Wild Bill Hickok

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A local bum who used several aliases, McCall entered the saloon unnoticed, as he often worked at menial jobs in the place. McCall began moving, quite casually, toward the back door behind Hickok’s chair. Once there, he stopped and watched the game for a few minutes. Hickok and Massie were discussing the captain’s habit of sneaking looks at his opponent’s discards. The other players stared at their hands.

Nobody was paying any attention to McCall. Suddenly the air was shattered by a loud crash, as McCall pulled a .45-caliber revolver from his coat pocket and shot Hickok in the back of the head from three feet. Hickok hung suspended in time for a moment and then toppled over backward, the cards in his hand dropping to the floor. That hand, which included a pair of aces and a pair of eights, became known as the Dead Man’s Hand. The suits of those cards and what the fifth card was are still being disputed-nobody will ever know these details for sure (see the editorial on P. 6 of the December 1995 Wild West).

Jack McCall was tried by an illegal miner’s court in Deadwood on August 3 and found not guilty. Later, he was tried in Yankton, Dakota Territory, and this time he was found guilty. He was hanged on March 1, 1877.

Hickok’s death devastated his family. Several months after he died, his wife wrote: ‘I can see him day and night before me. The longer he is dead, the worse I feel.’ In Kansas, Hickok’s sister Lydia expressed regret that he had not died with Custer at the Little Bighorn, rather than on a barroom floor. And when the bad news reached Troy Grove, Ill., his mother suffered a lung hemorrhage. She died two years later.

Who was Wild Bill Hickok? There are too many mysteries, controversies, half-truths and outright fabrications about his life for anyone to answer that question with total confidence. Yet people will keep trying to answer it because, while he was certainly no saint, Wild Bill lived a life of adventure and displayed enough courage and daring to forge one of the enduring legends of the Wild West.

This article was written by James Bankes and originally appeared in the August 1996 issue of Wild West.

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