The American West: Debunking Three Deadwood Wild Bill Hickok Legends

Warning: You may not want to read any further if you don’t like the idea of a legend being debunked. Many legends swirl around Wild Bill Hickok. Three of these are associated with his stay in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in 1876.

There’s the love affair with Wild Bill and Calamity Jane, the cards Wild Bill held when he was killed — the infamous Dead Man’s Hand — and Wild Bill’s death chair.

The Calamity Jane/Wild Bill Love Affair

The rumor that Martha “Calamity Jane” Canary and Wild Bill Hickok were lovers is false. It never happened. There is absolutely no evidence Wild Bill and Calamity Jane had an affair.

Wild Bill and Calamity Jane first met when Wild Bill and five friends were traveling from Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, to Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and stopped at Fort Laramie around July 1, 1876, to join a larger party waiting to make its way through hostile country to Deadwood. The fort’s officer of the day had a request for Hickok and his friends.

There was a young woman in the guardhouse who he asked they take with them. Hickok’s friend Joseph “White Eye” Anderson said, “It was just after payday and she had been on a big drunk with the soldiers and had been having a hell of a time of it. When they put her in the post guard house she was very drunk and near naked. Her name was Calamity Jane.”

Steve Utter, another Hickok friend, said he knew her and would take care of her. The officer gave Calamity Jane Army-issue underwear and, between the six men, they outfitted her with a buckskin shirt and pants and a broadbrimmed hat.

“When she got cleaned up and sober she looked quite attractive,” White Eye said.

White Eye also said, “Calamity Jane had a wonderful command of profanity, that is she could cuss to beat the band. She was also a good shot with a rifle and six-shooter and could skin mules for further order. I believe it was the first time that Wild Bill had met her and he surely did not have any use for her. She looked to be about 25 years of age [she was 20] and was as tough as they came. She laid up with Steve Utter and ate her meals with us during the trip.”

Hickok had recently married circus owner Agnes Lake, and from his correspondence to her he was in love with his wife.

There are no written accounts of a Wild Bill and Calamity Jane love affair in Deadwood.

This isn’t to say that they weren’t friends. Wild Bill could be kind to people, and there is no doubt that he was kind to Calamity Jane. Hickok and his friends took her along to Deadwood, grubstaked her until she could earn her keep, and even let her imbibe from Hickok’s private 5-gallon keg of whiskey on the way to Deadwood.

After Hickok and his friends settled into their Deadwood campsite, Calamity Jane asked them for a loan to buy some women’s clothing. She said she couldn’t compete in business against the other women since she only had buckskin to wear. All the men chipped in. Hickok gave her $20 on the condition that she wash behind her ears.

A few days later, Calamity returned to repay her debts. Hickok wouldn’t take her money saying, “At least she looks like a woman now.”

Calamity would continue to visit their camp whenever she was hungry.

After Wild Bill’s assassination Aug. 2, 1876, Calamity mourned him. Richard Hughes, who was in Deadwood at the time, said, “One sincere female mourner he did have. This was Calamity, whose grief for a time seemed uncontrollable.”

In her reminiscences, Calamity never mentioned anything more to their relationship than he was, “My friend, Wild Bill.”

In later years, Calamity implied there might have been more to the relationship than just friendship, but then again, she would say anything to anybody; and it helped her reputation to be associated with Wild Bill.

In July 1903, a subtle addition was added to the romance legend.

Deadwood businessman John B. Mayo found a drunken Calamity Jane sitting on a keg behind a saloon and coaxed her into having her photograph taken beside Wild Bill’s grave. They climbed the steep slope to the cemetery, as they crossed a deep ravine Mayo remembered, “Jane was woozy, panting and weaving as she plodded along on the high track. … I half expected her to take a header off the trestle into the gulch bottom.”

The photograph Mayo took of Jane is one of the more famous ones of her in her later years.

On her deathbed, it was reported Calamity said, “Bury me beside Wild Bill, the only man I ever loved.”

The Deadwood town folks were all too happy to comply with her wishes. Having Calamity Jane buried in a lot beside Wild Bill would help with tourism. If he could, Wild Bill would be rolling in his grave.

A bombshell in the Calamity Jane and Wild Bill love story burst on the national scene in 1941. On the May 6 Mother’s Day episode of the popular radio show “We the People,” Jean Hickok McCormick announced she was the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. She had a diary and letters to and from Calamity and herself to prove it.

Historians, writers and film producers ran with her story for 50 years without researching its authenticity. It wasn’t until 1995 that professor James D. McLaird and others through extensive study showed McCormick faked the letters and diary and that she was not the daughter of Wild Bill and Calamity, but a fraud.

“I was certain before I began examining the details carefully that the ‘Diary and Letters’ were fraudulent,” McLaird said. “Almost nothing in them coincided with the actual adventures of Calamity Jane. Besides, I was certain, after all my research, that Calamity was illiterate. It would have been impossible to have written the ‘Diary and Letters’ if she could neither read nor write.”

The Dead Man’s Hand

No one mentioned the cards Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he was killed until years later in the 1920s when a Black Hills character named “Doc” Ellis Peirce wrote about it. Peirce was called Doc because he claimed he had studied medicine for two years in Pennsylvania before the Civil War.

Doc Peirce was working as a barber in Deadwood on Aug. 2, 1876, when Hickok was shot in Number 10 Saloon. Colorado Charlie Utter asked him to help prepare Hickok's body lying inside the saloon which had been locked after the murder. Along with Utter and Hickok’s friends, Peirce entered the saloon.

Frank J. Wilstach in his 1926 book “Wild Bill Hickok: The Prince of the Pistoleers” included an extract from a letter he received from Doc Peirce: “When they unlocked the door for me to get his body, he was lying on his side, with his knees drawn up just as he slid off his stool. We had no chairs in those days — and his fingers were still crimped from holding his poker hand. Charlie Rich, who sat beside him, said he never saw a muscle move. Bill’s hand read ‘aces and eights’ — two pair, and since that day aces and eights have been known as ‘the dead man’s hand’ in Western country.”

Joe Koller, a reporter for the Rapid City Journal, interviewed Doc Peirce in Hot Springs, South Dakota, in 1915. Koller said Peirce was “a rare character” known for a variety of things in the Black Hills, including being “a barber, lawman, prospector, hotel proprietor, legislator and practical joker.”

Koller recorded one of Peirce’s Deadwood barber stories: “There was only once when Doc said he failed to make a customer smile. ‘This fellow wouldn’t talk as I lathered him up, stropped my blade, cooked him with a hot towel and lathered again,’ Doc elaborated. ‘All the while I was handing out a line of sure fire wit; but nary a smile. Finally, a miner that was chuckling out in front of the shop stuck his head in and said: “You’re wasting your breathe, Doc. That hombre is dead.”’”

Which happened to be true. The hombre was Wild Bill Hickok whom Doc Peirce prepared for burial after he was shot by Jack McCall in a Deadwood saloon. A gullible listener could never tell when Doc was playing an incident down or building it up.

When Hickok was killed, would his hand still be capable of holding the cards when he slumped onto the floor? Wouldn't the finger muscles relax and go limp without nerve control?

There has been a running controversy over what was the fifth card in Hickok’s hand. Maybe it was the joker.

Wild Bill’s Death Chair

There are at least two wooden straight-back chairs alleged to be Hickok’s death chair.

These chairs have one basic problem — when Hickok and the other men sat down at a table to play cards in Number 10 Saloon, they were on stools, not chairs.

Harry Young, the Number 10 Saloon bartender, said they were sitting on stools. The Chicago Inter Ocean correspondent who wrote about Wild Bill’s assassination said they were sitting on stools.

My favorite chair in Deadwood was in the entryway to the China Doll Restaurant. It was an old wooden straight-back chair painted green. Someone had taken a penknife and carved on the top back rail, “This is the only chair in Deadwood Wild Bill was not shot in.”

Bill Markley can be reached at markley@pie.midco.net