book why she is called that. that is how they met. their friendship began in dodge city. after the vendetta and white cannot go back, he looked up at bat in colorado to stay with him but he needed bat to help restore him back to some kind of sanity after the bloodshed. and in 1883 bat and wyatt get telegrams from a guy named luke short. he was in dodge city and they

were treating him really bad. there's new administration there that want to dodge city to go back to its old west wicked days. a lot of people did not like that. they were being railroaded and intimidated and he was thrown in jail and said to wyatt, i need your help. so they actually said let's go back to dodge city and if we have to clean it up again we will. they were not lawman. they were not elected or anything. but they put on their gun belts and they grab shotguns and they rendezvoused in dodge city. that is what became the dodge city war. if you want to know how that ended after the book. but the last time the two of them side-by-side went down the street as peace enforcers in dodge city, this was in 1883. the book does concisely give us what the rest of their lives are like. wyatt and his fourth wife, wyatt

had a rather complicated domestic life. he had four wives. a couple of whom were concurrent. bat was different that way. first of all, he did not get married. he had romances, but he did not go far enough to marry them. wyatt had a romance in the belly kid to marry them. at one point when bat was the manager of a theater in colorado he fell in love with an actress there and they got married and were together for the next 30 years for the rest of their life. but wyatt and his fourth wife in arizona, california and alaska they're constantly looking for a business that would make them a lot of money. they go in san diego for a while

he lived until 1929 and in his last years he was, among other things a consultant to young director named john ford. that is how he finished out his days. bat wandered around a lot. when he turned 50 and was still serving as a law man in different capacities he had met teddy roosevelt and ultimately failed they have become very good friends. when bat turned 50 roosevelt was president. he contacted roosevelt about that i have to get out of here because i'm afraid some guy will come along and kill me just because he wants to make a reputation. so he would come to new york and

so he got on the train and come to new york to start over again. and then i think joseph lewis was the publisher of the telegraph he said why don't you come doing the reporting write about sports in the theater on that is how he spent the last 15 years of his life as a newspaper reporter. in fact he had i think every journalist dream. he had been out the night before the saloons and had a great idea and finishes calm about noon and slumped over his typewriter. he is buried in the bronx. wyatt is buried at the cemetery in california. so when i started the writing of the book, schmidt came very swiftly. wyatt has spent almost three

years sifting through all the accounts and meeting out the tall tales. it was like sifting and there were a couple of nuggets in there that you can rely on. but he couldn't write fast. he could take the easiest stuff in third in there. i wanted to write a book that i hoped would be exciting, full of stories and action and iconic characters of history, but also wasn't as accurate as i can make it. but what really eschewed characters of these people especially wyatt and doc and bat were just as interesting if not more so than the telltale, so i like to think of never feeling guilty in this book.

this is entertaining, but it's probably a lot of bs. i should not be reading this. i hope you find it entertaining but a great effort was made to make this as authentic as possible. i really do think that you will enjoy. i thank you very much for listening to me as long as i you have. [applause] >> there is the microphone there. it's ripe, gentleman. if you have any questions you have to make your way over there or talk really loud. >> dodge city i'm not quite sure what to tell you as far as the

footage, the population was probably under 1000 people. obviously overtime that expanded because i think it's interesting and symbolic that boot hill would be doing a good business for years. one of the wooden crosses he died of lead poisoning. but when he finally came to the conclusion was because they exhume the body's elsewhere and were outside the schoolhouse. i thought that was very symbolic. dodge city needed the schoolhouse, this is people coming in and dodge city was making a transition especially after the dodge city war. they made a transition and i got to be a bigger city. it's not a big city by any means.

once the cattle business was over. >> i'm not surprised. but that put a limit on economic expansion. but they found different businesses and occupations. >> during your research how to do separate fact from fiction? >> one of the things that i did that helped is you try to go back as close to the event as possible. thankfully there's an extensive archives and i'm not saying they were pulitzer prize-winning journalist back then, but they were reporting what was going on a weekly basis. so you can have a good sense of what was actually happening. when he found the story in 1878

there's nothing about it and if it wasn't in the newspaper probably didn't happen. so there's also memoirs that people did or biographies, robert wright who is the very first who became a successful business person, he wrote extensively about dodge city days. he was pretty authentic. he took pride in writing about dodge city. also you go by what other people have written about bat masterson which is in that match. doc holliday and some of the other characters and you have to compare them some things match up the right way like this seems to be enough evidence and supporting documentation that this happened.

some of this other stuff you can't support. there a few times in the book where i will say and may not be exactly certain this happened what happened in this way, but it probably did. there's things i don't include in the book because i don't want to say it didn't happen. there's one exception, there's a story in the book and perpetrated in movies when you show wyatt earp with his gun and the story was in 1876 that the dimestore novelist and playwright who mostly wrote about the west and is a story in 1876 he was so impressed with the efforts of wyatt earp and bat masterson and the other deputies that he had the manufacturing company make these specialists and he came out

presented it to them. so that story has been perpetrated in book after book and it never happened. in 1876 nobody had ever heard of wyatt earp and bat masterson. that reputation was down the road. if you look at the other activities he was in new york. he did not make the trip out to dodge city. he would write plays that fabricated things about the west. there is one place successful when they're asked to report after he said he wrote it for hours. one of the critics said what took them so long. >> when we are anxious to start reading the book.

if you don't have questions and you are interested in having a book side and i'm told i will be right there perfectly after taking the sign down c can see me. like don't bother with the man behind the curtain. i be happy to sign copies you had thank you very much for being here. [applause] >> thank you very much. thank you all very much for coming. we have books for sale at the front desk. robin is going to come along biro and get you situated with your post-it notes for signing. we'll get this going as quickly as we can. thank you very much. this will move methodically and wonderfully. thank you very much. [applause]