Wild Bill Hickok
Calamity Jane, the stage musical
Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, 1996
In cards, the term ‘Dead Man’s Hand’ – aces and eights – got its name through being the very hand Wild Bill Hickok was holding at 4:15 Wednesday afternoon on 2nd August 1876 when Cross-Eyed Jack McCall shot him through the back of the head in the Number Ten Saloon at Deadwood. It may not have been quite the way this quick-on-the-draw legend of the frontier would have wanted to go – Bill was only thirty-nine. But it certainly ensured his immortality.
He had been born James Butler Hickok at Troy Grove, Illinois on 27th May 1837. From the age of fifteen, when his father died, he had laid the foundations of a tough and rootless existence, working on wagon trains, hunting wolves and generally turning his hand to any outdoor task that came along. During the Civil War he joined the Union cause as a civilian volunteer, serving as scout, wagon master and spy. The adjective ‘Wild’ accrued to his name following his intervention when a friend found himself at the mercy of a lynch mob.
When the war ended he was appointed deputy marshal art Fort Riley, Kansas, then spent the next three years carrying mail and scouting for the army. The Indian wars brought him into contact with another legend of the West, General George Armstrong Custer, who spoke rapturously of him as a man after his own heart: “one of the most perfect examples of physical manhood I ever saw… his skill with rifle and pistol was unerring.” Custer’s wife was no less taken with him either, her reaction apparently typical among the women Bill encountered throughout his brief rumbustious life.
Following a tour of duty as guide to a senator, Bill was rewarded with a handsome pair of Colt .36 Navy revolvers which he wore butt-first as he marched into his next official appointment, marshal of Hays City, Kansas. In 1871, now as marshal of the booming new cattle town of Abilene, Kansas, his office was a card table in the Alamo Saloon. Here he succeeded in shooting dead local troublemaker Phil Coe and his own deputy Mike Williams, who had strayed into his line of fire by mistake. It was also around this time that he took up with Calamity Jane, and before the year was out they married, shortly afterwards producing a daughter, Janey. It was also in Abilene that Bill started to woo Agnes Lake, the owner of a travelling circus then passing through town…
Having appeared briefly with Buffalo Bill Cody’s first ever Wild West Show, within two years Hickok was back treading the boards as one of Buffalo Bill’s ‘Scouts of the Plains’. He finally left the troupe in March 1874 and made his way to Cheyenne, Wyoming where he dallied awhile, enjoying the fleshpots. By now his sight was failing and he took to wearing some of the world’s first pairs of dark glasses.
In 1876 Agnes Lake drifted into his life again and this time they married. A few weeks after the wedding on 5th March 1876 he was itching to hit the gold fields of the Black Hills, as eager to slough off domesticity as he was to make a million. On the way into the hinterland he again met up with Calamity Jane in Deadwood.
Sadly, the reunion was short-lived. Once Jack McCall’s Colt Peacemaker had done its work, Bill was given the finest funeral the rough shanty town of the Gulch could afford, finally being laid to rest in Deadwood’s cemetery at Ingleside. The plot where he now lies beside his sometime wife Calamity Jane in the town’s new cemetery is still marked by a life-size effigy of its most famous incumbent.
