by Tom Clavin
The excursions Hickok had guided, first with General Sherman and then with General Pope, into Nebraska in the spring of 1866 were just the beginning. It was a pretty good life for a plainsman. He was paid well, from seventy-five to one hundred dollars a month, and in between the journeys, he could spend time at the gaming tables in Kansas City, dressed in much finer clothes than on the trail. He enjoyed the ambience of saloons, the risks and rewards of gambling, the attention of the women (it did not matter that many were prostitutes), the alcohol, and dressing well. With a good-natured grin, Hickok tolerated the ribbing he received for being possibly the only man in Kansas City who bathed every day. When it was time for the next mission to kick off, it was back into buckskins and moccasins and being alert for hostiles.
One of his lesser-known exploits at this time was on a baseball diamond. In Kansas City was a ballfield at the corner of Fourteenth and Oak Streets. This was the home of the Kansas City Antelopes, the first baseball team in the city. It had been organized by the attorney D. S. Twitchell in July 1866, three years before the Cincinnati Red Stockings, recognized as the first professional team in the United States. The Antelopes’ park had no grandstand or scoreboard, and patrons had to sit on benches in the hot sun. Still, every Saturday afternoon, people filed in to watch this new sport. One of the spectators, when he was in town, was Hickok. He played pickup games with local youngsters before games, and one Saturday, he was asked to umpire an Antelopes game.
The reason Wild Bill, of all people, was asked was because the weekly contests had a habit of descending into brawls, especially if the umpire ruled on a play against the Antelopes. There was no gunplay—guns weren’t allowed within the Kansas City limits—but fists, boots, bottles, and even the occasional knife were employed to dispute the call with fans of the visiting team and the cowering umpire. On this particular Saturday, the Antelopes were hosting the Atchison Pomeroys. The visitors had beaten the Antelopes on their home turf, and an attempt at a rematch in Kansas City had resulted in a riot, and the game was canceled. THE TOWN IS DISGRACED! blared a headline in The Kansas City Star.
A rematch of the rematch was arranged. Hickok agreed to be the umpire, and when the first pitch was thrown, he was behind the plate with what passed for umpire’s gear then. Hickok also wore, thanks to a dispensation from the city fathers, his Colt six-shooters.
The game was played to its completion, and the pleased crowd cheered the 48–28 victory by the Antelopes. (Pitches were tossed underhand, making the ball easier to hit.) They cheered the umpire, too, who bowed to acknowledge their approval, then made his way to Market Square to take up that night’s gambling entertainment.
Treaties or not, campaigns against the Indians were taking place more often with troops in the east freed up to be posted to hastily built frontier forts. Hickok routinely had to exchange his fancy frocks and other city duds for rough-and-ready outfits and to hit the trail once again as a scout. In this role, he met senior officers as well as up-and-coming ones, younger men looking to earn a reputation as an Indian fighter and ascend the ranks to the brevet levels they had enjoyed during the Civil War.
One of the officers Hickok encountered on expeditions against the Indians in the summer of 1867 was Arthur MacArthur, Jr. Born in Massachusetts to a man who would later serve as the governor of Wisconsin for just four days, the young MacArthur was only seventeen in August 1862 when he was commissioned a lieutenant in a Wisconsin infantry regiment. He somehow managed to survive the battles at Chickamauga, Stones River, Chattanooga, Missionary Ridge (where he ignored intense fire to plant the regimental flag atop the ridge), Franklin, and all the fights along Sherman’s March to the Sea. When MacArthur stood down in June 1865, he was a lieutenant colonel.
But in the postwar army of the American West, he was back to being a captain. Over the years, he rose through the ranks again in campaigns against several Indian leaders (including Geronimo) and in the Spanish-American War. Lieutenant General MacArthur retired in 1909 as the highest-ranking officer in the army. He died at sixty-seven, having lived long enough to see his son, Douglas MacArthur, well on his way to a distinguished military career.
The articles by George Ward Nichols and Henry Stanley were still being circulated, or at least discussed, in frontier settlements, when Hickok was hired to be a scout in General Winfield Scott Hancock’s campaign against Indians. Hancock had been a Union hero in the war and was the latest to think that what worked on a battlefield in Virginia or Pennsylvania would translate to success against the western tribes.
Hancock had a forty-year career in the U.S. Army, which included the Mexican-American War and distinguishing himself in many Civil War battles, especially at Gettysburg, and had risen to commanding a corps in the Army of the Potomac. An important assignment for him immediately after the war was to hang those convicted of being part of the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln. He then served during Reconstruction in the South, but not very long because General Grant sent him west.
Officially, Hancock’s mission, which got under way in the spring of 1867, was to negotiate treaties with elements of the Cheyenne and Sioux tribes. However, few saw it that way. S. J. Crawford, the governor of Kansas, recorded in his diary that April that “the plains were swarming with bloodthirsty Indians.”
Hancock took the field with six companies of infantry and artillery, hardly appearing to be an emissary of peace. He was joined by Colonel George Custer, who led four companies of the Seventh Cavalry and an infantry company. Two more cavalry companies joined them at Fort Harker. Hickok and his fellow scouts—who, viewing treaties as worthless, did not have any faith in the mission being a success—guided Hancock’s large force deeper into territory where the Indians were accustomed to roaming free and hunting.
The mission quickly devolved into a frustrating hunting expedition. Cheyenne bands conducted raids against Smoky Hill River settlements and stagecoach stations, making off with horses. Hancock had as much success at finding the fast-riding bands as he would have at grabbing running rabbits by the neck. Indians, he learned, did not stand and fight to the last man like Confederate troops did. Frustrated, he had his men set fire to Indian villages found along the Pawnee River. For Hickok, much of this was time wasted. He became frustrated, too, being mostly employed to carry dispatches, sometimes outriding Indians when they spotted him between Hancock’s headquarters and one of his commanders in the field.
Hickok was relieved when Hancock essentially declared victory and returned to Fort Riley. The general was soon reassigned. Hickok remained in the field, attached to Custer’s forces. The “boy general,” as he had been nicknamed during the Civil War, was more suited to life in the field and not as easily frustrated by Indians, whom he found fascinating, though he had little respect for their culture.
While Custer’s description of Hickok was not filled with as much blatant blushing as his wife’s had been, he was also much impressed by the laconic plainsman. It’s also interesting that Custer, already a legend in his own mind, would lavish such praise on another man, especially a rival for public attention. Noting that Hickok “always carried two handsome ivory-handled revolvers of large size,” Custer recalled in his 1874 memoir, My Life on the Plains. “Whether on foot or on horseback he was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw. Of his courage there could be no question. His skill in the use of the rifle and the pistol was unerring.”
Custer continued, without irony, given his own behavior: “His deportment was entirely free from all bluster and bravado. He never spoke of himself unless requested to do so. His conversation never bordered on the vulgar or blasphemous. His influence among the frontiersmen was unchallenged.” Custer reported that if there were quarrels among the scouts, all Hickok had to do was utter, “This has gone far enough,” to calm things down. But if that wasn’t enough, Hickok invited those in dispute to “settle with me,” and that surely ended any conflict.
Custer and his cavalry and his scouts—with Hicko
k “the most prominent man among them,” he would later state—embarked on a thousand-mile expedition that lasted well into the summer. They set out from Fort Hays and trekked through Kansas and Nebraska and back again to Fort Hays. Uppermost in Custer’s mind was to capture Pawnee Killer, the leader of the most active and violent band on the Plains, one that combined Sioux warriors with Cheyenne Dog Soldiers. This was not accomplished. Several times, Pawnee Killer surprised detachments and lone scouts, including Hickok, who was one of the few to escape with his life. By the end of July, the expedition was over.
Pawnee Killer, who had acquired his name for obvious reasons, would remain elusive. Ultimately, he died peacefully in his home on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1895, at age sixty-nine.
Chapter Eight
LIFE OF A FRONTIER MARSHAL
When Charles C. Whiting was appointed U.S. marshal for the District of Kansas, he needed deputies. With Wild Bill Hickok now free from his scouting chores, Whiting hired him. He was a good man for the job, being by now very familiar with much of Kansas and being dogged in tracking down outlaws. His assignments from Whiting in 1867 took him as far as western Kansas and Nebraska to find army deserters. With many Bluebellies underfed, underpaid, and stuck at frontier outposts against their will, slipping away had become a frequent occurrence.
The occupation of federal marshal had been created in 1789 with the passage of the Judiciary Act, signed into law by President George Washington. It provided that the president appointed U.S. marshals and the Senate confirmed them. Officially, only crimes committed against the federal government or on government property fell under their jurisdiction, but on the frontier, where the next county sheriff or town marshal could be a hundred miles away, a U.S. marshal and the deputies he appointed often filled in the gaps. They had the weight and authority of the U.S. government behind them, so if a man committing a crime or on the run from one had to be arrested or shot, such actions were rarely challenged in court.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Hickok was kept busy trailing and apprehending horse thieves, catching counterfeiters, and even stopping illegal liquor sales and searching remote areas for woodcutters felling trees on federal property. Outlaws were not the most literate people on the frontier, but those who had at least heard of the daring and ruthless Wild Bill Hickok depicted in the two articles were intimidated enough by reputation alone not to resist when confronted by this lone-riding deputy U.S. marshal.
One adventure had Hickok riding to the Solomon River valley with a squad of cavalry out of Fort Riley—one of whom was young Sergeant Billy Cody—on the trail of an industrious band that had stolen as many as two hundred horses and mules from U.S. government facilities. Hickok found the animals but not the thieves, who had dispersed into the hills at the first sign of the armed soldiers. Realizing this, not long after getting the four-legged government property on the move east, Hickok doubled back to hunt alone. A few days after the horses and mules and their uniformed escort had arrived at Fort Riley, Hickok was back. The Topeka Leader reported that he had brought with him eleven prisoners “and lodged them in our calaboose.”
Hickok rested up for part of 1867 in Hays City … after he had dallied in Ellsworth. Both towns were beginning to experience some success as cow towns. When Ellsworth was incorporated that year, the population had soared to two thousand people. This meant it was a place where a man like Hickok could have a choice of saloons and gaming tables to frequent.
It was also where he would find a new romance. Not too much is known about a woman who was dubbed “Indian Annie.” According to Joseph G. Rosa’s exploration, she lived in a small shack behind the Grand Central Hotel. She did various jobs for the hotel, including its laundry. She and Hickok kept company, and she was at least once identified in the Ellsworth newspaper as “Mrs. Wild Bill Hickok.” The “marriage” was a short one, however, as the plainsman moved on to Hays City. Indian Annie did become a married woman, but her husband was a man named Ben Wilson, with whom she had a daughter, Birdie. Annie returned to doing menial labor and took up fortune-telling. She probably did not foresee her unhappy ending, which was dying in a poorhouse in 1883.
Earlier in 1867, Fort Hays had been established, and the tracks of the Kansas Pacific Railway were being stretched west toward it. A doctor named William Webb had been given the authority by the railroad company to establish town sites, and he went to work laying out Hays City after creating the Big Creek Land Company. Once the railroad arrived, the town took off, with hundreds of people settling there to establish businesses like the Gibbs House hotel and the Moses & Bloomfield general store. The Railway Advance newspaper began publishing. By the end of the year, the population of Hays City approached a thousand people.
However, it was an exception to quickly established towns along the railroad companies’ paths in that Hays City did not become a cow town. Some trail drives did end there, and the cows were packed into railcars, but for the most part, the cattle trade bypassed Hays City in favor of other hubs like Abilene and, later, Dodge City. This did not save the town from its share of mayhem and unsavory characters, though, because there was still an abundance of saloons and whiskey and the women sometimes referred to as “soiled doves.” At the very first official meeting of the board of commissioners of Ellis County, thirty-seven licenses to sell liquor were granted. Another important source of revenue was the wagon trains rumbling along the Smoky Hill Trail, which could be outfitted and resupplied in Hays City.
A particularly notorious example of the type of disreputable people who gave citizens second thoughts about living in Hays City during its early days was Jim Curry. Hailing originally from Ireland, he may have served in the Union army, or the Confederate army, or possibly both, before working his way west. He had little regard for human life and found a haven in Hays City. Curry had a particular hatred for black men and murdered them at will, tossing their bodies into a dry well. Even if some residents objected to the bigotry and killings, there was no law enforcement in the town. After murdering a man named Brady by slitting his throat, Curry threw the bloody body into a railroad boxcar, and nothing was done about it. Believing a nineteen-year-old named Estes had flirted with a girl he was interested in, Curry went up to the teenager on the street and shot him through the heart. Again, no recourse.
It was into this rough environment that Hickok rode during Hays City’s first year. He did not stay long because of fresh scouting and guiding assignments as well as ones from Marshal Whiting. However, Hickok would later become a lawman in Hays City, his first significant frontier posting wearing a badge, charged with halting or at least slowing down the depravity. And he would have a memorable confrontation with Jim Curry.
For now, though, his focus was on being a federal marshal on a frontier where there was no lack of deserters and horse thieves. Hickok was back on the trail before winter could fully set in. Given the potential for violence in that occupation at that time, it would have been an achievement if Hickok made it to the end of 1867 without getting shot. But he had the misfortune on the afternoon of December 22 to walk into a rough-and-tumble crossroads saloon in Jefferson County, Nebraska. A dozen or so cattle herders had taken shelter from the early winter cold and were crouched against the sod walls. A tired and thirsty Hickok ordered a whiskey, which was drawn straight from a keg.
By this time in his life, though only thirty years old, Wild Bill had walked into hundreds of saloons, including remote ones like this, and encountered strangers without incident. On this day, probably working his way east back to Fort Riley, he expected to sip a whiskey, maybe two, then clap his sombrero back on and return to the cold and muddy road. It is not known if the other men knew he was a deputy U.S. marshal when they began to make remarks about the mud-covered stranger.
Hickok continued to ignore them as the remarks became more aggressive and personal. He knew the smart move was to knock back the rest of his drink and leave such an inhospitable shack. But one man, on purpose, bumped into Hickok
. The whiskey he was about to finish off instead splashed on his face. Drops of it flew from his mustache as he whipped around and backhanded the man in his face, sending him sprawling across the dirt-strewn floor.
In an almost comical understatement, considering the hostility in the saloon and being so outnumbered, Hickok advised, “Now cut it out before this gets serious.”
It got serious real fast. Several of the patrons went for their guns. Hickok shot one man but a moment later was shot in his right shoulder. If the others thought that would disable him, they did not know they were in a gunfight with Wild Bill Hickok, who now fired the Colt in his left hand. Two more men were hit. The man on the floor, now with a gun, was getting up, and Hickok shot off part of his jaw. Of the four men Hickok shot, he would be the only one to survive. By this time, as Hickok surveyed the dark interior of the saloon, the other men there had either not drawn their guns or had dropped them in a desperate plea for their lives.
Hickok backed out, got on his horse, and resumed his journey. He would stay in a Kansas City hotel until his shoulder had recuperated, allowing him to again draw and shoot with both hands. Hickok knew by now that not being a fully functional shootist was the kind of weakness that could get him killed.
Chapter Nine
BUFFALO BILL AND WILD BILL
Back in the saddle in the early spring of 1868, while passing through Junction City, Kansas, Hickok was reunited once more with the young scout now called Bill Cody. Though still only in his early twenties, Cody had just experienced two life-changing events—acquiring the name “Buffalo Bill,” and getting married. His new wife, Louisa, in an effort to domesticate him, had cajoled Cody into becoming the proprietor of a hotel. In Junction City, Hickok learned that effort had not worked out too well.
