Spurred West. Ian Neligh
is little doubt the exploits of then Army Scout James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok were well known by the people in the region, for better or worse. Hickok, a gunslinger in the truest sense, arguably had the first recorded quick draw shootout of the West. All the same, dime novelists and Hickok himself exaggerated his story up until that time and going forward beyond his death to a ridiculous degree. Still, it cannot be discounted that Nichols was about to meet the deadliest gunslinger in American history.
A man roused the journalist from his judgmental stupor to introduce him to Hickok who had come riding down the street. “Let me at once describe the personal appearance of the famous Scout of the Plains,” Nichols said. “‘Wild Bill’ who now advanced toward me, fixing his clear gray eyes on mine in a quick, interrogative way, as if to take my measure.”
Before Nichols stood a slender, tall man, about six-foot-two, who wore bright yellow moccasins and a deerskin shirt. “His small, round waist was girthed by a belt which held two of Colt’s Navy revolvers,” Nichols said. It appears Hickok was more than happy to talk up his own legend and frontier prowess. Just a few days before, he had killed a man in a duel in the city’s Park Central Square. Nichols heard an account of it from an Army captain who was enthusiastically working his way through a bottle of whiskey. Apparently there was bad blood between Hickok and a man named Dave Tutt, a former Confederate and gambler. According to the captain, Tutt had been looking to start trouble with Hickok for several days, and after a game of cards he had further provoked Wild Bill by taking Hickok’s watch off the table and pocketing it for not paying his debts.
“I don’t want ter make a row in this house. It’s a decent house, and I don’t want ter injure the keeper. You’d better put that watch back on the table,” Hickok said in Nichols’s account. Other reports of the incident had Hickok telling Tutt in no uncertain terms that if he took the watch he’d be a dead man. “But Dave grinned at Bill mighty ugly, and walked off with the watch, and kept it several days.”
The captain then told Nichols one day that friends of Tutt’s drew their guns on Hickok and dared him to fight, adding Tutt would wear the watch out in public tomorrow at noon in a personal affront to Hickok’s honor—unless Hickok wanted to do something about it. The next day Hickok came out into the town square and found that a crowd had gathered, which included many of Tutt’s friends. The two men came to within about fifty yards of each other with pistols already drawn. “At that moment you could have heard a pin drop in that square. Both Tutt and Bill fired, but one discharge followed the other so quick that it’s hard to say which went off first,” Nichols wrote.
Before even waiting to see if his bullet hit Tutt, Hickok turned on a crowd comprising of Tutt’s friends and pointed his gun at them. According to the story, many had already drawn their own weapons or were starting to. “‘Aren’t yer satisfied, gentlemen?’ Hickok asked the crowd. ‘Put up your shootin-irons, or there’ll be more dead men here.’ And they put ’em up, and said it war a far fight,” Nichols wrote.
As for Tutt, he had turned sideways in dueling fashion to make himself a smaller target—but Hickok’s bullet hit him regardless and went into his side, striking him in the heart. Tutt stood still for a moment or two after being hit and, according to the inebriated captain, raised his gun as if to shoot again, then walked forward several steps before falling to the ground dead. When given the chance, Nichols didn’t miss the opportunity to ask Hickok about the gunfight. “Do you not regret killing Tutt? You surely do not like to kill men?” Nichols asked him in a saloon.
“As ter killing men,” Hickok replied, “I never thought much about it. Most of the men I have killed it was one or the other of us, and at such times you don’t stop to think; and what’s the use after it’s all over? As for Tutt, I had rather not have killed him, for I want ter settle down quiet here now. But thar’s been hard feeling between us a long while. I wanted ter keep out of that fight; but he tried to degrade me, and I couldn’t stand that, you know, for I am a fighting man, you know.”
Predictably Nichols’s account, regardless of its accuracy or dubious colloquialisms, propelled Hickok to frontier stardom. At the time Hickok was already friends with “Buffalo Bill” Cody. In his fantastical autobiography, Cody said of his friend “Wild Bill” that the two had known each other since 1857. While he, or his biographers, claimed many things that are unlikely to have happened, the two did indeed serve together as scouts for the Army and later performed side by side in Wild West performances.
Hickok also made a good impression on General George Armstrong Custer. Custer described Hickok as a plainsman in every sense of the word, but unlike his peers: “Whether on foot or on horseback, he was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw.” Custer said Hickok was a man of courage, something he’d personally witnessed on many occasions. “His skill in the use of the rifle and pistol was unerring; while his deportment was exactly the opposite of what might be expected from a man of his surroundings. It was entirely free from all bluster or bravado. He seldom spoke of himself unless requested to do so. His conversation, strange to say, never bordered either on the vulgar or blasphemous. His influence among the frontiersmen was unbounded, his word was law …” But Custer added Hickok wasn’t a man who went looking for trouble. Trouble, however, always seemed to find him. “‘Wild Bill’ is anything but a quarrelsome man; yet no one but himself can enumerate the many conflicts in which he had been engaged, and which I have a personal knowledge of at least a half a dozen men whom he has at various times killed, one of these being at the time a member of my command,” Custer said. “Others have been severely wounded, yet he always escapes unhurt.”
Just how many people Hickok killed either during the war, as a scout for the Army, or in the times between isn’t exactly known. While being interviewed by journalist Henry Stanley, who was writing for the Weekly Missouri Democrat in 1867 and would later become famous for his own travels in Africa and coining the phrase “Doctor Livingstone, I presume,” Hickok boasted killing a ridiculous number of men.
“He claimed to have killed 100 men and said he killed his first when he was 28 years old,” Stanley said. “After a little deliberation, he replied, ‘I would be willing to take my oath on the Bible tomorrow that I have killed over a hundred a long ways off.’” Whether Hickok was just inflating his already outrageous reputation or having a little fun with the former Confederate writer isn’t known—but it was a time when men who already had nearly superhuman deeds under the belt often gleefully propelled themselves to superhero status for the eastern periodicals.
“No, by Heaven! I never killed one man without a good cause,” Hickok replied when asked. “I was twenty-eight years old when I killed the first white man, and if ever a man deserved killing he did. He was a gambler and counterfeiter, and I was in a hotel in Leavenworth City then, as seeing some loose characters around, I ordered a room, and as I had some money about me, I thought I would go to it. I had lain some thirty minutes on the bed when I heard some men at the door. I pulled out my revolver and Bowie knife and held them ready, but half concealed, pretending to be asleep. The door was opened and five men entered the room. They whispered together, ‘Let us kill the son of a bitch; I bet he has got money.’”
Hickok then claimed that he stabbed the man with his own knife and used his revolvers wounding another. He then rushed for help and came back with a soldier who captured the rest of the gang.
“We searched the cellar and found eleven bodies buried there—men who had been murdered by those villains,” Hickok said. Stanley said Hickok then turned to him and the rest of the company listening to the tale and asked, “Would you have not done the same? That was the first man I killed and I was never sorry for that yet.”
Colorful stories aside, there are some officially recorded deaths we know Hickok was responsible for, including David McCanles in 1861, who he shot from behind a curtain at a Pony Express Station in Nebraska. Depending on the source, McCanles was a bandit gang leader, a thief, a bully, or just a man looking to get money from the station which was owed to him. Regardless, McCanles came to that fateful day with help including two other men named James Gordon and James Woods. The story goes that after Wild Bill shot McCanles, James Gordon came into the station investigating the gunshots and was also shot by Hickok. Wild Bill stepped outside