Wild Bill

by Tom Clavin

  By the third week in March, Hickok was back in Cheyenne. He had no time for loafing; he was a newly married man on a mission. But nothing happened right away. As The Cheyenne Daily Leader reported, winter was lingering there, and Hickok did not make much headway in mounting an expedition. Possibly, everyone who intended on going to the Black Hills had already left, and a fresh pack of prospectors had not yet arrived by the chilly beginning of spring. Not long after unpacking his bag in Cheyenne, Hickok left, taking the train back to St. Louis.

  He could have simply ridden off to the Black Hills himself, but it is possible he hoped to have others along because of his diminishing eyesight, and thus for added protection. Seething about the invasion of Paha Sapa, the Sioux and a few allied tribes were continuing to rally around Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. No white man, especially one on his own who might have difficulty seeing danger approaching, was safe. It was believed that when full spring took hold on the Plains, there would be a war similar to the two years of conflict with Red Cloud a decade earlier.

  St. Louis might prove more fertile ground to gather a company of adventurers. There, Hickok had posters and flyers printed up and distributed “announcing that he is raising a company for the Black Hills and Big Horn country, which will leave St. Louis, Jefferson City, Sedalia and Kansas City, on Wednesday, May 17th,” according to the April 30 edition of The Cheyenne Daily Sun, which had received one of the flyers. Hickok further explained: “We hope to secure a large body of men for this expedition, not only for better self-protection on the route, but also to enable us to get cheaper rates of transportation, and lower figures on our supplies, and make a formidable settlement in the famous gold region.”

  However, it does not seem that the expedition gained much traction … or any volunteers at all. Soon, Hickok was back in Cheyenne, without an entourage, but at least he found that his fast friend Charley Utter had returned from visiting his family in Colorado.

  Utter’s plan was to organize a Black Hills transportation service, hauling both freight and passengers. A related business would be a Pony Express that would deliver mail between Fort Laramie and Deadwood. His partners would be John James Ingalls and Richard Seymour, as well as his brother Steve Utter. The entrepreneurs were putting together a wagon train of men and women who wanted to go to Laramie, and many would continue on to Deadwood.

  This was just the push and opportunity Hickok needed. He decided to throw in with Colorado Charley’s venture. And now he would finally have news to give Agnes. He would not have been surprised though still a bit chagrined to learn that his wife had written to his family in Illinois, “I have not heard from him and I feel so bad about it that I can not sleep at night, but the only consolation that I have is that he is where he cannot communicate. If I was sure it was that I would not feel so bad. But I am afraid that he is sick; and if so he will not write nor allow anyone else to do so.”

  Agnes’s reference to Hickok being “sick” could have been about a flare-up of the rheumatism or to his vision difficulties, or an ailment only the couple knew. In any case, he now had something to write about. The caravan of wagons Hickok and Utter had pulled together left Cheyenne on June 27—with no knowledge of that week’s disaster at Little Bighorn.

  The only mishap along the way was the loss of Hickok’s cane. On the night of June 29, he had stuck it in the ground near the top of his bedroll and then stretched out for the night. Somehow, in the caravan’s haste to get a good start at dawn, Hickok had forgotten about it. When the travelers came to a ranch, Hickok asked the owner, John Hunton, if he would send someone back for it and at his earliest opportunity have it sent on to him in Deadwood.2

  Actually, for Hickok, there was one more mishap on the journey: at Fort Laramie, the caravan was joined by thirty more wagons … and Calamity Jane, who, unhappily for Hickok, would be linked to him for the rest of his days, and well beyond.

  Chapter Twenty

  DEADWOOD DAYS

  After inviting Calamity Jane and the travelers with wagons to join them, the expedition led by Wild Bill Hickok and Colorado Charley Utter that left Fort Laramie numbered around a hundred people. With their wagons and horses and mules and livestock and dogs, it had become quite a caravan. In a way, Hickok now had his own traveling wagon show, imitating his new wife’s occupation.

  Calamity Jane joined some of the other men in the wagon train in wearing buckskin … not necessarily by choice. After her partying excesses with the soldiers from Fort Laramie, she did not have clothes left to go traveling. Hickok and the others lent her enough items to make for a suitable outfit.

  A last-minute addition to the party was a young man named Anderson. He had been a teenager when he and Hickok first met a few years earlier at Fort McPherson, and they had become reacquainted in Cheyenne. At the last minute, Hickok invited him to join the Deadwood excursion.

  The twenty-two-year-old Joseph Foster Moore Anderson hailed from Holmes County in Ohio. As the youngest of eight children—his exhausted mother died within days of his birth—he was “petted, pampered and spoiled until I became a sickly youngster,” according to the Anderson memoir I Buried Hickok published decades later. He was raised by an aunt and uncle until he struck out on his own. Not long after he did, he became known as White Eye Anderson. One day on the prairie, he and a friend known as Yankee Judd were searching along a stream for beaver and otter. Suddenly, they were almost completely surrounded by Indians, who, exhibiting a cruel streak, set fire to the tall grass. As the wind pushed the flames toward them, the horses of the two young men took off, so they had to try to outrun the crackling flames. Fortunately, with the blaze licking at their boots, they found a large buffalo wallow with water about a foot deep.

  They jumped in and lay as flat as they could and still managed to have a pocket of air inside the coats they had pulled over their heads. When he thought the fire had passed, Anderson sat up. Burning buffalo chips were swirling in the wind, and one of them hit him in the face above one eye. The two young men managed to trudge to a camp with friendlier Indians, and the elderly medicine man treated the burn wound with a mixture of mushy blue clay, roots, and buffalo manure. The new hair that grew in was stark white. The medicine man declared that this was a mark signifying that the Great Spirit would protect him. A reason to believe the medicine man knew what he was talking about was that Anderson would live to 1946, dying three weeks before his ninety-third birthday.

  During the caravan’s journey, Wild Bill Hickok had one more opportunity to encounter his friend Buffalo Bill Cody, who had left the stage and been pressed back into scouting because of the war with the Plains tribes. The paths of Hickok and Cody intersected at Sage Creek in eastern Wyoming. There was no beer-drinking frivolity for the old friends this time, though. Hickok was on a personal mission to Deadwood, and Cody and the cavalry troopers were in search of hostile Indians in the wake of the Little Bighorn massacre of Custer and his men. They may have indulged in a sip of whiskey while wishing each other safe and productive travels. It had to have been a solemn parting, with Wild Bill and Buffalo Bill wondering if each would see the other again.

  Calamity Jane was not the only female on the trip. Most of the members were male—prospectors, bartenders, and gamblers, all looking for new opportunities—but there were also at least a dozen travelers described as “ladies of easy virtue” by John Gray, one of the wagon riders. Two of them were known as Dirty Em and Madame Moustache. According to her memoir, Calamity Jane was not on this trip at all, claiming that she went to Deadwood as a Pony Express rider delivering mail and had gotten as far as Custer. However, the Pony Express service had long ceased to exist, and Colorado Charley did not initiate an express mail service to and from Deadwood until later in July.1

  In his account of the trip to Deadwood, White Eye Anderson wrote that Calamity Jane had some recovering to do, but once she “got cleaned up and sober she looked quite attractive.” Anderson did most of the cooking for the group, and she pitched in to help him. He view
ed Jane as being “a big-hearted woman,” and, he wrote, they “became good friends.” Not so for Wild Bill. Anderson recalled that he “surely did not have any use” for Calamity Jane.

  She was useful to the wagon train, however. No man on the excursion was better than she was at driving a team of mules, and all were impressed by her bull-whacking skills. She had very good skills with guns, too. One day, a coyote was spotted about a hundred yards from the wagon train. Several men fired at it with their rifles to no avail. Calamity Jane whipped out a pistol and killed it with a single, well-aimed shot.

  Though Wild Bill and Calamity Jane were together day and night as the caravan rumbled toward the Black Hills, they did not become romantic partners. Obviously, that is what has been portrayed over the years in novels, television shows, and several movies. For the rest of her life, Calamity Jane claimed more than a passing relationship between her and Hickok, and she even intimated that their Deadwood sojourn produced a child (though she had the year and state wrong). Not only was there no love affair, but from the accounts of others who knew them both during the summer of ’76, Hickok could barely tolerate her presence.

  His attitude toward Calamity Jane could be chalked up to being completely faithful to his wife. Hickok was, after all, still a groom of only three months. As he worked his way west in June, Hickok had written that he had fallen ill “but am feeling very well and happy now. I god Bless and Protect my Agnes in my Prair. Would I not like to Put my big hands on your Shoulders and kiss you rite now. Love to emma [and] one Thousand kises to my wife Agnes.”

  But it also seems that Calamity Jane’s rough manner rubbed him the wrong way. Perhaps if they had met a few years earlier it would have been a different story because Hickok was no stranger to rough frontier women, including prostitutes and “Indian Annies.” But he had a rather refined wife now whom by all the evidence he truly loved and admired. Sharing intimacies with Calamity Jane would have been a blatant betrayal of Agnes … in addition to Calamity Jane being a lot more trouble than he needed in his life that summer.

  However, Wild Bill and Calamity Jane did share a love of whiskey. He had made sure before leaving Cheyenne that the necessary supplies for the trip included a five-gallon keg of the potent liquor. Every morning, the group would prepare for the day’s ride by gathering around Hickok’s wagon for a pick-me-up, and there would be more imbibing in the evening. No wonder the keg did not last long, especially, as Anderson recounted, with Calamity Jane being the one who “hit it more often than anyone else.” Luck was with the party because they encountered a man named Shingle who was driving a wagonload of whiskey to Deadwood. He sold Hickok another five-gallon keg and continued on his way.

  As they wet their whistles after dinner, the group sat around the campfire and swapped stories. Oddly, Hickok had little to say. Perhaps it was a strange sensation those warm evenings on the Great Plains to be reenacting a scene from Scouts of the Plains, which was itself a reenactment of thousands of such scenes on the frontier. He may have been in a somber mood, thinking about his wife left behind and the uncertainty of his future and their future together. Any pauses in conversation, however, were filled by Calamity Jane: “I think she told some of the toughest stories I ever heard,” Anderson reported, “and there would always be a big crowd come over to the campfire to hear her talk.”

  After the wagon train arrived in Custer City, the travelers rested up for a couple of days. Then Hickok, Calamity Jane, the Utter brothers, and a handful of others—including, as the local newspaper noted, its “crew of depraved women”—decided to ride ahead to Deadwood. For Wild Bill, it would be his first glimpse of the town that had very quickly acquired a notorious reputation.

  However, it was the former Martha Canary who turned out to be the most famous figure to arrive that day. The July 15 edition of The Black Hills Pioneer proclaimed, “‘Calamity Jane’ has arrived.” The presence of the others, including Wild Bill Hickok, was not reported. The article was accompanied by a photograph showing Calamity Jane hoisting a mug of beer as a salute to her rough-hewn fans.

  Deadwood was the most recent boomtown that had exploded with the westward expansion of the American frontier. Right after the Custer expedition into the Black Hills in the summer of 1874, the first shanties and tents were quickly thrown up in a gulch lined with dead trees—the settlement soon to be called Deadwood Gulch, then simply Deadwood. The gold rush was on, and the new town became the beneficiary of it, if making fast money can be considered a benefit amid increasing violence, filth, and disease.

  By March 1876, more than six hundred prospectors were as busy as beavers in the hills around Deadwood. There were plenty of jobs for other men, too, such as laborers and shopkeepers and hotel and restaurant workers. By that summer, the thriving outpost in what was still Dakota Territory had close to ten thousand inhabitants, including over a thousand now who were “looking for color,” an expression that meant finding evidence of a gold deposit. Some did find what they were looking for, but most did not—it was estimated that the average income for miners was less than a dollar a day, and they were scraping by in a town with rampant inflation.

  Booming the most were the saloons and dance halls and their gaming tables. But other, more “legitimate” establishments, such as restaurants and small shops, were thriving, too. As the historian Sherry Monahan points out, residents “benefited from local fish and game, as well as having food shipped in,” indicating that not everyone who emigrated to Deadwood did so to be a prospector. “Local farmers supplied residents and merchants with chicken, pigs, potatoes, turnips, cabbages, eggs and butter.” Morgan & Eggots was a shop that sold breads, pies, fancy cakes, candy, and ice cream. Hilary’s Lee Street Bakery offered baked goods and cakes for special occasions.

  The Black Hills Pioneer began publishing in 1876, and a second newspaper, The Black Hills Times, would appear the following year. Later in 1876, a telegraph line strung from Denver would be completed.

  When Hickok and his party arrived that July, the main street of Deadwood was still lined with tents and wooden structures, though many of the latter were no longer shacks but one- and two-story buildings consisting of better-cut wood. The street was still dirt, and there were no sidewalks. When weather turned the street into boot-sucking mud, planks were dropped on top of it to cross the street.

  “During the daytime the street was packed with jostling men, horses, mules, oxen, and every conceivable manner of conveyance,” writes Joseph Rosa. “At night the sidewalks rang with the thud and scuff of thousands of boots, and the saloons did a roaring trade.”

  Wood and cigar smoke drifted out of those crowded saloons and dance halls, accompanied by the sounds of tinkling pianos, some laughter, some angry shouting, and the occasional gunshot. The air also carried the scents of burning kerosene and coal, horses and their manure, cheap perfume, and men who had gone too long without bathing.

  Fortunately, except in the depth of summer when the burning hot air was still, the air remained clear from regular washing. As John Edwards Ames describes the area in The Real Deadwood, “The Black Hills are a high-altitude island of timber surrounded by [a] level, barren, treeless plain. They are far less arid than the surrounding region because some of the peaks rise more than a mile high. Thus, they arrest rain clouds that otherwise quickly blow over the dry plains.”

  As would plague several of the booming cow towns in Kansas in the late 1860s and through the ’70s, Deadwood was rife with violence because of the combustible combination of guns and alcohol. As more men poured into the saloons and more whiskey was poured into their glasses, arguments and errant elbows and jealousies and accusations of cheating at cards very quickly escalated to gunplay. That few men were any good at shooting kept the death toll down.

  But Deadwood was really just getting started. The Black Hills historian Watson Parker tabulated thirty-four murders between 1876 and 1879, and it can be assumed that in the Black Hills and other remote locations nearby, other deaths by violence
went unrecorded. Every so often, there would be a report of a “bedroll killing”—men would sneak up on sleeping or drunken prospectors in the middle of the night and club or knife them to death, then make off with whatever gold they had harvested.

  Still, for most men, the risk was worth it because of the potential, if you survived, to live out the rest of your life in ease and comfort. In the summer of 1876, gold was valued at twenty dollars an ounce, and just in June and July, a million dollars’ worth of it was gouged out of the Black Hills. Newspapers in some of the major U.S. cities referred to the region as the “richest 100 square miles on Earth.”

  A ruthless man with ambition and gunmen to protect the services he provided could get rich yet never have to set foot on a claim. Such an entrepreneur was Ellis Albert Swearengen. Al, as he was called, and his twin brother, Lemuel, were born in Iowa, the eldest of eight children. When the thirty-year-old Al Swearengen showed up in Deadwood in May 1876, he brought with him a wife, Nettie, and a desire to get rich quick, whatever way that had to be done. He immediately managed to construct the Cricket, a saloon made of canvas and lumber. There was a bar, of course, and an expanding gambling operation and a small dance hall; he also hosted prizefights, and as prostitutes became available, he created small shanties out back that served dozens of men a night. The going rate was $1.50 per assignation.2

  Into such surroundings came Wild Bill Hickok and his party, in full plainsman regalia. Passersby stopped in their tracks to witness the arrival of the most famous gunfighter of his time. Hickok and Colorado Charley were immediately recognizable with their long, flowing locks. Calamity Jane was outfitted as though she, too, had spent considerable time as a U.S. Army scout. (According to her tales, she had.) It was something like a royal procession down the sunbaked, dust-swirling street.

  The journalist Richard Hughes observed the entrance of Hickok and his entourage and later reported, “They rode the entire length of Main Street, mounted on good horses and clad in complete suits of buckskin, every suit of which carried sufficient fringe to make a considerable buckskin rope.” Hickok made for an impressive figure at the head of the column, and the others “basked chiefly in the reflected glory of their leader.”