Spurred West. Ian Neligh
and trying to escape, Gordon later received the coup de grâce when some other station employees armed with a shotgun discovered him. The whole bloody affair was later deemed a matter of self-defense.
In October of that year Hickok joined the Union Army as a scout and likely saw more action. Then in 1865 he killed David Tutt over the pocket watch in Springfield, Missouri, and made history. Over the next several years he worked as a sheriff, Deputy U.S. Marshal, and City Marshal, killing five more men along the way. Among those five included John Kile, who, with Jeremiah Lonergan, both Seventh Calvary Troopers, got into a fight with Hickok in a saloon in Hays City. The story has it that in 1870 the troopers had Hickok on the floor and Lonergan kept him in place as Kile put his pistol in Hickok’s ear and pulled the trigger. But the hammer fell on a dud, giving Hickok the chance to get ahold of his own pistol. In quick order he shot Kile in the leg, then put two bullets in Lonergan and killed him. Afterward, Hickok waited, armed at the town’s cemetery, to see if any of the other troopers wanted to take an opportunity in the name of revenge. Apparently, none did.
The last man Hickok killed was fellow lawman Mike Williams in 1871. During an incident gambler Phil Coe allegedly took two shots at Hickok who responded by mortally wounding him. Hickok’s deputy Williams burst out on the street to assist Hickok in the encounter and Hickok spun around and shot Williams dead. This was the end of his law enforcement career. Hickok worked for a time, unsuccessfully, at trying his own Wild West show and then later with his old friends Buffalo Bill Cody and Ned Buntline, but time and the call of the frontier lured him once again back West. Rudderless, as so many of the gunslingers were, Hickok drifted around from town to town trying to seek his fortune at the gambling tables. In 1872 he arrived in Georgetown, Colorado, a town known for its rich silver mines, and spent six weeks gambling without issue before heading off once again.
In Defense of a Bad Man to Fool With
By this point his reputation was quite fearsome; however, his time of shooting others was behind him. Hickok rightfully became paranoid and began sitting at card games so that he could face the door and see any potential attackers as they came for him. The discovery of gold near Deadwood, South Dakota, drew him to yet another boomtown. Finding the work of the gold fields not quite to his liking, he again ended up in town gambling. On August 2, 1876, Hickok, at age forty-eight, went to the Number 10 Saloon to play cards. The only available seat was the one with its back to the door. Legend has it that he took it and continued to play hand after hand in the seat, despite trying to get someone to switch with him. It was late afternoon when Jack McCall from Kentucky came into the saloon, pointed a gun at the back of Hickok’s head, and fired. A special correspondent for the Chicago Inter-Ocean was in Deadwood and heard the shot, ran to the saloon, and rather ghoulishly reported the specific details of Hickok’s demise.
“Yesterday afternoon about 4 o’clock the people of this city were started by the report of a pistol-shot in the saloon … Your correspondent at once hastened to the spot and found J.B. Hickok, commonly known as ‘Wild Bill,’ lying senseless upon the floor. He had been shot by a man known as Jack McCall. An examination showed that a pistol had been fired close to the back of the head, the bullet entering the base of the brain, a little to the right of the center, passing through in a straight line, making its exit through the right cheek between the upper and lower jaw-bones, loosening several of the molar teeth in its passage, and carrying a portion of the cerebellum through the wound.”
Newspapers had incorrectly reported his death in the past, but this time it was real. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok was dead. During the murder trial, the reporter noted McCall assumed a nonchalance and bravado “which was foreign to his feelings, and betrayed by the spasmodic heavings of his heart.” The paper said a witness at the card table during the shooting saw McCall place the barrel of his gun to the back of Hickok’s head and say, “Take that,” before pulling the trigger. At first McCall said the act was done in revenge for the death of his own brother. But this was just one of several stories McCall said in his own defense, which changed multiple times. McCall was somehow acquitted, then retried and ultimately hanged.
“It appears that Bill died in just the way and manner he did not wish to die—that is, with his boots on,” said a writer for the Kansas City Times. “His life during the past five or six years has been one of constant watchfulness and expectation, as more than one reckless frontiersman had coolly contracted to take his life. But Bill was never off guard, and woe unto the wretched devil who failed to ‘get the drop’ on the long-haired William. More than one fool has had a bullet sent crushing through his brains from the ever-ready pistol of this cool and silent desperado … He has many warm friends in this city, as well as all over the West, who will regret to hear of his tragic end, the end he has so long been expecting.”
In 1909 William Cody wrote a letter for the New York Herald defending his friend Hickok from being labeled one of the bad men of the frontier. Cody said Hickok was instead a “bad man to fool with.”
“Never was there a man most misunderstood by the people of the present day who are impressed by the nickname, as it intimated a crazy thirst for human life,” Cody said. “This is a wrong impression. Some consideration must be given to the peculiar conditions that existed in a section that was a more politically and socially volcanic, disorganized locality …” He reasoned that the frontier tended to draw those who were adventurous, vicious, and who were sometimes evading justice, which only grew worse after the Civil War. “There drifted in a host of men addicted to all kinds of excesses, and whose actions were almost, one might say, invited by the simple, unorganized and unprotected life then existing among the early settlers. Some idea of the atmosphere in which natives like Hickok and myself had been born and raised can be imagined from this description.”
Looking in context, Cody believed Hickok was a necessary product of his time. Though an impressive gunslinger and not afraid of confrontation, as far as Cody was aware Hickok never provoked a fight.
Cody commemorated his friend: “‘Wild Bill’ now lies buried in the Deadwood Cemetery. His name will always live in a romantic history stranger than fiction.”
The Sport of the Cowboy Fast Draw
While Hickok was dead, his story would become legend, myth, then movies and television. About 130 years after Hickok was buried in Deadwood, a fictionalized drama about the town, its salty residents, and the death of Hickok aired on television. David and Shirley Miller had been watching the show Deadwood one evening when Shirley turned to her husband and mentioned that she had never been to Deadwood. David decided the time was right that they make the trip from Colorado to the town. He glanced at the town’s chamber of commerce website to see what events there were and spotted something about a “fast draw exhibition.” Intrigued, they went to Deadwood and attended a shooting match. At this time, the Cowboy Fast Draw sport was only a few years old.
“I was sitting in the bleachers and I was like, ‘This is not an exhibition—these guys are doing something,’” David remembers. Indeed, they were competing to see who had the fastest gun. David decided he was interested in trying his own hand at it. However, Shirley said she wanted nothing to do with it, having never touched a gun. She tells me she would often leave the room, or even the house, when David was cleaning his own firearms collection. Undeterred, David went to a Denver gun store and bought a Colt single-action revolver—also known as a Peace Maker, and the only firearm allowed in the quick draw competitions. “There’s any number of manufacturers now that make a faithful reproduction of the Colt Peace Maker and that’s what we have to use,” David says, adding he went straight home and practiced in his basement with plastic bullets.
Just six weeks later the first-ever quick draw world championships came to Deadwood, and David went to compete against some of the fastest guns in the world. He ended up placing thirteenth out of sixty competitors. Shirley wasn’t sure if she even wanted to be involved but at the last second decided to strap on a holster even though she’d never touched a firearm before then.
“I said those women made it look easy. I’ll figure this out because—I love the costumes. Still do,” Shirley says. “And I didn’t even know how to load it, so my hand judge had to physically load my gun. Everything you could