WILD BILL HICKOK

In the smoky haze of a Deadwood saloon on August 2, 1876, James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok held a poker hand of black aces and eights – a combination that would pass into legend as the infamous “dead man’s hand.” Moments later, a gunshot cracked behind him. Hickok, the famed gunslinger and lawman, collapsed forward, shot in the back of the head by a disgruntled drifter. It was a shocking end, yet a fitting final act for a life balanced on the edge of humor, high drama, and heartbreaking tragedy on the American frontier.

Lauded as a frontier celebrity even in his own time, Wild Bill Hickok lived on the frontier as a soldier, scout, lawman, gunslinger, gambler, and showman. He was as much a storyteller as a marksman – Hickok freely spun outlandish tales about himself, some outright fabrications, which only heightened his notoriety. Newspapers and dime novels eagerly amplified his exploits, turning him into one of the early “heroes of the West” in the popular imagination. Behind the legendary moniker was a real man named James Hickok, whose journey from farm boy to folk hero embodied quick wits, crack shots, wild pranks, and personal sorrows in equal measure.

Born in Illinois in 1837, Hickok grew up in a time and place where lawlessness was rife, and vigilante justice was a fact of life. A natural with firearms from a young age, he earned a local reputation as a dead shot with a pistol. At 18, a scuffle in his hometown dramatically altered his path. In 1855, Hickok got into a fierce fight with a man named Charles Hudson; both tumbled into a canal during the brawl, and each mistakenly thought the other was dead. Fearing he had killed a man, the young Hickok fled west to the lawless Kansas Territory – a decision that would launch him into the vortex of frontier violence and adventure.

In Kansas, Hickok joined up with anti-slavery vigilantes during the Bleeding Kansas conflicts and soon befriended a teenage scout named William Cody (the future “Buffalo Bill”). Hickok’s physical prowess and courage became the stuff of frontier campfire stories. One early tale had him surviving a near-fatal encounter with a grizzly bear in 1860 – according to Hickok’s account, when his bullets merely stunned the beast, he wrestled it with his bare hands and a Bowie knife until it lay dead at his feet.

Whether entirely true or embellished in the telling, such stories reinforced Hickok’s image as a man of almost mythic grit and humor. By 1861, as the Civil War erupted, Hickok had grown a sweeping mustache, adopted the nickname “Wild Bill,” and set out to live up to it. He served as a Union Army scout and spy during the Civil War, earning respect for his bravery and gathering skills that would serve him in the violent years to come.

Wild Bill Hickok’s rise to national fame began with a deadly showdown. On July 21, 1865, in Springfield, Missouri, Hickok faced off against a former friend turned rival, Davis Tutt, in one of the frontier’s first classic quick-draw duels. The dispute – reportedly over a poker debt and a gold pocket watch – culminated in a dramatic public square standoff. The two men stood sideways to present narrow targets, drew their pistols, and fired. Tutt’s shot went wide, but Hickok’s bullet found its mark, striking Tutt through the heart at roughly 75 yards. The astonished Tutt staggered and cried out, “Boys, I’m killed,” before collapsing dead.

Hickok was arrested for murder two days later, but a jury ultimately acquitted him after determining he had acted in self-defense in the face of Tutt’s threats. The “Wild Bill” legend was off and running: newspapers picked up the story of the duel (exaggerating it wildly), and Eastern readers thrilled to this new gunslinger folk hero who could shoot a man dead at 50 paces.

An 1867 Harper’s Magazine article further catapulted Hickok’s fame from regional to national, painting him as the invincible pistolero of the plains. Even Lt. Col. George Custer described Hickok as “a strange character, just the one which a novelist might gloat over … a Plainsman in every sense of the word … whose skill in the use of the rifle and pistol was unerring”.

Hickok’s gunfighting prowess soon translated into a career as a lawman in the unruly cattle towns of Kansas. By 1869, he wore a marshal’s badge in Hays City and later in the wild railhead of Abilene. Hickok’s approach to taming lawlessness was as audacious as his reputation suggested.

In his first month as sheriff of Hays, he faced down a drunken cowboy named Bill Mulvey, who galloped through town raucously firing his rifle. When Mulvey – who had bragged he’d come to kill the famous Wild Bill – aimed his gun at him, Hickok coolly yelled out, “Don’t shoot him in the back; he is drunk.” The perplexed Mulvey hesitated and turned to see who was behind him, whereupon Hickok instantly fired a single shot and dropped the troublemaker with a bullet to the temple. Such a ploy was cunning and darkly humorous, illustrating Hickok’s talent for thinking fast under pressure.

On another occasion, Hickok outdrew and killed a saloon aggressor who had insulted him, with a coroner’s jury deeming the shooting justifiable. By his own account, Hickok never enjoyed killing but, as he later insisted, “I never allowed a man to get the drop on me,” only resorting to gunplay in self-defense or to uphold the law. This lethal code of honor made him both feared and respected.

The volatile nature of frontier justice eventually caught up with Hickok in a tragic way. In October 1871, in Abilene, Hickok confronted a rowdy saloon owner, Phil Coe, who had been stirring up trouble. Coe fired a couple of shots (claiming to be aiming at a stray dog), and Hickok responded in a split second, shooting Coe dead. But in the chaos, Hickok saw a figure rushing toward him and whirled, firing again on instinct. To his horror, he had accidentally killed his deputy, Mike Williams, who had been coming to his aid.

The deputy’s death devastated Hickok. The mistake haunted him so much that he hung up his marshal’s star for good. After a final tumultuous year of keeping order in Abilene, Hickok was relieved of his duties, and the era of Wild Bill, the lawman, ended.

By the mid-1870s, the restless Hickok had drifted back into the life of a roaming gambler and occasional showman. He took to the stage for a time, joining his old friend “Buffalo Bill” Cody in a traveling Wild West show. But performing did not suit Wild Bill’s temperament – he often hid nervously behind stage scenery. In one performance, Hickok grew so irritated with a spotlight shining on him that he coolly took out his revolver and shot it out, much to the audience’s astonishment.

A separate attempt at running a frontier shooting exhibition (complete with buffaloes and even a trained monkey) ended in comedic disaster when the animals refused to behave, resulting in panicked buffalo stampeding through the crowd.

Hickok’s marksmanship and eyesight, once his pride, had also begun to fail him; by 1876, he suffered vision problems – perhaps glaucoma – that made it hard to see a target. Now nearly 39 years old and feeling the weight of age and reputation, Hickok wandered into the gold mining camp of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, perhaps sensing that his luck was running thin.

Shortly before his final departure from civilization, he married Agnes Thatcher Lake, a circus proprietor. He wrote her a poignant letter suggesting he knew his trail might be coming to an end. “Agnes Darling, if such should be we never meet again,” he wrote, “while firing my last shot, I will gently breathe the name of my wife – Agnes – and... try to swim to the other shore.”

That last shot came sooner than anyone expected. Hickok spent his days at the gaming tables in Deadwood, where his reputation drew crowds of admirers and ill-wishers alike. One evening, he showed kindness to a down-on-his-luck drifter named Jack McCall, paying for the man’s breakfast after McCall lost money at poker. McCall took the gesture as an insult.

The next afternoon, Wild Bill joined a poker game at Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon No. 10. Uncharacteristically, Hickok could not sit with his back to the wall (his usual precaution to see the door) and twice asked another player to swap seats only to be refused.

Seizing his chance, a whiskey-fueled Jack McCall stormed into the saloon, crept up directly behind Hickok, and shouted, “Take that!” as he fired a single .45-caliber round into the back of Wild Bill’s head. Hickok died instantly, the fatal bullet exiting his cheek and lodging in another player’s wrist.

True to frontier form, the murder set off chaos – McCall was grabbed and put before a makeshift miners’ court, which absurdly acquitted him of the killing (he falsely claimed revenge for a brother Hickok had supposedly killed).

It wasn’t until later that proper authorities retried McCall and hanged him for the cold-blooded murder. Meanwhile, observers noted the cards still clenched in Wild Bill’s dead hand: he held two black aces and two black eights, a two-pair poker hand forever after known as the “dead man’s hand” in Western lore.

So ended the life of Wild Bill Hickok – in a flash of violence as sudden and dramatic as any of the dime-novel tales that made him famous. News of his death spread quickly, and within weeks, the legend of Hickok only grew. He had already achieved almost mythical status while alive, thanks to lurid press accounts and his penchant for dramatic storytelling.

In death, he became enshrined as a martyr of the Wild West’s violent glory days. Hickok’s contemporaries knew him as a gentlemanly but fearless figure who “would not be put upon” and met danger with daring resolve. His blend of showmanship and true grit helped inspire the popular image of the Western lawman – the lone gunslinger who faces down chaos with a quick draw and wry bravado.

To this day, Wild Bill Hickok remains a towering figure in frontier folklore, his life a tapestry of tall tales and true events. From the humor of his crafty tricks to the high drama of his showdowns and the tragedy of his untimely death, Hickok’s story is a vivid testament to why he became and remains, a legendary figure of the American Wild West.