One Texan, however, infuriated Hickok. He was John Wesley Hardin, one of the most prolific and deadly shootists in the annals of the Old West. Hardin followed the murderer of a fellow Texan to Sumner City, Kan., killed him, and then moved on to Abilene and killed another man for no reason. Hardin fled when an angry Hickok came after him. Hardin later claimed that Hickok tried to disarm him. According to Hardin’s story, he had extended his pistols to Hickok, butts first. When Hickok reached for them, Hardin suddenly twirled the guns in his hands, getting the drop on his adversary and causing Wild Bill to back down. By the time Hardin made this claim in his 1895 autobiography, Hickok was already dead, and it seems highly unlikely that a man of Hickok’s experience would fall for this maneuver, called the ‘border shift’ or the ‘road agent’s spin.’

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Ben Thompson, another deadly Texas gunman, operated Abilene’s Bull’s Head saloon, and while he disliked Hickok, they didn’t test each other’s gunfighting skills. Phil Coe, co-owner of the Bull’s Head, did become involved in a dispute with Hickok when both men vied for the affection of Jessie Hazel, proprietor of an expensive bawdy house. Hickok lost out, and the madam decided to leave with Coe for Texas. On the evening of October 5, 1871, before he was to leave, Coe and some other Texans went on a shooting spree. When challenged on the street by Hickok, Coe made the mistake of drawing. Both men fired twice from about eight feet. Coe missed with both shots, but Hickok put two bullets into the Texan’s stomach, and he died two days later.

While Hickok may have taken pleasure in shooting Coe, it proved to be a tragic evening for him. Just as he fired at Coe, another man, holding a revolver, rushed toward them. Thinking the man was one of Coe’s friends, Hickok fired twice more and killed the man, who turned out to be his deputy and close friend, Mike Williams. Wild Bill Hickok, the stone-cold killer, wept openly as he carried Williams into the Alamo saloon and laid him on a billiard table, where he died. Hickok paid the funeral expenses for Williams, probably the last man he ever killed.

In December 1871, the city council of Abilene decided it no longer needed the high-priced services of Marshal Hickok and discharged him. He drifted to Colorado and then to Kansas City, where he lost all his money at the gaming tables. Destitute, he accepted an offer to appear on stage with Colonel Sidney Barnett’s Wild West show, giving two performances at Niagara Falls, N.Y., on August 28 and 30, 1872, and then quitting because he hated performing.

The next spring, reports flashed around the country that Hickok had been murdered in Fort Dodge, Kan., by some Texans. He responded by writing letters to several newspapers. In one letter he went after famed writer Ned Buntline: ‘Ned Buntline has been trying to murder me for years. Having failed to do so, he is trying to have it done by some Texans.’

Despite Hickok’s dislike of the stage, ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody persuaded him to join his theatrical group in the East in September 1873 (see the October 1994 issue of Wild West for more on Hickok’s short-lived stage career). Hickok toured with Cody for five months and then left for the West. He had begun wearing dark glasses, which he said he needed because of the stage lighting. Hickok, who may have been suffering from glaucoma or trachoma, was apparently bothered by eye problems the rest of his life.

During 1874 and 1875, Hickok spent at least some of his time in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory. It was there that he encountered Agnes Lake, a lady he had met several years earlier in Abilene. Lake had become a widow in 1869 when husband William Lake Thatcher (a circus performer who had dropped ‘Thatcher’ for show-biz reasons) was shot in an argument with a ‘customer’ in Missouri. Agnes Lake enjoyed international fame as a horsewoman, tightrope walker, dancer and lion-tamer. When Hickok met her in Abilene in 1871, she was a circus owner. On March 5, 1876, not long after their Cheyenne reunion, Wild Bill and Agnes were married. The ceremony took place at the Cheyenne home of S.L. Moyer and was performed by the Rev. F.W. Warren of the Episcopal Methodist Church. Following a two-week honeymoon in Cincinnati, at the home of Agnes Lake’s son-in-law, Gilbert Robinson, Hickok left for the Black Hills determined to earn enough money through gambling and gold prospecting to put his marriage on a sound financial base. The newlyweds would never see each other again.

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