WEBVTT - How Did Wild Bill Hickok Become America's First Gunslinger? 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:07.600 Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff 0:00:07.680 --> 0:00:13.480 Lauren Bobebam. Here. Some six decades after the button Down 0:00:13.600 --> 0:00:18.400 duel between gentlemen Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, and sixteen 0:00:18.480 --> 0:00:21.760 years before the blazing gunfight on a dusty lot near 0:00:21.800 --> 0:00:27.160 Arizona's Ok Corral, a former Confederate soldier named Davis Tutt, 0:00:27.360 --> 0:00:30.560 who was a gambler with a score to settle, stepped 0:00:30.560 --> 0:00:35.320 into the town square in Springfield, Missouri, and fell literally 0:00:35.640 --> 0:00:39.640 into history. On the other side of the square that day, 0:00:40.000 --> 0:00:43.120 July twenty first of eighteen sixty five was a man 0:00:43.159 --> 0:00:46.080 who stood six foot one inches tall that's one point 0:00:46.159 --> 0:00:49.760 eight five meters, with auburn hair curling to his shoulders, 0:00:50.080 --> 0:00:54.080 a distinctively long mustache underneath an aquiline nose, and a 0:00:54.160 --> 0:00:59.960 rakishly worn sombrero topping it all off. James Butler Hiccock 0:01:00.320 --> 0:01:04.080 was a former Union soldier and a gambler too, both 0:01:04.160 --> 0:01:10.200 by nature and profession. He was also good with a gun. 0:01:10.520 --> 0:01:13.160 At about six pm that day, with a lot on 0:01:13.200 --> 0:01:16.720 the line, a gold watch, a gambling debt, perhaps the 0:01:16.760 --> 0:01:19.360 affections of a woman, and certainly a good doll up 0:01:19.400 --> 0:01:22.800 of pride. The two men squared off in what's now 0:01:22.840 --> 0:01:28.600 recognized as the wild West's first quick draw shootout. Things 0:01:28.680 --> 0:01:32.479 didn't go well for young mister Tutt that afternoon. As 0:01:32.520 --> 0:01:35.839 for Hickock, whom many knew even then as wild Bill, 0:01:36.480 --> 0:01:42.280 the gunfight in Springfield became the stuff of legend. For 0:01:42.440 --> 0:01:45.320 the article this episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke 0:01:45.360 --> 0:01:49.240 with Tom Claven, author of the twenty nineteen book Wild Bill, 0:01:49.560 --> 0:01:54.760 The True Story of the American Frontier's first Gunfighter. He said, 0:01:55.400 --> 0:01:57.920 it was sort of inevitable as they approached each other 0:01:58.120 --> 0:02:00.000 to the point they saw where one could hit the eye, 0:02:00.560 --> 0:02:03.440 and then it was who drew first. So it was 0:02:03.640 --> 0:02:07.760 kind of improvised, but the story spread like a prairie fire. 0:02:08.440 --> 0:02:11.720 It sort of set the template the choreography for these 0:02:11.760 --> 0:02:14.680 gunfights that would take place over the next few decades. 0:02:17.120 --> 0:02:20.160 Hiccock was born in Illinois in eighteen thirty seven and 0:02:20.280 --> 0:02:23.680 made his way west as a young man. He worked 0:02:23.720 --> 0:02:26.320 as a Free State Army soldier in Kansas and a 0:02:26.440 --> 0:02:30.720 driver for a Kansas stagecoach company. In eighteen sixty one, 0:02:31.280 --> 0:02:33.960 then twenty four year old Hiccock got in his first 0:02:34.000 --> 0:02:37.360 big trouble with the law, charged with murder for gunning 0:02:37.400 --> 0:02:40.239 down one David McCanless in a dispute at a Pony 0:02:40.240 --> 0:02:44.880 Express station in Rock Creek Station, Nebraska. As with much 0:02:44.880 --> 0:02:48.160 of Hickock's life and legend, it's hard to tell now 0:02:48.280 --> 0:02:51.040 more than one hundred and fifty years later, exactly what 0:02:51.280 --> 0:02:55.440 spurred him to shoot McCanless, but most agree he was 0:02:55.560 --> 0:03:00.720 probably the first man wild Bill ever killed. A contemporary 0:03:00.720 --> 0:03:03.800 of Hiccock's, a colonist by the name of George W. Hanson, 0:03:04.120 --> 0:03:08.280 would later become interested in this story. Hanson helped publish 0:03:08.280 --> 0:03:11.680 an entire issue of the magazine Nebraska History devoted to 0:03:11.720 --> 0:03:15.760 the subject in nineteen twenty seven. In it, he wrote, 0:03:16.440 --> 0:03:20.120 from all accounts of killings in which Hiccock subsequently took part, 0:03:20.440 --> 0:03:24.320 I've been unable to find one single authentic instance in 0:03:24.360 --> 0:03:28.120 which he fought a fair fight. To him, no human 0:03:28.160 --> 0:03:31.480 life was sacred. He was a cold blooded killer, without 0:03:31.600 --> 0:03:37.680 heart or conscience. But at the time Hiccock was acquitted 0:03:37.720 --> 0:03:42.760 of the McCanless murder, and afterward banged around as a scout, stablehand, 0:03:42.840 --> 0:03:47.080 wagonmaster Marshall, and possibly a Union spy during the Civil War. 0:03:48.360 --> 0:03:51.880 Along the way, he gambled a lot and befriended another 0:03:51.920 --> 0:03:57.280 Wild West legend, William Frederick Cody or Buffalo Bill. Hiccock 0:03:57.360 --> 0:04:00.440 also picked up the nickname wild Bill, which he's sometimes 0:04:00.440 --> 0:04:04.880 called himself, and impressed a few women, including the wife 0:04:04.920 --> 0:04:08.800 of George Armstrong Custer, for whom Hickock scouted around that 0:04:08.880 --> 0:04:13.280 time in the eighteen sixties. Owet talked a bit about 0:04:13.320 --> 0:04:16.200 Custer in our recent episode, about his infamous last stand 0:04:16.680 --> 0:04:20.320 and about how his wife, Elizabeth or Libby Bacon Custer, 0:04:20.800 --> 0:04:24.760 spent half a century after George's death cementing his legacy. 0:04:25.920 --> 0:04:28.520 She wrote glowingly of her late husband in the three 0:04:28.560 --> 0:04:31.680 books she published during the fifteen years following his death 0:04:31.960 --> 0:04:37.160 in eighteen seventy six. Libby Custer had an entirely different 0:04:37.240 --> 0:04:40.960 view of wild Bill than his detractors. She wrote in 0:04:41.000 --> 0:04:44.800 her eighteen ninety book Following the Guidan a few secondhand 0:04:44.839 --> 0:04:48.679 stories of wild Bill being assailed by Ruffians and coming 0:04:48.680 --> 0:04:54.040 out miraculously on top. She also wrote, quote, I do 0:04:54.120 --> 0:04:57.400 not recall anything finer in the way of physical perfection 0:04:57.720 --> 0:05:00.680 than wild Bill. When he swung himself lightly from his 0:05:00.760 --> 0:05:05.200 saddle and with graceful swaying step squarely set shoulders and 0:05:05.320 --> 0:05:09.400 well poised head, approached our tent for orders. He was 0:05:09.520 --> 0:05:13.320 rather fantastically clad, of course, but all seemed perfectly in 0:05:13.440 --> 0:05:18.800 keeping with the time and place. Even in the time 0:05:18.839 --> 0:05:22.680 of these events, the mid eighteen sixties, wild Bill's reputation 0:05:23.000 --> 0:05:28.400 was widespread, if not entirely agreed upon or particularly believable. 0:05:29.680 --> 0:05:33.560 But one way or another, Hiccock was in Springfield, Missouri, 0:05:33.600 --> 0:05:36.760 in the summer of eighteen sixty five doing what he 0:05:37.000 --> 0:05:41.920 perhaps liked to do, most gamble. He lost his gold 0:05:41.960 --> 0:05:45.080 watch to Tut, or maybe Tut took it, and the 0:05:45.120 --> 0:05:48.520 many accounts of the day have wild Bill warning Tut 0:05:48.520 --> 0:05:52.280 about carrying the watch in public. Tut, who at one 0:05:52.320 --> 0:05:56.080 time may have considered Hickock a friend, wore the watch defiantly. 0:05:57.880 --> 0:06:01.040 In the end. Their face off across the Springfield Square 0:06:01.400 --> 0:06:04.800 wasn't exactly the stuff of the old west On film 0:06:05.160 --> 0:06:08.240 the quick pulls from dusty holsters in the middle of 0:06:08.240 --> 0:06:11.960 a street at high noon, but it certainly wasn't a 0:06:12.279 --> 0:06:17.479 proper Burr Hamilton duel either. The shootout at Springfield is 0:06:17.520 --> 0:06:20.279 now considered the first time in America that two people 0:06:20.360 --> 0:06:23.440 faced off in a public setting to settle a dispute 0:06:23.600 --> 0:06:30.159 via handguns. They both shot. Tut missed, but Hiccock aimed 0:06:30.200 --> 0:06:32.240 and struck his mark with a shot to the heart. 0:06:33.839 --> 0:06:36.840 The showdown was memorialized in an article in Harper's New 0:06:36.839 --> 0:06:40.560 Monthly magazine in February of eighteen sixty seven, in which 0:06:40.640 --> 0:06:48.360 author George Ward Nichols quotes bystander colorfully and in dialect, 0:06:47.640 --> 0:06:50.839 you want me to do the thing, I'll do the thing. Okay, 0:06:50.839 --> 0:06:54.520 this is my best representation of the dialect as written. 0:06:54.920 --> 0:06:59.320 Here we go. The instant Bill fired without whitened or 0:06:59.360 --> 0:07:01.400 see if he had hit at Tut. He wheeled on 0:07:01.480 --> 0:07:03.960 his heels and pulled at his pistol at Tut's friends, 0:07:04.040 --> 0:07:08.400 who had already drawn their weapons. Aren't your satisfied, gentlemen, 0:07:08.560 --> 0:07:12.720 cried Bill, cool as an alligator. Put up your shootin' irons, 0:07:12.960 --> 0:07:16.240 or there'll be more dead men here. And they put 0:07:16.280 --> 0:07:22.280 them up and set at war far five. This Harper's 0:07:22.400 --> 0:07:27.000 article has been widely panned by historians. In it, Nichols 0:07:27.000 --> 0:07:30.120 also says wild Bill killed hundreds of men, and that 0:07:30.240 --> 0:07:34.240 was almost certainly way off the mark. Still, that article 0:07:34.520 --> 0:07:37.800 and the dime store novels of the day provided one 0:07:37.800 --> 0:07:41.440 of the first glimpses for many people into Hickock's larger 0:07:41.480 --> 0:07:46.840 than life persona. Our modern biographer Claven explained it was 0:07:46.880 --> 0:07:50.560 not only the nature of that gunfight, but Hickock's coolness 0:07:50.640 --> 0:07:54.840 under pressure and his accuracy. He killed somebody with one 0:07:54.880 --> 0:07:57.280 shot at a time when people were not that good 0:07:57.360 --> 0:08:03.840 really with pistols. That was the beginning. Hiccock scouted more 0:08:03.960 --> 0:08:07.440 during the American Indian Wars, became a US marshal in 0:08:07.480 --> 0:08:10.920 two different Kansas towns, engaged in a few more shootouts, 0:08:11.000 --> 0:08:13.960 and killed a few more men, including in one his 0:08:14.040 --> 0:08:18.200 deputy accidentally shot in the middle of a gunfight. Hiccock 0:08:18.240 --> 0:08:21.440 took advantage of his celebrity when he could, adjoining his 0:08:21.480 --> 0:08:24.080 friend Buffalo Bill in a stage show in New York City, 0:08:24.440 --> 0:08:28.520 a sort of pre Broadway spectacle called Scouts of the Plains, 0:08:29.080 --> 0:08:32.400 but he knew too that his notoriety came at a price. 0:08:34.240 --> 0:08:36.920 Hiccock is said to have always been armed with his colts, 0:08:37.200 --> 0:08:39.480 and would often walk down the middle of the street 0:08:39.520 --> 0:08:41.880 in any given town where it would be harder for 0:08:41.920 --> 0:08:45.920 someone to surprise him from a dark doorway. Somewhere in 0:08:45.920 --> 0:08:49.960 his travels, Hiccock met fellow scout Martha Jane Canary but 0:08:50.040 --> 0:08:53.560 also known as Calamity Jane, and some accounts report that 0:08:53.559 --> 0:08:57.560 the two had a romantic relationship. According to Claven, though 0:08:57.679 --> 0:09:01.760 that never happened. Recent search has Hiccock marrying an older 0:09:01.800 --> 0:09:05.560 woman named Agnes Lake, a circus manager, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, 0:09:05.679 --> 0:09:09.560 in March of eighteen seventy six. Claven says that while 0:09:09.600 --> 0:09:13.080 Agnes was not a public persona, she was the only 0:09:13.280 --> 0:09:17.720 missus Hiccock, and that Calamity Jane, although fascinating unto herself, 0:09:18.120 --> 0:09:22.480 was not well liked by wild Bill. After their honeymoon 0:09:22.480 --> 0:09:26.520 in Cincinnati, Hiccock left again for the wild West, and 0:09:27.000 --> 0:09:30.280 that's where he was. In the summer of eighteen seventy six, 0:09:31.400 --> 0:09:34.360 at the age of thirty nine, wild Bill landed in 0:09:34.400 --> 0:09:37.960 the rowdy gold rush town of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, 0:09:38.400 --> 0:09:41.280 where he intended to earn some gambling money to take 0:09:41.320 --> 0:09:45.480 home to his wife. There, on August first of eighteen 0:09:45.520 --> 0:09:48.960 seventy six, he ran a foul of a drunken Kentucky 0:09:49.000 --> 0:09:51.800 man who was after his own slice of fame won 0:09:51.960 --> 0:09:57.000 Jack McCall again. The records are hazy on exactly what 0:09:57.200 --> 0:10:01.240 happened or why, But in a saloon in the middle 0:10:01.240 --> 0:10:04.680 of town, McCall stepped behind wild Bill while he was 0:10:04.720 --> 0:10:07.800 playing cards and shot him point blank in the back 0:10:07.840 --> 0:10:13.120 of the head. The wound was fatal. During his life, 0:10:13.400 --> 0:10:17.880 Hiccock was practically mythologized, and his story has continued to 0:10:17.920 --> 0:10:20.160 grow in this century and a half since his death, 0:10:20.600 --> 0:10:25.400 both through biographies and fictionalized accounts, including the nineteen fifties 0:10:25.480 --> 0:10:29.520 TV series devoted to him, in that he was portrayed 0:10:29.520 --> 0:10:34.360 by frequent Hollywood and Spaghetti Western gunslinger Guy Madison. He's 0:10:34.400 --> 0:10:38.400 also been played by Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers, Charles Bronson, 0:10:38.640 --> 0:10:45.000 Jeff Bridges, Keith Carrodine, and Luke Helmsworth. Claven said, we 0:10:45.080 --> 0:10:47.600 have this archetype in our history of the American West, 0:10:47.720 --> 0:10:51.040 of the gunfighter, the lone gunman, the man who goes 0:10:51.040 --> 0:10:53.120 his own way and it's confident that he's going to 0:10:53.120 --> 0:10:57.120 set things to right. Hiccock was basically the prototype of 0:10:57.160 --> 0:11:02.080 that man who did so much in his short life. 0:11:02.520 --> 0:11:05.640 Hickcock is probably best known for the skill he first 0:11:05.679 --> 0:11:09.440 exhibited in public in that Springfield Square in eighteen sixty five, 0:11:10.760 --> 0:11:15.000 But is that what Hiccock would have preferred. Claven said, 0:11:16.000 --> 0:11:18.480 if he were to describe himself, it would be as 0:11:18.520 --> 0:11:21.439 a gambler, because he spent more time doing that than 0:11:21.440 --> 0:11:24.720 he did anything else, and he enjoyed it. He enjoyed 0:11:24.720 --> 0:11:28.280 playing cards, He enjoyed the surroundings of the saloon life, 0:11:28.400 --> 0:11:32.080 the cigars, whiskey, the girls. He really liked that life. 0:11:32.960 --> 0:11:34.800 On the other hand, he also spent a lot of 0:11:34.880 --> 0:11:37.000 time out on the planes, out on the prairie as 0:11:37.000 --> 0:11:39.840 a scout, so he was kind of like two people 0:11:39.880 --> 0:11:42.480 in one. He could spend weeks at a time on 0:11:42.520 --> 0:11:45.199 the prairie by himself, but when he was in town 0:11:45.559 --> 0:11:48.960 he enjoyed it. He'd wear a formal frock coat. He'd 0:11:49.000 --> 0:11:52.280 really dress up. He is quite the dandy, I guess, 0:11:52.600 --> 0:11:56.640 maybe grudgingly he'd say a gunfighter too, because it was 0:11:56.720 --> 0:12:00.480 what he was. But he wasn't somebody who saw to 0:12:00.520 --> 0:12:04.800 be hurting people. He liked people, and people liked him. 0:12:09.679 --> 0:12:12.280 Today's episode is based on the article how wild Bill 0:12:12.360 --> 0:12:15.760 Hiccock became an American Legend on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written 0:12:15.760 --> 0:12:18.840 by John Donovan. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio 0:12:18.920 --> 0:12:21.480 in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by 0:12:21.520 --> 0:12:25.080 Tyler Klaang. Four more podcasts from my Heart Radio. Visit 0:12:25.120 --> 0:12:28.360 the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to 0:12:28.440 --> 0:12:29.360 your favorite shows.