Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies (16 page)

McCanles stood outside the cabin and began haranguing Hickok and the Wellmans, possibly ordering them off his land. A blanket had been hung inside the cabin, most likely to provide some privacy, and both Hickok and Wellman stepped behind it. One of them—it never was quite clear which—took a Hawken rifle off the wall and fired once through the blanket into McCanles’s chest; he fell dead on the ground. McCanles’s men, James Woods and James Roberts, went for their guns. Woods rushed the cabin, but Hickok pulled his Colt and wounded him, allowing Jane Wellman to finish him off with her sharpened garden hoe. Hickok fired again through the door, this time hitting Roberts, who stumbled off into the woods. Hickok pursued him and came out alone. Monroe McCanles ran off untouched.

Civilization was coming to the West, and three dead men now required a legal hearing. Four days after the shoot-out, Hickok and Horace Wellman were on trial. McCanles had
come to Nebraska from North Carolina, so, in addition to being a bully, he was thought to be pro-Confederate. Wellman and Hickok claimed they had been defending company property, and the circuit judge agreed with them. But as soon as the verdict was rendered, Hickok packed his saddlebags and left Rock Creek to join the war. The first battle of the Civil War, First Bull Run, had just begun at Manassas, Virginia.

By 1867, stories of derring-do in the West were thrilling readers in the big cities. In February of that year, journalist George Ward Nichols published a long, illustrated article entitled “Wild Bill” in the popular
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
In this wildly exaggerated article, McCanles showed up at the station with his gang of “reckless, blood-thirsty devils, who would fight as long as they had the strength to pull the trigger.” By the time the shooting ended, Hickok had dispatched McCanles and ten of his men. The hair-raising story introduced a fighting man to a post–Civil War American public searching desperately for a hero. Nichols created a larger-than-real-life character, a living legend, Wild Bill Hickok. “You would not believe that you were looking into the eyes that have pointed the way to death to hundreds of men,” he wrote. “Yes, Wild Bill with his own hands has killed hundreds of men. Of that I have no doubt. He shoots to kill as they say on the border.”

Hickok wasn’t the first Wild Bill, but when the name finally fell to him, he quickly became the one and the only. Another story that helped build his legend occurred when he enlisted in the Union army and was tasked with spying on the Rebels, scouting, and acting as a provost, or military policeman. One night he came upon a large group of troublemakers, probably fueled by drink, roughing up a bartender outside a saloon. There had been a fair fight, which the bartender had won, but the toughs came back with friends. They had dragged the bartender outside and were beating on him, threatening a hanging. Hickok didn’t hesitate, putting himself between the bartender and the mob. “How ’bout we make this a fair fight,” he said, glaring at them with his steel-blue eyes. Two men reached for their guns. But before they could clear their holsters, Hickok had drawn both his ivory-handled revolvers and had both men in his sights. They stopped and took their hands away from their weapons. Hickok nodded appreciatively, pointed his guns over their heads, and shot out a kerosene light. “That’ll be enough,” he was reported to have said. And as the crowd began dissipating, a woman called out, “My God, ain’t he wild!”

Wild Bill could indeed be a wild man: He drank, he brawled, he loved the cards and the ladies and treated them both with respect; he could be a gentleman or a cold-blooded shooter, depending on the occasion. He wasn’t just passing through life, he was taking thrilled Americans with him on his adventures as the cowboys and gunslingers and lawmen fought to tame the Wild West.

Hickok’s exaggerated exploits quickly made him a living legend. In this Hays City brawl, Sheriff Hickok supposedly faced fifteen Seventh Cavalry soldiers—killing two of them and shooting several more.

His legendary skills as a horseman and sure shot served him well during the Civil War. While many fighting men preferred to carry a long gun, Hickok was a pistoleer. He became well known for carrying two ivory-handled Colts, tucked handles-out into a sash or wide belt, which enabled his quick draw. Gunslingers were particular about the way they drew their weapons; a split second could mean the difference between life and death, and Hickok favored the lightning-quick cross-draw in which he’d reach across his body with both hands and pull out his guns. It was a unique style and required a hard twist of the wrist. Some said he’d based it on the technique used by military officers to draw their swords, but others believed it was his lifelong choice from early on. It was also during the war that he became known for wearing a broad-brimmed hat, his long, drooping mustache, and flowing hair.

More stories about Wild Bill’s Civil War exploits circulated: During one battle he worked as a sniper and supposedly shot thirty-five men. Hickok himself years later told a story of working
as a spy behind Confederate lines at the Battle of Westport, an important fight that took place near where Kansas City now stands. Apparently a skirmish broke out across the Sugar Creek River, with the Union and Confederate troops close enough to see the expressions on their enemies’ faces. One of the bluecoats suddenly recognized Hickok behind gray lines. “Bully for Wild Bill!” he shouted, catching the attention of a Rebel sergeant, who suddenly realized there was a spy in the ranks. He reached for his pistol, but Hickok beat him to the draw and drilled him in the chest; then, as Hickok remembered it, “As he rolled out of his saddle, I took his horse by the bit and dashed into the water as quick as I could…. The minute I shot the sergeant our boys set up a tremendous shout, and opened a smashing fire on the Rebs who had commenced popping at me. But I had got into deep water, and had slipped off my horse over his back, and steered him for the opposite bank by holding onto his tail with one hand, while I held the bridle rein of the sergeant’s horse in the other hand.” Wild Bill then crossed the river to safety.

After that escape, Hickok delivered his intelligence to General Curtis, information that may well have aided the Union troops in their victory at what became known as “the Gettysburg of the West” and ended with the Rebels being driven out of Missouri.

Hickok’s bravery and success as a scout attracted the attention of Union commanders, and when the war ended, General William Tecumseh Sherman employed him as a guide to take his party to Fort Kearny, Nebraska. He also scouted in the West for General Winfield Scott Hancock and Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. In Custer’s 1874 book,
My Life on the Plains,
he wrote of Hickok, “Of his courage there could be no question. His skill in the use of the rifle and pistol was unerring. His deportment was entirely free of bravado…. His influence among frontiersmen was unbounded, his word was law, and many are the personal quarrels and disturbances which he had checked among his comrades…. I have a personal knowledge of at least half a dozen men whom he has at various times killed, others have been seriously wounded—yet he always escaped unhurt in every encounter.”

The great respect in which Hickok was held made him the perfect lawman. His presence alone, often without a word or warning spoken, was known to quiet a combustible situation. At the end of the war, he raised his right hand and became a US deputy marshal at Fort Riley, Kansas, while also hiring on as a scout in the Indian Territory for George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. The Indian tribes were seen as an obstacle to the spirit of Manifest Destiny, the belief that America would someday stretch across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, as ordained by God. Agreements were reached with several tribes, granting them reservations, but other tribes decided to stand and fight for their traditional lands. In May 1867, while based in Fort Harker, Kansas, Hickok reported being attacked by a large Indian
band, successfully driving them off by killing two of them. Two months later, he led a patrol in pursuit of Indians who had attacked a homestead near the fort and killed four men. Although some stories claim Wild Bill’s patrol returned to the fort with five prisoners after killing ten more, others say they returned to Fort Harker without ever having seen an Indian.

Rincon train station, New Mexico, 1883

Hickok worked out of Hays City, Kansas, and as US deputy marshal tracked down deserters, horse and mule thieves, counterfeiters, and everyone else who ran afoul of the law. In 1868, he worked with his old friend, then government detective William F. Cody, to transport eleven Union deserters from Fort Hays to Topeka for trial.

After the fanciful
Harper’s
article spread Hickok’s fame throughout the West, he was faced with the downside of being a legend: He had to live up to it every day. People expected to see him regularly perform the kind of feats they’d read about. There was also the continual threat of yet another lowlife trying to earn his spurs by standing up to Wild Bill Hickok.

In 1869, Hickok won a special election to finish the term of the sheriff of Ellis County and marshal of Hays City. Hays needed him. It was a boomtown built out of the tumbleweeds to be the jumping-off point for teamsters carrying freight brought by the Kansas Pacific railroad from back east down to all the towns along the Smoky Hill and Santa Fe Trails. An endless stream of land speculators, tradesmen, storekeepers, and clerks, and sometimes their families, came roaring into town, followed by the buffalo hunters, the cattlemen, the adventurers, the Civil War veterans, and all the others looking for a place to stay a night or settle for a time. To satisfy these transients’ social needs, twenty-three saloons and gambling dens were built practically overnight, and the prostitutes and the card sharks and the cattle rustlers and the con artists followed the money. Within a year or so, Hays City had become the largest city in northwest Kansas—as well as the wickedest. It was a lawless place. One writer even referred to it as “the Sodom of the plains.”

Hickok quickly made his presence known. As author and historian Lieutenant Dan Marcou explained, “He would not walk down the sidewalk, he would walk down the middle of the street, his eyes were always searching. He was looking for trouble and when he found it he rushed in. His trademark entry to a saloon was to slam the saloon doors open all the way to the wall, both to let it be known he was there and make certain no one was hiding behind them. Then he announced his presence and, in most cases, Wild Bill coming through the door was all that was necessary.”

Trouble came to Hays City in all kinds of ways, and Hickok always responded. As one young mother wrote in a letter, she had entrusted her baby to a friend for a few moments so she could get her chores done, but somehow this man’s attention wandered, and when she
looked out from the shop, she was stunned to see her child crawling in the dusty street as horses and wagons whizzed by. Almost simultaneously she saw Hickok race into the street and rescue the baby—and, after making sure the child was safe, pummel the man responsible.

Hickok was not a man to draw his guns easily, but when it became necessary he was the fastest draw around. In the summer of 1869, a drunken cowboy named Bill Mulvey came bursting out of Tommy Drum’s Saloon and began shooting out lamps and windows. Hickok tried to calm him down peacefully, but Mulvey somehow got the drop on him. Thinking quickly, Hickok looked over Mulvey’s shoulder and yelled, “Don’t shoot him in the back, he’s drunk!” Mulvey hesitated—just long enough for Wild Bill to draw his gun and drill the cowboy in his chest.

Only weeks later, a drunken teamster named Sam Strawhun and about eighteen of his buddies began shooting up John Bittles Beer Saloon. Strawhun had been chased out of town several weeks earlier after attacking a member of the town’s Vigilance Committee, a group
of citizens trying to bring order to Hays City. He’d come back with vengeance on his mind and was heard to promise, “I shall kill someone tonight, just for luck.” Hickok managed to get Strawhun and his men out into the street, then collected their beer mugs, which he brought back inside. Strawhun followed, looking for a fight; he threatened to tear up the place. “Do it,” Hickok was said to warn, “and they will carry you out.”