Wild Bill

by Tom Clavin

  On November 26, scouts located a Cheyenne village near the Washita River, near what is today Cheyenne, Oklahoma. The Indians had no cause to be alarmed when they first saw white men. They had recently visited Fort Cobb to receive food, had been guaranteed safety by the commander there, and were on Cheyenne reservation land. Custer knew none of this—apparently, not even the white flag that flew atop one of the lodges made him pause. He saw only a necessary and convenient target.

  At dawn the next day, with the regimental band playing “Garry Owen,” four columns of soldiers streamed into the village, firing rifles and pistols. A few startled warriors managed to fight back, but there were not nearly enough of them; the majority of the village population was women and children. By the end of the action, the destroyed village was littered with 103 bodies, one of them being Black Kettle’s. As reports made their way to nearby military outposts and then to Washington, D.C., and other points east, the Battle of Washita River was hailed as a stirring victory.

  Instead of being with Custer, Hickok’s part of Sheridan’s campaign as fall gave way to winter was being the guide for a contingent of three hundred men under General William Penrose who were the advance guard for the main column commanded by General Carr. Their route was through the Raton Pass. This trek turned into an ordeal that was almost catastrophic.

  Snow had fallen regularly at the higher elevations since early November, and that made for slow going to the supply wagons, which kept threatening to slide down the slopes. Sudden squalls blinded the men and their horses, and Hickok struggled to keep everyone on a narrow path worn over the decades by hunters. Frostbite attacked hands and faces. Campfires flickered before being doused by snow or extinguished by gusting winds. Supplies meant to last the entire journey were dwindling. The contingent finally made its way down to the Cimarron River, then turned south toward the Canadian River. By then, Penrose’s men were frozen and exhausted and starving. The surrounding countryside was barren and bleak and covered with snow and ice.

  The only reason why Hickok might have been a little less concerned than the army troopers was he knew who was guiding the Carr column. If anyone could get those men and their supply wagons through, it was Buffalo Bill Cody. When the advance guard reached Polladora Creek, the soldiers set up camp. It made sense to give Carr an opportunity to find them—plus, with their food almost gone and most of their mules now dead, they could not go much farther.

  Day after freezing day, the plight of Hickok and the soldiers grew more desperate. A rescue party had been dispatched, but it was slow going. “We followed the trail very easily for the first three days, and then we were caught in Freeze-Out canyon by a fearful snow storm, which compelled us to go into camp for a day,” Cody recalled. “The ground now being covered with snow, we found that it would be almost impossible to follow the trail” left by the advance guard. Carr picked Cody to lead a small contingent of men to try to follow the trail, and the entire column would do its best to keep up.

  After a few more days, true starvation loomed. Hickok scanned the white, bleak landscape for any sign of life. Finally, he spotted one … and as it grew closer, he realized it was Buffalo Bill at the head of a squadron of troopers leading fifty mules loaded with supplies. The young man had sure repaid Wild Bill for confronting that bully years before. “The camp presented a pitiful sight, indeed,” Cody observed. “About the first man I saw after reaching the camp was my old, true and tried friend Wild Bill. That night we had a jolly reunion around the camp-fires.”

  Their happy reunion was about to become even happier. Once the men were sufficiently recovered and the rest of Carr’s force had arrived, they set out, guided by Hickok and Cody, for Fort Evans, a new supply depot that had been established by an army force originating in New Mexico. After arriving there and setting up camp outside the fort, the scouts learned that supply wagons carrying beer brewed in Mexico were on their way. Cody reported that he and Hickok went out that night and intercepted the apparently poorly guarded barrels of beer. Ownership of them changed hands. The barrels never made it to the intended customers inside Fort Evans but were tapped and enjoyed by General Carr’s men. And the scouts slaked their thirst as well: Cody wrote that the beer bacchanal was “one of the biggest jollifications it has ever been my misfortune to attend.”

  Chapter Ten

  “THEY KILLED ME”

  Most likely, Hickok would not have been stuck starving and freezing to death in the middle of the Raton Mountains if the previous fall he had managed to win an election. A better outcome would have allowed him to be comfortably sitting in the stove-heated office of the sheriff of Ellsworth County.

  Fort Ellsworth had been established in August 1864 by soldiers of the Seventh Iowa Cavalry, named for their commander, Lieutenant Allen Ellsworth. After the war, it was rechristened Fort Harker. The town of Ellsworth was founded in February 1867, in almost the center of Kansas and near the Smoky Hill River and the Santa Fe Trail. The town began to prosper after the Kansas Pacific Railway arrived, with the population growing to a thousand. Prosperity was short-lived, however—soon Ellsworth suffered a triple dose of bad luck: a swollen river poured over its banks and flooded the town, Indian war parties killed some residents and frightened some others away, and there was an outbreak of cholera. Within months, there were only about a hundred residents left.

  One of those of stubborn stock who remained was Arthur Larkin. Accepting that the river could not be moved and he couldn’t cure cholera (the hostiles would have to be the army’s responsibility), Larkin, in the fall of 1867, coordinated an effort to take what was left of the town and rebuild it on higher ground. He constructed a hotel and opened a general store. Ellsworth rebounded and became a popular destination for the cattle drives up from Texas. Saloons and brothels blossomed, and inevitably, violence became rampant as drunken cowboys took advantage of a lawless environment.

  By the end of the summer of ’68, citizens in and around Ellsworth were all for law enforcement. It is not known what motivated Hickok to run for county sheriff—perhaps the steady (though modest) paycheck or the challenge. His opponent was E. W. Kingsbury, who had been a Union officer during the war. Despite the reputation of being a good man with a gun that Hickok had brought with him to Ellsworth—or because of it—voters sided with Kingsbury.

  There was no further reason to hang around Ellsworth. The open prairie and an army scout’s paycheck awaited. And more adventures outriding Indian war parties and surviving to ride another day.

  For years, until too many people had heard it, Hickok told a story of being discovered by such a war party while on the open prairie and making a desperate ride for shelter as the whooping hostiles, shooting arrows and rifles, rode hot on his horse’s heels. No one in his audience at whatever saloon or campfire doubted such a tale because Hickok, as a wagon driver and an army scout and all-round plainsman, had had many encounters with Indians and, obviously, had survived them. In this particular story, though, Hickok, his expression dead serious, described finding a grove of tall boulders that offered some protection.

  The Indians would not be thwarted, however. They rushed through the rocks, and as they showed themselves, Hickok, backed up against a cliff wall, killed them one by one. When he was out of ammunition, he took out his bowie knife and continued to fight as more of the emboldened hostiles pressed forward. Wild Bill was in a tight spot for sure.

  There was a pause in the story. “Darn it, Bill, what happened?” his listeners demanded.

  “Well, boys,” he finally drawled, “they killed me.” The stunned silence that followed was broken by Hickok’s loud laugh.

  Wild Bill was not laughing in March 1869, when it looked like his punch line could come true. He had parted ways with the stolen beer and Buffalo Bill. In an odd overlap, by this time, Hickok was appearing as the title characters in pulp stories about his Indian adventures. The first one, Wild Bill, the Indian-Slayer, had appeared eight months earlier.

  Riding the prairie as a cour
ier between Fort Lyon and Fort Wallace, Hickok was spotted by a roving band of Cheyenne. Unwisely, after killing a buffalo, he had stopped by the side of a stream and built a fire to roast the meat. The smoke and possibly the aroma had attracted the hunting party’s attention. With stays in winter camps ending, most likely the Cheyenne had little food left and were anxious to find buffalo and game. Here was a lone white man providing a cooked meal and, soon, his scalp. As the Indians drew closer, they observed what a long and silky scalp it was.

  Hickok had not cultivated his luxurious locks with the intention of passing them on to anyone. He climbed onto his horse just as the Cheyenne hunters arrived at a cut bank above him. Hickok fired his repeating rifle, and four of the Indians were knocked from their ponies. The other three attacked, and one of them plunged a spear into Hickok’s thigh. Now with his revolvers out, he began firing. Another Indian with a spear was hit, but not before striking Hickok’s horse, which went down. He rolled away from it, firing, and another Indian was hit. The seventh one rode away from the creek, and a wounded Hickok let him go.

  Using one of the Indians’ ponies, after shooting his own disabled horse, Hickok rode as best he could to Fort Lyon. Along the way, he had yanked the spear out, but the spearhead remained embedded in his thigh. As it happened, Buffalo Bill Cody was at Fort Lyon. He later reported that several woodcutters working a few miles from the fort saw Hickok riding down the trail from the north. He was barely staying upright, and the woodcutters reached him just as the rider was about to fall off the pony. Hickok was placed in the back of a wagon and brought to the fort, where a concerned Cody greeted him. Hickok still had the rest of the spear, and he presented it to his friend.

  The fort surgeon—who in civilian life may have been the town barber or undertaker—could not manage to get the spearhead out without severing a major artery. He insisted that amputation was the only answer. Otherwise, gangrene or a similar potentially fatal infection was likely.

  This was as good a time as any to go home. Hickok had been meaning to head east soon anyway, because letters from siblings had mentioned his mother being ill. Illinois, he recalled, had real doctors, ones who had actually been to medical school, and having the leg looked at by one of them was a more appealing idea than having it chopped off.

  How he survived the journey there with such a grievous wound does call the story into question, but an account of the operation performed to dig the spearhead out and patch up his thigh appeared in a Chicago newspaper in 1896, written by one of his sisters. According to Lydia, by the time her brother arrived, the wound was indeed infected. A doctor had to lance it. He drew the flesh back to scrape the bone. Not only did Hickok endure this without flinching, but when Lydia grew faint, he said, “Here, give it to me,” taking the lamp from her and holding it for the doctor until the procedure was completed.

  James, as he was again called, was back at the Hickok homestead in the rechristened Troy Grove for the first time since he had left as a teenager. He was now approaching his thirty-second birthday. He was, as Joseph G. Rosa commented, “a man whose name was second to none on the frontier. Of all [Polly’s] sons, her youngest was the man of destiny.”

  James remained with his family for the rest of March and through April 1869. There, he was reunited with Horace, who had married Martha Edwards, a woman who had been smitten with his younger brother a decade earlier, and sisters Celinda and Lydia, both also married. Oliver had never returned from the sojourn in California, preferring to settle there, and Lorenzo was still hauling freight in Kansas and Nebraska. (He would soon return to Troy Grove for good, sharing farming duties with Horace.) Though not in robust health, their mother, Polly, was now in her sixty-fifth year.

  The contrast between James and the other Hickoks could not have been more apparent. Whether in buckskin or one of his in-town fancy outfits, James Butler would have been dressed differently from small-town farmers. Their world was Troy Grove, where everyone knew each other, and many residents intended to live the rest of their lives there.1 His world was the expanding frontier and its wide variety of people and experiences. Quite possibly, no other member of the family had ever killed anyone, while James, counting victims during the Civil War and encounters with Indians, might have killed dozens of men. One wonders if the family now viewed James as a romantic figure from a mythical land or as an unfortunate who had chosen a rough, dangerous life over home and hearth … with a hint of menace.

  In any case, as May began, he chose the frontier life again. He bid farewell to his family and Troy Grove and being known as James Butler Hickok. He put back on the badge of a deputy U.S. marshal and was Wild Bill again.

  The orders from his boss, Marshal Charles Whiting, were to head to Fort Wallace and find two men who were stealing army mules. It wasn’t long before Hickok was on a train with two prisoners to stand trial in Topeka. There, he learned he could be fired.

  It was not for anything he did wrong. Back in Ellsworth, there had been more trouble. It was a federal matter because several Pawnee had been killed, and rumors had spread that deputy U.S. marshals had done the killing. The first head to roll, though, was Whiting’s, for not having control of his marshals. Taking his place was Dana Houston, who in Leavenworth interviewed all of the former marshal’s deputies. Hickok was summoned to Leavenworth, too, but when the hatchet fell, Houston asked him to stay on. This may have been because Hickok truly had nothing to do with murdered Pawnee, but a factor had to be that Wild Bill was an especially effective and intimidating lawman.

  His next assignment brought him back to Hays City. Hickok by now was quite familiar with it. In December 1867, the Atchison newspaper editor Frank Root had reported that during a previous visit to Hays City, he had “formed the acquaintance of Wm. Haycock, better known as ‘Wild Bill.’ He is a man about thirty years of age, over six feet high, straight as an arrow, with long hair hanging over his shoulders. He is in the employ of the Government as a detective and is probably better acquainted with the plains than any other man living of his age.”

  This time, though, after just a short stay, Hickok again had to leave Hays City behind because of various army scouting adventures and deputy marshal labors that Whiting assigned him. One of the acquaintances whose company he could no longer enjoy was one of the more eccentric residents in a town that had its fair share of characters.

  David Morrow hailed from upstate New York, had served in the Union army during the war, and as a cavalry trooper had been part of campaigns against Navajo and Apache bands in Arizona and New Mexico. When he had enough soldiering, Morrow mustered out and found work hunting buffalo in the Hays City area. From time to time, he was residing in the city itself when a glut of buffalo meat on the market—Buffalo Bill was not the only efficient killer on the prairie—meant the cost of hunting outweighed the revenue. It was during one of these periods that Prairie Dog Morrow earned his nickname. A few years later, he would take it with him to Dodge City, where he served as a part-time deputy to Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Charlie Bassett, and other lawmen.

  As was true with many settlements in Kansas, Hays City was surrounded by thriving prairie dog communities. Officially, they were short-tailed ground squirrels, but their calls sounded like barking dogs, thus the name. Checking for any danger before searching for food, a prairie dog’s head popped up and down from the crater housing its underground burrow, which typically had several entrances. The burrows were connected by tunnels, and at the end of these subterranean corridors would be its nest, well protected from whatever weather or human havoc was above the ground. During some downtime in Hays City, Morrow captured two prairie dogs. Instead of killing them, it occurred to him to train them as performing pets.

  It should be mentioned that Morrow was a storyteller, so it was not unusual for him to be waiting at the railroad station to regale disembarking passengers with tales of his and others’ adventures on the frontier, the true ones mixed in with the fabrications. One particular day, though, travelers were presen
ted with the two prairie dogs Morrow plucked from his pockets, along with descriptions of all the remarkable tricks they could do. A persuaded passenger purchased the animals for five dollars. This was all the encouragement Morrow needed.

  After pondering the landscape right outside the city, Morrow created a prairie dog trap. It was a simple apparatus—a barrel of sand placed open-end down over a hole. To not become trapped, a desperate prairie dog climbed up through the flowing sand into the barrel. Trapped there, it could not escape because by then, sand had filled and covered the hole. Every day, Morrow made his way through the cratered community, carefully upending barrels and placing prairie dogs into a sack. Very soon, Hays City residents dubbed him Prairie Dog Dave Morrow. Alas, the town had its share of loafers who were copycats looking for a quick and easy buck. They, too, became collectors, and crowded the train station with their barking wares. Once the price of a pair of prairie dogs went from five dollars to fifty cents, Morrow grabbed his rifle and returned to where the buffalo roamed.

  In July 1869, after months of working for U.S. Marshal Houston, Hickok was back in Hays City. Its citizenry was in need of his peacekeeping abilities. The year had begun with three black soldiers in the local jail for minor offenses being dragged out by a mob and hanged. During the year, patrols from Fort Hays entered the town to temper the rowdyism a bit, but it resumed as soon as they rode out. That summer, with violence in the city reaching new levels, several business leaders petitioned Kansas governor James Harvey to appoint R. A. Eckles as the county sheriff. The mystery here is that there already was a county sheriff, and Hickok may have known the man, Isaac Thayer, because he was one of the scouts who had survived the attacks by Roman Nose’s warriors at the Battle of Beecher Island. But by the second week of July, Thayer was nowhere to be found. He was the third sheriff in eighteen months to suddenly crave new employment.