July 15, 2026 • 12 mins
In the mid-1800s, the archetype of the gentleman gunslinger emerged through tall tales of real people like James Butler 'Wild Bill' Hickok. Learn how Wild Bill became a legend in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/wild-bill-hickok.htm
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Lauren Bobebam. Here. Some six decades after the button Down
duel between gentlemen Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, and sixteen
years before the blazing gunfight on a dusty lot near
Arizona's Ok Corral, a former Confederate soldier named Davis Tutt,
(00:27):
who was a gambler with a score to settle, stepped
into the town square in Springfield, Missouri, and fell literally
into history. On the other side of the square that day,
July twenty first of eighteen sixty five was a man
who stood six foot one inches tall that's one point
eight five meters, with auburn hair curling to his shoulders,
(00:50):
a distinctively long mustache underneath an aquiline nose, and a
rakishly worn sombrero topping it all off. James Butler Hiccock
was a former Union soldier and a gambler too, both
by nature and profession. He was also good with a gun.
(01:10):
At about six pm that day, with a lot on
the line, a gold watch, a gambling debt, perhaps the
affections of a woman, and certainly a good doll up
of pride. The two men squared off in what's now
recognized as the wild West's first quick draw shootout. Things
didn't go well for young mister Tutt that afternoon. As
(01:32):
for Hickock, whom many knew even then as wild Bill,
the gunfight in Springfield became the stuff of legend. For
the article this episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke
with Tom Claven, author of the twenty nineteen book Wild Bill,
The True Story of the American Frontier's first Gunfighter. He said,
(01:55):
it was sort of inevitable as they approached each other
to the point they saw where one could hit the eye,
and then it was who drew first. So it was
kind of improvised, but the story spread like a prairie fire.
It sort of set the template the choreography for these
gunfights that would take place over the next few decades.
(02:17):
Hiccock was born in Illinois in eighteen thirty seven and
made his way west as a young man. He worked
as a Free State Army soldier in Kansas and a
driver for a Kansas stagecoach company. In eighteen sixty one,
then twenty four year old Hiccock got in his first
big trouble with the law, charged with murder for gunning
(02:37):
down one David McCanless in a dispute at a Pony
Express station in Rock Creek Station, Nebraska. As with much
of Hickock's life and legend, it's hard to tell now
more than one hundred and fifty years later, exactly what
spurred him to shoot McCanless, but most agree he was
probably the first man wild Bill ever killed. A contemporary
(03:00):
of Hiccock's, a colonist by the name of George W. Hanson,
would later become interested in this story. Hanson helped publish
an entire issue of the magazine Nebraska History devoted to
the subject in nineteen twenty seven. In it, he wrote,
from all accounts of killings in which Hiccock subsequently took part,
I've been unable to find one single authentic instance in
(03:24):
which he fought a fair fight. To him, no human
life was sacred. He was a cold blooded killer, without
heart or conscience. But at the time Hiccock was acquitted
of the McCanless murder, and afterward banged around as a scout, stablehand,
wagonmaster Marshall, and possibly a Union spy during the Civil War.
(03:48):
Along the way, he gambled a lot and befriended another
Wild West legend, William Frederick Cody or Buffalo Bill. Hiccock
also picked up the nickname wild Bill, which he's sometimes
called himself, and impressed a few women, including the wife
of George Armstrong Custer, for whom Hickock scouted around that
(04:08):
time in the eighteen sixties. Owet talked a bit about
Custer in our recent episode, about his infamous last stand
and about how his wife, Elizabeth or Libby Bacon Custer,
spent half a century after George's death cementing his legacy.
She wrote glowingly of her late husband in the three
books she published during the fifteen years following his death
(04:31):
in eighteen seventy six. Libby Custer had an entirely different
view of wild Bill than his detractors. She wrote in
her eighteen ninety book Following the Guidan a few secondhand
stories of wild Bill being assailed by Ruffians and coming
out miraculously on top. She also wrote, quote, I do
(04:54):
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 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. Even in the time
(05:18):
of these events, the mid eighteen sixties, wild Bill's reputation
was widespread, if not entirely agreed upon or particularly believable.
But one way or another, Hiccock was in Springfield, Missouri,
in the summer of eighteen sixty five doing what he
perhaps liked to do, most gamble. He lost his gold
(05:41):
watch to Tut, or maybe Tut took it, and the
many accounts of the day have wild Bill warning Tut
about carrying the watch in public. Tut, who at one
time may have considered Hickock a friend, wore the watch defiantly.
In the end. Their face off across the Springfield Square
wasn't exactly the stuff of the old west On film
(06:05):
the quick pulls from dusty holsters in the middle of
a street at high noon, but it certainly wasn't a
proper Burr Hamilton duel either. The shootout at Springfield is
now considered the first time in America that two people
faced off in a public setting to settle a dispute
via handguns. They both shot. Tut missed, but Hiccock aimed
(06:30):
and struck his mark with a shot to the heart.
The showdown was memorialized in an article in Harper's New
Monthly magazine in February of eighteen sixty seven, in which
author George Ward Nichols quotes bystander colorfully and in dialect,
you want me to do the thing, I'll do the thing. Okay,
(06:50):
this is my best representation of the dialect as written.
Here we go. The instant Bill fired without whitened or
see if he had hit at Tut. He wheeled on
his heels and pulled at his pistol at Tut's friends,
who had already drawn their weapons. Aren't your satisfied, gentlemen,
cried Bill, cool as an alligator. Put up your shootin' irons,
(07:12):
or there'll be more dead men here. And they put
them up and set at war far five. This Harper's
article has been widely panned by historians. In it, Nichols
also says wild Bill killed hundreds of men, and that
was almost certainly way off the mark. Still, that article
(07:34):
and the dime store novels of the day provided one
of the first glimpses for many people into Hickock's larger
than life persona. Our modern biographer Claven explained it was
not only the nature of that gunfight, but Hickock's coolness
under pressure and his accuracy. He killed somebody with one
(07:54):
shot at a time when people were not that good
really with pistols. That was the beginning. Hiccock scouted more
during the American Indian Wars, became a US marshal in
two different Kansas towns, engaged in a few more shootouts,
and killed a few more men, including in one his
deputy accidentally shot in the middle of a gunfight. Hiccock
(08:18):
took advantage of his celebrity when he could, adjoining his
friend Buffalo Bill in a stage show in New York City,
a sort of pre Broadway spectacle called Scouts of the Plains,
but he knew too that his notoriety came at a price.
Hiccock is said to have always been armed with his colts,
and would often walk down the middle of the street
(08:39):
in any given town where it would be harder for
someone to surprise him from a dark doorway. Somewhere in
his travels, Hiccock met fellow scout Martha Jane Canary but
also known as Calamity Jane, and some accounts report that
the two had a romantic relationship. According to Claven, though
that never happened. Recent search has Hiccock marrying an older
(09:01):
woman named Agnes Lake, a circus manager, in Cheyenne, Wyoming,
in March of eighteen seventy six. Claven says that while
Agnes was not a public persona, she was the only
missus Hiccock, and that Calamity Jane, although fascinating unto herself,
was not well liked by wild Bill. After their honeymoon
(09:22):
in Cincinnati, Hiccock left again for the wild West, and
that's where he was. In the summer of eighteen seventy six,
at the age of thirty nine, wild Bill landed in
the rowdy gold rush town of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory,
where he intended to earn some gambling money to take
home to his wife. There, on August first of eighteen
(09:45):
seventy six, he ran a foul of a drunken Kentucky
man who was after his own slice of fame won
Jack McCall again. The records are hazy on exactly what
happened or why, But in a saloon in the middle
of town, McCall stepped behind wild Bill while he was
playing cards and shot him point blank in the back
(10:07):
of the head. The wound was fatal. During his life,
Hiccock was practically mythologized, and his story has continued to
grow in this century and a half since his death,
both through biographies and fictionalized accounts, including the nineteen fifties
TV series devoted to him, in that he was portrayed
(10:29):
by frequent Hollywood and Spaghetti Western gunslinger Guy Madison. He's
also been played by Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers, Charles Bronson,
Jeff Bridges, Keith Carrodine, and Luke Helmsworth. Claven said, we
have this archetype in our history of the American West,
of the gunfighter, the lone gunman, the man who goes
(10:51):
his own way and it's confident that he's going to
set things to right. Hiccock was basically the prototype of
that man who did so much in his short life.
Hickcock is probably best known for the skill he first
exhibited in public in that Springfield Square in eighteen sixty five,
But is that what Hiccock would have preferred. Claven said,
(11:16):
if he were to describe himself, it would be as
a gambler, because he spent more time doing that than
he did anything else, and he enjoyed it. He enjoyed
playing cards, He enjoyed the surroundings of the saloon life,
the cigars, whiskey, the girls. He really liked that life.
On the other hand, he also spent a lot of
time out on the planes, out on the prairie as
(11:37):
a scout, so he was kind of like two people
in one. He could spend weeks at a time on
the prairie by himself, but when he was in town
he enjoyed it. He'd wear a formal frock coat. He'd
really dress up. He is quite the dandy, I guess,
maybe grudgingly he'd say a gunfighter too, because it was
what he was. But he wasn't somebody who saw to
(12:00):
be hurting people. He liked people, and people liked him.
Today's episode is based on the article how wild Bill
Hiccock became an American Legend on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written
by John Donovan. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio
in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by
(12:21):
Tyler Klaang. Four more podcasts from my Heart Radio. Visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Lauren Bobebam. Here. Some six decades after the button Down
duel between gentlemen Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, and sixteen
years before the blazing gunfight on a dusty lot near
Arizona's Ok Corral, a former Confederate soldier named Davis Tutt,
(00:27):
who was a gambler with a score to settle, stepped
into the town square in Springfield, Missouri, and fell literally
into history. On the other side of the square that day,
July twenty first of eighteen sixty five was a man
who stood six foot one inches tall that's one point
eight five meters, with auburn hair curling to his shoulders,
(00:50):
a distinctively long mustache underneath an aquiline nose, and a
rakishly worn sombrero topping it all off. James Butler Hiccock
was a former Union soldier and a gambler too, both
by nature and profession. He was also good with a gun.
(01:10):
At about six pm that day, with a lot on
the line, a gold watch, a gambling debt, perhaps the
affections of a woman, and certainly a good doll up
of pride. The two men squared off in what's now
recognized as the wild West's first quick draw shootout. Things
didn't go well for young mister Tutt that afternoon. As
(01:32):
for Hickock, whom many knew even then as wild Bill,
the gunfight in Springfield became the stuff of legend. For
the article this episode is based on How Stuffworks. Spoke
with Tom Claven, author of the twenty nineteen book Wild Bill,
The True Story of the American Frontier's first Gunfighter. He said,
(01:55):
it was sort of inevitable as they approached each other
to the point they saw where one could hit the eye,
and then it was who drew first. So it was
kind of improvised, but the story spread like a prairie fire.
It sort of set the template the choreography for these
gunfights that would take place over the next few decades.
(02:17):
Hiccock was born in Illinois in eighteen thirty seven and
made his way west as a young man. He worked
as a Free State Army soldier in Kansas and a
driver for a Kansas stagecoach company. In eighteen sixty one,
then twenty four year old Hiccock got in his first
big trouble with the law, charged with murder for gunning
(02:37):
down one David McCanless in a dispute at a Pony
Express station in Rock Creek Station, Nebraska. As with much
of Hickock's life and legend, it's hard to tell now
more than one hundred and fifty years later, exactly what
spurred him to shoot McCanless, but most agree he was
probably the first man wild Bill ever killed. A contemporary
(03:00):
of Hiccock's, a colonist by the name of George W. Hanson,
would later become interested in this story. Hanson helped publish
an entire issue of the magazine Nebraska History devoted to
the subject in nineteen twenty seven. In it, he wrote,
from all accounts of killings in which Hiccock subsequently took part,
I've been unable to find one single authentic instance in
(03:24):
which he fought a fair fight. To him, no human
life was sacred. He was a cold blooded killer, without
heart or conscience. But at the time Hiccock was acquitted
of the McCanless murder, and afterward banged around as a scout, stablehand,
wagonmaster Marshall, and possibly a Union spy during the Civil War.
(03:48):
Along the way, he gambled a lot and befriended another
Wild West legend, William Frederick Cody or Buffalo Bill. Hiccock
also picked up the nickname wild Bill, which he's sometimes
called himself, and impressed a few women, including the wife
of George Armstrong Custer, for whom Hickock scouted around that
(04:08):
time in the eighteen sixties. Owet talked a bit about
Custer in our recent episode, about his infamous last stand
and about how his wife, Elizabeth or Libby Bacon Custer,
spent half a century after George's death cementing his legacy.
She wrote glowingly of her late husband in the three
books she published during the fifteen years following his death
(04:31):
in eighteen seventy six. Libby Custer had an entirely different
view of wild Bill than his detractors. She wrote in
her eighteen ninety book Following the Guidan a few secondhand
stories of wild Bill being assailed by Ruffians and coming
out miraculously on top. She also wrote, quote, I do
(04:54):
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 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. Even in the time
(05:18):
of these events, the mid eighteen sixties, wild Bill's reputation
was widespread, if not entirely agreed upon or particularly believable.
But one way or another, Hiccock was in Springfield, Missouri,
in the summer of eighteen sixty five doing what he
perhaps liked to do, most gamble. He lost his gold
(05:41):
watch to Tut, or maybe Tut took it, and the
many accounts of the day have wild Bill warning Tut
about carrying the watch in public. Tut, who at one
time may have considered Hickock a friend, wore the watch defiantly.
In the end. Their face off across the Springfield Square
wasn't exactly the stuff of the old west On film
(06:05):
the quick pulls from dusty holsters in the middle of
a street at high noon, but it certainly wasn't a
proper Burr Hamilton duel either. The shootout at Springfield is
now considered the first time in America that two people
faced off in a public setting to settle a dispute
via handguns. They both shot. Tut missed, but Hiccock aimed
(06:30):
and struck his mark with a shot to the heart.
The showdown was memorialized in an article in Harper's New
Monthly magazine in February of eighteen sixty seven, in which
author George Ward Nichols quotes bystander colorfully and in dialect,
you want me to do the thing, I'll do the thing. Okay,
(06:50):
this is my best representation of the dialect as written.
Here we go. The instant Bill fired without whitened or
see if he had hit at Tut. He wheeled on
his heels and pulled at his pistol at Tut's friends,
who had already drawn their weapons. Aren't your satisfied, gentlemen,
cried Bill, cool as an alligator. Put up your shootin' irons,
(07:12):
or there'll be more dead men here. And they put
them up and set at war far five. This Harper's
article has been widely panned by historians. In it, Nichols
also says wild Bill killed hundreds of men, and that
was almost certainly way off the mark. Still, that article
(07:34):
and the dime store novels of the day provided one
of the first glimpses for many people into Hickock's larger
than life persona. Our modern biographer Claven explained it was
not only the nature of that gunfight, but Hickock's coolness
under pressure and his accuracy. He killed somebody with one
(07:54):
shot at a time when people were not that good
really with pistols. That was the beginning. Hiccock scouted more
during the American Indian Wars, became a US marshal in
two different Kansas towns, engaged in a few more shootouts,
and killed a few more men, including in one his
deputy accidentally shot in the middle of a gunfight. Hiccock
(08:18):
took advantage of his celebrity when he could, adjoining his
friend Buffalo Bill in a stage show in New York City,
a sort of pre Broadway spectacle called Scouts of the Plains,
but he knew too that his notoriety came at a price.
Hiccock is said to have always been armed with his colts,
and would often walk down the middle of the street
(08:39):
in any given town where it would be harder for
someone to surprise him from a dark doorway. Somewhere in
his travels, Hiccock met fellow scout Martha Jane Canary but
also known as Calamity Jane, and some accounts report that
the two had a romantic relationship. According to Claven, though
that never happened. Recent search has Hiccock marrying an older
(09:01):
woman named Agnes Lake, a circus manager, in Cheyenne, Wyoming,
in March of eighteen seventy six. Claven says that while
Agnes was not a public persona, she was the only
missus Hiccock, and that Calamity Jane, although fascinating unto herself,
was not well liked by wild Bill. After their honeymoon
(09:22):
in Cincinnati, Hiccock left again for the wild West, and
that's where he was. In the summer of eighteen seventy six,
at the age of thirty nine, wild Bill landed in
the rowdy gold rush town of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory,
where he intended to earn some gambling money to take
home to his wife. There, on August first of eighteen
(09:45):
seventy six, he ran a foul of a drunken Kentucky
man who was after his own slice of fame won
Jack McCall again. The records are hazy on exactly what
happened or why, But in a saloon in the middle
of town, McCall stepped behind wild Bill while he was
playing cards and shot him point blank in the back
(10:07):
of the head. The wound was fatal. During his life,
Hiccock was practically mythologized, and his story has continued to
grow in this century and a half since his death,
both through biographies and fictionalized accounts, including the nineteen fifties
TV series devoted to him, in that he was portrayed
(10:29):
by frequent Hollywood and Spaghetti Western gunslinger Guy Madison. He's
also been played by Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers, Charles Bronson,
Jeff Bridges, Keith Carrodine, and Luke Helmsworth. Claven said, we
have this archetype in our history of the American West,
of the gunfighter, the lone gunman, the man who goes
(10:51):
his own way and it's confident that he's going to
set things to right. Hiccock was basically the prototype of
that man who did so much in his short life.
Hickcock is probably best known for the skill he first
exhibited in public in that Springfield Square in eighteen sixty five,
But is that what Hiccock would have preferred. Claven said,
(11:16):
if he were to describe himself, it would be as
a gambler, because he spent more time doing that than
he did anything else, and he enjoyed it. He enjoyed
playing cards, He enjoyed the surroundings of the saloon life,
the cigars, whiskey, the girls. He really liked that life.
On the other hand, he also spent a lot of
time out on the planes, out on the prairie as
(11:37):
a scout, so he was kind of like two people
in one. He could spend weeks at a time on
the prairie by himself, but when he was in town
he enjoyed it. He'd wear a formal frock coat. He'd
really dress up. He is quite the dandy, I guess,
maybe grudgingly he'd say a gunfighter too, because it was
what he was. But he wasn't somebody who saw to
(12:00):
be hurting people. He liked people, and people liked him.
Today's episode is based on the article how wild Bill
Hiccock became an American Legend on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written
by John Donovan. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio
in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by
(12:21):
Tyler Klaang. Four more podcasts from my Heart Radio. Visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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