Wild Bill

by Tom Clavin

  The country had changed, and he had changed with it. True, by this time, the Hickoks were no longer looking for a frontier homestead and were content to live on in Homer, which was soon to be renamed Troy Grove, Illinois. The original purpose of his first foray west no longer mattered. But mostly, James Butler Hickok was a different man. A routine job, farming, or any kind of simple labor was not for him. He had seen some of the American West, and he wanted more of it. He knew how to take care of himself in many situations, including very dangerous ones involving men out to kill him. He had killed men, an untold number during the war, after the initiation of the McCanles killings. He wanted to fully embrace life as the man known in the summer of 1865 as Wild Bill.

  By this time, too, he had acquired a distinctive look to go with his more ambitious life and with new adventures yet to come. By his appearance, at least, he separated himself from many other men in their late twenties to be found on the frontier. He was “the most striking object in camp,” an army officer, Colonel James Meline, would soon be including in a letter about Hickok. “Six feet, lithe, active, sinewy, daring rider, dead shot with pistol and rifle, long locks, fine features and mustache, buckskin leggings, red shirt, broad-brim hat, two pistols in belt, rifle in hand—he is a picture. He goes by the name Wild Bill and tells wonderful stories of his horsemanship, fighting, and hair-breadth escapes.” Tongue-in-cheek, Meline concluded, “We do not, however, feel under any obligation to believe them all.”

  Hickok did not care what people believed or didn’t. He wasn’t looking back, only forward. He said good-bye to Lorenzo and traveled to Springfield. Its saloons and gambling houses were looking to lure men like Hickok, and he obliged. Whatever reputation Springfield may have today as a peaceful place, it was anything but tranquil in the summer of 1865. There was a volatile mix of settlers and adventurers heading west, gamblers and prostitutes, entrepreneurs looking for business opportunities or on the run from creditors after their previous businesses failed, and soldiers who had been mustered out, some ex-Union and some ex-Confederate. It was an exciting town for a man with no encumbrances and responsibilities, looking for card games and cheap liquor and other forms of entertainment.

  What he also found in Springfield was Davis Tutt. Somehow, Hickok and the man from Arkansas had become friends, or at least acquainted with each other in a friendly enough way, even though they had been on opposite sides in the just-concluded war. There were even rumors that Hickok had impregnated Tutt’s sister, though it is unclear how they would have encountered each other while there was a war going on (though Hickok may have done more than spying while behind enemy lines). A mutual love of gambling was enough to overcome any blue-gray obstacles and to resume that friendship in Springfield. Tutt, having been there longer and being among Southern sympathizers in Missouri, was a well-known man in Springfield, so a friend of his was welcome at the gaming tables.

  They were viewed as something like two peas in a pod. “He is a noted scout, desperado and gambler,” reported Albert Barnitz, who led the Second Ohio Volunteer Cavalry stationed at Springfield, about Tutt. “Both have been in the habit of appearing on the streets with two revolvers strapped on their belts. Both have been intimate for years and have been gambling together.”

  However, it soon became clear the friends had another mutual love: Susannah Moore. She may have been waiting for the war to be over, and Hickok would, perhaps, settle down, even take up farming again. Whatever the thinking, Moore was waiting for him in Springfield when he arrived. This may not have been the welcome Hickok was wanting. He was a free man with a thirst and an itch for gambling, and settling down in any capacity was not in the cards. If Susannah would be patient, or they could cohabit until …

  Apparently, she was not so inclined. Moore was not scorned, exactly, but she had different thoughts about their relationship, and when he didn’t share them, she got angry. Turned out, angry enough to take up with Davis Tutt, who possibly saw this as revenge for any dalliance Hickok had had with his sister.

  Hickok was content to let matters take their course and probably valued a drinking buddy and fellow gambler more than an ex-girlfriend, but Tutt was looking for trouble. He not only refrained from being in the same card games as Hickok, but he gave money to other players, underwriting an effort to clean Hickok out and presumably send him on his way.

  But what led directly to what turned out to be a historic gunfight was Tutt’s attempt to humiliate Hickok. Tutt’s plan for the exiling of his former friend had gone awry when Hickok beat the other players at cards. Worse, the money he raked in was as much Tutt’s as theirs. Frustrated, he told Hickok that he owed forty dollars from a deal the two men had made on a horse. Right then and there, without argument, Hickok took that amount from his winnings and attempted to give the money to Tutt.

  That was not enough to appease him. Tutt then insisted that Hickok owed him an additional thirty-five dollars. “I think you are wrong, Dave,” Hickok said. “It’s only twenty-five dollars. I have a memorandum in my pocket.”

  The attempt to tamp down the tension that permeated the warm and smoky room failed. Tutt insisted on the higher amount. The two men disputed the ten-dollar difference. Suddenly, Tutt stepped forward, reached out, and snatched Hickok’s watch off the card table. This was not just any timepiece but a Waltham gold pocket watch. Tutt announced that Hickok would get his watch back when he paid a thirty-five-dollar ransom for it. Hickok was tempted to go for his guns, but the other men in the room were friends of Tutt’s, and they were armed. With a grin, and the watch, Tutt walked out.

  Soon after, Hickok was told that Tutt intended to parade in public with the confiscated watch dangling from the pocket of his vest. Hickok seethed, and he repaired to his room to make sure his .36-caliber Colt 1851 Navy revolvers were well-oiled and loaded. Word spread fast in Springfield that there could be a confrontation the next day.

  Still, Tutt was given one last chance. “He shouldn’t come across that square unless dead men can walk,” Hickok told Tutt’s friends.

  Now Tutt risked being shamed if he didn’t wear the watch while in the town square. He did; yet, showing remarkable restraint considering how much Tutt had turned against him, Hickok offered one more way out. Confronting Tutt in the square, he said he would pay the twenty-five dollars he owed Tutt to settle the supposed debt and the return of the watch. Tutt now insisted on forty-five dollars. Eli Armstrong, who knew both men, intervened, urging Tutt to compromise at the thirty-five dollars he’d originally demanded. Tutt refused. Incredibly, both he and Hickok contended they did not want to fight, and they strolled to a nearby saloon to have a drink. From there, Tutt left, the matter unresolved.

  As previously described, the matter was resolved by the bullet that killed Davis Tutt. Immediately after he hit the ground, Hickok wheeled about to confront a group of the dead man’s friends who had positioned themselves behind him. They had guns, and they were angry. However, they had also just witnessed a perfect performance by a coolheaded shootist.

  “Aren’t you satisfied, gentlemen?” Hickok demanded. “Put up your shooting irons or there’ll be more dead men here.” No one challenged him.

  Word would spread far and wide that Wild Bill Hickok was not a man to be trifled with when he held a gun. Worse was when he held two, because he could shoot just as accurately with either hand.

  An arrest warrant for murder was issued, and three days after the town-square duel, “William Haycocke” was taken into custody. A magistrate reduced the charge to manslaughter and set bail at two thousand dollars, which Hickok posted. On August 3, the trial began, with Judge C. B. M’Afee presiding.

  Considering that Springfield had been more Tutt’s town than Hickok’s, and the gunfighter’s having served the Union cause, one might expect that during the trial the deck and especially the jury would be stacked against him. That his lawyer was Colonel John Phelps, an army officer and former Union military governor of Arkansas, probably didn’t help in Missouri. A finding
of guilty could have resulted in years in prison, with Wild Bill Hickok never heard from again. However, it seems from the coverage in The Missouri Weekly Patriot—the trial transcripts having been lost—that witnesses testified during the three-day trial that Hickok tried to avoid an armed conflict, and when it was inevitable, he had allowed Tutt to draw first. Letting an adversary do that meant a finding of self-defense was automatic.

  Still, the not guilty verdict the jury delivered after ninety minutes of deliberation was not greeted warmly. According to Captain Barnitz, “‘Wild Bill’ has been released on bail. Public sympathy seems about equally divided between him and his victim.” A few of Tutt’s friends even made noises about putting a noose around Hickok’s neck. Leaving Springfield seemed like a good idea.

  Tutt was buried in the Springfield City Cemetery, where he remained for almost eighteen years. In 1883, Tutt’s body was dug up and reburied by Lewis Tutt, once a slave who was the son of Tutt’s father and a black woman he owned back in Arkansas.

  Hickok certainly had to consider that every time he turned his back in Springfield, a bullet would find its way into it. Yet he remained in Springfield. He did not want to be chased out; he would leave when it suited him. And he had a good streak going at the gaming tables.

  Soon after the trial, Hickok was approached by Colonel George Ward Nichols. Their subsequent conversations, gathered in an interview for an article published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, would do much to create the Wild Bill Hickok legends that exist to this day. It even contained a few facts.

  Nichols was a New Englander, having been born in Maine in 1831. As a young man, he worked his way down to Boston, where he wrote for newspapers. His first foray as a sort of foreign correspondent was when he journeyed west in the late 1850s to report on the bloody doings in Kansas. When Nichols returned east, it was to become an editor at The New York Evening Post. A year after the Civil War began, he was commissioned a captain in the Union army.

  By the end of the Civil War, he was indeed a colonel, having served in campaigns headed by the generals John C. Frémont and William Tecumseh Sherman. He was also a somewhat celebrated author because his book published in 1865, The Story of the Great March: From the Diary of a Staff Officer, about Sherman’s march to the sea, was a bestselling crowd-pleaser. That year, he became a correspondent for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. It is not clear how he happened to interview Hickok, though one explanation was that while roaming the frontier looking for a good story, he heard about the deadly gunfight in Springfield.

  In any case, he interviewed Hickok at length and spent some time with a man he identified as “Captain Honesty.” This was a pseudonym for the second man named Owen to have an impact on Hickok’s life. Captain Richard Bentley Owen had been a regimental quartermaster in the Union forces that had battled General Sterling Price for years and had been a supervisor of Hickok when the latter was a military policeman. It was Captain Owen who, during the last year of the war, often dispatched Hickok on his policing missions, which included tracking down deserters and mule stealers. Apparently, they had remained friends and had reconnected in Springfield.

  It would not be until early 1867 that the lengthy article written by Nichols would appear in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, when it would cause a national sensation. Hickok had no inkling of this when he and Nichols parted. Even if he indeed did trust the man, he had no idea what would be written—and how much of that would be within shooting distance of the truth. He would have gotten a pretty fair idea had Nichols shared the thoughts that later comprised just one paragraph of the magazine piece:

  Whenever I had met an officer or soldier who had served in the Southwest I heard of Wild Bill and his exploits, until these stories became so frequent and of such extraordinary character as to quite outstrip personal knowledge of adventure by camp and field; and the hero of these strange tales took shape in my mind as did Jack the Giant Killer or Sinbad the Sailor in childhood’s days. As then, I now had the most implicit faith in the existence of the individual; but how one man could accomplish such prodigies of strength and feats of daring was a continued wonder.

  According to Nichols, as he was leaving Springfield, he asked Hickok if it was all right to publicize a few of the scout’s adventures. (This, of course, begs the question of what Hickok thought he was being interviewed for.) “Certainly you may,” he responded, adding a curious statement: “I am sort of public property.” Hickok was reported to have tears in his eyes when he prevailed upon Nichols to reassure him that his “old and feeble” mother—sixty-one was practically elderly in 1865—in Illinois would not be embarrassed by anything she read. “I’d like her to know what’ll make her proud,” Hickok said. “I’d like her to hear that her runaway boy has fought through the war for the Union like a true man.”

  The details of the magazine article, some of which might have made even Polly Hickok gag, will be discussed in the next chapter, to coincide with its publication and impact.

  Obviously, Hickok did not count political advisers among his few friends in Springfield, because that fall, he decided to run for office there. He set his sights on becoming the marshal. He did have law-enforcement experience, beginning as a constable in Monticello and carrying out Captain Owen’s assignments in the war. That experience did not count as much as his lingering unpopularity, and he was defeated at the polls.

  Hickok might have continued in Springfield out of sheer spite—or with Tutt in his grave, he might have reawakened the romance with Susannah Moore—but an appealing offer came his way. It was from Captain Owen, who as the winter of 1865–66 took hold was the assistant quartermaster at nearby Fort Riley. Hickok could wear a badge as a deputy U.S. marshal.

  The turmoil at the fort went beyond it being a main hub for travelers going west. Army money was being embezzled, soldiers were deserting with alarming frequency, and worse, often they made their getaways on stolen horses and mules. Hickok made his way into north-central Kansas and was appointed to the position in February 1866. A plus was finding Lorenzo there, his brother having moved on from Independence and now undertaking what hauling trips the winter would allow, earning a decent seventy-five dollars a month as a wagon master. Officially, Wild Bill’s duties were to “hunt up public property,” man or beast, and for this, he would earn the same salary as his brother. He could not take advantage of the shelter the frontier fort provided the rest of that winter. (It was established in 1853, named after General Bennett Riley, who had led the first military escort along the Santa Fe Trail.) Owen had him back on his horse to make arrests.

  One mission was to track down several men who had all deserted together, on four-legged government property that was probably viewed as more valuable than they were. Hickok tracked the deserters south through Council Grove to the upper waters of the Little Arkansas River. When he returned, three weeks after leaving Fort Riley, he had three of the deserters and nine of the stolen mules. The army was especially glad to have the mules back. What observers noticed was that the biggest of the three deserters was riding on a mule next to Hickok.

  One man wondered if that was taking too much of a chance, that the deserter under arrest could have suddenly lunged for one of the marshal’s six-shooters. The confident Hickok answered that he would have drawn his other gun and killed all three deserters before the first one had fired a shot. This same observer, George Hance, who would write an article titled “The Truth About Wild Bill” published thirty-five years later, claimed to have seen Hickok “draw a pistol and hit a spot, not larger than a silver dollar, at 20 to 30 steps, before an ordinary man could fire a shot into the air or into the ground.”

  It would seem that seventy-five dollars a month, Lorenzo to hang around with, rounding up stolen property, tracking down fleeing men, all that fresh air and exercise, and putting on demonstrations of fantastic marksmanship would constitute a fine life. But Hickok quickly grew bored. As it turned out, midspring was a good time for him to again turn his eyes westward. By t
hen, the war had been over for a year, and some of the men who had returned to their homes in the Northeast and Midwest became restless or desired new opportunities for farming or owning a business. Some of the men who had returned home from the Confederate army felt similarly in addition to chafing under Yankee occupation and the implementation of Reconstruction. To the west was the so-called Great American Desert with its wonders to be explored and its millions of acres of free or at least very cheap land to be exploited.

  But all that territory contained an obstacle: Indians. While some easterners advocated for the rights of America’s indigenous people, to many people west of the Missouri River, being a Native American conferred no rights. And anyway, they were savages—not white, not educated, not Christian, not civilized, and not deserving of any charitable feelings. Let them be exiled or pushed to places where they weren’t going to bother westbound explorers and those in their wake aboard wagons that would be dubbed “prairie schooners” as they yawed and creaked along trails created through the tall grass.

  During the Civil War, some tribes had returned to the hunting grounds and other lands abandoned by earlier settlers and left virtually unprotected by army forts that had been surviving with bare-minimum contingents of Bluebellies or had shut down altogether. A few Indian leaders had allowed themselves to dream that the white men had hurt themselves so badly making war on each other that they would not return.

  In 1866, those dreams were about to be dashed. The tribes of the prairie and Great Plains were to experience the nightmare of westward expansion—Manifest Destiny—with a new wave of white men coveting their land and buffalo and protected by a fresh influx of soldiers. Those army units needed scouts to guide them to where forts could be built, and between them would be long trains of supplies hauled by heavily laden wagons steered by men like Lorenzo.

  In May, General William Tecumseh Sherman arrived at Fort Riley. He was taking a tour of the West as commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi. Sherman, who doubled as general of the army, was in charge of most of the territory between St. Louis and the Rocky Mountains. His immediate destination was Omaha, Nebraska, and from there he would travel to St. Paul, Minnesota. When he requested someone to be his scout and guide, Captain Owen readily suggested Hickok, who was hired for the first leg of the trip, which would take Sherman and his party to Fort Kearny in Nebraska.