Talk:Wild Bill Hickok

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By Uri Ridelman - Journalist

I have been working on a project regarding the life of Wild Bill Hickok, and while doing that I've noticed the inconsistencies regarding his incident with the McCanles Gang. Some say the McCanles were not a gang but just some unfortunante souls who had some disputes with Wild Bill and ended being shot by him. Others claim that they were indeed ruthless criminals and that they deserved to die at the hands of the famous gunfighter.

Here I present to you information I found while surfing the Internet. Hopefully, together we can reach a satisfactory answer and then create a page for them here at Wikipedia. Please feel free to post any info you have on this matter.

From our own Wikipedia on the Wild Bill Hickok page: "He became well-known for single-handedly capturing the McCanles gang, through the use of a ruse."


From About.com on the Wild Bill Hickok page: "The incident that began his claim to fame. While employed at the Rock Creek Pony Express Station in Nebraska he got into a gunfight with an employee looking to collect his pay. Wild Bill shot and killed McCanles and wounded two other men. He was acquitted at the trial. However, there is some question on the validity of the trial because he worked for the powerful Overland Stage Company." http://americanhistory.about.com/library/timelines/bltimelinehickock.htm


From AOL Hometown on the Wild Bill Hickok page: "The incident at Rock Creek Station, Nebraska was what began his legend. The station was an important stop for overland stages and as Pony Express station. It had been owned by David McCanles before he sold it to Russell, Waddell, and Majors, of the Pony Express. After that, the station was operated by Horace Wellman and his common-law wife, Wild Bill, a stock tender, and J.W. "Dock," Brink, a stable hand. That summer the station was almost bankrupt and could not pay McCanles. Wild Bill had just arrived when an altercation took pl ace. It happened on July 12, 1861.

McCanles, cousin James wood, and hand James Gordon showed up at the station to collect money owed him. After a short argument, Wild Bill shot and killed McCanles from inside the house. He also wounded Woods and Gordon. Wellman finished Woods off by beating him with a hoe. They both ran after Gordon and killed him with a shotgun blast. A trial was held but it was a farce. 12 year old Monroe McCanles, who witnessed the shootings, was not allowed to testify, nor was he even allowed in the court room. Wild Bill and Wellman were allowed to put forth a defense of self-defense. Since they were employees of the Overland Stage Company, the most powerful corporation west of the Mississippi, they had a lot of friends.

Four years later, writer Colonel George Ward Nichols wrote about the event, and he didn't much care if he got the details right. Wild Bill didn't seem to care either. This was the start of his gunfighter legend. Nichols wrote that there was a "McCanles gang" of terrorists. He write that Wild Bill held off and killed ten men, in a bloody one-sided fight. He also said Wild Bill was gravely wounded himself and later had eleven bullets removed. None of it was true, but it made Wild Bill's reputation." http://members.aol.com/Gibson0817/WildBill.htm

From The World According to Jerome "Brilliant Brief Lives": "The McCanles outlaw gang was wanted for train robbery, murder, bank robbery, cattle rustling, and horse theft. In 1861 word came to Wild Bill that they had set up a camp at Rock Creek Station, in Jefferson County -- just outside his limited jurisdiction." http://www.abacom.com/~jkrause/hickok.html

Answers.com has them on their "List of Western Outlaws" under the category of Outlaw Gangs, right next to those like the Dalton Gang. http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-western-outlaws

And finally they are portrayed as an infamous gang in the HBO series "Deadwood."

There are other sites that make the case one way or the other but I posted here only some of the ones I found more interersting.

Your help will be greatly appreciated, and at the same time we'll create a page for them on this site. Thanks

Contents

[edit] Please add any comments you might have

Please feel free to comment on this subject. Your information, insight and opinion is welcome and needed.

==Wild Bill an Opium Smoker? After seeing the most recent film about Wild Bill, played by Jeff Bridges. It shows Bill was an Opium user. Now, I understand that Hollywood is not always factual when making a film about a person or events. I personally cannot find any information that Wild Bill smoked Opium. I know that Laudanum was heavily used in the west for pain relief, which is from the Opium Poppy plant. Now, before anyone wants to start a defensive post about this possibility. Remember many great American men have used Opium and other opiates for recreational. Im not condoning the practice, but lets be realistic. That doesn't not make them bad people.

Furthermore, if anyone can add some information regarding Opium usage by Wild Bill, I would love to read it. Thank you KineticRic (talk) 06:13, 20 April 2008 (UTC) KineticRic

I remember reading something about some showman threatening to exhume Hickok's body and take it on a tour, and Charlie Utter returned to Deadwood to stand guard over the body. Does anyone else remember this? Gorilla Jones 18:46, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

This article, while rather good overall, repeats a few things that are not proven.

1. "The saloon proprietor claimed that, at the time of his death, Hickok held a pair of aces and a pair of eights, with all cards black, and this has since been called a "dead man's hand".

I'm not sure where this info comes from. There are no contemporary cites about the poker hand held by Hickok, and Rosa(his biographer) says the cards are in dispute. Can anyone tell me where I can find the "saloon proprietor's" claim? And when was this combination of cards first referred to as a "dead man's hand?"

2. Under the trivia section, this is repeated as truth. Unless someone can supply a contemporary cite, or at least a time frame for the phrase, I see no reason to leave this in the article. Samclem 19:10, 27 August 2006 (UTC)


I think it is wrong to say he was shot by "the coward Jack McCall". This is biased. It would be better to say in a cowardly act he was shot by Jack McCall.

==Nonsensical sentence "Hickok was later, after his death, alleged to have met and been acquainted with later famous lawman Wyatt Earp, by Earp's biographer."

After whose death? Hickok's? And what did the biographer do?

An earlier sentence is missing the name of a marshall. I put question marks in to flag the missing name.--Tdkehoe 16:47, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, after looking into it, it seems that there really is no difinitive fact of what Wild Bill's poker hand was when he was shot, but many sources cite that "legend has it" that the hand was aces and eights, with some saying it is unknown what the fifth card was, or others saying that it wasn't dealt yet, and was interrupted by Wild Bill getting shot. Mabey it would be best to simply change the wording in the text, and trivia, to "Legend has it that Wild BIll's hand was Aces and eights." Because we will probably never know what it actually was, and even if there were sources citing what his hand was, you would have to question their validity. An7drew 18:38, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Some years ago I picked up a book titled "Triggernometry: A Gallery of Gunfighters" (originally published in 1934) on a lark because I thought it would represent the most outrageous of the dime store novel tales. But its author, one Eugene Cunnigham, was the consumate journalist in trying to sniff out what was fact and what may very well have been fiction in the tales of the famous gunfighters, including Wild Bill. He grew up during the tail end of the gunfighers' time, and so knew and interviewed many of the men and/or witnessess to the events in which the men got their fame. But the book is not at all boring. Cunnigham manages to capture both the realism and the spirit of the lawful and lawless gunslingers; these stories really have panache. I highly reccomend it for anyone wanting to l'arn a bit more about these men of lore. 66.57.225.77 02:37, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I'm reading the same book (Triggernometry), and, yes, it is quite entertaining, a well as full of details, some stated as fact, some less so.

This page has been vandalized. I am a new user and don't believe I have the permissions necessary to lock the page to new users. OverCee 19:29, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

In teh Trivia section: the last point (what could I do, they had me surrounded, and killed me) is also attributed to Jim Bridger, in the Wiki article on him.

Just a quick point: Under the "Lawman and Gunfighter" head it refers to the Hickok-Davis Tutt's "quick draw" duel as "in fact the only one on record that fits the portrayal." However, the associated citation (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/WWhickok.htm) refers to it as "the first recorded example of two men taking part in a quick-draw duel." That's enough to stop me in my tracks. Which is it: The only one on record or the first recorded example? Either way, very sloppy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.83.229.102 (talk) 02:25, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] IMDB Links?

I did a lot of copy editing to this article, which is an interesting entry but, in my opinion, could still use a lot of clarification and would benefit enourmously from additional citations. Some of the IMDB links A) are bad but B) I coudn't find them when I clicked edit on that section, so I wasn't able to fix them. funkendub 07:06, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

The footnoted links are found in the body of the text. Click the "^" link to jump back to the source location. Links fixed. 208.106.26.20 05:53, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] going blind

The History channel said he was going blind from veneral disease when he died. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.105.208.190 (talk) 07:36, 7 January 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Summary

What the hell was that "Summary" section doing there? It doubled the length of the page for absolutely no reason than to take all the information already there and smush it together. It's gone. If anyone can find some worthwhile information that I deleted, please re-add it in the appropriate place, not in a mega-section that looks like a copy-and-pasted high school research paper. --DCrazy talk/contrib 23:38, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Charlie Utter

The name "Utter" just appeared out of nowhere in the "Death" section with no explanation or context. I added his first name and some very basic context that he was a friend of Hickock's. -Sarfa 16:22, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Shooting of Chief Whistler

The following comment by 134.186.102.191 was moved here from the article's subsection Civil War and scouting:

[edit] Civil War and Scouting==

This section needs to be edited. The same fact is stated twice, once in the first line and once in the last line of the paragraph. It is stated twice that Bill Cody and the three other men met while scouts in the army

CORRECTION: According to Joseph G. Rosa, foremost expert on James Butler Hickok, Chief Whistler was NOT killed by Hickok. The best evidence indicates that a man names M.N. Kress, known as "Wild Bill of the Blue" locally, was the killer of Chief Whistler. And far from calming things down, the murder of Whistler caused serious trouble.

[edit] McCanles Gang

Uri above will interested in this. I've been researching the incident and found a contemporary newspaper report. The report was written as a rebuttal to the Harpers article and as such is obviously written by someone who didn't like Hickok and some time after the event following the Harpers article. The book that contains the copy of the report did not name the newspaper it came from so I have checked details to confirm legitimacy and found enough similarities with other versions to reasonably assume authenticity. The main difference I found is it claims McCanles was shot in the back while several other sources identical in detail to this account of the shooting say the chest.

"Duck Bill" Hickok: The Falstaff of Nebraska
A fight in which three unarmed men were outnumbered and killed is undergoing transmogrification. Twenty seven year old James “Duck Bill” Hickok , one of the winners, represents himself as the sole combatant against the “McCanles Gang”, in Rock Creek Nebraska. Forty year old Dave McCanles sold a house to the local freighting company, which was slow to pay. McCanles, something of a bully, went to demand the second instalment, taking a couple of unarmed ranch hands and his 12 year old son. At the office he was met by Hickok, nicknamed “Duck Bill”. There was already bad blood between the two, who had quarrelled over their disreputable interest in the same woman. McCanles straightaway abused manager Horace Wellman, ultimately using his fists. Whereupon Hickok, hiding behind a calico curtain, shot him in the back. Then, Hickok, Wellman, Mrs Wellman and freight company employee, J.W. “Doc” Brink, ran out to McCanles’ waiting ranch hands. One was killed with a shotgun blast, probably by Mrs Wellman. The other was battered to death with hoes. The little boy saved his life by running away. Hickok is fabricating “nine men in buckram” out of McCanles and his unarmed ranch hands, who have become the “McCanles Gang” of “desperados, horse thieves, murderers and regular cut throats. Hickok claims to have faced them down, saying he was hit by 11 bullets in the fiercest gunfight one man ever undertook. The facts are as we gave them. Hickok was one of three armed men and a woman who attacked three unarmed men and a child. Hickok’s heroic act was to shoot a bully in the back without warning from a hiding place.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by WLRoss (talk • contribs) 15:05, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Somebody needs to note the National Lampoon's satirizing of both Hickok and Cody in the composite character "Wild Bill Shitcock" in their 1975 "199th. Birthday Book". "William S. Cock" is first noted as a claim jumper on a much altered claim form to a gold mine, then is the empresario of "Wild Bill Shitcock's Wild West Show". This glorious production offers such diversions as "Miss Fannie Ugly" defecating from a tightrope onto an Ace of Spades ("She Has Never Missed"), miners castrated with rusty chisels, and a chance to discharge a shotgun into a barrel of passenger pigeons ("A Test Of Manly Mettle!"), among other horrors. I don't have a copy of the damned thing with the details or I'd enter it myself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.162.142.110 (talk) 02:23, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] ======================================================

WILD BILL's DEATH CHAIR

Unfortunately, everything about Wild Bill's "Death Chair" at Saloon #10 in Deadwood is bogus -- even the chair. The open-top gun holster displayed is not of the kind used by Hickok. Hickok and most of his contemporaries favored holsters that had a top flap. Contrary to pop culture, Hickok favored and used holsters. A fancy legend arose that Hickok preferred not to use holsters and carried his two pistols in a belt sash around his waist, which idea originated from a photo taken of Hickok dressed in buckskins, with two ivory pistols stuffed in his belt sash along with a large-style unsheathed knife. The photo was set up and taken in a photographer's studio at the time when Hickok was appearing in a Wild West stage production with Buffalo Bill Cody back East. The knife and buckskins outfit were stage props.

The gun on display with the "Death Chair" was not manufactured during Hickok's lifetime. The blood stain displayed on the chair at a previous time was red paint. And Wild Bill was sitting on a stool -- not a chair -- when he was shot. Transcripts of the first trial of the killer Jack McCall include the sworn testimony of eyewitness Carl Mann, the co-owner of Saloon #10. He was tending the bar at the time when Hickok was shot. Carl Mann stated, "Hickok was sitting on a stool, we didn't have chairs." —Preceding unsigned comment added by SCCLL (talk • contribs) 10:30, 2 May 2008 (UTC)