by Tom Clavin
Ironically, during the 1870s and into the ’80s, this was the kind of lawman more towns and counties began to shun as they became more “civilized” and a law-and-order system became further entrenched. Hickok was both the prototype and the first victim of progress on the American frontier. He would stay the same, true to himself, while the West changed around him.
The firing was also bad news because Abilene had become something of a safe haven for Hickok. True, there were citizens who did not like him, and as those bounty hunters on the Topeka train had demonstrated, there could be the occasional visitor looking for trouble or a reputation. But Hickok was on his own turf, and Abilene gave him a home-field advantage, especially because there were also many residents who did like or at least respected him. He had become one of theirs.
Essentially homeless, as 1871 turned into 1872, Hickok returned to his wandering ways, at first staying in Kansas. He was gambling a lot and possibly drinking even more than before, even though he had to recognize that being a gunfighter without a badge meant he was more exposed as a marked man and could not afford a weakness. As he moved about, he was like a turtle without its shell, very vulnerable out in the open. In any town at any time, a man-killer could want to prove he was the fastest, and the most direct and visible way to do that was to outdraw and kill Wild Bill. There was nowhere to hide; everyone everywhere on the frontier knew Hickok. And he wasn’t about to change his distinctive and immediately recognizable appearance. By this time in his life, he would not be one to blend in, even if that attitude cost him his life.
Hickok was a celebrity. He was famous. He was feared. He was already a legend. It is estimated that over fifteen hundred dime novels were written just about Buffalo Bill Cody, beginning in 1869, when he was only twenty-three, into the 1930s, and during the early years Wild Bill was in that same category of iconic western hero. He had risen to the heights of both reputation and fabrication … and now the slow, inexorable descent began. Like a Hamlet or Macbeth or another of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, there would be no escaping his fate.
But Hickok tried. He decided to move on from Kansas, hoping to find shelter where he was less well known. He worked his way west and wound up in Colorado, where he found a man who would become one of his best friends.
In Charles H. Utter,1 as he was known at the time, Hickok might have thought he was consorting with a shorter version of himself. Utter was about average height for a man in the 1870s, five foot six, but he wore fringed and beaded buckskins, his curly light-brown hair hung to his shoulders, he, too, took a bath daily (though it was more often outdoors), he was fastidious about his dress, he wore a revolver on each hip, and he derived much of his income from gambling. A huge difference was there were no reports of Utter being a man-killer. It probably helped the friendship of the two men that Utter was not a magnet for violence, and perhaps Hickok felt a bit safer. As with Buffalo Bill Cody and California Joe Milner, Hickok’s friendship with Utter was among his most enduring.
Utter had been born near Niagara Falls, the New York side, in 1838, but he grew up on a farm in Illinois his parents owned next to the property of William Bross, who was for a time the state’s lieutenant governor. Young Charley was a frequent visitor to the Bross home, and he would later accompany the former state official on hunting and exploring trips to Colorado.
Utter’s life of roaming adventure began when he was nineteen. The United States was in the midst of an economic depression, and he left the family farm to find work elsewhere, heading west. Like Hickok, who was only one year older, Utter wound up in Kansas. However, unlike Hickok, he didn’t stay long. An area soaked with blood from Bushwhackers and Border Ruffians and Red Legs and Jayhawkers was not for him. Utter heard about gold being found near Pikes Peak. Sometime in 1858, he arrived in Middle Park, an area in Utah Territory at the time (it later became part of Colorado), west of the Snowy Range. He was the only white man there, and no one bothered him while he was busy trapping game and prospecting for gold. He built a cabin there and was befriended by Ute Indians who passed through on hunting expeditions.
Over the years, Utter gained the reputation of being a first-rate trapper and hunter. Prospectors began to show up, mines were dug into hillsides, and towns sprang up around them. Utter continued his own way through the Civil War, which had little impact on Middle Park and its immediate surroundings. He had a couple of sidelines, one being as a territorial clerk who recorded land claims, the other as an interpreter between Indians and government agents. Otherwise, though, he spent months on his own. An article in the June 28, 1865, edition of The Daily Miners’ Register began, “Charley Utter, our agreeable young mountaineer friend, came over from his far off haunts yesterday. For many months Charley has lived alone in the unexplored regions of the Parks, upwards of two hundred miles from the habitations of white men, with no companion save a trusty dog, and an occasional cinnamon or grizzly visitor.”
Apparently, his appreciation of solitude had its limits. The following year, he relocated to Empire, Colorado, building a ranch on Bard Creek. In September 1866, Charley Utter married Matilda Nash, who was all of fifteen. An item in The Denver Tribune two years later remarked that since “he got married [he] has lived a civilized life.” Utter was residing in Georgetown, Colorado, then, and he and his wife had at least one child. In June 1871, Utter could not have been aware of the coincidence of Agnes Lake’s circus troupe performing in Georgetown several weeks before it reached Abilene, but he and his family probably attended.
Though a family man, Utter was still a keen gambler, and most likely, he was at a gaming table in a hotel or saloon in Georgetown in early spring 1872 when Wild Bill Hickok strolled in. As the careful former marshal scanned the occupants, his blue eyes may have settled on Charley Utter because of their similarities of dress. They became friends immediately. “He was out of work and put in most of his time playing poker,” wrote A. D. McCandless in a letter to the Kansas State Historical Society about Hickok when McCandless, who would become a lawyer, worked at a mine outside Georgetown. “He was very pleasant and agreeable, and never had any trouble while there.”
But Hickok stayed, at most, only two months. Then he moseyed on east, winding up back in Kansas City. It was there that he received what could reasonably be said to be the most disturbing news of his life.
For some time, Hickok had been experiencing some difficulties with his eyes. There was occasional blurred vision and some irritation. For a clerk in a dry goods store, this would not have been cause for concern, but for a famous gunslinger …
He sought out a physician in Kansas City who was known to be an expert on eye ailments. The diagnosis given to Hickok was potentially devastating—he could eventually go blind. To this day, there are several theories as to what the exact condition was. The eminent researcher Joseph Rosa goes on for pages with different possible explanations, then concludes “that what Wild Bill really suffered with will remain a mystery, owing to the absence of medical records.”
One plausible cause was secondary syphilis. Hickok was no stranger to “soiled doves,” and many of the prostitutes on the frontier had venereal diseases. A possible consequence of that disease is iritis, resulting in cloudy vision, some pain in the eyes, and a sensitivity to light. Glaucoma was another possibility, as were trachoma and chronic conjunctivitis. Whatever the cause of his troubles, Hickok was not given much hope of reversing their course, and at the time, few remedies were available. Thus, a famous gunfighter whose accurate eyesight and quick reflexes had saved his life more than a few times was faced with becoming an invalid dependent on others … if he lived that long.
That could have been one reason why Hickok was open to a change of careers. Many people believe that it was Buffalo Bill Cody who created the concept of a Wild West show. This is understandable, as he spent decades organizing and presenting such productions, some of them featuring famous frontier figures like Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, and others who purported to be. And Cody made a fort
une doing it. But before Buffalo Bill ever trod the floorboards of a stage, Wild Bill tried his hand at being a producer and performer.
This would seem uncharacteristic, because Hickok was not an orator or actor and would seem more comfortable telling tales around a campfire under a starry prairie sky. But he couldn’t have helped noticing how crowds gathered when he put on shooting exhibitions and how much people enjoyed the free entertainment. And thanks to Agnes Lake and her circus, Hickok had witnessed the joy of people as they sat watching acts involving horses and other animals perform. All this combined with two other factors in the spring of 1872 to provide the inspiration to produce a show: Wild Bill was bored, and he had accumulated several thousand dollars in gambling winnings.
Most likely, he had listened to talk in saloons by visitors from the east of circus troupes in addition to Agnes Lake’s that crisscrossed the more populated areas, some of them including Wild West segments featuring men dressed as cowboys and Indians. Hickok had the idea of a show that would focus only on the West. Such an exotic exhibition would fascinate audiences, many of whom would not otherwise experience anything about the American frontier. Mostly, though, Hickok listened to the siren song of Colonel Sidney Barnett.
Barnett, who would live to the impressive age of eighty-nine, was thirty-six in 1872, a year older than Wild Bill when they met in Kansas City. The son of a museum owner on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, Barnett had been sent west to recruit performers. To boost tourism, the Barnetts had originally tried to put together a production that would feature Indians from the American frontier, a couple of cowboys doing horse tricks, and supposedly authentic Mexican vaqueros. The younger Barnett rounded up several men willing to dress up and perform these roles. During a stop at Fort McPherson in Nebraska, Barnett met Texas Jack Omohundro and a group of Pawnee, and they were invited to Canada. However, when informed that the Indians would not be allowed by the Grant administration to cross the border, Texas Jack decided to pass on the production and remain in the States.
Barnett was persistent. He hired Indians from the Sac and Fox tribes who, unlike the Pawnee, were not subjected to the same travel restrictions. And then he met Hickok. Intrigued, Wild Bill agreed to invest in the project, whatever it was going to be, and serve as master of ceremonies, plus he would have an opportunity to see Canada, even if just a small corner of it. The two men conceived of a production titled The Daring Buffalo Chase of the Plains.
This idea should have been allowed to fade away like the next morning’s hangover, but Hickok became truly enamored with it. He was told that Niagara Falls had already become a popular tourist attraction in the summer and a new, somewhat exotic show about the American West would be a raging success. The cast of the show would include the new Indians signed up, cowboys who wanted a break from long, exhausting cattle drives, and, of course, buffalo.
In May, Hickok began to pull the production together. Three cowboys were found who probably thought a lark with Wild Bill to Canada could be more fun and profitable than returning to Texas. The nascent troupe traveled to Nebraska and found plenty of buffalo there. The challenge, however, was capturing them. As Cody and others had demonstrated, killing American bison was not a difficult task. And they could be herded into pens without too much trouble. But capturing and transporting a relatively small number, even with the promise of stage fame, was another matter. Hickok had done a lot of jobs in his thirty-five years, but this was not one of them.
The animals did not cooperate with being lassoed, and getting a rope on them anyway was especially frustrating because of their large heads and prominent horns. Hickok and the cowboys finally figured to cut a buffalo out of the herd one at a time, spook him, chase him across the prairie, and when he finally could not move another step, walk up and tie a rope around him. When they had apprehended six animals this way, Hickok and the cowboys made the ride to Ogallala, Nebraska, the trek slowed by having the buffalo behind them at the end of their ropes. Along the way on this poor imitation of a cattle drive, Hickok may have reflected that less than a year ago he was the most feared man in Abilene and his word was law … now this was his life.
It was another effort in Ogallala to push the buffalo up planks into a railroad car. An easier task was finding four Comanche who were happy to join Hickok’s enterprise in exchange for food. It was viewed as a stroke of luck that one of the Indians was followed around faithfully by a small, tame cinnamon bear, and a second Comanche had a monkey as a pet. This could only make the Buffalo Chase show more exotic to the eastern audiences.
Toward the end of June, Barnett and Hickok and their motley entourage disembarked at the Niagara Falls train station. Word spread quickly that not only was Wild Bill Hickok, the legendary man-killer of the American frontier, in town but that he planned to put on an exciting production there that would portray the Wild West with real Indians and cowboys and even buffalo. The first performance of The Daring Buffalo Chase of the Plains was set for July 20, giving Barnett and Hickok time to create an arena, do advertising, sell tickets, and fine-tune the production.
Only the latter was done, and not very well, because there was no script, and none of the cast, especially the buffalo and the bear and the monkey, had acted before. By this time, Hickok was broke, with the cast eating up his stage stake. He couldn’t advertise or even build an adequate enclosure. However, there was a lot of pent-up anticipation for the production, and it was believed several thousand would attend opening night at an arena ringed by wire, the best venue Hickok could create with moths in his pockets, and Barnett’s finances by this point not much better. That would change, though, if all those people did show up and they dropped coins into the buckets that would be passed around.
According to newspaper accounts, the performance of The Daring Buffalo Chase of the Plains on opening night—and, it turned out, closing night—was indeed dramatic and eventful, and thousands of people did show up. The only scenario the “director,” Hickok, had concocted was literally the title—have the buffalo run around the arena with the cowboys and Indians in pursuit. The problem was that after the six buffalo were pushed and otherwise persuaded to enter the enclosure, they simply stood still. They may have been mesmerized by the thousands of human faces staring back at them. That changed quickly, though, when Hickok fired one of his Colt pistols.
That got them going. The petrified buffalo rumbled around the makeshift arena. The four Comanche joined in, as did the three cowboys. They all were joined by a pack of dogs that ran through the porous wire-rimmed perimeter. And then, foreshadowing the running of the bulls at Pamplona, some daredevil spectators joined the chase and were in turn chased. The buffalo, thoroughly panicked by now, burst out of the enclosure. At about the same time, a spectator thought it would increase the excitement level to open the cages holding the bear and the monkey. The former ambled over to a sausage vendor and eagerly sampled his wares. The monkey sought high ground—it clambered up onto a wagon and began throwing whatever was in it at the crowd.
Hickok and the cowboys rode in the direction the buffalo had gone, which was into a residential neighborhood, where frightened occupants had barred their doors. (The Indians, seizing the opportunity, had remained behind with the bear at the sausage stand.) The exhausted beasts were found and were content enough to be escorted back to their corral. By this time, most of the spectators were heading home. The buckets yielded a take of $124.
That amount plus selling the buffalo to local butchers totaled enough to buy Hickok and his cast tickets on the train to Kansas City. Hickok bid farewell to Colonel Barnett and believed he was done with show business. He would, however, have other stage show experiences, the next being a dangerous one, involving Frank and Jesse James and angry Texans.
For a few weeks after his return to the less tumultuous entertainments of Kansas City, Wild Bill Hickok spent his afternoons and nights at the horse races and gambling in the saloons. During the fourth week in September, the Kansas City Industrial Exhibition w
as held. This was an elaborate event that offered people near the center of the country a glimpse of the future. For four days, spectators could examine industrial machines that would transform American manufacturing and enjoy sophisticated floral displays and performing horses. Given that sixty thousand people attended the exhibition—twice the number of people who lived in Kansas City—it is very likely that Hickok went to see it, too. That provided the potential for the frontier’s most famous gunfighter to again encounter two of its most famous outlaws.
On September 26, the final day of the exhibition, workers were beginning to close it up when three men approached the ticket office. It was near sunset, so the thousands of patrons filing out may not have immediately noticed that the men were wearing masks. Apparently, no policeman or someone acting as a security guard did, and upon learning these were Frank and Jesse James and a compatriot, he might well have fled, anyway. All three drew their guns. The horrified patrons stopped in their tracks. Two of the masked men set about taking money and jewelry from them while the third helped himself to the ticket office cash box. As a bit of punctuation to the robbery, one of the outlaws fired a shot into the ground. The bullet ricocheted and struck a girl in the lower leg. The men backed away, jumped on horses, and took off.
Their timing was good and bad. It was good in that Hickok either was not there that day or had already left. Though not a lawman, it is not far-fetched to think that he might have felt some responsibility to protect the people being victimized and bullied, especially with a girl being wounded. And with rumors having circulated that the James gang had passed through Abilene the previous year with no interference from the marshal, Hickok may have felt compelled to restore his honor—how nice that an opportunity to do so had landed in his lap. The thieves’ timing was bad in that their entire haul was $978 … when a half hour earlier, the treasurer of the industrial exhibition had transferred $12,000 to a vault.