The Death of Wild Bill Hickok

The Death of Wild Bill Hickok

I've been watching Deadwood again over a few weeks. During the first season, they covered the arrival and death of Hickok. Wild Bill was a living legend of his time and people still saw him as a hero. It was like hanging out with Batman in your hometown. Just like in life, his death was a legend of sorts.

The show does a great job showing what happened just like the real accounts of the incident.

From Wiki, ((Jack McCall sat down to play. McCall lost heavily. Hickok encouraged McCall to quit the game until he could cover his losses and offered to give him money for breakfast.  ))

The kicker is that Jack McCall was from “Louisville”. In reality, he was from Jefferson County. At the time, Louisville and JC were different governments. More or less if you were from JC you were from Louisville. So, a coward that shot a living legend in the back was from Louisville...swell. I find it amusing that someone from Louisville is part of this legend.

McCall was freed by a court in Deadwood and later recaptured and put to death for the murder. (Was McCall a U of L or U of K fan?)

Anyway, the other part of this legend comes from the “dead man's hand”. From the wiki page, (( Currently, the dead man's hand is described as a two-pairpoker hand consisting of the black aces and black eights. Along with an unknown "hole" card, these were the cards reportedly held by "Old West" folk hero, lawman and gunfighter, Wild Bill Hickok when he was murdered. ))

Now, there was a guy that picked up the alleged cards from the incident and kept them. (Neil Christy ) Christy's family passed down the legend until it became a pop cultural thing known as the Dead Man's Hand. It was tied into the tale of Wild Bill's murder.

The Deadwood show makes a case that the DMH was made up by a guy at the table. So, the whole card thing was a legend.