Some six ten after thebutton - down duelbetween gentlemenAaron Burrand Alexander Hamilton , and 16 age before the blazing gunfight between lawmen and a gang called the Cowboys on a moth-eaten lot near Arizona’sO.K. Corral , a former Confederate soldier named Davis Tutt , an itinerant gambler with a score to settle , stepped into the town square in Springfield , Missouri , and fell , literally , into chronicle .
On the other side of the square that solar day — it was July 21 , 1865 , — was a 6 - foot-1 - inch - magniloquent drink of a dude , with auburn hair curl to his shoulders , a distinctively long mustache underneath an aquiline olfactory organ and a rakishly - worn sombrero topping it all off . James Butler Hickok was a former Union soldier , and a risk taker , too , both by nature and profession . He also was good with a throttle .
At about 6 p.m. that afternoon , with a Au sentry , a gambling debt , perhaps the heart of a woman , and certainly a good dollop of pride on the melodic line , the two serviceman became the stars in what is now recognized as theWild West ’s first warm - draw shootout .
thing did n’t go well for untried Mr. Tutt that afternoon . As for J.B. Hickok — many jazz him even then as Wild Bill — the gunfight in Springfield became the clobber of legend .
" It was sort of inevitable as they approach each other , to the point where they saw that one could hit the other … and then it was who draw first . So it was kind of improvised , " saysTom Clavin , the generator of " Wild Bill : The True Story of the American Frontier ’s First Gunfighter . " " But the story spread like a prairie flack . It sort of plant the template , the stage dancing , for these gunplay that would take piazza over the next few decade . "
Becoming Wild Bill
Hickok was born in Illinois in 1837 and made his way west as a young man . He grind as a devoid - DoS army soldier in Kansas and a driver for a Kansas stage company . In 1861 , the 24 - class - old Hickok got into his first gravid trouble with the natural law , charged with slaying forgunning down David McCanlesin a difference of opinion at a Pony Express station inRock Creek Station , Kansas .
As with much of Hickok ’s life and fable , it ’s hard to tell now , more than 150 eld later , exactly what spurred him to inject McCanles . But McCanles , most fit in , probably was the first man Wild Bill ever killed .
" From all account of killings in which Hickok subsequently took part , I have been unable to find one single authentic representative in which he fought a middling conflict , " George W. Hansen pen in Nebraska History Magazine in 1968 . " To him no human life was consecrated . He was a cold - full-blood killer without nerve or conscience . "
Hickok was acquitted of the McCanles slaying , and afterward get it on around as a scout , stable mitt , wagon master , marshal , and , perchance , a Union undercover agent during the Civil War . Along the fashion , he adventure a lot , befriend another Wild West fable , William Frederick " Buffalo Bill " Cody , picked up the sobriquet " Wild Bill " ( which he sometimes called himself ) , and yarn-dye a few women , include the married woman of badly - famed Amerindic scrapper George Armstrong Custer , for whom Hickok scouted .
By the mid-1860s , Wild Bill ’s report was far-flung , if not entirely correspond upon or particularly credible . In her book , Mrs. Custer bear on the secondhand level of a time five men with inauspicious intent broke in on a quiescency Hickok .
" Some one hearing the noise of the contest burst start the door , " she publish , " and found four of the assailants dead on the storey , and Wild Bill stretched fainting on the seam across the eubstance of the 5th assassin . " She publish , too , of Hickok being jumped in town by three assassins , only to free one of his hands , grab an ever - present Colt handgun from his belt and sack blindly behind him to kill one of the assailants . fit in to Mrs. Custer , with all these ruffians gun for him , Wild Bill had to leave town .
bother , inevitably , followed .
Wild Bill was in Springfield in the summertime of 1865 , doing what he like to do most : gamble . He suffer his Au watch to Tutt , or Tutt merely took it , and the many business relationship of the day have Wild Bill warning Tutt about carrying the ticker in public . Tutt , who at one time may have considered Wild Bill a friend , fag out the watch defiantly .
The Springfield Shootout
In the end , the two squinted at each other from about 75 yards ( 69 metre ) apart across the Springfield public square and draw their pistols . If it was n’t exactly the stuff of thousands of movies and TV shows — quick pull from a leather holster in the middle of a street at high noon — it surely was n’t a right Burr - Hamilton duel , either . The shootout at Springfield is now considered the first time in America that two people faced off in a public setting to settle a dispute via side arm .
Tutt missed . But Wild Bill , steady his gun by laying it across his play off forearm , aim and struck his mark , instantly kill his rival with a slam to the heart . The showdown was memorialize in an clause in Harper ’s New Monthly Magazine in February 1867 , in which writer George Ward Nichols quotes a bystander ( viaLegends of America ):
" Both Tutt and Bill fired , but one dismission followed the other so quick that it ’s unvoiced to say which went off first . Tuttwas a noted guesswork , but he missed this meter ; the ball from his pistol went over Bill ’s head . The exigent Bill fired , without waitin ter see ef he had strike Tutt , he wheeled on his heels and pointed his shooting iron at Tutt ’s friends , who had already draw their weapon system .
' Are n’t yer slaked , man ? ' cried Bill , as cool as an alligator . ' Put up your shootin - irons , or there ’ll be more dead men here . ' And they put ‘em up , and tell it war a far fight . "
The Harper ’s clause has been widely panned by many historians . ( In it , Nichols says Wild Bill stamp out " hundred " of men , almost sure as shooting room off the mark . ) Still that article , and thedime store novelsof the metre , provided one of the first glimpses for many people into Wild Bill ’s larger - than - life character .
" It was not only the nature of that shootout , but Hickok ’s frigidness under pressure and his accuracy . He killed somebody with one shot at a time when people were not that good , really , with handgun , " Clavin enounce . " That was the beginning . "
The Legend Grows
Wild Bill scouted more during the Indian Wars , became a U.S. Marshall in two different Kansas towns ( Hays and Abilene ) , engaged in a few more shootouts and killed a few more humans ( let in , in Abilene , his deputy , incidentally shot in the middle of a shootout ) .
He took advantage of his renown when he could , joining his friend Buffalo Bill in a stage show in New York City’sNiblo Gardens , a variety of pre - Broadway spectacle called " Scouts of the Plains . " But he knew , too , that his ill fame come at a price . Wild Bill always was armed with his Colts , Clavin suppose , and often would walk down the midriff of the street in town , where it would be harder for someone to bushwhack him from a dark doorway .
Somewhere in his travel , Wild Bill met fellow sentinel Martha Jane Cannary — have intercourse asCalamity Jane — and some accounts cover that the two had a romantic relationship . agree to Clavin , though , that never hap . Wild Bill married an old woman named Agnes Lake , a circus impresario , in Cheyenne , Wyoming , in March 1876 .
" Nobody know she existed , and she was the only Mrs. Hickok , " Clavin say Newsday before this year . " Calamity Jane is a bewitching character , but Wild Bill could n’t stand her . "
After his honeymoon in Cincinnati , Wild Bill leave again for the wilderness of the Wild West . And that ’s where he was in the summer of 1876 .
The Last of the Legend
Eleven year after the shootout with Tutt , shortly after his marriage ceremony to Lake , Wild Bill land in the rowdy Au rush townsfolk of Deadwood , in the Dakota Territory , where he mean to garner some money — gaming , of course — to take home to his married woman . There , on Aug. 1 , 1876 , he operate afoul of a drunken Kentuckian who was after his own slice of celebrity , Jack McCall .
Again , the records are hazy on precisely what happened or why . But in a taphouse in the centre of town , McCall stepped behind Wild Bill while he was playact batting order and shot him , point - white , in the back of the head . The wound was fateful .
Wild Bill was 39 .
" We have this original in our history of the American West of the gunfighter , the sole gun for hire , the humankind who rifle his own agency and is confident that he ’s going to place things to right , " Clavin say . " Hickok was basically the image of that . He was the first post - Civil War gunfighter . "
During his lifespan , Wild Bill was practically mythologise , and his tale has proceed to rise in the more than a hundred after his death . He has been the subject of many biographies , notably by the British writer Joseph G. Rosa , whose book of account , " They Called Him Wild Bill : The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok " , service as the first major work on the valet .
Wild Bill also was the subject of a 1950s boob tube series ( " The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok " ) . On film , he ’s been portrayed by Gary Cooper ( 1936 , in Cecil B. DeMille ’s " The Plainsman " ) , Roy Rogers ( 1940 , " Young Bill Hickok " ) , Charles Bronson ( 1977 , " The White Buffalo " ) , Jeff Bridges ( 1995 , " Wild Bill " ) , and Luke Hemsworth ( 2017 , " Hickok " ) . Keith Carradine act an older version of Wild Bill in the HBO series " Deadwood " .
For a man who did so much in his short lifespan , Wild Bill in all likelihood is best hump for the acquisition he first exhibited in world in the Springfield square in 1865 . But for Clavin , that ’s not what Wild Bill would have preferred .
" If he were to describe himself , it would be as a gambler , because he spent more time doing that than he did anything else . And he enjoy it . He enjoyed playing card . He enjoyed the surroundings of the saloon life . The smell of vulgar men . Cigars . Whiskey . The miss . He really liked that life , " Clavin says . " On the other bridge player , he also spend a lot of time out on the plains , out on the prairie , as a scout . So he was kind of like two people in one . He could expend weeks at a sentence on the prairie , by himself … but when he was in townsfolk , he enjoyed it . He ’d wear aPrince Albert dress . He ’d really dress out up . He was quite the swell .
" I guess , maybe grudgingly , he ’d say a gunfighter , too , because it was what he was . But he was n’t somebody who sought to be hurting the great unwashed . He liked mass and masses liked him . But … he was a gunfighter . "
Learn more about Wild Bill Hickok in " Wild Bill Hickok , Gunfighter : An Account of Hickok ’s Gunfights " by Joseph G. Rosa . HowStuffWorks break up related titles found on books we cogitate you ’ll wish . Should you pick out to corrupt one , we ’ll receive a part of the sale .
