This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib with our American stories.

And for the hour, we're going to tell a great story about our past.

Old West lawman Bat Masterson was as well known in his lifetime as celebrities are today.

To bat, gunslingers were hoodlums who killed for fun. He used guns to enforce the law or defend a friend.

In the end, he'd achieved defeat almost none of the Old West legends that attained

he lived to see an old age.

Here to tell the story of Batmasterson is Roger McGrath.

McGrath is the author of Gunfighters, Highwayman, and Vigilantes.

A U.S. Marine and former history professor at UCLA,

McGrath is a regular contributor for us here at our American Stories.

Here's McGrath. One regular contributor for us here at our American stories. Here's McGrath.

One of the most widely traveled and greatest characters in the Old West was Bat Masterson.

His first taste of the frontier came as a buffalo hunter on the high plains in the early 1870s when he was still a teenager.

He took part in the famous Battle of Adobe Walls.

He served as a scout for the U.S. Army pursuing Indian war parties.

He was a sheriff of Ford County, which included Dodge City during the heyday of the Cattle Town.

He was with the Earps in Tombstone, Arizona for a time.

He was a gunfighter and professional gambler and eventually a sports promoter and journalist.

Here's Texas State historian Bill O'Neill, also Dodge City historian and narrator of the Wild West podcast, Brad Smalley.

There was a U.S. Postal Stamp series that was aptly named. It was called Legends of the West.

Twenty of them, in fact, and one of them was Bat Masterson. On a 29-cent stamp, Bat Masterson was indeed a legend of the West.

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