This Day in American History: Wild Bill Hickok Is Shot and Killed
On this day in 1876, one of the most famous gunfighters of the American frontier never even saw the shot coming -- because for the first time in years, he didn't have his back to the wall.
James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok had already lived several lifetimes' worth of frontier legend by the time he arrived in the rough gold-mining boomtown of Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in the summer of 1876. Before the Civil War he'd worked as a stagecoach driver and a lawman in Kansas; during the war he served as a Union scout and spy; afterward he built a national reputation as a marshal, gambler, and gunfighter in towns like Hays City and Abilene, a reputation later inflated by dime novels and magazine profiles into something closer to myth than fact. By 1876, his eyesight was failing and his gunfighting days were largely behind him -- he'd come to Deadwood chasing gold and cards, not trouble.
On the afternoon of August 2, 1876, Hickok sat down for a game of poker at Nuttal & Mann's Saloon No. 10. He had a longstanding personal rule of always sitting with his back to the wall, but every other seat at the table was already taken that day, forcing him to sit with his back to the door instead. A recent arrival to town named Jack McCall, who'd lost money to Hickok in a game the day before, walked in, crept up behind him, and shot him in the back of the head at point-blank range. Hickok died instantly, still holding a hand of two pairs -- black aces and black eights -- a combination that has been known as the "Dead Man's Hand" in poker lore ever since.
McCall fled the saloon but was quickly captured. A hastily assembled Deadwood miners' court acquitted him within hours -- the town had no formal legal authority to try a capital case, and some believed McCall's claim that he was avenging a brother Hickok had supposedly killed. McCall's freedom didn't last: he later bragged about the killing in Wyoming Territory, where he was rearrested, properly tried under federal jurisdiction, convicted, and hanged in March 1877. Hickok was buried in Deadwood's Mount Moriah Cemetery, where his grave remains one of the town's most visited sites to this day, and where fellow frontier legend Calamity Jane was later buried at her request, beside him.
Also on this day:
1776 -- Most of the 56 delegates to the Continental Congress sign the engrossed Declaration of Independence, nearly a month after its adoption on July 4.
1921 -- A Chicago jury acquits eight members of the "Black Sox" in the 1919 World Series fixing scandal.
1923 -- President Warren G. Harding dies in San Francisco; Vice President Calvin Coolidge succeeds him.
1959 -- Rookie Willie McCovey hits the first of his 521 career home runs, off Pittsburgh's Ron Kline.
1982 -- Rickey Henderson steals his 100th base of the season, the earliest any player has ever reached the mark.
Two pairs, black aces and eights, and a legend cut down mid-hand -- the West rarely wrote a tidier ending than that.
Source: HISTORY.com, Wikipedia, National Portrait Gallery
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