Spurred West. Ian Neligh

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СКАЧАТЬ actually shoot in fast draw, even though we’re not shooting at somebody—it is just still kind of about the romance of the Old West.”

      Gunfights in the Old West were rarely simple, clean, or for that matter particularly cinematic. In Thomas Dimsdale’s 1921 book The Vigilantes of Montana, he records a fight in the winter of 1862 or 1863 between George Carrhart and George Ives, who were walking down the street of Bannack, Montana (now a ghost town), when an altercation broke out. The dispute became increasingly heated between the two men until Ives said he’d shoot Carrhart. Without further delay, Ives ran off to the local grocery to fetch his gun where it was waiting for him.

      Carrhart ran to his cabin to get his firearm and then waited outside with the six-shooter held down by his side. When Ives burst out of the grocery store, he was armed and ready—but looking in the wrong direction. Carrhart waited for Ives to turn and face him. When Ives finally saw him, he swore, raised his six-shooter, and fired at Carrhart. The bullet missed, striking the side of a house next to where Carrhart was standing. Carrhart answered in kind by raising his own firearm and pulled the trigger, but his weapon misfired. Ives hastily shot a second time, but this bullet hit the ground in front of Carrhart.

      Carrhart then took his second shot and aimed for Ives’s face—but somehow the bullet missed. Possibly dismayed, Carrhart ran into a nearby house, stuck his six-gun out of the door, and fired again at Ives, who also shot back. The two blasted away at one another until Ives finally ran out of bullets. He turned to walk off when Carrhart came out of the house, with one shot left, and carefully aimed at Ives and fired. This time the bullet hit, striking Ives in the back and near one side. The bullet reportedly went straight through his body and hit the ground in front of Ives, kicking up dirt. Ives wasn’t even close to dead. He turned and swore at Carrhart for shooting him in the back, then stormed off again to fetch another loaded six-gun. No doubt deciding he’d had enough, Carrhart fled from the scene. Supposedly the men ended their dispute soon after and lived together on Carrhart’s ranch over the remainder of the winter.

      Unusual stories like this show that two men even at close range sometimes had a difficult time hitting and killing the other. Misfires and misses were common. In my research I found an interesting story about two men who were playing cards when a gunfight broke out. One man got his gun out first, but because they were so close his opponent’s pocket watch chain kept his six-shooter’s hammer from falling and firing the bullet—which ultimately cost him his life.

      The romance of the West is something largely concocted from nostalgia by people who didn’t actually have to live through it. The Wild West wasn’t full of men staring each other down the length of a dirty street, waiting for the clock to strike high noon before trying to gun each other down. Such fantasy is often the mortar of which most of the romance of the time is constructed. That’s not to say that it didn’t happen. There were men who unerringly hit what they were aiming at with predictably fatal results. One such man was given the nickname “Wild Bill” and may have been the greatest gunslinger who ever lived.

       Tall Tales of Wild Bill Hickok

      In all likelihood it was August 1865, several months after the Civil War, when Harper’s New Monthly Magazine journalist George Ward Nichols found himself in Springfield, Missouri. Sitting in the shade of an awning, he was both fighting the need to take a nap and looking on at the residents of the area with thinly veiled superiority and contempt. “Men and women dressed in queer costumes; men with coats and trousers made of skin, but so thickly covered with dirt and grease as to have defied the identity of the animal when walking in the flesh,” he said. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but the story Nichols had come out to write would make history.

      There 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, СКАЧАТЬ