Copyright by Gary L. Pullman
A Blond
A casting director who chooses an actor with black shoulder-length hair to portray Wild West legend Wild Bill Hickok might suppose that such a choice would be historically accurate, since surviving photographs of Hickok show him to have been a brunette. In fact, however, descriptions of the hero who was, at various times of his life, a fugitive, a stagecoach driver, soldier, an army scout, a town marshal, a cattle thief, a gambler, a showman, and an actor, reveal that Hickok was actually a blond.
A Bear Fighter
When Hickok crossed paths with a bear with her two cubs while he was hauling freight westward from Independence, Missouri, on his way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, he shot the mama bear in the head. She was hardheaded, though, and the bullet bounced off the animal's head, accomplishing nothing more than enraging the beast.
As the bear crushed him against her body, the teamster got off another shot, this time wounding his attacker in the paw. The bear responded by seizing Hickok's arm in her mouth. He could have lost the appendage, had he not been able to slash his attacker's throat with his knife. After four months in bed, he was dispatched to Rock Creek Station, Nebraska, to recover from his injuries while taking on the duties of a stable hand. This is the account of the incident, at least, provided by D. M. Kelsey, author of Our Pioneer Heroes and Their Daring Deeds.
Joseph G. Rosa, author of They Called Him Wild Bill, is more skeptical, declaring, “This legend has been repeated countless times, bowdlerized, twisted, and warped, and just how much truth there is in it has always been in doubt,” and probably originated with J. W. Buel, the city editor of the St. Louis Dispatch and an early Hickok biographer, who used the story to “boost the heroics of his character,” rather than with Hickok himself.
A Showman
Well before his friend (and later, briefly, his employer) “Buffalo Bill” Cody assembled his Wild West Show, Hickok put on his own version of a similar extravaganza. According to Life and Marvelous Adventures of Wild Bill, The Scout, by J. W. Buel, the show, featuring four Comanches and a half-dozen buffalo, took place in Niagara Falls, but attendees refused to cough up the admission fee, and, since the show took place outdoors, they couldn't be required to pay. There would be no repeat performance.
A Painter
He faced down Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, who claimed he'd turned the tables on Hickok by performing the maneuver known as the road agent's spin, twirling his six-gun around so that the barrel, rather than the butt, faced the lawman. The story is regarded as highly unlikely, given Hickok's own experience and skill as a gunfighter.
When Phil Coe and his business partner Ben Thompson painted one of the exterior walls of their establishment, the Bull's Head Saloon, with a painting of a bull sporting an erect penis, even the citizens of the rough-and-tumble cow town, Abilene, Kansas, were offended, demanding that Hickok order that the portrait be removed. When they balked, Hickok had the offending member painted over, causing further bad blood between the saloon owners and himself.
Complaining to Hardin of Hickok's high-handed response to their masterpiece, Thompson made a case to him for assassinating the marshal: “He's a damn Yankee. Picks on rebels, especially Texans, to kill.” Hardin, himself a Texan, as Thompson knew, did not take the bait. “If Bill needs killing, why don't you kill him yourself?” Hardin replied.
As Sarah Smarsh recounts in Outlaw Takes of Kansas: True Stories of the Sunflower State's Most Infamous Crooks, Culprits, and Cutthroats, Coe tried a different gambit. Hoping to cow Hickok, he boasted that he could “kill a crow on the wing.” The saloon owner's adversary asked, “Did the crow have a pistol? Was he shooting back? I will be.” Subsequently, as Hickok was dealing with a crowd during a street fight, the marshal killed Coe when the latter tried to shoot him.
On the same occasion, Hickok mistakenly killed his own deputy, Mike Williams, who was rushing to Hickok's assistance. As a result, Hickok was suspended and, later, traveled west, eventually to his death in Deadwood, Dakota Territory.
A Husband
Between Abilene and Deadwood, he briefly became a member of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, but his aversion to acting led to his departure from show business. Along the way, he married Agnes Thatcher Lake (Agnes Lake Hickok: Queen of the Circus, Wife of a Legend by Linda A. Fisher and Carrie Bowers).
A Dead Man
In Deadwood, while playing poker in a saloon, he was shot in the back of the head by Jack McCall. Hickok died almost immediately, and his prediction that he would be killed in Deadwood was fulfilled. The cards he was holding at the time of the shooting, a pair of aces, spades and clubs, and a pair of aces, also spades and clubs, became known as “the dead man's hand.”
The Butt of an Everlasting Practical Joke
Most of Deadwood's citizenry attended Hickok's funeral. Had Charles Rich, another of the gamblers participating in the game the night that Hickok was killed agreed to either of the famous gunfighter's two requests to change seats with him so that Hickok could face the saloon's door, Hickok would, in all likelihood, have dispatched McCall, had the drunken killer been bold enough to have tried to shoot Hickok face to face instead of in the back of the head.
Despite his marriage to Lake, Hickok's admirer was buried beside him, as had been her wish. According to some accounts, those who honored her last wish did so for their own amusement, it seems, as they explained their action by starting that Hickok had had “no use” for Jane, so they'd supposed their planting her next to him for eternity would be an appropriate prank.
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My series An Adventure of the Old West is available on Amazon, as a prequel novelette and and four single novels or as a boxed set of all five works.
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