Wild Bill Hickok, Man Into Myth: An Interview with Jeff Morey
Wild Bill Hickok, that legendary hero of the West, was shot dead in Deadwood, South Dakota, 131 years ago today, on August 2, 1876. Jeff Morey is one of the leading experts on him. In fact, Morey is one of the leading researchers on the American frontier in general. He was historical adviser for the 1993 movie Tombstone and appeared as a commentator in the History Channel’s Tales of The Gunseries and its biography of Doc Holliday. He has also been a consultant for the Gene Autry Museum, and he’ll soon be seen on a new series produced by BBC, The Wild West. From his home in San Diego, he talked with us about the life and legend of Wild Bill Hickok.
As a legendary figure, Wild Bill Hickok follows such heroic earlier frontiersmen such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson. But those men had real historical import, whereas it’s hard to find purely historical reasons for Wild Bill’s legend. How did he become a household name, and why?
The question of Hickok’s renown raises the question of why the “Old West” was being mythologized even while the region was being initially populated by settlers. Looking at him, it’s difficult not to suspect he was fully alert to the emerging myth and intended to ride the very crest of the oncoming wave. He was perfectly matched to his time and place. Over six feet tall with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, he looked every inch the hero. His buckskin outfits were generally described as immaculate, even in the harshest of frontier circumstances. His character was forged by the bloody depredations in Kansas and Missouri before the Civil War. During the war he served as a storied spy and sharpshooter. Then, three months after the war’s end, James Butler Hickok killed Davis K. Tutt in a standup gun duel that would set the standard for the hundreds of movie gunfights over the years.
Little is reliably known about the background or character of Tutt. He may have become acquainted with Wild Bill during the Civil War. But when he boldly snatched Hickok’s prized pocket watch during a late-night card game and announced that he was going to wear it in the public square, it was perceived as a direct challenge to Wild Bill. Then when Hickok and Tutt confronted each other the next day, it was Tutt who let loose the first shot. Wild Bill calmly returned fire and shot Tutt through the heart. That shooting seemed to signal the beginning of an era. With the killing of Tutt, the West of our imagination began to take shape.
So, “Wild Bill”—no one really knows how he gained the nickname—isn’t remembered because of any political or economic consequence of his actions; he’s remembered as a representative of a certain stern breed of gritty individual that populated the Western territories following the Civil War. As a scout, guide, deputy U.S. marshal, and celebrated shootist, he lived a life suited more to mythical magnification than to scholarly study. In fact, he is more exemplar than mere representative figure. He dressed better, shot straighter, was poetry on horseback, and could out-fight most anyone. Even the desperate Texas gunman John Wesley Hardin called him “the redoubtable ‘Bill’ Hickok of Abilene, than whom no braver man ever drew breath.”
Every hero needs a balladeer or he will soon be forgotten, and Wild Bill found his in George Ward Nichols, who wrote a centerpiece article on him for Harper’s Weekly in 1867. Full of exaggeration and worshipful wonderment, Nichols’s portrait secured Wild Bill’s national fame at a time when the country was looking for new heroes to inspire a nation still reeling from the Civil War. Hickok actually seemed to live the exciting life of a dime-novel hero, through incident after incident. Nichols’s article gave Hickok his fame, but Hickok had made himself, larger than life.
George Ward Nichols might be called the premier celebrity journalist of his day. He accompanied General Sherman on his march to the sea during the Civil War (as a soldier, but he later wrote about it) and gained a measure of fame for writing a profile of Henry Morton Stanley, the journalist and explorer who found Dr. Livingstone. How much did Nichols create the Hickok myth, and how much did he reflect a legend that was already started?
Nichols provided Hickok with national exposure, but before the Harper’s Weeklyarticle, Wild Bill enjoyed a growing local renown as a frontier character, adventurer, scout, and man-killer. It’s interesting that you should mention Henry Morton Stanley. In April 1867 Stanley himself wrote a rather gushing article about Hickok for the St. Louis Missouri Democrat. So did Nichols and Stanley “create the myth” of “Wild Bill”? I wouldn’t put it that way. They found a story in Hickok. By exaggeration, they mythologized him. But erase all the hyperbole and Wild Bill was still a force to be reckoned with. Just look at the photos of him. Who else was carrying a brace of fancy guns in a scarlet sash? Who else wore a hat like he did? The guy was one of a kind. In a sense he was like T. E. Lawrence. They both were reluctant exhibitionists. Nichols and Stanley played the same part in Hickok’s story that Lowell Thomas later played in the story of Lawrence of Arabia. They didn’t create the legends; they magnified and broadcast them.
Well, speaking of those fancy guns, the foundation of Hickok’s legend is his prowess as a pistoleer, or shootist. Sweeping aside the inevitable hyperbole of the period, how good was he really? What’s the evidence?
Of all the storied gunfighters, only Wild Bill and John Wesley Hardin gave public displays of their prowess. Numerous witnesses validated Hickok’s outstanding skill as a marksman. He could hit targets from a horse at full gallop. He could keep a can rolling in the dust by blazing away from the hip alternately from one side and then the other. Hickok and Hardin were the two prime examples of men who defined themselves through the use of firearms on the frontier. Bat Masterson said the best man he ever saw with a gun was the Texas gunman Ben Thompson. Ben Thompson said the only man he ever feared was Wild Bill Hickok.
Beyond the exhibitions, we have the known men Hickok killed in gunfights—David C. McCanles, Davis Tutt, Bill Mulvey, Samuel Strawhun, and Phil Coe among them. And that’s a partial list. One doesn’t obtain a grim accounting such as that without impressive ability as a shootist.
Part of the Hickok legend has always been his relationship with Calamity Jane. Was there actually anything to it, or was it largely a figment of her imagination?
The image of Wild Bill and Calamity Jane Canary has a certain appeal because those splendid monikers seem destined to form a spectacular pairing. Trouble is, satisfactory evidence for their involvement has yet to surface. Even Jane’s deathbed wish to be buried next to Wild Bill is difficult to validate. Now, any way you slice it, Wild Bill had an eager fondness for the ladies. He had numerous relationships over the short course of his life. In fact, many of his shooting scrapes seem to have been generated by romantic triangles. So it’s possible that he and Jane enjoyed a spontaneous physical union of sorts. But Hickok seems to have been an emotional isolate. While he had friends, he didn’t have intimates. Even when he married Agnes Lake, the minister who performed the ceremony didn’t think the wedding was a serious union of lovers. The Reverend W. F. Warren actually wrote in the church register, “I don’t believe they meant it.” His letters to Agnes are affectionate, but his leaving her so soon after their marriage raises questions.
Western heroes have long been portrayed as sadly isolated individuals, lone figures compelled to follow the far horizon. Even in that regard, Wild Bill seems to have set the standard. He would no sooner lose his heart than lose his scalp.
There have been numerous Wild Bills in movies and TV shows, both good and bad. My personal favorite was Jeff Bridges in Walter Hill’s Wild Bill, though the movie was disappointing. Who do you think are the best and worst Wild Bills?
Of the movie Wild Bills, Jeff Bridges’s performance stands out. Unfortunately, that film’s script killed Hickok quicker than Jack McCall ever did. Jeff Corey was also fun, in Little Big Man, and Keith Carradine did an exceptional turn in Deadwood. Actually, movies have not done well with Wild Bill Hickok, because his life was a fascinating series of disparate events. That is, it was episodic and without any overarching dramatic structure. It would work much better as the basis for a miniseries than in a theatrical film. The reason Wyatt Earp has eclipsed Hickok in popular culture isn’t because Earp was a more interesting character. It’s because Earp’s Tombstone experiences are structured like a real story. There’s a natural dramatic arc to it. So despite that fact that both William S. Hart and Gary Cooper played Wild Bill, the great film about the Prince of Pistoleers remains to be made.
The accounts of Hickok’s final days all have a sort of twilight-of-the-gods tinge to them. His eyesight was going bad and he seemed to be having a hard time living up to his legend. In retrospect, Deadwood was as good a place as any for him to cash in his chips, literally and figuratively. The circumstances of his murder by Jack McCall have always seemed somewhat muddled. Can you straighten them out for us?
Ostensibly, Wild Bill went to Deadwood to strike it rich, so as to properly support his new bride. However, after arriving in town he rarely if ever engaged in any serious prospecting. Mostly he just gambled, drank, and grew increasingly melancholy. It is said he had a grim premonition that he would soon meet his end.
And so, at around 3 p.m. on August 2, 1876, a furtive little drifter named Jack McCall blasted a hole in the back of Wild Bill’s skull. No one knows the why of it. McCall, a 25-year-old Kentuckian, gave three different explanations before he was finally hanged on March 1, 1877. First it was claimed Wild Bill had killed McCall’s brother in Kansas, and McCall was rightly acting out of family duty to revenge that slaying. Then he said he had been put up by a fellow named Johnny Varnes to get rid of Hickok. For some reason that possibility was never followed up on by any of the authorities. Finally McCall stated he didn’t even remember killing Wild Bill. The shooting had been done during what we would today call an alcoholic blackout. So the reason for the murder remains a mystery.
By 1876 Wild Bill Hickok represented frontier attitudes that were quickly being shoved aside by an increasingly refined civilization. For a man like him, there simply weren’t many places left to go. For a brief span of time James Butler Hickok was the perfect man in the perfect place. But when that moment passed, he quickly became an awkward anachronism. That he died a little over a month after Custer fell somehow seems most fitting.
Was he really holding aces and eights when he was killed?
Sure he was holding aces and eights. Hell, if he’d been holding queens and deuces, we’d be calling that the “dead man’s hand.” Whatever hand Wild Bill was holding when he cashed in his chips would have been instantly mythologized. Unless, of course, it was four jokers. Then they would have made up the aces-and-eights story, and no one would be any the wiser.