Dispatch XVI

Hickok Draws the Dead Man’s Hand

Day 51 - November 15, 2021

Cyndy and I rolled into Deadwood, SD in a rental car, not on horses, and we didn’t carry even a single revolver on our hips. We paid the fee for parking and headed to Main St. to explore one of the wild west’s most notorious cities, and citizens …

Jack McCall was having a bad day at Nuttal & Mann's No. 10 Saloon. It was August 1876 and hot, and he was drunk, losing at Five Card Stud, almost out of money.  William Butler Hickok gazed across the game table at McCall and suggested it might be best to stop playing and cover his losses. Hickok may have twirled his substantial mustache and pushed back his long head of brown, wavy hair before he offered to give the stranger some money for breakfast. McCall didn’t like it, but took the advice, and the meal.

The next day Hickok was playing poker again at Nuttal & Mann’s. Mostly that’s the way he passed his time. His days as a gunslinger were over. He wasn’t yet 40, but had already developed advanced glaucoma. That rendered him not nearly as useful as he had been as a soldier and spy in the Civil War, and then marshal and sheriff in Kansas where he had “restored order” to the towns of Hays and Abeline; where he had worked as a wagon master, and scouted with General George Custer, become known as the “Prince of Pistoleers,” and survived hand to hand combat with a bear that crushed his chest and shattered an arm. His killing pedigree in a murderous land was long, and he was still the most famous gunfighter in the American West. Earlier in his life a few people had called him Duckbill Hickok for his long, straight nose and protruding lips, but for some time now everyone knew him as Wild Bill. He hadn’t killed the hundreds of men that dime novelist George Ward Nichols had written he did, but several had fallen at the other end of his twin, ivory-handled, Colt Navy pistols — the revolvers that seemed to appear like magic in his hand before he fired.

Generally people gave him a fair degree of latitude.

“Boys, I’m Killed”

One of his most famous gunslinging exploits happened in Springfield, Missouri on a July day 1865, when Hickok was barely 18. He and a gambler named Davis Tutt had gotten into it over a woman and a watch Hickok had lost in a card game. Both men decided to face off in a duel in the town square. They stood sideways 75 yards apart. Tutt's shot missed. At 75 yards most men’s would. But Hickok's struck Tutt through the heart. “Boys,” Tutt called out, “I’m killed.” It’s considered the first quick draw gunfight of the American West.

There were plenty of other killings too, all of them quick and lethal, until in an 1871 gun battle in Abilene he accidentally killed his partner as he came to his aid. After that he never killed another man.

When Hickok played cards at Nutall and Mann’s, he always faced the doorway. But the day after his brief talk with Jack McCall, the only seat available was a chair facing away from the door. Wild Bill asked Charles Rich to change seats with him, twice, but Rich refused. So Hickok took a seat with his back to the saloon entrance.

Cards were being dealt when McCall walked into the saloon. He was drunk again, and nursing the insult he felt Hickok had inflicted upon him the day before. Standing behind Hickok, McCall pulled his Colt .45, barked, "Damn you! Take that!" and shot the west’s most famous gunfighter through the head. On the table lay the hand he held, two aces and two eights, known forever afterwards as the dead man’s hand.

Deadwood, South Dakota

You could write volumes about Deadwood and its checkered past; maybe even create a TV series about its wild days as a gold rush boomtown where vice seemed more at ease than virtue. Cyndy and I wandered along Main Street. The sky was the color of periwinkle. Here and there a tourist passed, but the streets were otherwise ghostly. In 1961 the entire town was designated a National Historic Landmark because so many of its buildings had survived the 150 years since its emergence. They had the look of a classic Hollywood set, except for the cement sidewalks and parking meters. The wood facades and big glass windows were still there waiting to be shot out by Steve McQueen or John Wayne.

Deadwood, South Dakota nowadays (Photo Chip Walter) and in 1876 the year Hickok was shot. (Unknown author - GeoEpochePanorama, Nr.13, 2018, p. 90)

In 1989 the state legislature legalized gambling in Deadwood, and for a while it was the only place you could do such a thing legally outside of Las Vegas and Atlantic City. You can still gamble in Deadwood, but there wasn’t much of it going on that we could see. Covid hadn’t helped according to the waitress we talked to when Cyn and I walked into the Mineral Palace Hotel and Casino for lunch. A determined woman with graying hair,  jeans and a half empty beer sat alone playing at a row of empty slot machines.

Upstairs we ordered lunch and gazed at the street where guns had been slung, claims jumped and drunk men murdered over the love of the prostitutes at Madam Dora DuFran’s brothel. Pictures of Deadwood’s Chinatown, and a portrait of Wild Bill Hickok hung on the walls along with framed sepia tones of Deadwood saloons, cat houses and the very hotel where we were eating lunch.

We consumed a roast beef sandwich.

It somehow seemed the right thing to do.

Carrie Moniot, a fellow Vagabond and journalist who worked at KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh (after I departed), said her mom and her brothers used to play in the Mount Moriah Cemetery where Hickok and Calamity Jane lay buried, along with Sheriff Seth Bullock, a close friend of Teddy Roosevelt. (Wyatt Earp had originally offered to take the job, but deferred to Bullock.) Another Vagabond, Rick Starr, wrote me, “My Dad (and 6 siblings) grew up in Deadwood. Grandma was head maid at the Deadwood Hotel for decades (there’s a plaque somewhere). They lived up on a mountainside so steep that houses were on one side of the street only and you could see over the roof of the next one down below, even though it was a three story house. She walked to work every day, including during snow and ice storms.” And Kim Shumaker got in touch to say there is a great song by Nanci Griffith called Deadwood South Dakota. “It’s the perfect song to listen to on your visit.” (You can listen at the end of this Dispatch.)

Gold Fever in the Black Hills

William Hickok hadn’t been in Deadwood long before he died, no more than a couple of weeks. The July day he arrived, the town wasn’t much to look at. The land belonged to the Sioux Nation (see Dispatches XIV and XV) under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, but in 1874, while leading an Native American expedition (murder?), General George Custer announced that gold had been found in the Badlands (not far from Thunderhead Mountain and the Crazy Horse Monument - see links above), and everything changed.

The Black Hills Gold Rush soon brought thousands crawling over the Sioux people’s sacred lands. A valley known for all of the dead timber lying in its gulch almost instantly filled with 20 mining camps. People called it Deadwood. By 1875, 5000 souls had arrived. The town sprouted hotels, stores, brothels and saloons like spring wild flowers.

Charlie Utter’s wagon train had brought Wild Bill from the Wyoming Territory along with characters like Madame Mustache and Dirty Em, and a woman known as Martha Jane Cannary, recently released from the guard house in Fort Laramie. Twenty-four years old, she was already famous as scout, Indian fighter and superior story teller. The day she arrived, the Black Hills Pioneer, headline read, “Calamity Jane Has Arrived!”

Hickok was hoping to make money mining gold like nearly every other denizen of Deadwood. Once settled he would bring his new wife Agnes Lake to town. That was the plan.

Custer would eventually get his comeuppance. The rush for gold and the decision to take back sacred native lands eventually lead to the battle at the Little Big Horn River, and the end of the man the Sioux called “long hair.” Hickok and Calamity were departing Wyoming just about the time Custer was killed.

Jane Cannary said she got the name Calamity during a battle in 1873 to quell an Indian uprising in Goose Creek, Wyoming. It was during an ambush, she said, when she saved Captain Egan who was shot while in command of the post there. “I turned my horse and galloped back with all haste to his side and got there in time to catch him as he was falling. I lifted him onto my horse in front of me and succeeded in getting him safely to the Fort. Capt. Egan, on recovering, laughingly said: ‘I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains.’ I have borne that name up to the present time.”

It’s not clear if this was true. The story came out of a promotional autobiography Jane wrote in the early 1900s. Captain Jack Crawford who served  in the Indian Wars didn’t think so. Calamity "never saw service in any capacity under either General Crook or General Miles,“ Crawford told a reporter for the Anaconda Standard April 19, 1904. And she …  “never was in an Indian fight. She was simply a notorious character, dissolute and devilish, but possessed a generous streak which made her popular." Some say she picked up the name because she liked to tell men that to offend her was to "court calamity.”

Stories about Martha Jane Canary are legion. There’s her claim that she had married Wild Bill and had a child with him in 1873 (On September 6, 1941, the U.S. Department of Public Welfare did provide old age assistance to a woman who claimed to be that child: Jean Hickok Burkhardt McCormick), her monumental drinking binges, and the death-defying story that she diverted stagecoach passengers in South Dakota who were being attacked by Plains Indians.

I checked in at the Deadwood History and Information Center and talked with a light-haired handsome woman with a teacher’s sharp eyes to get her thoughts. She was preparing to close up but gave me time to explore the detailed diorama illustrating the look of the town in its heyday. I looked over the examples of mining equipment and six guns and rifles on the walls and in glass. Guns and gold seemed to be the common theme.

I asked about Wyatt Earp showing up after Hickok’s death to straighten out all the killing in Deadwood. She said the town’s real hero was Seth Bullock (now in Mt. Moriah). “When Earp arrived Bullock told him he had everything under control.” Earp didn’t argue and soon headed back to Dodge City. Bullock became Deadwood’s first sheriff and later its Marshal. Until his death in 1919, he helped stabilize the town between hunting excursions with Roosevelt. What about Calamity, and all the stories, I asked. She said not to believe that Calamity was nothing more than a drunk and whore with a loud mouth.

“She was a good woman with a big heart, and she cared about the poor and the needy.” Jane raised five siblings from the time she was 14 years old after her parents had died moving to Utah from Missouri. In the late 1870s she nursed the victims of a smallpox epidemic near Deadwood when no one else would. Estelle Bennet who wrote about and knew Jane said she simply, “struggled with curbing her impulses and carrying through on long term plans.”

August 1, 1903, almost 27 years to the day after Will Bill met his end, Martha Jane Canary died in the Calloway Hotel not far from Deadwood. She had been drinking heavily, according to reports, and caught pneumonia.

Dead and Gone. Hiking to Mount Moriah

Cyndy and I hiked the 700 vertical feet to the Mount Moriah Cemetery, Deadwood’s “Boot Hill” to see the graves of Wild Bill and Calamity. Hickok’s grave was marked by a large bust of the gunslinger. Right beside him lay Jane.

Walking the steps and switchbacks to Mt. Moriah Cemetery. The cemetery itself on a crisp November day. The memorial for Wild Bill Hickok, It read: “Victim of the assassin Jack McCall.” Calamity Jane’s memorial ends with the words, “Bury me with Wild Bill.” (Photos by Chip Walter)

One story has it that Hickok had absolutely no use for Calamity and that the four men who planned her burial put her next to Hickok to play a post-mortem joke on him. But another story in Deadwood Magazine says the Society of Black Hills Pioneers [laid her] beside Wild Bill at her request, and honored it.

On the day of her funeral, the First Methodist Church of Deadwood overflowed, and then the crowd slowly followed her up the ridge’s switchbacks to Mount Moriah where she was put in the ground.

Cyn and I turned away from Mt. Moriah. The autumn afternoon sun was slipping low, and it was time to go. Next stop, another well known wild west town, the 21st century variety: Sturgis. But first, Nanci Griffith’s cover of Deadwood South Dakota by Eric Taylor… and then west.

This is a series about a Vagabond Adventure - author and National Geographic Explorer Chip Walter and his wife Cyndy’s personal journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries, never traveling by jet.

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As of this Dispatch …

We have travelled 4700 miles, across four ferries, on five trains, visiting three World Heritage Sites, through 13 states, three National Parks and memorials, one National Historical Landmark, and three Canadian provinces, in 26 different beds, and seen more different kinds of hotel keys than there are prairie dogs on South Dakota’s Badlands.