by Tom Clavin
At 8:10 on the morning of July 2, “Advance!” was called out, and Custer’s caravan began to move out. “The companies wheeled by fours into line of march, guidons flying in the breeze, the band playing our battle quickstep, ‘Garry Owen,’ the officers dashing up and down the column with an air of importance, the men cheerful and full of chatter, and we cast our eyes for the last time on Fort A. Lincoln,” recorded Private Theodore Ewert. “Up the valley, we saw the ladies of our command waving their scarfs and handkerchiefs in sad farewell, and just as we left the last ridge that overlooked the valley the men gave three hearty cheers.”
Custer was certainly in his element on this expedition. “The idea of visiting new country and bestowing names on the land naturally appealed to Custer, but he viewed himself not as another Lewis and Clark so much as a plainsman, a restless soul who liked to see what was over the next hill,” writes the western historian Brian Dippie. “He knew men like Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody, and they were his ideal. They belonged to what has been described as a ‘flamboyant fraternity,’ with a dress code that ran to long hair, buckskins, and a broad-brimmed hat set at a rakish angle.”
With such an intoxicating excursion, Custer may not have cared if he discovered gold at all. Unfortunately for the Sioux, in early August, one of the miners panning on French Creek found the coveted mineral. Initially, Custer tried to keep the discovery under wraps, but it did not help that he had allowed a wagon full of newspaper reporters to accompany his contingent and that the entire journey had been photographed by William Illingworth. (Also along for the trip was Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Dent Grant, son of the president.) Custer himself wrote in a letter that passed through many hands, “I referred in a former dispatch to the discovery of gold. Subsequent examinations at numerous points confirm and strengthen the fact of the existence of gold in the Black Hills.”
By the third week in August, daily newspapers in the major cities back east were printing blaring headlines. The rush was on.
Though he was more dependent on the blue-lensed glasses, Hickok could still read newspapers. He saw the Black Hills gold discovery as an opportunity. At a well-weathered thirty-seven, he was not about to begin kneeling on the sides of creek beds panning for nuggets or clawing rocks for gold dust. In fact, kneeling anywhere had become a problem because of a touch of rheumatism. Adding to the sartorial impression Hickok made was that in addition to the blue-lensed glasses, he had taken to using a rosewood cane that had once been a billiard cue stick. This not only helped with walking when the rheumatism acted up but gave him another self-defense option.
Wild Bill was not ready for a rocking chair yet. He was a gambler and a very good one, and with the expected boom in the building of saloons in towns surrounding the Black Hills, and men suddenly with money in their pockets, he envisioned a way to make a lucrative living.
Hickok set off for Cheyenne, the town in Wyoming that had become the launching ramp for participants in the gold rush. However, just before he had left Kansas City, he received word that there were men in Hays City and Abilene who still bore grudges from his lawman days there and wanted a reckoning with him. They would be waiting when the Kansas Pacific train made stops in Hays City and Abilene on its way west.
In response, he telegraphed a message to the newspapers in those cities: “I shall pass through your prairie-dog villages on Tuesday. I wear my hair long as usual.” When Hickok’s train pulled into those stations, no adversaries awaited. Instead, when he appeared, his long hair flowing out of his black sombrero, crowds who had gathered in anticipation of a showdown saluted him with cheers.
There was another item in the press at that time that caught readers’ attention. On July 21, as Hickok was on his train trip, The Topeka Daily Commonwealth reported that he “is suffering from an affection of the eyes, caused by the colored fire used during his theatrical tour.” Probably, he could not avoid answering a question about his glasses, and the tour was the best explanation he could give. Telling the truth—that he had a degenerative disease—could have been a fatal mistake. While he might still draw a pistol faster than an opponent, by now, or soon enough, he might not see well enough to shoot him.
He arrived to find Cheyenne a hustling and bustling place. There had been rapid growth in just the seven years since General Grenville Dodge and a survey crew plotted the site in what was then Dakota Territory. He hoped the town that emerged would be named Dodge, but he had to be satisfied years later when Buffalo City in Kansas became Dodge City. Cheyenne was, predictably, named after the Indian tribe. There were already four thousand people living there in November 1867 when the Union Pacific Railroad arrived. From that point on, Cheyenne was an important railroad hub as well as a supply depot for prospectors, miners, and other explorers seeking and exploiting gold and silver finds in what became Wyoming Territory. It was nicknamed “Magic City of the Plains.”
It could well have shared what Dodge City would be called: “Wickedest Town in the American West.” As Joseph Rosa colorfully put it, “Cheyenne had the reputation of being the wildest, roughest place on the continent. It was filled to overflowing with a crowd of roughs, killers, gamblers, and prostitutes such as had never assembled at any one place in America, except perhaps at Abilene.” This began to change in 1870 when T. Jeff Carr was elected sheriff of Laramie County.
Cut out of cloth similar to that of Tom Smith in Abilene, Carr took on a tough job without gunplay as his first option. Unlike Smith, Carr would have a long career in law enforcement. Hailing from Pittsburgh, he served in the Union army and then went west, finding his first peace officer position in Central City, Colorado. Carr had done a good amount of cleaning up in Cheyenne by the time Hickok got there, and he was about to add to his duties being superintendent of the Wyoming branch of the Rocky Mountain Detective Association, a post he would hold for thirty-three years. He would also hold positions as marshal of Cheyenne, U.S. marshal for Wyoming, and chief deputy U.S. marshal, and he ran a detective agency in Cheyenne. He would become a member of the “super posse” organized in 1900 that went after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Wild Bunch. He died in San Antonio at seventy-three, having bridged the time periods of frontier and “modern” law and order.
It may seem indulgent to have just devoted a long paragraph to a character who will appear again only twice in these pages. But there is a direct relevance to Wild Bill Hickok. In Cheyenne in the fall of 1874 were both Thomas Jeff Carr and Hickok, representing the new and old lawmen of the American West. Wild Bill had been a gunfighter with a badge, whose white-handled six-shooters compelled law and order, always prepared to corral or kill those who strayed from it. Carr represented the gradual civilizing of the frontier, when due process and the judicial system made communities feel safe. He was only five years younger than Hickok, but he represented the future, while Hickok, though not yet forty and still on the sunny side of the ground, was already being viewed as a relic of the “old” West.
Most likely, he recognized this. “Hickok was intelligent enough to be aware that things were changing fast in the West,” writes Richard O’Connor in his 1959 biography. “Soon there would no longer be a place for his kind, the adventurer, the gunman. It was only a matter of time before the whole cast of characters—gunfighters, badmen, road agents, professional gamblers, dance-hall queens—would no longer be tolerated, let alone admired. He had retreated before the steady march of respectability in Kansas, had seen the lace curtains and bay windows replace the swinging doors and red lamps of the parlor houses.”
There are accounts that Hickok did not initially stay in Cheyenne because he was hired to guide an expedition of wealthy hunters. He had told a Kansas reporter that the party would consist of “about twelve English lords and noblemen.” If this expedition did take place, it would be his last one because of his eye affliction. In September, he was back in Cheyenne and with his friend Colorado Charley Utter, who had come north from Colorado looking for new adventures and revenue.
The two friends may have enjoyed a good laugh over the story of Hickok’s arrival in Cheyenne. He had hoped to ease his way into the town without being noticed, but this had not gone as planned.
His disguise consisted of the blue glasses and having tucked his hair up under the sombrero. After getting off the train, he made his way through the dusty streets, the tip of his cane digging into the dirt, to a complex of buildings containing a hotel, theater, and gambling hall called the Gold Room. Upon entering this room, Hickok spied a faro bank. Hickok put fifty dollars on the high card.2
He lost. Maybe a second fifty dollars would get the first one back, and more. This time he won. But the dealer handed him twenty-five dollars. Hickok wanted to know why so small an amount. He was told by the dealer that the limit was twenty-five dollars, and his lookout snickered.
“You took fifty when I lost,” Hickok said.
“Fifty if you lose,” the dealer pronounced, “and twenty-five if you win.”
Hickok could have chalked this up to being new in Cheyenne and not knowing how the gambling house operated. He had learned, and it cost him seventy-five dollars. Instead, he bristled at being swindled and in such a discourteous way. He went with his anger and the arc of his cane, which came down on top of the heads of the dealer and his lookout. Two bouncers rushed to the scene and were also introduced to the former billiards cue stick. Now, there were four men on the Gold Room floor.
Others in the gambling hall closed in on the impertinent stranger. Hickok corkscrewed, showing his cane to all. In the process, his glasses and hat flew off. His hair had barely touched his shoulders when a patron cried out, “My God, that’s Wild Bill Hickok—watch out or he’ll blow us all to kingdom come!”
Finding this a more enjoyable bit of theater, Hickok made a motion toward his guns. That was all it took. It was later reported that patrons and remaining bouncers alike went out of the doors and windows “in blocks of five.” Within seconds, the Gold Room was empty, save for the four groaning men on the floor and a petrified bartender who rose up from behind the bar … fortunately for him, without a weapon. Hickok retrieved his hat and glasses. He also took a stack of money out of the faro bank and headed for the door.
In a quavering voice, the bartender offered Hickok a drink on the house. He accepted, drank it back, placed the shot glass on the bar, and left.
Hickok rented a room in the hotel, and the next morning, he was visited by a man named Bowlby, the Gold Room proprietor, and the city marshal. They explained that seven hundred dollars had been taken, but of course, the matter could be resolved without any trouble. Hickok said, “I don’t know as I ought to keep all the money.”
Bowlby liked the idea that the money would indeed be returned. But then Hickok added, “How about I split it with you instead, Mr. Bowlby.”
That didn’t sit nearly as well, but the marshal declared, “That settles that,” and linked arms with the two men, suggesting they repair to the Gold Room for a morning drink. For Hickok, Cheyenne might be a lucky place after all.
He settled down there for an indefinite stay. Now that he would have a fixed address, he resumed writing letters to his mother and siblings in Illinois and to Agnes Lake. As rudimentary as the postal system was and despite the vast distances mail had to traverse in the 1870s, the letters did find her.
Return letters informed him that Agnes was struggling a bit. The expenses of the Hippo-Olympiad and Mammoth Circus had become overwhelming, and she had trimmed the production and merged it with other ones that were also having financial difficulties. The circus boom had at best plateaued as the Panic of ’73 took hold. The twenty-two companies that went out on tour in the 1873–74 season represented a 30 percent decrease from the previous season. Only the smartest and strongest circus owners could expect to survive.
Agnes was also more focused on the career of her daughter Emma, who was emerging as one of the country’s most popular equestrian performers. For Agnes, the 1874 tour was her last as a performer, preferring to present “Miss Emma Lake” to audiences.
Hickok spent his days and nights in Cheyenne quietly. He gambled and set aside some of his winnings. This far away from his familiar haunts in Kansas and Missouri, he apparently did not feel in danger. A woman named Annie Tallent, who would become known as the first white woman in the Black Hills and as a writer of pioneer life, includes in her book titled The Black Hills encountering Hickok for the first time, and he was not wearing pistols. He was dressed plainly and “might easily have been taken for a Quaker minister.”
It was known that Tallent and her husband, along with twenty-six others, had tried to stake claims along French Creek but had been escorted out of the Black Hills by a U.S. Army cavalry patrol, making one of the few last feeble attempts to abide by the Fort Laramie Treaty. Encountering Tallent on the street one day, Hickok doffed his sombrero and, explaining that he expected to go there soon, asked her some questions about the Black Hills.
Tallent was at first put off: “I have often heard of Wild Bill and his reputation is not at all creditable to him. But, perhaps he is not so black as he is painted.”
“Well, as to that, I suppose I am called a red-handed murderer, which I deny,” Hickok said. “That I have killed men I admit, but never unless in absolute self-defense, or in the performance of an official duty. I have never in my life taken any mean advantage of an enemy. Yet understand, I never yet allowed a man to get the drop on me. But perhaps I may yet die with my boots on.”
Impressed, Tallent answered his questions; then: “Wild Bill, with a gracious bow that would have done credit to a Chesterfield, passed on down the street and out of sight.”
Colorado Charley was in Cheyenne because he knew the transportation business, and a rush to the Black Hills would mean a great demand for horses, wagons, mules, and supplies. In September 1874, he told a reporter from a Nebraska newspaper, “This rush is going to be a lallapaloozer.” He arranged to buy horses and mules and equipment, which he expected to use, then resell at a good profit. And he and Hickok spent much time with their new friends in the Gold Room.
A man named Upton Lorentz was in Cheyenne at the time, seeking his own piece of the gold rush. In an article published in the May 1936 edition of Frontier Times, he recalled,
Wild Bill stood at the end of a long bar, opposite the entrance from the south or railroad side of the building. Never far from him, generally in front of the bar, could be seen Colorado Charley, a slight, well dressed man, with long fair curls to shoulder also, and perhaps but five feet six inches tall. It was said at that time that the position maintained at the bar by Hickok at the east end and Utter fronting him a short distance away, was a precaution against attack from enemies looking for a chance to get the drop on Bill.
As 1874 ended, Hickok was not any closer to setting foot in the Black Hills themselves than when he had arrived, and while he had done plenty of gambling, he hadn’t gotten rich from it. Perhaps a change of scenery would do him good, but he was stuck in place. “Wild Bill is still in the city,” reported the December 3 edition of The Cheyenne Daily News, adding, “He is a noble specimen of Western manhood.”
Maybe so, but hanging around was not gaining him anything. And Hickok was not the only one. The Magic City of the Plains was now bedeviled by an increasing number of loafers, men who had arrived and did not have the means or ambition to move on, joining those who had tried to venture into the Black Hills and were repulsed. That Hickok was lumped in with them was evident when the city marshal nailed notices around town stating that vagrants had twenty-four hours to leave, and if they did not go, they would be forced out of Cheyenne. One of the names listed was Wild Bill Hickok. When he saw one of the notices, he used his bowie knife to hack it to pieces.
One day soon after, Sheriff Carr was walking down the street when he spotted Hickok lounging outside a saloon. He called over, “Bill, I guess I’ll have to run you out of town.”
Hickok gazed at him for a few seconds, then responded,
“Jeff Carr, when I go, you’ll go with me.”
Still, this seemed like a good time to leave Cheyenne. Hickok was soon to go on one last adventure that would involve not one but two women who loved him.
Chapter Eighteen
A WOMAN CALLED CALAMITY
The woman who would become known as Calamity Jane was born Martha Jane Canary in May 1856 near Princeton, Missouri.1 Her father, Robert, had been born and raised on a farm in Ohio, and he and his wife, Charlotte, had moved to Missouri soon before the birth of their first child.
To say that Martha had a tough childhood would be a major understatement. Based even on frontier standards in the 1850s and ’60s, it was a bad way to grow up. Robert Canary was not known as a hardworking farmer, and his wife liked to frequent local taverns and reportedly could swear as well as the most unruly patrons. “Time and again Charlotte bruised the social expectations of neighborhood wives,” writes Richard W. Etulain in The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane. “Her brightly colored and eye-catching clothing, her cigar smoking, her public swearing, and her drinking (sometimes to drunkenness) negatively marked a woman when mothers were supposed to be more innocent.”
A probable reason why the family had left Ohio was found in 1862 after Robert’s father died. It was then discovered that the younger man had pilfered a significant portion of the family’s inheritance. The executor sued Robert, but when the time came to serve the papers in Missouri, the Canarys had flown. They had gone gold-seeking in Montana.
When the family arrived in Virginia City, not all of the Canarys’ six children had been born yet. Whatever money Robert had stolen must have run out, because by the end of 1864, the family was in desperate straits. Eight-year-old Martha and her two younger sisters, who offered a plausibly pathetic appearance wearing only calico slips, were sent out to beg in the muddy, sleet-showered streets. When they had filled a makeshift wagon with food and clothing donated by sympathetic—and appalled—residents, they trudged out of Virginia City to Nevada—not the state but the slovenly mining camp on the outskirts.