by
William Barclay “Bat” Masterson lived an extraordinary life it would be impossible to imagine. If it weren’t true, no one would believe it. Bat Masterson lived the West when the West was wild. He lived it as a buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, army scout, lawman, and gambler. His adventures took him from the Bear Shield Raid to Second Adobe Walls to the Red River War and Dodge City in its anything-goes-cow-town heydays. He was partisan to the Royale Gorge War and the Dodge City War. His significance in these events remains largely unknown to most of us. His story encounters some of the West’s most colorful characters, deadly gunfighters, and dangerous desperados. He counted among his friends a veritable “Who’s Who” in old West history. among them Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Doc Holliday, Billy Dixon, Bill Tilghman, Luke Short, Ben Thompson, Buffalo Bill Cody, William Pinkerton, Theodore Roosevelt, William S. Hart, and more. He walked away from his Western adventures to live out the last twenty years of his life as a sportswriter for a New York daily newspaper. There he followed his beloved sport of boxing from bare-knuckle brawling John L. Sullivan to the root of the modern game in Madison Square Garden. Friends Call Me Bat is his story and those of his friends as he might have told them, complete with an otherworldly twist at the end.
