by Tom Clavin
The enraptured writer added, “There was a singular grace and dignity of carriage about that figure which would have attracted your attention, meet it where you would.” On Hickok’s head was a large sombrero, and out of it “a mass of fine brown hair falls below the neck to the shoulders.”
And there were the guns. Unlike most men of the time who wore pistols, Hickok did not use a single-action Army Colt .45; he now carried double-action Colt .44s with the catch filed down for hair-trigger quickness. (Some gun historians do contend that Hickok continued to use .36 Navy Colts.) In his side pockets, he carried .41-caliber derringers, and in his belt was a bowie knife. Later, as a lawman, he also carried a shotgun or repeating rifle. A decade later, another lawman, Wyatt Earp, would extoll the effectiveness of shooting deliberately over shooting first and furiously. Though this had worked well enough in his gunfight with Davis Tutt in July 1865, by early 1867, Hickok’s approach was if forced to draw, he would do it faster than his opponent and pump out several bullets while his victim was still thinking about squeezing the trigger.
During idle periods when he was not a scout for the army or a deputy U.S. marshal or gambling, Hickok enjoyed putting on shooting exhibitions. Especially impressive was his ambidextrous accuracy. Witnesses report seeing Hickok driving a cork through the neck of a whiskey bottle at twenty paces, splitting a bullet on the edge of a dime at the same distance, and putting as many as a dozen bullet holes in a tomato can that had been tossed in the air. No doubt Hickok enjoyed the expressions of astonishment on the faces of his ad hoc audiences, but such exercises also kept him in practice. And letting the public know he was always at the top of his game could dissuade ambitious gunmen from trying to take Hickok on. Such men may have entertained thoughts of gunfighter glory, but they weren’t suicidal.
This was the man who was on the cusp of becoming the 1860s equivalent of a matinee idol in a country whose Civil War glory was receding into history and was now looking west for new legends.
Chapter Seven
FRONTIER FAME
The unauthorized celebrity biography of today or the overnight fame achieved through social media has nothing on what was published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in February 1867. The article took a plainsman with an emerging reputation as a superior scout and a sharp-eyed shootist and turned him, at just twenty-nine years old, into an American frontier legend.
True, even before the piece appeared, Wild Bill Hickok was no longer an obscure figure. Here and there, people had begun to pass around stories about him the way they had told tales the previous couple of decades about the frontiersmen Jim Bridger and Kit Carson. In the case of Carson, some of those stories, true or not, had been published, enchanting young boys like Jim Hickok on the family farm in Illinois. In the years to come, there would be stories printed in dime-store novels about Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Bat Masterson, Buffalo Bill Cody, and a handful of other figures as the West was mythologized into an American Iliad. This would be true, too, on the big screen as motion pictures emerged as popular entertainment. Beginning in 1903, when Edwin Porter released his silent film The Great Train Robbery, the western was a favorite among moviegoers. When Cecil B. DeMille took a train west from New York and stepped off at a place called Hollywood to direct the 1914 western The Squaw Man, the American film industry took root.
But no single published piece catapulted a man on the American frontier more than the George Ward Nichols article did for Hickok. Harper’s was a very high-profile magazine, especially in the more-populated eastern states, where the literacy rate was much higher than in the West. Nichols may have cynically been trying to create a heroic character to sell copies, but most accounts suggest he was genuinely enamored of Hickok. His embellishments were true as far as Nichols (and apparently his editors) was concerned. Hickok did have real adventures in his life, including the behind-the-lines Civil War spying and the McCanles and Tutt gunfights. And he was a rather exotic figure in his features and the way he dressed and carried himself. He had exhibited an uncanny talent for gunplay and marksmanship. Add all this to the fertile imagination of a writer who could cash in on a sensational story and an outlet that offered that story to thousands of eager and mostly gullible readers, and America had its first postwar frontier star.
Nichols was no hack aspiring to be a better writer than he was. The former member of General Sherman’s staff was a keen observer, and reading the article is like seeing a series of snapshots of the frontier in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. While in Springfield that summer of 1865, Nichols had watched “men and women dressed in queer costumes; men with coats and trousers made of skin, but so thickly covered with dirt and grease as to have defied the identity of the animal when walking in the flesh. Others wore homespun gear, which oftentimes appeared to have been of lengthy service. Many of those people were mounted on horse-back or mule-back, while others urged forward the unwilling cattle attached to creaking, heavily-laden wagons, their drivers snapping their long whips with a report like that of a pistol-shot.”
Nichols went on to observe about the citizens of Springfield lolling outside shops: “The most marked characteristic of the inhabitants seemed to be an indisposition to move, and their highest ambition to let their hair and beards grow.”
Nichols was approached by the army officer Captain Richard Bentley Owen—the Captain Honesty in the Harper’s article—who introduced Nichols to Hickok. From that day on, the reporter was a sponge, absorbing whatever Hickok recollected about his life on the frontier. In the absence of taped recordings and Nichols’s notes, we can only conjecture, when reading the resulting article, where Hickok—or “William Hitchcock,” as Nichols renamed him—ended and where the infatuated, easily impressed writer began.
An indication that Nichols did have an agenda of some kind was how he reported the way Hickok spoke. Though without a formal education, Hickok was an intelligent man who spoke like one. However, Nichols offers, “I allers shot well; but I come ter be perfeck in the mountains by shootin at a dime for a mark, at bets of half a dollar a shot.” Later in the article: “I am going out on the prarer a piece to see the sick wife of my mate. I should be glad to meet yer at the hotel this afternoon, Kernel.” The use of such dialect by Nichols implies he was deliberately painting a more romantic or exotic portrait for his East Coast readers.
As copies of the Harper’s article and word of it circulated and spread the rest of that winter, even the edge of the Great American Desert got wind of the tales told about the handsome, chivalrous, yet cold-eyed killer who roamed the prairie, a kind friend to children and a quick-drawing punisher of evildoers. The article proclaimed his code of behavior: “When the war closed I buried the hatchet, and I won’t fight now unless I’m put upon.”
Suddenly, Hickok had to contend with two strong and opposite realizations—he was a heroic figure, quite out of the ordinary compared to anyone he knew (except Kit Carson), and he was a marked man. The article had implied that Hickok had killed a couple of dozen men, if not more, and he was quick on the trigger, remorseless in a fight, he’d shoot first and ask questions later, and in this new kind of dueling, no one was faster to jerk out a six-shooter and fire with calm accuracy than Wild Bill. Inevitably, there would be those who would be willing to risk their lives to instantly gain such a reputation by killing this frontier demigod.
Thus, the Harper’s article changed Hickok in dramatic ways. He made an effort to live up to the person portrayed in it, while allowing some of the stories to go undisputed. In fact, he began to repeat them in saloons and around campfires, living the life Nichols had partly been responsible for creating, becoming the famous Wild Bill the article celebrated, the kind of adventurer who could both endure and tame the American West. He also began to feel that bull’s-eye on his back. As time went on, Hickok would make sure to keep his back to the wall, walk down the middle of a street instead of on the sidewalk, and develop a sixth sense for danger. For the rest of his life—less than ten years—he wo
uld experience the glory and tragedy of being Wild Bill Hickok.
Included in that was being the subject of more widespread press coverage. Newspapers in Missouri and Kansas were quick to pounce on the Nichols piece for the license it took. Tarred with the same brush, Hickok was held up for some ridicule. “The story of ‘Wild Bill’ is not easily credited hereabouts,” intoned The Leavenworth Daily Conservative. “To those of us engaged in the campaign it sounds mythical. The scout services were so mixed that we were unable to give precedence to any.”
The Springfield Patriot offered that the community “is excited” about the magazine article. “It has been so ever since the mail of the 25th brought Harper’s Monthly to its numerous subscribers here. The excitement, curiously enough, manifests itself in very opposite effects upon our citizens. Some are excessively indignant, but the great majority are in convulsions of laughter.” With a wry shrug, the writer concludes about the Nichols article, “If it prevents any consummate fools from coming to Southwest Missouri, that’s no loss.”
Naively, Nichols was unprepared for such criticism of the article and the ridicule for its author. Covering frontier figures quickly lost its allure. He wound up in Cincinnati and lived out the rest of his days—he died in September 1885—writing about music instead.
As if the sensation caused by the Nichols piece and reactions to it were not enough, in April 1867, Hickok met Henry M. Stanley. He was a reporter for The New York Herald, a daily newspaper, who had heard the siren call of the western frontier and found it to be a reservoir of good stories about colorful characters. His forays west of the Missouri River were not the first time he had traveled to seek excitement beyond the next horizon. Though only twenty-six, Sir Henry Morton Stanley—as he would later be known—had already enjoyed a life of adventure.
He had been born as John Rowlands in Wales. Orphaned very young, he lived in a variety of homes that included a workhouse for the poor. At eighteen, he managed to make his way to New Orleans and was taken under the wing of Henry Hope Stanley. The wealthy trader cared for the young man until he joined the Confederate army. The newly christened Stanley was captured during the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, was released when he agreed to join the Union army, then was released to join the U.S. Navy, serving on the USS Minnesota. (He has the distinction of being the only man during the Civil War who served in those three military forces.) After the war, Stanley opted to organize an expedition into the Ottoman Empire, which turned out to be a bad decision when he was captured and tossed into prison. The Welshman had a silver tongue, though, and he charmed Ottoman officials enough that they released him. Early in 1867, he was in New York, working as a reporter for James Gordon Bennett’s popular daily newspaper.
No doubt Stanley had read the Harper’s article published three months earlier, and in May 1867, he sought out Hickok specifically when he arrived at Fort Riley. The restless frontiersman and the fearless reporter hit it off. The Fort Riley compound housed several sutlers’ shops that provided liquid refreshment, and the two men frequented them together. They told tales of their most interesting experiences, and some of them were probably true. By this time, Hickok had digested Colonel Nichols’s article whole. He may have repeated some of his adventures knowing they were embellished or entirely fabricated, or, especially as time went on, the line between fact and fiction narrowed until it became too thin for him to notice.
An example can be found in the article Stanley wrote that was published in The New York Herald soon after he left Kansas. Stanley reported that he had asked Hickok how many white men he had killed “to your certain knowledge.” After seeming to give the question some thought, Hickok replied, “I suppose I have killed considerably over a hundred.” Stanley marveled at the number and wondered if there had been good reasons for all those fatalities. Hickok assured him that he “never killed one man without good cause.”
With Stanley’s article appearing only a few months after the Harper’s opus, and with no other frontiersman gaining a similar amount of attention, Wild Bill Hickok was further solidified in the minds of folks back east as the American westerner. He was busy blazing trails and defying savages so that Manifest Destiny could be fulfilled. If anyone got in his way and wasn’t fast enough on the draw … well, that was good enough cause to meet a bullet.
After Stanley wrote up his article at The Herald’s office in New York, he was off on more adventures. He rode as a special correspondent with a British force sent to topple Tewodros II of Ethiopia, he was the first to tell the world of the fall of Magdala in 1868, he covered a civil war in Spain, and in his most famous outing, in November 1871 near Lake Tanganyika in Africa, he found a physician who had been reported missing and queried, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
In today’s celebrity-riddled culture, it may be difficult to comprehend the figure Wild Bill Hickok now cut in frontier society. Turning thirty, he was being talked and written about like adventurers Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson all rolled into one. When Hickok was staying in a town or just passing through, people elbowed each other and pointed and whispered, “There goes Wild Bill.”
To his credit, the mounting fame did not turn him into an insufferable egotist. Several accounts written or relayed decades later insist that Hickok was a courteous and chivalrous man and that he did indeed have a particular fondness for children. He enjoyed talking to and sometimes playing with them. With other men, he never sought confrontations and had no need to prove his reputation. His outlook, expanding what had been quoted in the Nichols article, seemed to be one espoused by John Bernard Books in the novel by Glendon Swarthout and subsequent movie The Shootist: “I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a-hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”
This description illustrates a fundamental contradiction. Hickok knew that he had become a public figure thanks to the stories passed around the frontier coupled with the attention the Harper’s article had generated from Kansas to New York and Boston. Being a public figure with a gunslinger reputation also meant being a marked man. It made self-preservation sense to blend into the background, to pass through the towns and along the trails as unobtrusively as possible. Yet that was not Hickok’s way. He dressed and carried himself declaring to be Wild Bill. He did not invite trouble, yet he had the confidence to inflict damage on those who chose to cause trouble. No wonder that to this day, Hickok has been a hard man to understand.
Wild Bill Hickok’s reputation may have had a brief shelf life if he had spent his days and nights loafing in towns gambling and telling tall tales. However, much of his time was spent on one trail or another in Nebraska and Kansas, especially the latter. For Hickok, there was much of Kansas still to be explored, and for the next couple of years, he would often do that as a scout and guide for the U.S. Army. The demand for guides and scouts was rising sharply, and being both reliable and a public figure with a dramatic reputation helped him to gain top dollar.
The postwar bloom of settlers and gold-seekers heading west was in full flower. Encounters with “hostiles,” or “savages” as they were often labeled in the eastern press, were more frequent, and a downsized army was being called upon to do more to protect the white migrants. Ostensibly, officers and U.S. government emissaries, and their guides, some of whom also acted as interpreters, were sent out to persuade tribes to sign treaties. Few doubted that vast swaths of the former Great American Desert were going to be taken from the Indians anyway, but for those in the supposedly more civilized society back east, doing it legally, even with savages, was more justifiable under God.
Treaties were not all that hard to arrange. Many of the Indian leaders were not interested in making war and endangering their women and children. They might not understand white men, but they readily observed that there was an increasing number of them, carrying weapons far more sophisticated than lances, bows and arrows, and single-load carbines. Mostly, tribes wanted to be left alone to continue
their traditions of hunting and raiding each other’s camps to win horses and honor. Incredibly, though, after four years of death in the bloody Civil War, there appeared to be more white men than ever invading Indian lands.
One strategy, then, for Indian leaders was to let the white men pass on through. If they had somewhere to go farther to the west, let them go there as quickly as possible. But that wasn’t working out well, either. The bulky wagons creaked and crawled along the rough, dusty trails, not making brisk progress across the hundreds of miles of flat prairie. Along the way, furniture, clothing, and other debris were tossed to the sides of the trails, and worse, to feed the white people, buffalo were being hunted with abandon. Indians found it fantastic and appalling that buffalo would be killed by the white man’s long-range rifles to provide only one meal, and the next day when the wagon train moved on, carcasses still containing meat and tongues and hides were left behind to rot in the sun. If the stream of travelers trekking west continued, there would be no buffalo left in a corrupted landscape.
Worst of all, too many of the white men were choosing to stop and stay. They were setting up businesses in expanding towns and carving farms out of the rich prairie soil. To provide protection, the Bluebellies were building forts and other outposts. This was intolerable. But what to do about it? Resistance came at a high cost because of the firepower of the white soldiers. Perhaps treaties could be an alternative. Many Indians did not understand the concept of landownership, so it did not occur to them that they were giving anything away. If the government wanted to give them food and clothing and other gifts so it could do what it was going to do anyway, fine. Still, there were some leaders of the tribes who did fight and try to kill the encroaching white men—they saw no other way to protect their hunting grounds, families, and honor.