The Wild West of Yester-Year
Wild Bill Hickock
By Rachel Kovaciny
When I was a kid, I
used to get Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody confused.
My dad liked to throw real Wild West figures from history
into our games of posse-and-robbers, including them. I found
their colorful names fascinating, but I could never remember
which Bill was which. Eventually, I read junior biographies
of them both, and then I could tell them apart because
Buffalo Bill Cody was a buffalo hunter, and his name made
sense to me. But I always wondered, why was Wild Bill Hickok
not only called “Wild,” but also called “Bill” when his
actual name was James Butler Hickok?
It turns out that,
like so much about his legendary life, even Wild Bill
Hickok’s name is more a matter of legend than of fact.
In reality, James
Hickok was born to abolitionist parents in Illinois in 1837.
Reportedly, the Hickok home was a station for the
Underground Railroad when he was a child. An excellent shot
even as a child, Hickok was renowned locally for his
marksmanship with a pistol. At eighteen, James got into a
fight with another young man that ended when they fell into
a canal. Each of them thought they had killed the other one,
and they both fled Illinois.
While living in
Kansas, James Hickok began using his father’s name of
William instead, possibly to remember his father, who had
died when James Hickok was fifteen. In 1860, a bear attacked
him while he was driving a freight wagon along the Santa Fe
Trail and severely injured Hickok. He spent four months in
bed recovering, then worked as a stable hand in Nebraska
Territory for a way station. While there, Hickok was
involved in a shooting with a disgruntled employee. This is
the first instance on record of Hickok being involved in a
gunfight.
Hickok joined the
Union Army during the American Civil War, and his last name
was sometimes spelled Haycock or Hitchcock instead. These
name discrepancies have made it difficult for biographers to
sort out the facts of Hickok’s life from the many legends
that sprang up around him (or were started by him). Later
accounts refer to him as Wild Bill during the Civil War, but
there is no clear evidence for exactly when or why he earned
the nickname.
The first recorded
instance of a quick-draw duel, the sort we see between
gunfighters in movies, occurred between Wild Bill Hickok and
a gambler named Davis Tutt in Springfield, MO, on July 21,
1865. A disagreement over a pocket watch lost in a poker
game led to the two men facing off in the middle of the
street. Tutt fired a single shot, but died from Hickok’s
bullet to his heart.
They arrested Bill Hickok for the murder of Davis
Tutt, but the jury acquitted him. After the trial,
newspaperman George Ward Nichols interviewed him about the
incident for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. That interview
calls Hickok “Wild Bill,” which is the first definite record
of the nickname. It’s full of inaccuracies and
exaggerations, including the claim that Hickok had faced
down hundreds of other men in duels. This seems to have been
the beginning of the mystical legend that grew up around
Hickok during his lifetime.
Over the next few
years, Hickok served as a scout for General Custer with the
Seventh Cavalry, a deputy U. S. Marshal, and a scout for the
Tenth Cavalry, which was a segregated African-American
regiment of “Buffalo Soldiers.” In 1869, he got elected as
both the city marshal of Hays City and the sheriff of Ellis
County, Kansas. During his first month in office, he killed
two men in the line of duty, and was involved in other
shootings during the next few months. With every new job,
the stories about Hickok grew taller and wilder.
Hickok found work as
a marshal for Abilene, a notoriously rough cow town. He was
a successful and popular lawman there until a tragic
altercation, when Hickok accidentally shot and killed his
deputy. Hickok never involved himself in another gunfight
after that, and the accidental killing haunted him for the
rest of his life.
Wild Bill soon left
Abilene and tried his hand at running a Wild West show like
his longtime friend Buffalo Bill Cody. When Hickok’s show
folded, Cody offered him a spot in his, but Hickok hated
acting and would sometimes hide behind scenery or refuse to
come onstage at all. It’s no surprise he left Cody’s show
after a few months.
On August 2, a man
named Jack McCall entered the saloon seeking revenge. McCall
had lost a great deal of money to Hickok in a poker game the
previous day. He walked up to Hickok and shot him through
the back of the head without warning. Almost the entire town
of Deadwood attended Bill Hickok’s funeral. His legend grew
larger and larger with every passing year, first thanks to
all the dime novels published about him during and after his
life, and then all the movies made about him.
The actor best known
for Wild Bill Hickok is Guy Madison, who starred on the TV
show Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, which cemented
Hickok in the imaginations of Americans as a heroic lawman.
My dad loved that show as a boy, and it’s undoubtedly the
reason he dragged Wild Bill Hickok into our games when I was
a kid. Which means it’s also the reason I spent all this
time researching Hickok’s nickname and writing this article!
♦