Spurred West. Ian Neligh

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 and then shot James Woods. Woods wasn’t yet dead and the station manager’s wife finished him off with a hoe. Wounded 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 СКАЧАТЬ