by Tom Clavin
If that were not enough to make the two men antagonists, there was the matter of Sandra Schull. She was twenty-six in the spring of 1861. Like McCanles, she was a North Carolina native. There are inferences that she was romantically involved with Hickok, or McCanles, or both, which could have been reason enough for an angry confrontation.
However, for an ambitious businessman like David McCanles, most likely money was a bigger issue than a woman. Wellman kept saying he would wring the next payment out of the Overland Stage, but he could not deliver. The company, he insisted, was in bad shape financially and could not complete the purchase of the property. On the afternoon of July 12, McCanles went to the station to again confront Wellman. He was accompanied by William, his twelve-year-old son, and two friends, James Woods and James Gordon. McCanles carried a shotgun. He and his son walked toward the ranch house that served as the Wellman home while the other two men, armed with pistols, stayed in the front yard.
McCanles stood in the doorway and demanded that Wellman appear. When he did, McCanles went into a rant about Wellman and his employer. Intimidated by the bigger man and the shotgun, Wellman retreated inside. He was replaced by his wife, who, demonstrating plenty of gumption, gave McCanles a piece of her mind, enraging the station owner even more. When she returned inside, the next person to appear was Bill Hickok. McCanles was taken aback. He did not expect to be confronted by the young man, and he told Hickok to mind his own business. Hickok responded that he was making it his business.
“Send Wellman out here,” McCanles demanded, “so I can settle with him, or I will come in and drag him out.”
Hickok went back inside, and McCanles followed. Finding Wellman, he continued his verbal abuse of him. When he gestured with the shotgun, Hickok raised his right hand. There was a Navy Colt in it, and before McCanles could turn the shotgun toward him, Hickok fired. The bullet went through McCanles’s heart. He fell to the floor and died within seconds, his son kneeling beside him.
Out in the yard, Woods and Gordon heard the shot, and with pistols drawn, they started for the house. As soon as Woods entered, Hickok shot him. Woods went back outside, staggering, and fell into a weed patch. Then Hickok shot Gordon. He, too, was not killed; wounded enough, he turned and ran for the cover of the brush by the creek. Mrs. Wellman emerged from the house, saw Woods on the ground, and screamed with fury as she finished him off with a garden hoe. Hickok and two other men who worked at the station followed Gordon’s bloodstained tracks to the creek, where he, too, was finished off, reportedly with the shotgun McCanles had brought with him.
The bodies of David McCanles and James Woods were tossed into the same wooden box, which was buried on nearby Soldier Hill. James Gordon’s body didn’t go as far—it was wrapped in a blanket and buried where he died close to the creek. McCanles and Woods rested in peace for about twenty years, until the construction of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad required that tracks go onto and over Soldier Hill. The displaced bodies were reinterred at the Fairbury Cemetery.
Three days after the shootings, Hickok was arrested for murder, along with Wellman and J. W. “Doc” Brink, a Rock Creek Station employee. The only witness for the prosecution to actually see what had transpired was William McCanles, but at the trial, the judge ruled he was too young to testify. With no other witnesses and with the jury believing the Rock Creek Station employees’ defense that they were protecting themselves from a sudden attack—no doubt, McCanles’s notorious reputation helped here—a verdict of not guilty was rendered.
While there was no official testimony from her at the trial, Sandra Schull’s version of events may have influenced the men on the jury. She maintained that McCanles and the two men had gone to the Rock Creek Station looking for trouble, to further force the issue with Wellman, which is why all three were armed. (This does not explain, however, why McCanles would put his twelve-year-old son in danger.) Schull contended that Hickok had fired in self-defense, he had no choice, and it was three against one. If there had indeed been something between Hickok and Schull, it is understandable that she would help get him acquitted. Though she wound up as another girl he left behind, this remained the tale she was still telling when interviewed at age ninety-one. (She died at ninety-eight in June 1932.)
Even though he had been acquitted, Hickok thought it a good idea to get far away from Rock Creek Station. Many men his age were choosing sides and signing up to fight in the war that was now over three months old. Hickok became one of them. He returned to Leavenworth and enlisted in the Union army. As would be true for whatever Hickok did during his life, it would not take long for him to see action.
Chapter Four
BEHIND ENEMY LINES
In a family full of abolitionists, James Butler Hickok would be the only member of his immediate family to directly serve the Union cause. And, ironically, he spent a considerable amount of time during the Civil War wearing Confederate uniforms.
It was out of the question for Horace to enlist because he had to remain in Homer to maintain the family farm and thus be the only means of support for his mother. Oliver may have sat out the war entirely while living on the West Coast. Lorenzo continued working for companies with government contracts to haul freight, which made him immune to being conscripted. Bill was the only one of the brothers to step forward and enlist, which he did in Leavenworth in July 1861. Because of his extensive travels, he offered himself as a scout; being cannon fodder in the infantry was out of the question. He saw action rather quickly—a little too quick for his taste.
Hickok was indeed selected as a scout, his first assignment being to accompany the force of fifty-five hundred Union troops commanded by General Nathaniel Lyon. Their mission was to defeat a hastily reorganized Missouri state guard led by a General Sterling “Old Pap” Price, who would wind up having one of the longest tenures of any Confederate general in the war. A Virginian born in 1809, he studied law and made his way west, arriving in Missouri at age twenty-two. Price served as a state representative and then as a member of the House of Representatives, resigning to take command of a regiment of Missouri volunteers in the Mexican-American War. He served with distinction, leading men in battle, and returned to Missouri as a hero and brigadier general. From 1853 to 1857, he was governor of the state. Afterward, Price was a slave-owning businessman; then when the war began he was back in uniform as leader of the state guard.
The Battle of Wilson’s Creek, in which he opposed Nathaniel Lyon, was his first major Civil War action, and its success made Price a Confederate hero, too. On August 10, 1861, what was essentially Missouri militia (which included the soon-to-be guerrilla leader William Quantrill) beat the Union forces, killing General Lyon in the process. Hickok was at times in the thick of the action and later confessed to his brothers that especially the crashing artillery scared him to pieces. As the leaderless Union troops retreated, Hickok and the other scouts made for the rear and out of harm’s way.
Alas, for Old Pap, it was pretty much downhill from Wilson’s Creek. His force, which was absorbed into the regular Confederate army, was defeated at Pea Ridge in March 1862 (more on this later). The so-called Price Raid of 1864 was an unsuccessful effort to divert William Tecumseh Sherman’s march toward Atlanta. The end of the war was not the end of Price as a Confederate general. He took the command he had left into Mexico, waiting for a Southern revival. Eighteen months later, when it was quite evident there wouldn’t be one, Price returned. He died shortly afterward in St. Louis.
As with other periods in Hickok’s life, there are gaps during the Civil War years, and thus it is not known exactly what he did where and when. For some of that time, he traded in his scout outfit to be a teamster again, here and there working for the same firms that employed Lorenzo. Beginning in October 1861, he was based in Sedalia, Missouri, and employed as a wagon master. He stayed at this job for a year, receiving a couple of promotions and a raise to a hundred dollars a month, not bad at all for a twenty-five-year-old on the frontier.
He was certainly reminded there was a war going on in the spring of 1862. He was leading a wagon train from Independence to Sedalia when Johnny Rebs attacked and captured it. Hickok got away, returned to Independence, and rounded up some men, and they rode after the pilfered train. They attacked the next morning, and quickly it and the supplies for Union troops were theirs again.
There are several versions of how Bill Hickok became Wild Bill Hickok, including that he was out on the town one night with the mild-mannered Lorenzo, who was nicknamed “Tame Bill,” and by obvious contrast his younger, whiskey-loving brother was “Wild Bill.” But the tale that has the most support took place in Independence when he was a civilian wagon master. As Hickok walked through town one day, he came upon a disturbance in a bar. He was told that the bartender had incautiously spoken in favor of the rebellion and several drunken Union-favoring patrons inside were beginning to show the bartender the error of his ways with a severe beating. Though far from sharing the man’s views, Bill believed in fair fights, and peering inside, he saw this wasn’t one.
Drawing his pistols, Hickok stepped inside and told the attackers to back off. They did, because now they had a new target. As they moved at Hickok, he fired twice over their heads. “I’ll shoot the next man who comes at me,” he told them. Grumbling, they went out the saloon door. That night, as Hickok sauntered past a meeting being held to organize a vigilance committee, several people noticed him. Apparently, his somewhat reckless defense of the outnumbered bartender had made the rounds. One woman shouted, “Good for you, Wild Bill!” A name fit for a frontier legend was born.
Other times, when he was lured away from wagons by better pay (or simply ordered to report), Hickok was a scout for various Union army detachments. This sometimes put him, as in the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, in the line of fire. In March 1862, he served as a scout under General Samuel Curtis. By then, General Price and his troops were in the process of being pushed out of Missouri and would soon take refuge in Arkansas. There he was reinforced by a two-thousand-man force led by General Earl Van Dorn. The combined command outnumbered Curtis, offering the Confederates an opportunity to gain back ground in Missouri.
But before the Confederate army could get there, Hickok and other scouts spotted them on the move. Curtis set up a defensive position on the Arkansas side, northeast of Fayetteville. On the seventh, Price attacked, and the two-day Battle of Pea Ridge began. Again and again, Curtis’s lines repelled the rebels. Hickok was seemingly everywhere, riding between bullets to gather information to report to Curtis as well as carrying dispatches from the general to the front lines. On that first day, he went through four horses, three giving in to exhaustion and the other being shot out from under him. The fierce fighting took more of a toll on the attackers than on the defenders. One of the more famous deaths in the Civil War was recorded that day: when Confederate general Ben McCulloch was shot by a soldier in the Thirty-Sixth Illinois Infantry, he exclaimed, “Oh, hell!” and died.1
On the second day, the Union army shifted to offense, and their firepower forced Price to retreat. Part of that firepower was supplied by Hickok with a group of sharpshooters on a ridge offering a clear view of the Confederate troops. Curtis pressed forward, and the rebels quit the field entirely. A consequence of the battle was that Missouri would never be seriously threatened again by a Confederate army.
Kansas, however, did not enjoy such relative peace from conflict. In fact, quite the opposite: it was mostly during the Civil War years that the state was at its bloodiest. While there were Union troops stationed there, not enough of them could be spared to guard towns against various vigilante groups. Having almost free rein were the proslavery Missouri Bushwhackers for whom the war simply provided further opportunities for depredations. The Jayhawkers were not the only antislavery force. Early in the war, a company of border scouts formed what became known as the Red Legs because they wore red- or tan-colored leather leggings. The somewhat secret society of about a hundred men—one of whom might have been Bill Hickok, though he had plenty else to do—was under the direction of Thomas Ewing, Jr. He had been the first chief justice of Kansas and would go on to serve as a senior Union officer and, after returning to his native Ohio, in the House of Representatives.
Hickok certainly would have qualified for membership in the Red Legs, which included loyalty to the Union cause, shooting skills, and courage under fire. The organization’s headquarters was near Wyandotte. One of the Red Legs’ officers was George Hoyt, an attorney whose clients had included John Brown at his trial in Virginia.2 Initially, this group of militant abolitionists was viewed as modern-day Minutemen, protecting eastern Kansas from brutal invaders. However, it was at times infiltrated by less idealistic men who used the red leg decoration as a license to steal from and kill farmers and other settlers on the Missouri side of the border.
Even when the Jayhawkers and Red Legs were at full strength, they could not completely protect Kansans from the worst of the Southern-sympathizing guerrilla groups. And the worst of the worst, who truly made Kansas bleed, was William Clarke Quantrill, a schoolteacher turned vigilante leader.
Born in Ohio in 1837, Quantrill left his teaching position to move to Utah, then returned east, to Lawrence, Kansas. He didn’t remain long there because his proslavery views found more of a welcome in Missouri. Soon after the Civil War began, Quantrill joined General Sterling Price’s troops and thus was part of the force opposing General Lyon and Hickok at Wilson’s Creek. He chafed, though, under authority and believed that the Southern troops were not brutal enough.
In the western part of the state, there were many former Border Ruffians who hadn’t had their fill of violence against abolitionists and Kansas residents in general. They were quick to fall in behind Quantrill—who had deserted Price’s army—as he formed a group of guerrillas. He did not have any particular ties to the South and was not a slave owner and had no desire to be one. However, according to the Civil War historian James McPherson, Quantrill “chose the Confederacy apparently because in Missouri this allowed him to attack all symbols of authority. He attracted to his gang some of the most psychopathic killers in American history.”
They were active early in the war, raiding civilian settlements in addition to Union outposts. In 1862, Quantrill and his guerrillas officially became a unit in the Confederate army, and he was appointed a captain. They conducted raids on isolated Union camps and for a short time took and ransacked Independence. They later did the same to Shawnee, Kansas. En route, they captured a dozen unarmed drivers of Union supply wagons. All were murdered. Over time, the band known as Quantrill’s Raiders would include the future outlaws Frank and Jesse James, the Younger brothers, and William “Bloody Bill” Anderson.
Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence on August 21, 1863, became one of the most notorious events of the entire war. The direct motive for the attack has often been attributed to the collapse of a federal prison in Kansas City, which killed several Confederate sympathizers being held there, including wives of the raiders, and crippled Josephine Anderson, Bloody Bill’s fifteen-year-old sister. A week later, Quantrill gathered about four hundred men and off they rode. Entering Lawrence, they immediately set to work destroying as much property as they could. The raiders set fire to as many as two hundred buildings, and when panicked people ran out of the burning structures, they were gunned down. The fires and the bullets killed close to 150 people.
Remarkably, one of those who survived was James Lane, who during the attack had jumped out his bedroom window in his nightshirt and ran through a cornfield. Soon after Quantrill’s Raiders left, Lane rounded up as many men with guns as he could find, and they hurried off in pursuit, the screams of terrorized citizens in their ears and the smell of woodsmoke and burning flesh still in their nostrils. But Quantrill had gotten too big a lead on them, and his band of murderers escaped across the river and into Missouri.
James Lane was in Lawrence after a stay in the nation’s capital. In January 1861, Kansas had
become a state, and its first two senators were S. C. Pomeroy and Lane. They were in Washington, D.C., on April 17, 1861, when Virginia seceded from the Union. More than a few people feared a newly formed Confederate army would march on the city and possibly kidnap or even kill the new antislavery president, Abraham Lincoln. Lane didn’t stand around wringing his hands. He put out a call to all Kansans in the city, and within twenty-four hours, he presented to the War Department an “army” of fifty armed men.
Just in time, it seemed, because reports arrived from Baltimore that Southern sympathizers there had attacked the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry as it passed through the city. All that mob had to do was travel forty miles south to be storming the capital. Rumors were rampant that Lincoln was to be assassinated and Congress held hostage. With the War Department’s approval, Lane led his men to the White House to protect the president.
As they stood guard, Lane was easy to spot—he brandished a shiny saber. When night fell, the unit, an abrupt precursor of the Secret Service, entered the building and practiced military drills in the East Room. When Lincoln went to see what the commotion was all about, the Kansan standing guard at the door refused to let him in because the president did not know the countersign. When the exercises ended, Lane and his men camped out in the East Room.
These ad hoc occupants of the White House intended to remain indefinitely and not be secretive about it. Calling themselves the Frontier Guard and with Lane and his saber leading them, on April 22, now numbering over a hundred men, they paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue, displaying their rifles, pistols, and knives. Bring on those Confederate hooligans! However, three days later, a sufficient number of Union troops was bivouacked in and around Washington that when the Frontier Guard entered the East Room that evening, Lincoln was waiting with hastily printed discharge certificates. The president greeted each man and presented him with a certificate, and afterward, the Kansas contingent disbanded.