Tom Clavin - Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter

After finishing Dodge City, about the lawmen and cowboys and outlaws who made it the wildest of Wild West cow towns in the 1870s, and especially after it became a national bestseller, a natural question was Whats next? Well, next turned out not to be going forward in time but to step back a few years. Before the heyday of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, and other iconic figures who continue to populate our books and screens, there was arguably the most iconic of all: James Butler Hickok.

Some people may think we know his story, the gallant plainsman and gunslinger who helped dozens of villains to meet their maker and who romanced perhaps the most notorious female figure of the Wild West, Calamity Jane. Those are indeed elements of the Wild Bill story, but, thankfully, the true and still to some degree untoldaccuratelytale of the man known as Wild Bill is pretty surprising. Once again, as with Dodge City, it was a delight to discover that the truthas far as we can know itis at least as exciting and fascinating, if not more so, than the legends that have been attributed to Wild Bill Hickok.

The legends cant be ignored, however. For the most part, they are why we know (or think we know) Wild Bill today. He was indeed the first gunfighter on the expanding American frontier, and he was the first postCivil War celebrity of the West. There had been legendary figures before Hickok, especially Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and Kit Carson. But Wild Bill became bigger than all of them in the mind of a gullible and impressionable public, especially those on the east side of the Missouri River. He was an American legend by the time he was thirty years old, and by the end of the nineteenth century, only his good friend Buffalo Bill Cody, who transformed from army scout and hunter to shameless showman, and outlived Hickok by four decades, came close to Wild Bills legendary status in the public imagination.

That Hickok was famous while still young was something of a curse. To me, one of the most important aspects of the life of James Butler Hickok is his story would have fit snugly in a portfolio of Shakespeares tragedies. (Remarkably, and suitably, there was a connection between the Hickok family and the Bard of Avon.) From humble origins, Hickok ascended to a great height, and then, from a combination of his own flaws and the cruelties of fate, he fell. There was one final opportunity for redemption and lasting love, and then suddenly his life was snatched away. Still, the fame he left behind has continued for 150 years with Wild Bill Hickok being depicted in countless books and movies and television shows.

Today, Wyatt Earp, perhaps, equals Hickok as an icon of the American West. But Wild Bills adventures and exploits, his triumphs and tragedies, came first. And during the finest years of his all-too-brief life, which ended at thirty-nine, there wasnt a man alive who could beat him. Looking at the landscape, I really had no choice but to answer the question Whats next? with Wild Bill Hickok.

A quick note about sources and the true story: A good amount of material has been published about Hickok, beginning with the so-called dime-store novels that began appearing while he was still alive. Even more serious attempts, such as The Plainsman, Wild Bill Hickok by Frank J. Wilstach and Wild Bill and His Era by William Connelley, liberally included fictions as well as a generous sprinkling of embellishments and exaggerations. The Englishman Joseph G. Rosa found a career in writing about Hickok, and one has to admire his relentless, decades-long efforts to track down every tidbit of information, though the result of his 1964 biography was a somewhat mind-numbing saga of facts and disclaimers and rebuttals ricocheting off each other.

As with Dodge City, I sifted through every source I could get my hands on, and at the end of each day, a little more gold had been collected in the pan. These nuggets added up to a book that once more demonstrates that the truth can be at least as dramatic and potent as the fabrications. What is no exaggeration is that the man we know as Wild Bill Hickok was one of the most intriguing figures in American history.