The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (45 page)

Dan Stuart was also happy, because as 1895 drew to a close with no fight, sunshine appeared on the western horizon. The El Paso business community, more interested in promoting their city than in the fine points of Texas law, had offered him $6,000 to stage a fight between Fitzsimmons and Maher. The community leaders envisioned the bout as the main event of a “Great Fistic Carnival,” with lesser prizefights, baseball, football, shooting matches, a rodeo, and bullfights across the river in Ciudad Juárez.
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El Paso was the ideal spot for a grand event. The Southern Pacific ran through the city on its way to the West Coast, giving the sporting crowd easy access to the city from both directions. It was conveniently located to New Mexico and Arizona, federal territories outside the realm of conventional state law. Júarez was in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, beyond the reach of U.S. law.

Culberson was not interested in El Paso’s grand scheme, and he ordered Adjutant General W. H. Mabry to send a detachment of Rangers to make sure the fight did not occur. This brought an immediate denunciation of the governor, Mabry, and the Rangers by the indignant members of the El Paso city council, who firmly believed that it was no one’s business in Austin how they ran their community.
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The
El Paso Herald
lobbied hard for “that scrapping match,” bluntly stating that local citizens were less interested in “the scientific display of the manly art itself” than in the money it would bring. In fact, the
Herald
commented that if Stuart brought the fight to El Paso, he would find local morals exceedingly flexible. Stuart was happy to oblige, and the fight was set for February 14, 1896, either in El Paso or in the immediate vicinity.
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As far as Mabry was concerned, state law was not subject to local option. He ordered Captain Hughes to move his Rangers into town from their camp at Ysleta and prevent the match.
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The entry of the Rangers provided new grist for the cartoon mills of the New York newspapers. The
World
portrayed a Ranger as a disheveled frontiersman with drooping mustache, stringy, unkempt, chest-length hair, outsized sombrero with a Bowie knife stuck through the brim, rifle slung over his shoulder, heavy cartridge belt, and fringed trousers. Each hand held a six-shooter bearing a more than passing resemblance to Colt’s giant, intimidating Walker Model. The muzzles were stuck in Fitzsimmons’s and Maher’s faces, and the Ranger was daring either of them to throw a punch.
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After all was said and done, community standards in El Paso were not as flexible as the city’s newspaper presumed. The Law and Order League swung into action, as did the El Paso Ministers’ Union. Both were determined to stop the fight, not only in their city, but anywhere within a convenient radius, regardless of jurisdiction. The Ministers’ Union correctly guessed that if El Paso couldn’t host the match, Stuart would hold it just across the line in New Mexico, where neither federal nor territorial law prohibited it. When New Mexico authorities explained they were powerless to stop the fight in their territory, the ministers began lobbying the U.S. Congress. Responding to the growing furor, Congress outlawed both prizefighting and bullfighting “for money or for other things of value, or for any championship” in federal territories. Violation was a felony, with a penalty of one to five years in prison.
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Soon after, Adjutant General Mabry arrived in El Paso with his other three captains. Forty Rangers were on hand to prevent the fight. President Grover Cleveland dispatched U.S. Marshal Edward Hall and thirteen deputies to make certain the match did not slip over into federal territory. These efforts spurred Mexico to action. Gen. Miguel Ahumada, governor of Chihuahua, was a grim, stern man with a reputation for using the military to suppress lawlessness in his state. True to form, he sent a cavalry detachment to the border to make certain the fistic carnival did not occur in Mexico. They were followed by the governor himself, who crossed the Rio Grande into El Paso on February 11 to confer with local officials. As a courtesy, he also met with leaders of the local business community, but he remained inflexible. He would not allow the fight in Chihuahua.
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“If men come into Mexico and intend to break the law they will be arrested and if they resist arrest they will be shot. That’s all there is to the matter,” Ahumada said. He warned that spectators and newspaper correspondents would be considered participants in the fight, and would be subject to prosecution or worse under the laws of Mexico.
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A day later, the great John L. Sullivan arrived in El Paso and rode to his hotel in an open carriage to the acclaim of the crowds. Sullivan’s head was bandaged because of what one news correspondent politely called a “railroad accident.” He had fallen off the observation platform of a train going forty miles an hour between Rock Island and Peoria, and had been found unconscious by the roadbed. Those in the know said he had been drinking again, but regardless of circumstances, he was badly hurt. Asked his opinion of the coming fight, Sullivan, who didn’t care for Fitzsimmons, predicted Maher would win. So did two of the nation’s leading astrologers, who combined their efforts under the name Astor-Hazelrigg and said the stars were definitely in the Irishman’s favor.
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SPECTATORS WERE POURING
into town. Already there were some fifteen hundred with more on the way, paying as much as five dollars a night for a cot in a hallway. Then, only two days before the bout, Maher was out of it, at least for the time being. Earlier in the week, alkali dust had blown into his face during a
remolino,
a vicious Southwestern whirlwind that blows up for only a few seconds but throws dust and sand with incredible force. The Irishman was diagnosed as suffering from ophthalmia and could barely see his hand in front of his face.

Maher’s sudden vision problems raised suspicions. Some said he was losing his nerve. Others believed Stuart himself had concocted the ailment to buy time (and build excitement) while he considered all his options. Mabry suspected a ruse, and Fitzsimmons’s manager, Martin Julian, was disgusted with delays and ready to claim a forfeit. But for some fight fans who had followed the match from Dallas to Hot Springs to El Paso, this was the final straw, and they began leaving.
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John L. Sullivan, however, was convinced that it was no act. “I feel sorry for Maher,” John L. wrote to the New York
World
. “His eyes are in bad shape.”
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Maher’s backer, John J. Quinn, assured the public through the pages of the
World
that although Maher was in great pain and his vision was poor, he was beginning to recover and would “give a good account of himself” in the coming fight.
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WHILE THE SPORTING
world waited, Mabry kept everyone involved under tight scrutiny. Rangers watched the railroad depot, with orders to note and follow any fight paraphernalia that might be unloaded. They duly reported cars containing the platform, carnival paraphernalia, and Kinetoscope equipment (Stuart’s real profit—if any—would come from showing films of the fight throughout the country). The Rangers also followed Fitzsimmons and Maher, and Capt. Bill McDonald became a constant companion of the unwilling Stuart.
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Stuart found the situation irritating, but otherwise was not impressed. “Nothing short of lightning or the destruction of the earth by fire and flood can stop the contest we have arranged to pull off,” he remarked. Surveillance was so close that some people only vaguely connected with the fight complained that Mabry and Culberson were running a police state.
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Mabry was also ready with accusations. Stuart, he alleged, was exercising “a kind of censorship” over news correspondents, telling them if their dispatches were not favorable to the fight, they would not be allowed to attend. Consequently, Mabry said the city council’s resolution condemning Culberson’s efforts received wide distribution. On the other hand, a resolution of support from the Ministers’ Union, which Mabry contended “represented a large class among the best citizens approving the Governor’s action and upholding my methods,” was hardly mentioned in the press. There were also rumors that Stuart had sent for ex-gunslinger Bat Masterson, himself a sporting man, to head up a hundred toughs and make certain nothing interfered with the fight. The New York
World,
which reported the events as they unfolded, called Masterson “Dan Stuart’s sergeant-at-arms.”
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Masterson arrived in El Paso, but was tight-lipped about his role in Dan Stuart’s scheme of things. “As to my connection with the enterprise I can say nothing,” he remarked, although he did not hesitate to call Stuart “an honorable sportsman.” He commented, “To be sure, he has been in hard luck since he started pugilistic enterprises, but he is here to stay this time; and if it comes down to cases will pull the fights off just to show that a Texan is not to be bluffed.” That said, Bat turned his eloquent wrath against the moralists and politicians.

That all the commotion has been stirred up because two men are going to box with five-ounce gloves seems to me to be utterly ridiculous. When the Senate and House of Representatives of this great country can find nothing better to do than to make a law prohibiting boxing contests in the Territories it is high time something was done.
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UNFORTUNATELY FOR STUART
and Masterson, Mabry had a better grasp of public opinion. Citizens were getting tired of the large influx of people, not all of whom were of the best character. The out-of-towners naturally provided a boost to gambling and prostitution, and the entire situation was becoming a nuisance. Even the pro-fight
Herald
was starting to complain about the “tin horns” streaming into the city.

Downriver near the confluence with the Pecos, the Rio Grande flowed around a sandbar situated midstream, straddling the international boundary. This sandbar was a no-man’s-land, unclaimed by either the United States or Mexico and therefore under no one’s jurisdiction—a fact not lost on Judge Roy Bean, who sat in his Jersey Lilly Saloon in the nearby town of Langtry. For now he minded his own business, peddling cold beer and watered-down whiskey to thirsty passengers during the Southern Pacific’s twenty-minute watering stop and shortchanging them until the whistle of the departing train told them they could argue no longer. All the while, he was following Stuart’s frustrated efforts in El Paso, waiting for the right moment to intervene.
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Just when the promoter’s situation seemed hopeless, Roy acted. Stuart received a telegram advising him that he and his fighters would be welcome in Langtry. Ranger Ed Aten boarded the train carrying all the lumber and equipment, not knowing for certain where it was bound. When everything was finally off-loaded at the little whistle-stop town of a few dozen people, 389 miles downriver from El Paso, Aten immediately telegraphed Mabry, who sourly observed:

The prize fighters were merely dough in the hands of Mr. Stuart and the hundreds of others who were present for the money they hoped to win, and would have fought in the ring, wherever located, if unmolested by officers at that time.
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Dan Stuart, the fighters, the spectators, and supporting cast boarded the train for Langtry shortly before midnight on February 20. So did Mabry and twenty-six Rangers. When the conductor asked the adjutant general for tickets, he produced authorization from Culberson and said the state would pay the bill. The conductor did not argue.
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Some fight fans may have felt more comfortable with the Rangers along for the ride. The New York
World
correspondent reported:

There were “bad men” aboard the train. They were of the variety who declared they would see the fight without the necessary tickets, and confided to everybody that there would be music if Dan Stuart or any Denver man-killer interfered with their sport. By Denver man-killer they meant “Bat” Masterson. . . . These bad men had an uncomfortable manner of fingering their firearms when speaking of the most commonplace things, and some of the more timid Eastern gentlemen agreed among themselves that sporting life was not quite up to what it was cracked to be.
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John L. Sullivan was among those who found theTexans’ fascination with six-shooters unsettling. “I don’t like this gun business,” he wrote. “A true man should be able to take care of himself with the weapons provided by nature.” He felt lawmakers would better serve the public by regulating firearms instead of “such innocent and manly sport as boxing.”
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The Texans, of course, felt the public best served by not regulating either boxing or firearms. They were accustomed to handling their own disputes and did not necessarily feel that every law that came out of Austin was a good law. The law against boxing, for example, was viewed as an effort to satisfy a small but politically vocal segment of the community at the expense of the majority of the state’s citizens. And as a law unsupported by the majority, it was not subject to respect or obedience, and neither were its enforcers.

Among the noncitizens ready to challenge the lawmen was Bat Masterson. The train stopped for lunch at Sanderson, and Bat sat next to Bill McDonald in a Chinese restaurant. According to Albert Bigelow Paine, McDonald’s friend and biographer, a dispute arose between the Ranger and the gunfighter. Paine wrote a few years after the incident, “Bat has since given up all his reckless ways and become a good citizen, but at that time he was training with the unreformed and not feeling very well, anyhow.”