“Wild Bill” Hickok just borrowed $50 to keep himself in a four-way poker game. With his back seated to the saloon’s bar in Deadwood, South Dakota, he stared sadly at his hand. A man approached from behind and fired just one shot with an old .45 Colt revolver. The bullet crashed through Hickok’s skull and lodged in the forearm of another player.
Without a twinge or whisper, Hickok died instantly on Aug. 2, 1876. He was 39. In his hand Hickok held an ace of spades, ace of clubs, two black eights-clubs and spades-and the jack of diamonds, what became known as aces and eights-the dead man’s hand.
Violence and poker were Hickok’s strong suit. His assassin, Jack McCall, had killed a celebrity and would hang for it in 1877, taking with him the genuine rhyme and reason to it all. Hickok’s widow found out about her husband’s murder in a Cincinnati newspaper.
A Union scout, spy, lawman, famous gunfighter, gambler, Hickok lived and died by the law of the gun. A kind of social order where a revolver stood for everything that was sane and superior. An era when people were warned the only real defense against wicked men and evil deeds was a powerful weapon.
Among the ruffles of his spotless white shirt and flowered waistcoat, Hickok was a mythic character in an age of emerging myths. It was as though he was living out his story fully aware of his future adulation.
“I thought John Wilkes Booth was the handsomest man I had ever known, but Wild Bill Hickok was handsomer,” said Col. George Ward Nichols, a publicist for Harper’s. Gen. George Custer’s wife Libby described Hickok as a delight to look at. Tall and agile. To her, he walked and rode as if every muscle in his physique was perfection, a happy-go-lucky power about him that seemed in time with the man, the country and era in which he lived.
Without a twinge or whisper, Hickok died instantly on Aug. 2, 1876. He was 39. In his hand Hickok held an ace of spades, ace of clubs, two black eights-clubs and spades-and the jack of diamonds, what became known as aces and eights-the dead man’s hand.
Violence and poker were Hickok’s strong suit. His assassin, Jack McCall, had killed a celebrity and would hang for it in 1877, taking with him the genuine rhyme and reason to it all. Hickok’s widow found out about her husband’s murder in a Cincinnati newspaper.
A Union scout, spy, lawman, famous gunfighter, gambler, Hickok lived and died by the law of the gun. A kind of social order where a revolver stood for everything that was sane and superior. An era when people were warned the only real defense against wicked men and evil deeds was a powerful weapon.
Among the ruffles of his spotless white shirt and flowered waistcoat, Hickok was a mythic character in an age of emerging myths. It was as though he was living out his story fully aware of his future adulation.
“I thought John Wilkes Booth was the handsomest man I had ever known, but Wild Bill Hickok was handsomer,” said Col. George Ward Nichols, a publicist for Harper’s. Gen. George Custer’s wife Libby described Hickok as a delight to look at. Tall and agile. To her, he walked and rode as if every muscle in his physique was perfection, a happy-go-lucky power about him that seemed in time with the man, the country and era in which he lived.
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