Ep. 06: John Wesley Hardin vs Wild Bill Hickok

America’s first famous gunfighter also happens to have been a titanic fraud. Join best-selling author Bryan Burrough as he dives separates the into facts from the fictions enveloping the career of Wild Bill Hickok. Thank you to our sponsor, Tecovas tecovas.com. Follow now on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu?si=56a282df832a4bd2, iHeart, and YouTube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O&si=TG3vGnVvFhznWz0g. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  In May 1871, when seventeen-year-old John Wesley Harden finished driving a herd of Texas cattle up the Chisholm Trail to the bustling cow town of Abilene, Kansas, more than a few friends sensed he was destined for a violent confrontation with the town's new marshal, who happened to be the most famous gunfighter in America, one of the few most Americans they'd ever heard of. Harden, who had already shot and killed at least seventeen men by that point, declared he wasn't looking for trouble, but he wouldn't run from it either. The confrontation did, in fact, become one of the most famous of the gunfighter era. It happened one morning, probably that June, when Harden and some of his cowboy pals got rowdy playing tenpence in a bowling alley.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  When Hickock was called, he walked in, pulled the pistol, and knowing what Harden was capable of, demanded he hand over his guns. It was a tense moment. The two of them, viewed as legends of the Old West today, the heralded lawman and the teenage Texas killer, both known for being quick to the trigger, standing there sizing one another up. And then Harden, probably staring into Hickock's eyes, handed his guns forward. Butts first. If you've listened to or watched the last episode, you can guess what he did next. Harden whirled the guns around his hands, the move known as the road agent spin, AKA the barrel roll. Suddenly, it was Hickock facing the barrel of a gun.

• 3:05Speaker 03

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• 3:19Speaker 03

  Hey y'all, it's Brian. Welcome to episode six of the Gunfighters. You know, it was pretty rare for two name-brand gunfighters to face off against each other in the Old West, but it did happen. And this was one of the most famous such confrontations. I'll tell you how it played out in a moment, but let me just set the scene for you first. Because in the annals of the gunfighter era, Abilene in that summer of seventy-one was the first place in America that would go down as an historic theater of gunfighter violence. Abilene may not have seen the most brutal violence in the Old West, but what it did have was unprecedented star power, plus proximity and railroad access to big city newspapers in Chicago and St. Louis, whose readers were startled to suddenly see stories of lawmen

• 4:04Speaker 03

  and rowdy Texas cowboys shooting each other just a few hours away. So if you're new to all this, you might be wondering, what on earth are Texas cowboys doing in some random town in Kansas in the middle of nowhere, shooting up stuff? The answer, of course, is cattle, Texas cattle. And this is important enough to our story to pause for a touch of background. Texas was the undisputed capital of the beef cattle business, thanks to the hardy animals you probably know today only as football mascots, the ornery Texas longhorn. There were about 1.2 million of them in the state when the Civil War broke out, most sold locally or into nearby states. But after a year or two of war, the business pretty much froze.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  There was no longer any way to safely herd the animals anywhere to be sold. The longhorns themselves, though, just kept doing their thing out on the open range, eating, breeding, and multiplying. By the time the war ended, there were an astounding five million of them, mostly roaming the coastal plains of South Texas, just waiting to be roped and sold. But where to sell them? The South lay in ruins. There was no market for beef in New Orleans or Shreveport anymore, so cattlemen looked north. The big stockyards in Chicago had actually just opened, and the demand there was huge. The problem was getting the cattle from Texas to Chicago. There weren't yet any railroads that went north from Texas.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  A few cattlemen tried to bring their herds up cross-country to the railroads in Missouri, but several of these efforts were turned back, one or two at the point of a gun. The problem was, there were stories that longhorns carried a deadly tick fever, they called it Texas fever, and several states actually began banning them. Kansas was one of those states. But as the railroads started building track west, further and further into the state, they started pressuring lawmakers to let Texas cattle in. In eighteen sixty-seven, the state legislature finally agreed. Texans rejoiced. Getting the animals there meant long-distance trail drives, which was not an entirely new thing by that point.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  For years, a handful of ambitious Texas cattlemen had been moving herds overland all the way to Denver, and one or two as far away as California. The drives they began launching to Kansas, though, were a different thing, a massive undertaking, hundreds of thousands of animals, accompanied by seemingly half the cowboys in Texas, all riding north to sell these cows, thronging the state's southern plains. There were fortunes to be made. Overnight, new trails began to be blazed north.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  The first and greatest of these was the Chisholm Trail, which rose outside San Antonio, passed up through Belton and Waco, crossed the Red River into Indian Territory, and then headed to one of the railheads in central Kansas. It was generally a three- or four-month trip, usually a few hundred cattle at a time and a few dozen cowboys, all of it out in the open, totally exposed to the elements. It was dangerous work. Longhorns were big and mean, practically wild animals, and prone to stampedes. Just getting them across the Red and other rivers was really scary stuff. From a cattlerman's point of view, the drives were about business, about money.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  But from a cultural standpoint, from our standpoint, the far more important fact was that, for the first time, hundreds of rambunctious young Texans, almost all of them products of the state's hyper-violent customs, were flooding into a series of placid little Midwestern towns that had little to no experience with the kind of wild and violent behavior Texans all but took for granted. This was the moment many Americans began hearing a new term, cowboy. And let's be clear, they were all, at least in those early years, from Texas. The term Texas cowboy, in fact, was redundant. For years, there was no other kind. And these were not a bunch of dreamy, crooning buckaroos, your Gene Autry or Audie Murphy

• 8:09Speaker 03

  types, until Buffalo Bill's Old West show and then Hollywood Westerns came along and civilized their images. Americans viewed cowboys very differently than they do today, as wild, roaming menaces, quick to take offense and quick on the trigger. Think of the Cossacks in Russia. That's how cowboys were regarded for an awful long time. And there was an element of truth to all this. The Texans who grew up steeped in their home state's post-war violence viewed the world very different than, say, a farmer in Illinois. They had to. It was in the Texans' DNA. Most of these cowboys were basically just spirited country boys, sometimes away from home for the first time, looking to blow off steam after months in the wilderness.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Many had little experience with hard alcohol or women, and were almost always eager to prove their manhood. One surefire way for a young Texas male to do that? Shoot someone. I'm not kidding here. You can read this in any number of cowboy memoirs. One of the best, by a cowboy named Teddy Blue Abbott, notes that he'd been, quote, "itching to shoot somebody in order to prove myself." These cowboys got a reputation for shooting a man for the smallest infractions, cutting in on a dance, name-calling, bumping shoulders, being refused to drink.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  So when Kansas opened to Texas cattle, these were the men who came riding up alongside them. A series of dusty towns sprang up to greet them, built not only to process the cattle, but also to entertain the Texas cowboys who risked their lives in the business. What followed, pretty much for the entire decade of the 1870s, was a series of violent cattle seasons that really set the stage for this gunfighter era. The five main Kansas cow towns, from Abilene to the fabled Dodge City, kind of passed the Texas cowboys like a baton, each taking over a center of the cattle trade when its predecessor got sick of the trouble the Texans brought. In turn, these towns became kind of the Madison Square Garden of the gunfighter era, the place

• 10:15Speaker 03

  where so many of its marquee gunmen first made their marks, from Wes Harden to Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. The first of these towns was Abilene, which at the end of the Civil War was a collection of mud huts on empty land in the middle of the state. But then came the railroad. Just weeks after Kansas lawmakers allowed the Longhorns Inn, a savvy Illinois cattle trader named Joseph McCoy bought 250 acres on the edge of town and opened holding pens. McCoy sent envoys to Texas to tell cattlemen that while they might not be welcome in Missouri, Abilene would be glad to have them. When the first herds rumbled in during the spring of 68, the Texans were amazed to find

• 10:58Speaker 03

  McCoy had built them a three-story hotel, the Drovers Cottage. By 1870, Abilene had become a true boomtown, and a unique one at that, a kind of Texas-themed adult amusement park. There were bars, dance halls, and gambling dens, designed to make men and boys from Belton and Victorian Bastrop feel at home. The main drag was Texas Street. There were bars like the Longhorn and the Lone Star, and of course, a luxurious tavern called the Alamo, which featured a 40-foot veranda. Once the herds started arriving each spring, the population of Abilene ballooned to 7,000 or so people, mostly the incoming Texans, but also the prostitutes and gamblers who

• 11:43Speaker 03

  came to serve them. In those first years, things were actually fairly calm. Abilene's town marshal, a man named Tom Smith, was a stern guy who preferred using his fists to his colt. He'd made an example of a few cowboys early on, and after that, had the streets pretty well under control. But then, during a routine arrest in 1870, Smith was shot and killed by a homesteader. Outside of Abilene, this was no big news, but that shooting set in motion a series of events that turned this nowhere town into an American legend. And that's mostly because of the man Abilene hired as its next marshal, a man who happened to be the most famous gunfighter in America, really, the only gunfighter most Americans

• 12:28Speaker 03

  had ever heard of, Wild Bill Hickok. There's something you need to know up front about James Butler Hickok, America's first celebrity gunfighter, the man who practically invented the roll. It's something that's absolutely clear from the historical record, something his biographers have repeatedly proven, but that few people ever come out and actually say, and it's this: This guy was a total fraud. Wild Bill Hickok, quite simply, was an invention, born of his own fantasies, along with a succession of journalists who repeated and embellished his tall tales. This is the reason you know his name. It's what made him the first famous gunfighter. Later on, men like Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid were cast into the same mold, but Hickok

• 13:12Speaker 03

  was the first. To my mind, the most impressive thing about the guy is that, over time, he actually kind of began to grow into the legend he concocted. Some of this was just happenstance, and some was his own hard work. But over time, you can make the case Hickok really did become a lawman and a gunfighter of note, feared and respected. And then, with one big mistake, he shot the wrong man, Hickok threw it all away and spiraled into a boozy twilight with a fitting sad little end. He was born in Illinois in 1837, a farmer's son, tall and thin, with reddish hair down to his shoulders, and his most distinctive feature, that ski jump of a nose.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  As a boy, he took regular target practice, and he was a good marksman from the start. We're told he practiced pretty much every day of his life. When he was 18, we're told, he got into a fight with another teenager, and during the scrap, they both fell into a canal. Hickok thought mistakenly that the other boy had drowned. That's the story he always told, at least, and maybe it's true. I think it's a little questionable, but whatever happened, we know he ran away west to Kansas. He worked off and on, taking a constable's job at one point, until he found steadier work driving freight wagons all the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, until he was mauled by a bear, which happens.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Hickok's origin story as a gunfighter is one writers have combed over for years, and I think we finally about got it right. It happened on July 12, 1861, in the first weeks of the Civil War, at the Rock Creek Stagecoach Station in southeast Nebraska. Hickok was 24. He'd been sent there to recover after his run-in with that bear. Hickok's job was to tend the horses. His boss, a man named Horace Wellman, had gotten into a row with the previous owner of the station, a Bellico Southerner named David McCandless. McCandless had insisted the company still owed him money, and on that day, he showed

• 15:21Speaker 03

  up outside Wellman's house by the station and loudly demanded to be paid. He brought along a shotgun, a pair of slouching henchmen, and his 12-year-old son. Standing there at the door, McCandless berated Wellman. This wasn't the first time poor Wellman had heard all this. After a bit, he tired of it all and stepped aside. McCandless then turned to Mrs. Wellman and began berating her. When she'd had enough, Hickok loomed in the doorway. There was already bad blood between the two men. Maybe it was a woman, maybe it was because Hickok's people were abolitionists, or maybe just because McCandless enjoyed teasing him about his nose.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  Legend has it he's the one who first called Hickok "Duck Bill." There on the porch, McCandless spat that this was none of Hickok's business. Hickok's laconic reply, we're told, was...

• 16:15Speaker 04

  Perhaps it is, or it ain't.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Hickok, wearing a colt, stepped back inside. McCandless followed him in and got to berating poor Wellman again. At some point, McCandless made some kind of gesture with his shotgun. At that moment, a shot rang out. McCandless fell dead. A bullet threw his heart. His son fell to his side in tears. When one of the henchmen outside rushed in, Hickok shot him too. This was a guy named James Wood, and wounded badly, he staggered out and collapsed in the yard. Hickok then shot the third man, James Gordon, who managed to limp off into a thicket. Mrs. Wellman stepped out and finished off Wood with a garden hoe, and then Gordon was killed by a blast from a shotgun.

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• 20:11Speaker 03

  In less than a minute, three men were dead. A boy was left orphaned. And we honestly don't know whether any of it was justified. The boy was ruled too young to testify, so there was no court case. One newspaper covered the event and then it was forgotten. But then, of course, years later, Hickok became a national celebrity. And the killings of McCandless and his men became sort of his Rosebud moment, if you will, scrutinized by generations of writers seeking to understand the man Hickok would become. For the time being, though, he was still a nobody. He spent the Civil War as a wagon master and then a Union scout in Missouri and Kansas. And then, after a shootout with Davis, Tut and Springfield, out of nowhere,

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Hickok was approached by a magazine writer. His name was George Ward Nichols. Nichols had been on William Tecumseh Sherman's staff during the war and went on to write a profile of the Union general, which he then parlayed into a job at one of the nation's top magazines, Harper's New Monthly Magazine. No one knows how Nichols stumbled on Hickok, but Hickok sat for extensive interviews in the weeks after he killed Tut. Was it Nichols' plan all along to concoct this legend around Hickok? Honestly, to me, the evidence suggests yes. It's possible he was just naive and really believed that Hickok was the man he described in his profile. The article ran in January 1867, a year and a half after the shootout,

• 21:40Speaker 03

  and it was a jaw-dropping exercise in myth-making. In the story, based on little more than their interviews, Hickok emerges as the deadliest gun in the West, an American legend on the order of Jack the Giant Killer or Sinbad the Sailor. Meeting Hickok, Nichols wrote, "You would not believe that you were looking into the eyes that have pointed the way to death to hundreds of men. Yes, Wild Bill with his own hands has killed hundreds of men. Of that, I have no doubt."

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Maybe you're wondering if you've missed something here. You have not. At this point, Hickok is known to have killed precisely two people. Four, if you count the McCandless henchmen. This article was the most consequential thing ever written about an old West figure during his lifetime. Nichols didn't use the word gunfighter. But in this one story, he invented the archetype. Hickok, this anonymous unemployed war veteran, overnight became one of the most famous men in the West, if not the country. The first dime novel appeared soon after, and it wouldn't be the last. Easterners ate this shit up, but folks who actually knew Hickok were left confused. Wait, a deadly gunman? Bill Hickok?

• 22:55Speaker 03

  The best line was from the paper in Springfield, which noted that some in town, quote, "are excessively indignant, but the great majority are in convulsions of laughter." The amazing thing is he got away with it. Later, another New York reporter tracked Hickok to Fort Riley, Kansas, for a follow-up interview and asked him point-blank how many white men he had killed. Hickok took a moment and replied,

• 23:19Speaker 04

  "I suppose I have killed considerably over 100."

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Maybe he was leaning into his new celebrity or just teasing. But when the reporter gaped at him, Hickok assured him he, quote, "I have never killed one man without good cause." Hickok, it's clear, enjoyed his newfound celebrity. He liked becoming a somebody. In time, he adopted a flashy wardrobe, check trousers, Prince Albert coats and a silk caper tube. What many noticed, though, was how careful he got, especially once he became a lawman. He'd sit with his back to the wall and walk down the middle of streets to avoid the shadows. Hickok didn't get rich off all this, but it did open doors. After working as a scout in campaigns against Plains tribes,

• 24:05Speaker 03

  he was named marshal of the town of Hayes, next to Fort Hayes in central Kansas. This was in August 1869. People there soon noticed the unhurried, cool way Hickok carried himself, his steady gaze and the unusual way he wore his two colts. It was noticeable enough just to wear two guns. Most wore a single pistol low or strapped to a thigh. But Hickok wore his high above his waist with the butts facing forward. This led him to use his right hand to draw the gun from his left side and vice versa, what people call a cross draw. It might have allowed him to fire his pistol a touch faster, though Hickok always downplayed the need for speed. What mattered more, he always said, was accuracy.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  Hayes was one of the tougher towns in Kansas in those days, and Hickok was quickly involved in two killings in his first six weeks on the job. The first involved a drunk named Bill Mulvey, who rampaged around town, shooting up several bars. Mulvey was on horseback, holding a cocked rifle when Hickok appeared. Hickok shouted, "Don't shoot him in the back, he's drunk." When Mulvey turned around to see who was there behind him, there was no one behind him. Hickok shot him through the temple. Pretty clever, or depending how you view such things, a dirty trick. A month later, a notorious tough named Samuel Strawhun

• 25:32Speaker 03

  was in town with a bunch of cowboys wrecking another saloon and tossing glasses into the street. Hickok arrived and picked up several glasses and carried them inside. Apparently referring to the poor barkeep at the saloon, Hickok told him,

• 25:47Speaker 04

  "Boys, you had not to treat a poor man in this way."

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Strawhun was offended. He told Hickok he'd throw more glasses if he wanted. Hickok told him, "Do and they will carry you out." Strawhun made some kind of move and Hickok shot him through the neck.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Both these killings, at least according to the coroner, were justified. But I have my doubts. I mean, why use deadly force here? There's no sense Hickok or anyone else was in mortal danger. Could it be that Hickok was just inexperienced? Or, and this is what I've always kind of secretly suspected, was he acting out the part of deadly gunman to justify his reputation? Whatever the reason, Hickok was defeated in an election barely six weeks later. Five months after that, he got himself a new job offer 120 miles east in the town of Abilene. Hickok was sworn in as Abilene's new marshal on April 15th, 1871,

• 26:48Speaker 03

  just as the season's first cattle herds began rumbling into the pastures outside town. One of them was overseen by John Wesley Harden and his cousins, and Harden's arrival was not without incident. A few days below Abilene, near the banks of the Little Arkansas River, a herd supervised by Mexican vaqueros had run into Harden's, mixing up the cattle. There was an argument, then some insults, then a vaquero shot Harden's way. He fired back, wounding the man. Calmer heads prevailed, but just as Harden and his cousins felt the matter settled, six of the vaqueros charged the Texans. In a wild gunfight, all six vaqueros ended up dead.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Harden claimed to have killed five of them. By the time he bought his first drinks up in Abilene, he found he had earned a new nickname, Little Arkansas.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  Hickok probably knew something of Harden's notoriety, perhaps even that he was a wanted man. But bringing in fugitives from another state was not in his job description. At one point, we're told, he simply greeted Harden, shook his hand and told him to try and stay out of trouble. Trouble, though, was just what a Texas gambler named Ben Thompson was trying to stir up. Thompson, as it happens, was on his way to becoming one of the greatest gunfighters of them all. I'll tell you his story in the next episode. But in Abilene that summer, he appears in our story just as a bar owner trying to get Harden to kill Hickok. Thompson and his partner had arrived from the Texas capital of Austin

• 28:25Speaker 03

  and opened a bar and gambling hall they called the Bull's Head Saloon. Already a well-traveled gambler at 17, Harden knew both men from Texas. And as he told the story years later, he walked into the Bull's Head to find Thompson just livid at Hickok. As the story goes, the saloon's sign had featured, of all things, a bull's erect penis. Many in town stunningly were offended. Thompson refused to take it down. So Hickok, we're told, brought in a painter and stood by as the sign was painted over. Afterward, Ben Thompson complained that Hickok was this damn Yankee who hated Southerners, especially Texans.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  So Thompson asked Harden if he would kill him. Years later, Harden wrote that Thompson, quote, "He tried to prejudice me every way he could against Bill. I said..." If Bill needs killing, why don't you kill him yourself? And that for the moment was that. But this was the prelude to the story you heard at the top of the episode. That morning in June, when Hickok turned up at the bowling alley and demanded Harden hand over his guns and suddenly found himself in a standoff with the Texas teenager. Once he executed the border roll, Harden had the clear advantage. Apparently Ben Thompson, in an effort to goad Harden into killing Hickok, had told him Hickok was planning to kill him first.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Standing there, Harden cursed Hickok as a long-haired scoundrel, determined to do him in. He warned his pals not to get involved, saying he would kill the first man who tried. Clearly, he was working himself into a serious lather. Hickok, though, kept his composure. He replied evenly, quote, "Why, little Arkansas, you have been wrongly informed." You know, relax, let's have a drink and discuss this. And amazingly, given Harden's knack for shooting just about anyone for just about any reason, that's what happened. They settled things. It's gone down as one of the greatest non-gun fights in Old West history.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Maybe Harden was still itching for a fight, though. Later that same day, and this story has never been confirmed, there's never been a mention found in newspapers or court records, Harden says he was drinking with a one-armed cowboy he called Payne. A drunk in the bar was insulting Texans, and Harden announced, "I'm a Texan." The drunk pulled his gun and fired, hitting Payne in his remaining arm. As the drunk ran for the door, Harden shot him through the mouth. One biographer wrote that as the man fell forward, his, quote, "teeth scattered all over the streets." Vivid. Harden's next two shootings, though, have been confirmed.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  In late June, a vicarage named Juan Bedano argued with a popular young Texas cowboy and shot him in the back, killing him. While the cowboy received one of the larger funerals Abilene to that point had seen, Harden and three Texans rode in search of Bedano, figuring he was heading back to Texas. A hundred and thirty miles south, at a hotel in the town of Sumner City, they found him seated at a table, a cup of coffee to his lips. Bedano didn't have a chance to move before Harden drew his Colt and shot him in the face. By one account, Harden gave the hotel's proprietor $5 to clean up the mess.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Harden returned to a hero's welcome in Abilene, but his summer wasn't quite over. On August 6th, word spread that a Texas cattlemen named Charles Cougar had been murdered in his room at the American Hotel. This became one of the most notorious of Harden's killings. We know he did it. The question has always been why? Years later, Harden claimed he'd shot an assassin sneaking into his room. I doubt that. The one news account we have says Cougar had been reading in his bed when he was struck by four bullets fired through the hotel room wall. The most popular version in Old West lore is that Harden killed the man for snoring,

• 32:43Speaker 03

  apparently while he was drunk. As one of his biographers tells it, Harden yelled for Cougar to roll over and speculates that when the snoring persisted, Harden fired the shots to get the guy's attention, not to kill him. So maybe the evidence is thin here, but I don't know, it does make a weird kind of sense. Why else would you shoot someone through a wall in the middle of the night? I mean, it's not like they were having an argument. Anyway, after it happened, Hickok was on the scene within minutes. Just as Hickok runs into the hotel, Harden and one of his cousins jump off a low roof and run away, hiding in a haystack till morning. They stole horses and then surprised and disarmed a group of deputies when they rode into their campsite.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Then Harden and his cousin rode hard to Texas. They got there in just a few days. Wes Harden had spent barely two months in Kansas and killed, depending on how you count it, seven or possibly eight men. The last gunfight of that cattle season was Hickok's, and it was a tragic thing. It happened two months later, on the night of October 5th. A crowd of cowboys was out on a farewell pub crawl. Hickok was standing outside the novelty theater with his deputy, this guy Mike Williams. A shot rang out around the corner, near the Alamo. Hickok said, "Be right back," and circled around to the back of the bar, walked through it, and stepped out onto its wide front veranda.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  There was a crowd there in the street. Hickok demanded to know who fired the shot. The man who spoke up was Ben Thompson's partner, the well-known Texas gambler Phil Coe. Coe was a large belligerent man, six foot four with a black pompadour. He confessed it was his shot, that he'd shot a dog. These two had a history, Hickok and Coe. Maybe over a woman, more likely an accusation that Coe was fixing card games. Hickok yelled at the crowd and told the cowboys to disarm and leave town. It was then, evidently without warning, that Phil Coe drew his pistol and fired. His shot missed.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  Hickok pulled both of his, fired back, he didn't miss. Two of his bullets struck Coe in the midsection. Mortal wounds. And then, barely a moment later, another man comes racing around the corner to Hickok's left, his pistol drawn. Hickok wheeled and fired two shots. The crowd gasped. The running man, it turned out, was Hickok's deputy, Mike Williams, coming to help. And he was killed instantly. It was a horrible accident, but it's easy to see how it happened, given how freely Hickok fired his guns. We can only guess what Hickok felt at that moment. The only comment he offered was directed at the crowd.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  He told them, quote, "If any of you want the balance of these pills," meaning bullets, "come and get them." Hickok carried Williams' body into the Alamo and laid it across a poker table. Then he went from bar to bar, telling all the Texans to get out of town right then or die. He sent word to the deputy's family the next day, and later he paid for the funeral. All that season's shootings, Harden's and Hickok's alike, have gone down as some of the most famous in frontier history. I think that's mostly because of Hickok's fame and all those witnesses, too. Back in Texas, meanwhile, Phil Coe had been a popular bar owner and gambler.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  The Texas papers called for Hickok's head, painting him as this bloodthirsty Yankee murderer. Taken together, all this put Abilene and other Kansas cowtowns on the cultural map, so that when shootings erupted in later years, reporters were far more prone to consider this newsworthy. It's one reason we've heard so much about so many of these killings. Abilene, though, had had enough. It wanted nothing else to do with Texas cowboys and their violent ways. That winter, city fathers announced they would, quote, "no longer submit to the evils of the trade." They fired Hickok around the same time. He was never really the same after that, not really.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Some said he never got over shooting his deputy. He also developed some kind of degenerative eye disease, we still can't be sure what it was, but bright lights and sun glare began to bother him. For the rest of his life, he often wore blue-tinted glasses. For the next three years, Hickok toured the Northeast in various Wild West shows, including productions by his friend Buffalo Bill Cody. At least once, Hickok got so upset he shot out a light because it hurt his eyes. And he found the performances kind of soul-killing, hamming up for the crowd, you know, spouting flowery speeches and pretending to kill Buffalo and Comanche.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  He started complaining about the work more and more, started flubbing his lines and started drinking heavily. Late in 1874, in the middle of a show in Rochester, New York, he suddenly tears off his buckskins, puts on street clothes, and stalks out of the theater for good. By early 1875, Hickok had returned west, this time to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he settled into a quiet life as a gambler. He gave up the show he closed. One writer who ran into him there said he, quote, "might easily have been taken for a Quaker minister." Hickok was still just 38, a young man, but he developed rheumatism in his knee and began walking with a cane.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  A marshal who took a disliking to him arrested him at one point for vagrancy. This was a common charge against unwanted gamblers, and he was warned to leave town. He decided to try South Dakota, where gold had just been found. And so, in July 1876, he arrived in a new boomtown, Deadwood. Outside town, where he camped with some friends, he tended to start each day with target practice and a shot of whiskey. He sometimes passed the rest of the day at saloon number 10, playing poker or sitting at the bar and regaling his audience with tales of his exploits. On August 1st, Hickok was at the saloon playing poker, dressed in his favorite frock

• 39:14Speaker 03

  coat and black sombrero. A drunk named Jack McCall was there, too, and he was losing big. Hickok encouraged McCall to take a break. He actually slid him some money for a meal. The next afternoon, for reasons no one's ever been able to explain, Jack McCall returned, and rather than thank Hickok for his generosity, he circled around where Hickok was playing and placed a Colt 45 to his temple. With the words "damn you, take that," he pulled the trigger. Hickok died instantly. McCall hanged for it. Wild Bill Hickok may have been America's first celebrity gunfighter, but you know,

• 39:57Speaker 03

  it's really the only legacy he left. He's had his share of books and bad movies in the last 150 years. I thought the arc on HBO's Deadwood series was maybe the best I've seen, but he's never really drawn the kind of fan base Wyatt Earp or Billy the Kid or Jesse James enjoy. I think that's because there's no easy narrative arc to his life, right? No clear storyline and no moral to what story there was. He was just a nobody who got caught in a lucky lie, and that's really the only reason he's remembered.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  I'm Brian Burrow and this has been episode six of The Gunfighters. Thanks so much for coming by. Hope we'll see you next time when we'll be talking about one of my favorite gunfighters, maybe the most famous gunfighter you've almost certainly never heard of, a man some called the deadliest gun in the Old West.

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• 42:46Speaker 00

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