The Mysterious Dave Mather
Dave Mather was born in Massachusetts in 1845. Supposedly he was related to Cotton Mather, the famous New England preacher. However, there is no way of knowing whether he was really related. Many people who left the east and came west took new names. He did have a brother in Dodge City with the same last name, but he could have changed his name as well. He was of average height and slim. He had black hair and grey eyes. He wore a handlebar moustache like most fashionable men of the day.
When his name first appeared in the paper he was called Mysterious Dave. His origins are sketchy. He had a reputation for playing on both sides of the law. He had a reputation for being a killer, though there is no proof he killed anyone until he killed Thomas Nixon in 1884.
Mather appears in the paper on January 7, 1879, in Dodge City. The paper reported his whereabouts in Trinidad, Colorado, keeping company with Henry Born, a horse thief. By November 4 of that same year he moved to New Mexico, where he was caught robbing stagecoaches with the Rudabaugh gang. He was found innocent of the charges, however. Amazingly, he got into law enforcement somehow, because on November 22, the Las Vegas, New Mexico Gazette reported that Mather arrested some soldiers for disturbing the peace.
By the following January, Mather was still a law officer who gunned down a man in the course of his duties. A coroner's inquest was held soon afterward, but Mather was found innocent of all charges. Shortly after this stint, Mather left New Mexico and headed for Gunnison County, Colorado, with Charlie Bassett and some other friends. The prospecting yielded nothing so he returned to New Mexico.
After this he spent time in Texas as deputy marshal under James Gillett. One time he had to run down a cattle thief named William M. Bryd. Unfortunately he made no secret of what he was doing and the man easily got away. Later another sheriff captured Bryd in Fort Worth. Another time, though, he was able to stop Charles Ellsworth, a known jail breaker, from escaping. Sometime before returning to Kansas, he once again ended up on the wrong side of the law and hung around the Dave Rudabaugh gang. He was nearly caught when running away from a train robbery, but he managed to talk his way out of it.
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