Bryan B. King

On July 21, 1865, two men stood on opposite sides of the town square in Springfield, Missouri, while a crowd watched from the storefronts. One was Davis Tutt, a former Confederate soldier and a gambler. The other was a former Union scout named James Butler Hickok. Most people already called him Wild Bill. They had been friends once. Then it went bad. Some said it was over a woman. What everybody agreed on was the money. Tutt claimed Hickok owed him a gambling debt from a horse trade. Hickok said he'd already paid part of it and argued about the rest. The night before, during a card game, Tutt reached across the table and picked up Hickok's gold pocket watch. He said he was keeping it until the debt was paid. Hickok told him not to wear it in public. Tutt said he'd wear it across the square the next day. The next afternoon, Tutt came walking across the square with the watch. Hickok was waiting. The two men were about 75 yards apart, which is a long way for a pistol. Witnesses said they turned sideways like old-fashioned duelists. Both men drew. Tutt fired and missed. Hickok steadied his revolver across his other arm and fired once. The bullet hit Tutt in the chest from 75 yards away. Tutt ran a few steps toward the courthouse, said something nobody could make out, and fell dead in the street. Hickok was arrested and tried for manslaughter. The jury found him not guilty in a matter of minutes. This is about as close as the real West ever got to the movie shootout. Two men, face to face, drawing in a public square. It almost never actually happened that way. Most gunfights were drunken, panicky, close range, and messy. The Hickok and Tutt fight is one of the only ones that looks like what Hollywood would later sell. Two years later, a writer for Harper's magazine interviewed Hickok and turned the duel into national legend. The article claimed Hickok had personally killed hundreds of men. That was nonsense, and Hickok probably helped inflate it, but it didn't matter. Wild Bill became the most famous gunfighter in America. He spent the next decade as a lawman, a scout, a gambler, and even a stage performer with Buffalo Bill Cody's show. In August 1876, he was playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, in Dakota Territory. For once, he was sitting with his back to the door. A drifter named Jack McCall walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head. The cards Hickok was holding were two black aces and two black eights. People have called it the dead man's hand ever since.