James Butler Hickok

By the time Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back of the head over a poker table in Deadwood, he had spent nearly two decades becoming a myth in real time, and he had grown so accustomed to being both target and legend that he sat, that final night, with his back to the door — the one cardinal rule of his own trade he almost never broke, and the single time he did, it killed him. James Butler Hickok was born on an Illinois farm that his father used as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and he grew up believing, with total sincerity, that a man's rightful place was standing between danger and whoever couldn't defend themselves. It made him, by turns, a stagecoach driver, a Union scout and spy during the Civil War, a lawman, a gambler, a gunfighter for hire, and eventually a stage performer selling a version of himself that was already half invention before he ever stepped in front of the footlights.

His first documented gunfight — the one that made "Wild Bill" a name newspapers wanted to print — came in 1861 at Rock Creek Station, Nebraska, a violent brawl with the McCanles family that left three men dead and Hickok's account of it wildly, self-servingly exaggerated in the retelling. That pattern would define his whole public life: a real, dangerous encounter, followed by a story that grew taller with every year and every dime novelist who never met him. Harper's New Monthly Magazine ran a profile in 1867 that turned him into a national sensation, crediting him with feats of marksmanship and body counts that owed more to fiction than to any court record, and Hickok — canny enough to know a good story sold better than a modest one — rarely bothered to correct it.

He served as marshal of Hays City and later Abilene, Kansas, two of the rowdiest cattle towns of the trail-drive era, where Texas cowboys arrived flush with pay and looking for exactly the kind of trouble a town marshal was paid to prevent. His time in Abilene ended in a way that haunted him: in October 1871, during a chaotic street confrontation, he shot and killed a gambler named Phil Coe — and in the smoke and dark, also killed his own friend and deputy, Mike Williams, who ran toward the gunfire to help him. Hickok was reportedly devastated. He was relieved of his marshal's duties within months, and though he worked other jobs after, he never held a law enforcement badge again.

His eyesight was failing by his mid-thirties — some historians suspect glaucoma, others point to the general toll of a hard, exposed life — and for a gunfighter whose entire reputation rested on speed and accuracy, this was close to a death sentence delivered in slow motion. He tried the stage, touring briefly with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show, but performing a version of himself for paying audiences suited him poorly, and he drifted back to what he knew: cards, saloons, and the gambler's economy of risk. He married circus performer Agnes Lake Thatcher in 1876, late in his life and briefly, before heading west to the gold camps of the Black Hills, chasing money in a boomtown he'd heard was thick with it.

Deadwood, Dakota Territory, was a lawless mining camp with no formal government, packed with prospectors, gamblers, and men running from something. Hickok gambled there most nights at Nuttall & Mann's Saloon No. 10, and on August 2, 1876, a drifter named Jack McCall walked in, crossed the room, and shot him in the back of the head at close range — over what McCall first claimed was revenge for a card debt, then later, at his second trial, claimed was vengeance for a brother Hickok had supposedly killed, a story never substantiated. Hickok was holding two pair — black aces and eights — when he died, a hand that would be renamed in his honor and repeated in every saloon story about the frontier for the next century and a half.

McCall was acquitted at a hasty, informal miners' trial in Deadwood — a court with no real legal standing — and made the fatal mistake of bragging about the killing once he left town. He was re-arrested, tried properly under federal jurisdiction since Deadwood sat on Sioux treaty land outside any organized county, convicted, and hanged in 1877, the double jeopardy defense rejected on the technicality that the first trial had never been legitimate.

Wild Bill Hickok died at thirty-nine, already more legend than lawman, a man whose real gunfights were genuinely dangerous and whose invented ones were more dangerous still to the truth. He is buried in Deadwood's Mount Moriah Cemetery, and the mythology he helped build about himself — the fastest draw, the fearless marshal, the frontier's most photogenic killer — outlived the more complicated, more human man underneath it by more than a century.