by Tom Clavin
Soon after they arrived, “there was little of anything exciting to report about it,” writes Robert G. Athearn in his William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West. “The dilapidated frame buildings, standing gauntly out on a vast, treeless plain, were desolate and lonely. Despite the barrenness of the country, there were a few farms dotting the landscape. The land to the east was more heavily settled and was generally safe from hostile Indians. Sherman wondered why there were any settlers around the place at all.”
Perhaps this unpromising route was not worth further exploring, because Hickok parted ways with Sherman at Fort Kearny. He was soon hired to scout for another well-known—though less successful—Civil War general, John Pope. His greatest achievement was being appointed by President Lincoln to command the Army of Virginia in the summer of 1862. His greatest failure came soon after, when Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and James Longstreet gave him a good drubbing at the Second Battle of Bull Run. By that September, Pope had been banished to Minnesota. In the summer of 1866, his exile was over, and he was leading an expedition to Santa Fe, a route well traveled by Hickok.
In September, Hickok returned from this sun-drenched excursion. Beginning the previous month at Fort Riley, the Seventh Cavalry Regiment was being organized. Soon, both it and the fort would have a new commander: Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. He had with him his beautiful wife. At the fort, the Custers made the acquaintance of the buckskin-wearing scout called Wild Bill, who made an immediate impression on the twenty-four-year-old Libbie Custer. She would spend the rest of her life—a long one, not ending until four days before her ninety-first birthday in April 1933, stretching from the presidencies of John Tyler to Franklin Delano Roosevelt—refuting rumors that she and Hickok had engaged in an affair. Libbie was not especially aggressive in her denials, and her view of Hickok certainly allowed for some speculation.
“Physically, he was a delight to look upon,” is how the description begins in Following the Guidon, her memoir published in 1890.
Tall, lithe, and free in every motion, he rode and walked as if every muscle was perfection, and the careless swing of his body as he moved seemed perfectly in keeping with the man, the country, the time in which he lived. I do not recall anything finer in the way of physical perfection than Wild Bill when he swung himself lightly from his saddle, and with graceful, swaying step, squarely set his shoulders and well-poised head, approached our tent for orders. He was rather fantastically clad, of course, but all seemed perfectly in keeping with the time and place. He did not make an armory of his waist, but carried two pistols. He wore top-boots, riding breeches, and dark blue flannel shirt, with scarlet set in the front. A loose neck-handkerchief left his fine firm throat free. I do not remember all his features, but the frank, manly expression of his fearless eyes and his courteous manner gave one a feeling of confidence in his word and his undaunted courage.
Wild Bill Hickok was about to become a new kind of plainsman on the American frontier—part explorer, part hunter, part romantic figure, and part gunslinger. One-third of the nation, its entire middle section, was relatively untouched, a temptation many men could not resist, and experienced guides into that territory were in much demand. For the rest of the year, Wild Bill spent a lot of time in the saddle, becoming a familiar and striking figure across the frontier.
While Hickok rode with the Custers, the article written by Colonel Nichols was being prepared for publication. A legend that would increasingly deviate from reality was about to be born.
ACT II
Wild Bill Hickok when he was a lawman in Hays City in the 1860s.
(COURTESY OF THE KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY)
Wild Bill was a Plainsman in every sense of the word, yet unlike any other of his class.
—LIEUTENANT COLONEL GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER, 1872
Chapter Six
ALONG THE CHISHOLM TRAIL
The world of Wild Bill Hickok was about to expand to include much of the American West, with his adopted state of Kansas as the main gateway to it. Looking at a map today, one might wonder about Kansas being considered part of the West at any time in American history. At most, the state was sort of the eastern edge of the vast American West and resided in the central time zone, not even the mountain zone. And being pretty much smack in the center of the continental United States and thus not at all remote, could Kansas ever have been included in what was once called the Great American Desert?
Yes. The plains west of Topeka when the Civil War ended had only a handful of inhabitants. In all of Kansas, the population in the mid-1860s was only around 250,000 people, and they were easily outnumbered by millions of American bison (or buffalo). There were also untold numbers of antelope, coyotes, wolves, snakes, and the inescapable prairie dogs. Most tribes had been decimated by diseases communicated by white men, or those who once occupied Kansas had been moved south into the Indian Territory that had been carved out of Oklahoma. Still, until the postwar migration really gathered steam, a westbound traveler was more likely to encounter an Indian than a white man. The weather could be harsh for the hardiest of hunters and settlers, with the sun baking the prairie in the summer and brutal winds and days-long blizzards collecting fatalities in the winter.
Like Hickok had before the war, the increasing numbers of travelers heading west were discovering not just the promise of Kansas but its beauty. As in other years, in 1866, from the middle of spring into late September, the state and its four-hundred-mile width offered a wide array of green prairie grass and colorful flowers. Most of the land the migrants plodded through was covered with waves of grass, in some areas six inches high or even taller. Among the flowers they observed were plum blossoms, elderberries, blue lupine, primroses, and wild strawberries. Above this verdant and radiant pageantry was a limitless blue sky. Though this was beautiful to look at, cloudless days meant no escape from the relentless sun. Narrowing and swelling with the seasons, rivers and streams coursed through the prairie, and near them could be found such trees as hickory, willow, elm, walnut, oak, cottonwood, and buttonwood.
Men looking for homesites could pick the most appealing combination of fresh water and sturdy timber. And there would be no lack of food as long as one had a rifle, as there were plenty of wild turkeys, prairie chickens, quail, and other readily available game. There were travelers who intended to push through to Nebraska or even Colorado, but the grasslands and fertile beauty of Kansas persuaded some of them to pick a spot and begin to put down roots.
The promise of Kansas was more immediately realized precisely because of its central location. The end of the war produced the peak years of the cattle trade, and most of the cattle would be coming up from Texas. Driving them due north meant cutting through a piece of Indian Territory / western Oklahoma and up into Kansas. At the same time, railroad companies were laying track from east to west, and the most desirable avenue was through the state. Kansas was not only in the middle of the country, its flat grassland occasionally interrupted by modest ranges of brown hills made for efficient track-laying. Eventually, the Kansas Pacific Railway and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway would become the dominant companies, and their lines would allow for a virtually straight run to Colorado.
Though not a cattleman or a Kansan or Texan, Jesse Chisholm was the man the business leaders in the cow towns could thank once they began to benefit financially from the cattle trade. Legend may have him depicted as a big, strapping American frontiersman who blazed the trail brandishing smoking six-shooters. The real story of this true pioneer is not quite that dramatic but still colorful. Chisholm was born in 1805 or 1806 in Tennessee. His father had emigrated from Scotland, and his mother was Cherokee. In his early twenties, he was living near Fort Gibson, on land given to the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, and working as a hunter and trail guide. When he married in 1836, Chisholm relocated to Creek Nation territory, also in Oklahoma. There, he established a trading post, and certainly one reason why it was su
ccessful was he was fluent in fourteen different Indian dialects.
His linguistic talents not only appealed to Indians with goods to trade but made Chisholm much in demand as an interpreter between various tribes and U.S. government emissaries as treaties were being negotiated. He traveled regularly from his trading post in Hughes County, Oklahoma, to other sites in Indian Territory as well as Texas, Nebraska, and Kansas. During one of his journeys, Chisholm rescued several Mexican children who were prisoners of the Kiowa and Comanche tribes and brought them back home, adopting them as his own. With an expanding family, he focused more on also expanding his business, establishing trading posts elsewhere in Oklahoma and in Kansas. He was living in Wichita during the Civil War. At first, he traded with the Confederate army. Then as the winds of war blew the other way, the Union army became his primary customer.
What would be called the Chisholm Trail began in 1865. He and a partner led a train of wagons weighed down with supplies out of Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and took them south to one of his trading posts, at Council Grove, near the future Oklahoma City. Chisholm hadn’t used this route arbitrarily. Based on his experience as a wide-ranging scout and interpreter, he followed a path worn by the feet and hooves of Indian raiding and hunting parties. Other traders followed his lead, and it became a popular route, named for its first and most prominent traveler. The trail lengthened with the coming of the cattle drives, though Chisholm, past sixty years old after the war, never drove a single steer himself. Indeed, he did not last long enough to reap any possible reward for the Chisholm Trail, dying of food poisoning in March 1868. His grave can be found in Geary, Oklahoma.
At the time of Chisholm’s death, the trail was still a work in progress. Ranchers began their cattle drives in San Antonio—or even as far south as the Rio Grande—and took them due north to Red River Station. From there, cowboys continued to drive the cattle north, through the Oklahoma Indian Territory (over what is U.S. Highway 81 today) and into Kansas near Caldwell. As the railroads laid track west, most of the herds pushed on up to Abilene. It is estimated that by the time the cattle drives from Texas were pretty much done in the late 1870s, close to five million head had churned up dust on the Chisholm Trail.
Even with the relative efficiency of the trail, it could take as long as two months to complete it from south Texas, and this was even in friendly weather conditions. The terrain cattle had to plod along was sometimes treacherous, and water barriers such as the Washita, Canadian, Red, Arkansas, and Smoky Hill Rivers were death-defying to cross. The occasional thunderstorm or just the crack of a Sharps hunting rifle could set the jittery longhorns stampeding. An annoying threat was rustlers and marauding Indians, who quietly picked off cattle by the twos and threes under the cover of darkness.
Being a cowboy was a lonely occupation. For most of the trek north, the drovers saw only the outskirts of small settlements and few people, and the menu did not stray far from beef and beans and coffee. Trail bosses prohibited alcohol. Women were available only in the cowboys’ feverish imaginations. Men could start fights out of boredom as much as genuine irritation. After weeks upon weeks of smelling cattle and eating dust, the cowboys entered a town demanding that it accommodate their thirst and other needs.
The impact on the cow towns was prosperity and plenty of it, though the towns flamed out rather quickly. Across Kansas, the convergence of the railroad and the cattle drives created boomtowns. Saloons seemed to pop out of the ground like the heads of prairie dogs. Bartenders could not dispense liquor fast enough to the tired, dirt-streaked, and parched cowboys whose pockets were filled with their pay. Bordellos also prospered, as did other businesses like dry goods stores and dance and gambling halls and hotels. It was difficult for a reasonably competent man to not make money.
But for each town, the boom began to fade. The railroads moved relentlessly west, and with them went the trail bosses and their herds. Many citizens were glad to see them go because the rowdiness and violence had become too high a price to pay for prosperity. The cow towns had to find ways to survive without cows. Gamblers like Wild Bill Hickok moved on, too, following the action.
The first of the major postwar cow towns in Kansas was Abilene. The town that within a few years would play a major role in the life of Hickok had, like many of the frontier towns springing up, a modest origin but drew men with vision.
One morning in July 1856, Timothy Hersey guided a wagon out of the gates of Fort Riley and rode west. With the sun at his back and then climbing up his neck and warming his hat, he drove up the Smoky Hill River, camped along Chapman Creek, and set off again the next day. On the bottoms between present-day Detroit, Kansas, and the banks of Mud Creek, Hersey encountered a large herd of buffalo. He shot a few—it was hard to resist; the dumb beasts simply stood there and took it—and he camped there for the night. On this site, what is today the intersection of First and Vine Streets, Abilene was founded.
Hersey built a log cabin. He had left a wife and child behind in Illinois, and the following year, he returned there to fetch them. Back in Abilene, he made additions to his cabin, including a store and bedrooms and stables, necessitated both by business and by Mr. and Mrs. Hersey having eight more children. It was Elizabeth Hersey who gave the town its name. The devout Methodist was a fervent Bible reader, and soon after relocating from Illinois and taking stock of her surroundings, she was struck by a passage in the book of Luke that mentions Abilene as a province in Judea that is described as a “beautiful area of the plains.”
The coming of the railroad was still years away, but Abilene became a stop on the Overland Stage route from Leavenworth to Denver. Inside his corral, Timothy Hersey kept horses and a few mules for the stagecoaches, and his wife took care of feeding the dust-caked travelers. Hersey would later claim that the phrase “a square meal” originated at his outpost. The food that he and his wife provided was, he contended, the last and best of its kind for hundreds of miles, and he advertised that at his outpost, travelers would have the “last square meal east of Denver.” That meal typically consisted of bacon and eggs, some beef when available, hot biscuits, coffee, dried peaches and apples, and Elizabeth’s pies. The entrepreneur also contracted with the Overland Stage to supply it with hay and feed for the company’s animals, some of which were kept in his own corral.
Perhaps to his eventual regret, Hersey was a restless man, and he lived in restless times on the American frontier. He stayed with his family in Abilene until the town grew up around him. During the Civil War, he was a lieutenant in the Kansas militia. With a partner, C. H. Thompson, who had built Abilene’s first hotel, on the east bank of Mud Creek, Hersey bought large tracts of land and sold parcels at a good profit as more visitors decided to become residents. Another sign of progress came in 1864, when W. S. Moon built the Frontier Store, which also served as the post office and where court sessions were held. The first saloon was simply called Old Man Jones and was, for whatever reason, constructed in the middle of a prairie dog town, which must have made for treacherous going for tipsy travelers.
“By 1867, more than a score of adults had established themselves in the usual one-room homes on the east side of the creek,” wrote Stewart P. Verckler in his history of Abilene. “These homes consisted partly of logs plastered together with clay and mud; dirt was banked around the bottom to keep out the weather and the wind. The roofs were of poles, brush and grass held down by dirt. Hersey had built the only decent home.”
Hersey could have had a long and prosperous life in Abilene, especially being on the ground floor when the lucrative cattle trade began. But one morning, he was once again setting off on a wagon heading west. He went on to found the town of Benoit by building a sawmill and then a gristmill at Willow Springs. As the town grew, Hersey became restless again. He moved on, constructing another sawmill and gristmill, these on the Solomon River. When his pockets were full enough, he packed supplies and tools into five wagons and left Kansas altogether, driving his teams to Wyoming. There, the
Panic of 1873 caught up to Hersey, and his pockets were emptied. For some reason, he thought Los Angeles was the answer. If it was, he never found out. He got only as far as Denver, where he had health problems while trying to make money investing in mines. However, though his pioneering days were over, Hersey would wind up with a long life, not dying until 1905, in Castle Rock, Washington.
Whatever credit Hersey deserves, he alone did not turn Abilene into a boomtown. That happened because of another visionary entrepreneur, Joseph McCoy, and the railroads working their way west. It would make Abilene the first of the boisterous cow towns, to be followed in the late 1860s and early ’70s by Ellsworth, Hays City, Newton, Wichita, and Dodge City. And as the people moved west with the railroad, they carried tales of the famous frontiersman Wild Bill Hickok—famous, thanks to the Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article, which had finally appeared in February 1867.
Hickok could not have known in advance the contents of the article with any certainty, so he was surprised when he heard people talking about it and questions were put to him, and even newspapers of the day began commenting on it. When people encountered Hickok, they found the man to be as described by George Ward Nichols: He was over six feet tall and wore bright yellow moccasins. A deerskin shirt hung jauntily over his shoulders, revealing, as Nichols offered, echoing Libbie Custer’s bodice-ripping estimation, “a chest whose breadth and depth were remarkable. His small round waist was girthed by a belt which held two of Colt’s Navy revolvers. His legs sloped gradually from the compact thighs to the feet, which were small and turned inward as he walked.”
