Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Speaker 1: Lauren Bobebam. Here. Some six decades after the button Down
Speaker 1: duel between gentlemen Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, and sixteen
Speaker 1: years before the blazing gunfight on a dusty lot near
Speaker 1: Arizona's Ok Corral, a former Confederate soldier named Davis Tutt,
Speaker 1: who was a gambler with a score to settle, stepped
Speaker 1: into the town square in Springfield, Missouri, and fell literally
Speaker 1: into history. On the other side of the square that day,
Speaker 1: July twenty first of eighteen sixty five was a man
Speaker 1: who stood six foot one inches tall that's one point
Speaker 1: eight five meters, with auburn hair curling to his shoulders,
Speaker 1: a distinctively long mustache underneath an aquiline nose, and a
Speaker 1: rakishly worn sombrero topping it all off. James Butler Hiccock
Speaker 1: was a former Union soldier and a gambler too, both
Speaker 1: by nature and profession. He was also good with a gun.
Speaker 1: At about six pm that day, with a lot on
Speaker 1: the line, a gold watch, a gambling debt, perhaps the
Speaker 1: affections of a woman, and certainly a good doll up
Speaker 1: of pride. The two men squared off in what's now
Speaker 1: recognized as the wild West's first quick draw shootout. Things
Speaker 1: didn't go well for young mister Tutt that afternoon. As
Speaker 1: for Hickock, whom many knew even then as wild Bill,
Speaker 1: the gunfight in Springfield became the stuff of legend. For
Speaker 1: the article this episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke
Speaker 1: with Tom Claven, author of the twenty nineteen book Wild Bill,
Speaker 1: The True Story of the American Frontier's first Gunfighter. He said,
Speaker 1: it was sort of inevitable as they approached each other
Speaker 1: to the point they saw where one could hit the eye,
Speaker 1: and then it was who drew first. So it was
Speaker 1: kind of improvised, but the story spread like a prairie fire.
Speaker 1: It sort of set the template the choreography for these
Speaker 1: gunfights that would take place over the next few decades.
Speaker 1: Hiccock was born in Illinois in eighteen thirty seven and
Speaker 1: made his way west as a young man. He worked
Speaker 1: as a Free State Army soldier in Kansas and a
Speaker 1: driver for a Kansas stagecoach company. In eighteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: then twenty four year old Hiccock got in his first
Speaker 1: big trouble with the law, charged with murder for gunning
Speaker 1: down one David McCanless in a dispute at a Pony
Speaker 1: Express station in Rock Creek Station, Nebraska. As with much
Speaker 1: of Hickock's life and legend, it's hard to tell now
Speaker 1: more than one hundred and fifty years later, exactly what
Speaker 1: spurred him to shoot McCanless, but most agree he was
Speaker 1: probably the first man wild Bill ever killed. A contemporary
Speaker 1: of Hiccock's, a colonist by the name of George W. Hanson,
Speaker 1: would later become interested in this story. Hanson helped publish
Speaker 1: an entire issue of the magazine Nebraska History devoted to
Speaker 1: the subject in nineteen twenty seven. In it, he wrote,
Speaker 1: from all accounts of killings in which Hiccock subsequently took part,
Speaker 1: I've been unable to find one single authentic instance in
Speaker 1: which he fought a fair fight. To him, no human
Speaker 1: life was sacred. He was a cold blooded killer, without
Speaker 1: heart or conscience. But at the time Hiccock was acquitted
Speaker 1: of the McCanless murder, and afterward banged around as a scout, stablehand,
Speaker 1: wagonmaster Marshall, and possibly a Union spy during the Civil War.
Speaker 1: Along the way, he gambled a lot and befriended another
Speaker 1: Wild West legend, William Frederick Cody or Buffalo Bill. Hiccock
Speaker 1: also picked up the nickname wild Bill, which he's sometimes
Speaker 1: called himself, and impressed a few women, including the wife
Speaker 1: of George Armstrong Custer, for whom Hickock scouted around that
Speaker 1: time in the eighteen sixties. Owet talked a bit about
Speaker 1: Custer in our recent episode, about his infamous last stand
Speaker 1: and about how his wife, Elizabeth or Libby Bacon Custer,
Speaker 1: spent half a century after George's death cementing his legacy.
Speaker 1: She wrote glowingly of her late husband in the three
Speaker 1: books she published during the fifteen years following his death
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy six. Libby Custer had an entirely different
Speaker 1: view of wild Bill than his detractors. She wrote in
Speaker 1: her eighteen ninety book Following the Guidan a few secondhand
Speaker 1: stories of wild Bill being assailed by Ruffians and coming
Speaker 1: out miraculously on top. She also wrote, quote, I do
Speaker 1: not recall anything finer in the way of physical perfection
Speaker 1: than wild Bill. When he swung himself lightly from his
Speaker 1: saddle and with graceful swaying step squarely set shoulders and
Speaker 1: well poised head, approached our tent for orders. He was
Speaker 1: rather fantastically clad, of course, but all seemed perfectly in
Speaker 1: keeping with the time and place. Even in the time
Speaker 1: of these events, the mid eighteen sixties, wild Bill's reputation
Speaker 1: was widespread, if not entirely agreed upon or particularly believable.
Speaker 1: But one way or another, Hiccock was in Springfield, Missouri,
Speaker 1: in the summer of eighteen sixty five doing what he
Speaker 1: perhaps liked to do, most gamble. He lost his gold
Speaker 1: watch to Tut, or maybe Tut took it, and the
Speaker 1: many accounts of the day have wild Bill warning Tut
Speaker 1: about carrying the watch in public. Tut, who at one
Speaker 1: time may have considered Hickock a friend, wore the watch defiantly.
Speaker 1: In the end. Their face off across the Springfield Square
Speaker 1: wasn't exactly the stuff of the old west On film
Speaker 1: the quick pulls from dusty holsters in the middle of
Speaker 1: a street at high noon, but it certainly wasn't a
Speaker 1: proper Burr Hamilton duel either. The shootout at Springfield is
Speaker 1: now considered the first time in America that two people
Speaker 1: faced off in a public setting to settle a dispute
Speaker 1: via handguns. They both shot. Tut missed, but Hiccock aimed
Speaker 1: and struck his mark with a shot to the heart.
Speaker 1: The showdown was memorialized in an article in Harper's New
Speaker 1: Monthly magazine in February of eighteen sixty seven, in which
Speaker 1: author George Ward Nichols quotes bystander colorfully and in dialect,
Speaker 1: you want me to do the thing, I'll do the thing. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is my best representation of the dialect as written.
Speaker 1: Here we go. The instant Bill fired without whitened or
Speaker 1: see if he had hit at Tut. He wheeled on
Speaker 1: his heels and pulled at his pistol at Tut's friends,
Speaker 1: who had already drawn their weapons. Aren't your satisfied, gentlemen,
Speaker 1: cried Bill, cool as an alligator. Put up your shootin' irons,
Speaker 1: or there'll be more dead men here. And they put
Speaker 1: them up and set at war far five. This Harper's
Speaker 1: article has been widely panned by historians. In it, Nichols
Speaker 1: also says wild Bill killed hundreds of men, and that
Speaker 1: was almost certainly way off the mark. Still, that article
Speaker 1: and the dime store novels of the day provided one
Speaker 1: of the first glimpses for many people into Hickock's larger
Speaker 1: than life persona. Our modern biographer Claven explained it was
Speaker 1: not only the nature of that gunfight, but Hickock's coolness
Speaker 1: under pressure and his accuracy. He killed somebody with one
Speaker 1: shot at a time when people were not that good
Speaker 1: really with pistols. That was the beginning. Hiccock scouted more
Speaker 1: during the American Indian Wars, became a US marshal in
Speaker 1: two different Kansas towns, engaged in a few more shootouts,
Speaker 1: and killed a few more men, including in one his
Speaker 1: deputy accidentally shot in the middle of a gunfight. Hiccock
Speaker 1: took advantage of his celebrity when he could, adjoining his
Speaker 1: friend Buffalo Bill in a stage show in New York City,
Speaker 1: a sort of pre Broadway spectacle called Scouts of the Plains,
Speaker 1: but he knew too that his notoriety came at a price.
Speaker 1: Hiccock is said to have always been armed with his colts,
Speaker 1: and would often walk down the middle of the street
Speaker 1: in any given town where it would be harder for
Speaker 1: someone to surprise him from a dark doorway. Somewhere in
Speaker 1: his travels, Hiccock met fellow scout Martha Jane Canary but
Speaker 1: also known as Calamity Jane, and some accounts report that
Speaker 1: the two had a romantic relationship. According to Claven, though
Speaker 1: that never happened. Recent search has Hiccock marrying an older
Speaker 1: woman named Agnes Lake, a circus manager, in Cheyenne, Wyoming,
Speaker 1: in March of eighteen seventy six. Claven says that while
Speaker 1: Agnes was not a public persona, she was the only
Speaker 1: missus Hiccock, and that Calamity Jane, although fascinating unto herself,
Speaker 1: was not well liked by wild Bill. After their honeymoon
Speaker 1: in Cincinnati, Hiccock left again for the wild West, and
Speaker 1: that's where he was. In the summer of eighteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: at the age of thirty nine, wild Bill landed in
Speaker 1: the rowdy gold rush town of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory,
Speaker 1: where he intended to earn some gambling money to take
Speaker 1: home to his wife. There, on August first of eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, he ran a foul of a drunken Kentucky
Speaker 1: man who was after his own slice of fame won
Speaker 1: Jack McCall again. The records are hazy on exactly what
Speaker 1: happened or why, But in a saloon in the middle
Speaker 1: of town, McCall stepped behind wild Bill while he was
Speaker 1: playing cards and shot him point blank in the back
Speaker 1: of the head. The wound was fatal. During his life,
Speaker 1: Hiccock was practically mythologized, and his story has continued to
Speaker 1: grow in this century and a half since his death,
Speaker 1: both through biographies and fictionalized accounts, including the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: TV series devoted to him, in that he was portrayed
Speaker 1: by frequent Hollywood and Spaghetti Western gunslinger Guy Madison. He's
Speaker 1: also been played by Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers, Charles Bronson,
Speaker 1: Jeff Bridges, Keith Carrodine, and Luke Helmsworth. Claven said, we
Speaker 1: have this archetype in our history of the American West,
Speaker 1: of the gunfighter, the lone gunman, the man who goes
Speaker 1: his own way and it's confident that he's going to
Speaker 1: set things to right. Hiccock was basically the prototype of
Speaker 1: that man who did so much in his short life.
Speaker 1: Hickcock is probably best known for the skill he first
Speaker 1: exhibited in public in that Springfield Square in eighteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: But is that what Hiccock would have preferred. Claven said,
Speaker 1: if he were to describe himself, it would be as
Speaker 1: a gambler, because he spent more time doing that than
Speaker 1: he did anything else, and he enjoyed it. He enjoyed
Speaker 1: playing cards, He enjoyed the surroundings of the saloon life,
Speaker 1: the cigars, whiskey, the girls. He really liked that life.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, he also spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time out on the planes, out on the prairie as
Speaker 1: a scout, so he was kind of like two people
Speaker 1: in one. He could spend weeks at a time on
Speaker 1: the prairie by himself, but when he was in town
Speaker 1: he enjoyed it. He'd wear a formal frock coat. He'd
Speaker 1: really dress up. He is quite the dandy, I guess,
Speaker 1: maybe grudgingly he'd say a gunfighter too, because it was
Speaker 1: what he was. But he wasn't somebody who saw to
Speaker 1: be hurting people. He liked people, and people liked him.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is based on the article how wild Bill
Speaker 1: Hiccock became an American Legend on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written
Speaker 1: by John Donovan. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Klaang. Four more podcasts from my Heart Radio. Visit
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.