The Prince of Pistoleers
Pancake hat, Prince Albert frock coat
Even while Wild Bill Hickok was
alive, and ever since his dramatic death, tall tales and exaggerations of his
exploits have been common. As was the case with all noted figures of the West,
be they outlaws, lawmen or somewhere in between, the number of men they fought
or killed has been grossly inflated. Just as with Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp
and countless others, the fictional Wild Bill has so far cast the factual one
in shadow as to make the true person unknown.
Hollywood in particular latched
onto Wild Bill as a perfect subject for Westerns and his character
appeared in silent movies, programmers, serials and major A-pictures. He
appeared on the big screen
40 times, that I know of, and in 153 TV shows. That’s a lot of screen Bills. He
has been impersonated by actors as diverse as William S Hart, Gary Cooper, Roy
Rogers, Wild Bill Elliott, Forrest Tucker, Guy Madison, Charles Bronson, LQ
Jones, David Carradine, and both father and son, Lloyd and Jeff Bridges.
Out of all
these appearances (I do not count here the TV documentaries), not a single one
has accurately shown us the true James Butler Hickok (1837 – 76).
1.
The fact
To get at the real (but no less
interesting) Wild Bill, we need to read Joseph G Rosa. Mr. Rosa, an Englishman
from Middlesex, devoted his life to the subject and he is by far the most
authoritative and reliable of Bill’s biographers. He wrote many books but
the key text is They Called Him Wild Bill:
The Life and Times of James Butler Hickok, University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman, which was first published in 1964 and then revised after more research in
1974. It is an admirable book, scholarly yet readable, obviously deeply
researched, balanced, clear, factual and fascinating.
Fine book - you won't do better
Early life
James Butler Hickok was born in
Homer (now Troy Grove), Illinois on May 27, 1837, the fourth son of farmers William
Alonzo and Polly Butler Hickok. He received schooling (though all his life his
spelling was to be basically phonetic) and as a boy developed a passion for and
skill with firearms. He was also imbued with his parents’ detestation of
slavery and helped southern slaves escape to the safety of Canada through the ‘underground
railway’. James was a lifelong anti-slaver.
Kansas
In 1856 James and his brother
Lorenzo set out for Kansas to establish a claim on farmland. For some unknown
reason, James was often known in the family as Bill. Lorenzo was known as ‘Tame
Bill’ and was of a different character. He soon returned home, leaving James to
make his way in Kansas. James became involved in the Free State movement and
joined James H Lane’s Free State Army, which he stayed with for about a year.
In 1857 he first met William
Cody, known as Buffalo Bill, and began their lifelong friendship. He stayed at
the Cody home in Leavenworth for several months.
Buffalo Bill Cody as a young man
In March 1858 James, not yet 21, was elected
Constable of Monticello in Johnson Country. It was his first experience as a peace officer. He farmed at the same time and made
a claim on land. At the end of ’58 he left Monticello, apparently because of an
unsuccessful affair with a girl, Mary Owen.
James got a job as a freighter
and coach driver. When in 1860 Cody became a rider for the new Pony Express, James
was too tall and big to join him (they only hired youths and slight men) and instead continued with his transportation work. It is
at this time that he was said to have fought a grizzly bear and killed it with
his knife, being, however, severely mauled. In September, Indians attacked a
station and drove off stock; James led a successful raid to recover the animals,
with Cody along too.
The McCanles affair
In July 1861 Hickok was involved
in the first of his several famous shooting scrapes. As far as we can ascertain,
the facts, according to Rosa, were these: David C McCanles, whose mistress Sarah
Shull had perhaps been dallying with Hickok, came to the Pony Express station
at Rock Creek to demand payment of money he was owed by the company, and was fatally
shot from inside the building as he entered, perhaps by Hickok or by the superintendent,
Horace Wellman.
Dave McCanles. He looks a bit like Pavarotti.
Two of McCanles’s supporters then
rushed the station. Hickok shot and wounded one, James Woods, and then Mrs. Wellman,
crazed, screaming, “Kill them! Kill them all!” attacked and killed the injured
Woods with a grubbing hoe. She then made a rush at McCanles’s son, Monroe,
12, who ran away and escaped. The other McCanles partisan, James Gordon, received a
shot in the body, it is not clear from whom, and staggered away. Two company
men, Doc Brink and George Hulbert, pursued him and one of them killed him with
a shotgun beside a creek. Thus three men had died, one of them possibly, but not
certainly, killed by Hickok. In a subsequent hearing, Hickok was cleared of
murder. Mrs. Wellman was not even charged and appeared as a witness.
Immediately, the affair was written
up, discussed and exaggerated and Hickok’s reputation as a deadly gunman was
established.
The war
Mr. Rosa has uncovered a lot
more than was previously known about Hickok’s role in the Civil War. Although
he joined the Union Army as a teamster, Hickok soon became a scout and spy
behind enemy lines. He was especially active in the Battle of Westport in 1864.
He became celebrated for his
daring and it was during the war that he became known as Wild Bill.
Dave Tutt
In July 1865, about a month
after being mustered out, Wild Bill got into a gunfight with Davis K Tutt in
Springfield, Missouri. They had been on bad terms for some time. One theory
says that Bill had got Tutt’s sister pregnant. Another says that Hickok and
Tutt were rivals for the affections of Susannah Moore. Owed money by Bill after
card games, Tutt took Bill’s watch. Bill warned him not to wear it but Tutt
flaunted it the next day on the public square. Bill warned Tutt not to cross
the square but he did. They both pulled pistols and fired as one. Tutt’s shot
missed but Hickok’s hit him in the heart.
Wild Bill fights Dave Tutt in Springfield Missouri, 1865
A warrant was issued for Hickok
for the killing though the charge was later reduced to manslaughter. Bill was
tried and acquitted. Juries held to the Western code of a fair fight. Press reaction was,
however, quite negative to Bill.
Added to the McCanles affair of
four years earlier, the killing of Dave Tutt made Wild Bill’s reputation grow
by leaps and bounds. This surge in notoriety received a huge boost when Bill
met a certain Colonel George Ward Nichols, who later wrote up Bill’s life in lurid
and exaggerated terms in an article for the widely-read Harper’s Weekly magazine. For years afterwards, Bill was known in the
press as ‘Wild Bill, of Harper’s fame.’ He was a celebrity.
Deputy US Marshal Hickok
In 1866 Wild Bill was appointed
a deputy US marshal at Fort Riley and captured deserters and mule thieves. He signed
on as a scout for General Sherman and also acted as a guide for tourists on the
plains. At this time he got to know California Joe (Moses Milner), scout, gunfighter, trapper, gold digger; the Welsh-American journalist and explorer HM Stanley; and
General George Armstrong Custer, for whom he scouted in ’67.
California Joe
Henry Morton Stanley
In 1868 Deputy US Marshal Hickok escorted some prisoners from Hays City to Topeka, accompanied by Bill Cody. A young boy met him and was enormously impressed: it was Bill Tilghman, later to become one of the greatest (though least celebrated) Western lawmen. Hickok then scouted for the 10th Cavalry but missed the
Washita and was snowed up on the Canadian River with General Penrose. He was
rescued by Buffalo Bill.
Bill Tilghman as a young man (he was a buffalo hunter at 15)
In 1869 Bill was wounded by Indians
and left the scouts. He made his base in Hays and in August was elected sheriff
of Ellis County. In August he fatally shot Bill Mulrey (or Mulvey) and in
September he killed Samuel Strawhun in a saloon brawl. In October he prevented a
lynching in Hays. But in November he lost the election to succeed himself and
left for Topeka.
In 1870 he was back in Hays and
got into a fight with some 7th Cavalry troopers in which he killed one and
wounded another. He left town in a hurry ahead of irate citizens, and gambled in
Topeka.
Abilene
In April 1871 he accepted the
job as marshal of the booming and lawless cattle town of Abilene. Although one
of his predecessors was a certain Tom Smith, Mr. Rosa is not sure that this was
in fact the famous ‘Bear River’ Tom Smith, as is usually thought.
John Wesley Hardin
Hickok’s tenure lasted barely
seven months but in that period at different times he came up against Texas
gunmen John Wesley Hardin, Ben Thompson and Phil Coe. Mr. Rosa discounts the
story that Hardin got the drop on Hickok with a ‘border roll’, putting it down
to Hardin’s boastful autobiography. There was no love lost between Ben Thompson
and Hickok and it is possible that Thompson tried to get Hardin to brace the
marshal. In any case, Thompson left for Texas to get his wife but was involved in
a bad buggy accident and never returned.
Ben Thompson
Bill kept the lid on Abilene,
enforcing a no-gun ordinance and confining the worst excesses to the area known
as the ‘Devil’s Addition’ north of the tracks. He was admired by many grateful Abilene residents but did enough to earn the hatred
of the Texans who regarded Abilene as ‘theirs’.
Phil Coe
6 foot 4 inch Phil Coe deserted
from the Confederate army after one day, having struck an officer, and went to Mexico to fight for
Maximilian. There he met and befriended fellow Texan Ben Thompson. Coe became a saloon man and eventually arrived in Abilene. On
October 5, he was with a mob of Texans outside The Alamo saloon. There Coe
discharged his revolver. Marshal Hickok came running and demanded to know who
had fired in contravention of the no-gun law. Coe said he had shot at a stray
dog. The marshal told the mob to disperse and when they roared in protest he
shot Coe twice in the abdomen (he died in agony two days later). Just at that
moment a friend of Hickok’s, a special deputy (though not Hickok’s deputy)
named Mike Williams, rushed round the corner and Hickok instantly and
instinctively fired again and Williams was killed.
Phil Coe
Once again, reports were
magnified and erroneous. Hickok had “shot down two policemen in cold blood”, and so on.
Texans put a price on Hickok’s head. Bill foiled three would-be murderers on a rail
trip to Topeka. Bill was crushed by what he had unwittingly done and it was not
long before he left Abilene. In any case the anti-cattle-trade reformers were
gaining ground and there was a strong anti-Hickok party forming. He was
dismissed on December 13.
In 1872 Bill was in Georgetown,
Colorado with his loyal friend Charley Utter and he then went to Kansas City where he
met Col. Sidney Barnett who persuaded him to take part in a 'grand buffalo
chase', a sort of Wild West show, in Niagara Falls at the end of August. In
September he visited the Kansas City Exposition where he enraged some Texans by
refusing to let the band play Dixie. Rosa discounts, however, the story that he
foiled Jesse James’s raid on the box office – the James gang got clear
away.
The person on the left has been variously identified but is most commonly thought to be Colorado Charley Utter, Wild Bill's good friend
The murder of Chief Whistler
Later that year Wild Bill was
blamed for the murder of the Indian chief Whistler and two other Indians but
Rosa is clear that the ‘Wild Bill’ concerned was not Hickok. There were several
‘Wild Bills’ on the frontier.
Show business
In the fall of 1873 Hickok was persuaded to
join Bill Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro back East on the stage in their
enormously popular shows about life on the plains. Hickok was a poor actor and
disliked making an exhibition of himself. In 1874 he left the show.
Wild Bill Hickok, Texas Jack Omohundro and Buffalo Bill Cody at the time of their theatrical collaboration
Agnes
Bill had first met Agnes Lake
Thatcher, an accomplished circus equestrienne, in Hays but while she had been
enthusiastic, he had been less so. Now, however, they took up together, and they
continued a long correspondence when Bill left again for the plains. He acted
as guide for rich tourists and by 1875 was gambling in Cheyenne. There his name appeared on a list of those liable to arrest for vagrancy. His eyesight was giving him trouble and Mr. Rosa discusses
all the possible causes. Bill appears to have been photophobic and he started
wearing tinted glasses.
Agnes Lake Thatcher, Mrs. JB Hickok
In March 1876, Bill and Agnes
were married by a Methodist minister in Cheyenne. They honeymooned in Agnes’s
home town of Cincinnati and then Bill, eager to make money, left again to make
a strike in the Black Hills. Together with Charley Utter and Charley’s brother
Steve, they set off for Deadwood, where they arrived in July ’76. Bill wrote genuinely tender letters to Agnes while there.
Calamity Jane
Mr. Rosa completely discounts
the story of a romance between Martha Jane Cannary, Calamity Jane, and Wild
Bill. Still less is it likely that they married. There is no evidence at all
for any relationship and it is improbable in the extreme. In any case Jane was
not in Deadwood when Bill was killed (as many movies show).
Calamity Jane
Murder
On Wednesday, August 2, 1876,
Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back of the head while playing cards in
Nuttall & Mann’s No. 10 saloon by one ‘Bill Sutherland’ whose real name
turned out to be Jack McCall. Wild Bill was supposed to have been holding aces and eights, ever after known as the dead man's hand.
Dead man's hand
No one will ever know the
complete truth about why Wild Bill was killed. Jack McCall took the secret to the gallows with him.
But it seems likely that he was paid to do it, possibly by one John or Johnny Varnes.
At one point McCall named Varnes, who had once fallen foul of Hickok in Denver and
the animosity was increased by a confrontation over a game of poker in Deadwood
when Bill had interfered in a dispute between Varnes and another man. A marshal
was sent to find Varnes but he had disappeared. The matter was never pursued and no one knows what happened to Varnes. After
being acquitted by a miners’ kangaroo court in Deadwood right after the murder, McCall
was properly tried in Yankton and hanged there in March 1877.
The only known picture of Jack McCall
Bill received a proper funeral in
Deadwood paid for by his pardner Charley Utter.
The Prince of Pistoleers
Wild Bill Hickok thus lived a
short but remarkable life and one wonders why it should be necessary to invent nonsense
about him in movies. Scout, spy, lawman, gambler, marksman supreme, his life
was charged with excitement, danger and action.
We still await the true Wild
Bill on the screen. Sadly, it is too late now to have Joseph Rosa as historical consultant on the set.
In a later post, Wild Bill Hickok in fact and fiction, part 2/2: the fiction, we’ll look at
how Wild Bill has been presented to us in serious novels, pulp fiction and on the screen.
Revolting
