Bartholomew William Barclay Masterson was born to an Irish family in Quebec in 1853 and grew up in a family that moved constantly before settling in Kansas. As a young buffalo hunter he survived the five-day Second Battle of Adobe Walls in 1874, then worked as an Army scout. A gunfight in Sweetwater, Texas, in 1876 left him with a shattered pelvis and a lifelong cane, which he turned into a trademark of refined swagger.

Elected Ford County Sheriff in Dodge City by just three votes in 1877, he policed a chaotic cattle town, lost his brother Ed in the line of duty, and later joined Wyatt Earp in the Dodge City Peace Commission. After restless years in Denver, he reinvented himself in New York as a sports columnist for the Morning Telegraph, befriended Theodore Roosevelt, and died at his desk of a heart attack in October 1921.

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