Bat Masterson, Foreigner and Lawman

Bat Masterson is one of the most famous lawmen in the Old West.  But he was also a serial lawbreaker.

Bat was born in Canada in 1853 and never became a US citizen.  Yet he not only voted in American elections, he held elected office—as a deputy and then sheriff in Ford County, KS (Dodge City) and marshal of Trinidad, CO.  Masterson’s crowning glory: appointed as a deputy US marshal for the southern district of New York by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905.

But it was illegal for foreigners to hold those jobs—or to vote.