Wild Bill Hickok
Willd Bill Hickock
It was Hickok’s father who moved his family from Vermont to Maine, and then to Homer. The farm where Bill was born was known to be a stop on the Underground Railroad. Hickok left home at the ripe age of 17, where he worked on a canal boat v before he eventually headed west to Bleeding, Kansas. At the time, there was a conflict broken out in the state over whether or not slavery should be illegal. Bill had joined the antislavery Free State Army of Jayhawkers.
Due to his abillity to weild a gun, he also served as a bodyguard to Gen. James H. Lanes. It was during this time of his life that he prevented a man from beating an 11-year-old boy, who grew up to become Buffalo Bill Cody, a man who would become one of his lifelong friends. It was because of this and his growing courage that eventually landed him the job of constable in Monticello, Kansas.
Eventually, Bill became teamster with the great freighting enterprise Russell, Majors and Waddell, who were the creators of the Pony Express. When he was fighting off a bear, he was nearly crushed to death, leaving him bedridden before he eventually moved to Rock Creek, Nebraska, where he worked at the Pony Express.
Hickok picked up his nickname "Wild Bill" for his daring fighting in the Union army during the Civil War, which included service as a spy, a scout, and a sharpshooter. After the Civil War was over, Bill still had a wild spirit, though this time he tended to stay on the right side of the law. On July 21, 1865, in a shootout in Springfield, Missouri, he killed David Tutt, a skillful gunfighter who had been flaunting the watch he won from Hickok in a poker game.
It was this incident that added to his fame as a gunslinger, which skyrocketed when journalist and later explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley reported as fact in the New York Herald in 1867 Hickok’s exaggerated claim that he had killed 100 men. In 1866 Hickok helped guide Gen. William T. Sherman’s tour of the West, and in 1867–68 he scouted for Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock and Lieut. Col. George Armstrong Custer.
It was in 1869 when Hickok became the sheriff of Hays City, Kansas, where he killed several men in shootouts. In 1871 he moved once more and took over as the marshal of the tough cow town of Abilene, Kansas. There, again, he killed several men, including his deputy marshal, whose death—the result of an accidental shooting—led to Hickok’s dismissal.
Hickok then tried acting in Wild West shows, which were growing in popularity. His own show, The Daring Buffalo Chase of the Plains, did not fare well, but in 1873 he joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s The Scouts of the Prairie, which was based in Rochester, New York.
On August 2, 1876, during a poker game in a saloon that found him with his back uncharacteristically to the door, Hickok was shot in the back of his head by Jack McCall, who may have been hired to kill him. McCall was tried and acquitted of murder as a result of his dubious claim that the killing was in revenge for Hickok’s murder of his brother in Abilene. Later, after bragging of his murder of Hickok, McCall was retried in Laramie, Wyoming Territory, found guilty, and hanged on March 1, 1877. The cards Hickok had been holding when he was shot and killed—a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights plus an unknown fifth card—became known as the “Dead Man’s Hand.”