Wild Bill Hickok, star of a somewhat abortive Wild West show in Niagara Falls, Ont., was either a cold-blooded murderer, a braggart and coward, or the bravest, most ethical, fastest gun in the West.
As with most legendary historical occurrences, new revelations continually come to light about Hickok and his appearance in this area. The vagaries and outright misconceptions about his life and times are due in part to the lurid writing in dime novels and frontier newspapers of the times, acerbated by modern Western movies. Journalists in those days seldom let facts stand in the way of a good story.
Hickok himself, a public relations buff, contributed to the historic misconceptions.
Niagara Falls Museum operator Sidney Barnett, son of museum founder Thomas Barnett, conceived the idea of bringing a Wild West show and hired Hickok and another famed gunman, Texas Jack Omohundro, also known as the Sundance Kid. But the promoter ran into trouble when the Pawnee indian agent refused to allow Native Americans to join the show.
Barnett hired a Niagara Falls, N.Y., law firm to advance his cause with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. A letter to the bureau from the firm of Griffith & Porter, of Niagara Falls, N.Y., exists today in the National Archives.
Wild West Historian James D. Horan wrote, "Hickok put on an exciting show with a band of Sac and Fox braves staging a buffalo hunt using blunt arrows, then finally lassoing the big beasts."
Posters of the event noted, "The Buffalos captured for this purpose near the foot of the Rocky Mountains, after one of the most exciting chases ever witnessed on the plains, will be liberated in a large and beautiful park at Niagara Falls, Canada side."
However, a Niagara Falls, Ont., reporter wrote, as previously related in this column, that the show turned out to be "a swindle and a farce." There were only two buffalo and one ox that behaved more like domestic cattle.
But there can be little doubt that it was thrilling for many easterners to view Wild Bill in person. His first kill came in July 1861, at the stagecoach station at Rock Creek, Neb., when an altercation occurred with David C. McCanles, his 12-year-old son and two employees. Hickok was a young assistant stable hand in the employ of station operator Horace Wellman.
McCanles owned the property and was owed rent. He went to the station to demand payment, but Wellman refused to see him. McCanles, a rough-and-tumble farmer, entered the station but was unarmed. Hickok shot him with a rifle from behind a curtain, a cold-blooded murder. McCanles' son escaped, but two McCanles workers were also killed.
Hickok and Wellman were tried but acquitted. As Hickok later told a reporter, he confronted the "McCanles gang" of 10 members who were armed to the teeth and dispatched them all.
Later on, Hickok did fight many a one-on-one duel in dusty cowtown main streets and always came out on top. He was in excellent physical condition and had extraordinary hand-eye coordination.
Henry M. Stanley, the famed African explorer who found Dr. Livingstone, was a reporter for the weekly Missouri Democrat when he interviewed Hickok in 1867, when Hickok was a scout for Gen. Custer's Seventh Cavalry Regiment -- the Garry Owen outfit I once served in, although many years after Custer.
Stanley asked Hickok how many "white men have you killed?" Apparently Native American deaths did not count. Wild Bill replied, "I would be willing to take my oath on the Bible tomorrow that I have killed over a hundred a long ways off." But he hastened to add, "I never killed one man without a good cause."
Custer was lavish in his praise for Hickok. And Robert A. Kane, a big-game hunter and editor of the magazine Outdoor Life, witnessed a shooting demonstration by Hickok in which he hit everything he shot at with lightning speed. He said Hickok possessed "that perfect coordination of hand and eye which was essential to the perfect mastery of the one hand gun."
Hickok met his fabled end while playing poker, with his back to the door, in a saloon in Deadwood, S.D.
Jack McCall, who claimed Hickok had killed his brother, walked into the saloon and shot Hickok in the back of the head from a foot-and-a-half away. Hickok was holding two black aces, two black eights and the jack of diamonds -- which became known as the Dead Man's Hand.
McCall was tried for murder but acquitted. However, because the trial was on Indian land, it was not recognized in the states, so his second trial in a court of proper jurisdiction was not double jeopardy. This time, he was found guilty and hanged.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 16 2009 |