Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier's First Gunfighter - Tom Clavin

I grew up during what was once called the “golden age” of television, those days when broadcast television’s three networks were filled with something for everyone: variety shows, situation comedies, dramas, cop shows, and westerns.  Many of those old shows are now considered classics, but for boys my age it was really all about those glorious westerns.  We all were as familiar with the likes of Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill, Bat Masterson, Jesse James, Calamity Jane, etc., as we were with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  Well, if I admit the truth, probably more familiar with them than we were with Washington and Lincoln.  But even as fictionalized as those old shows were, they still managed to do one thing other than simply entertaining the children of the day.  Many of us came away from them with a lifelong fascination with the world those “gunfighters” and their friends lived in - and a desire to find out what it was really like to be them.  And that brings me all the way to my fascination with books like Tom Clavin’s new Hickok biography, Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter.  

As Clavin reminds us, by the time he was thirty years old Wild Bill Hickok was already a bigger legend to the people of his day than Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, or Kit Carson.  And make no mistake about it, those three men were deservedly legendary in the minds of the American public.  Hickok was the first national celebrity to come along after the Civil War, and only his good friend, the extraordinary showman Buffalo Bill Cody (who outlived Hickock by forty years), would even come close to reaching that kind of celebrity. But barely two months past his thirty-ninth birthday, Wild Bill Hickok was dead.

Wild Bill Hickok Himself

It all started on just weeks after the close of the Civil War (July 31, 1865) with a gunfight over Hickok’s watch.  The watch had been snatched from Hickok by Davis Tutt as collateral for a debt that Hickok owed Tutt as the result of a card game.  When Tutt decided to add a little public humiliation into the equation, Hickok decided it was time to call the man out.  But this would be no ordinary duel; instead it took the form of what we have come to think of as the traditional western gunfight where two men face each other to see which is the fastest and most accurate shootist between them.  Obviously, that man was Bill Hickok (whose real name was James Butler Hickok), and a legend was born.  Publication of an account of the duel in Harper’s New Monthly Magazinesome eighteen months later only made it official.  Twenty-nine-year-old Wild Bill Hickok was now a national legend, and he would remain one well beyond his death a decade later.

But this was not all good.  

Author Tom Clavin

The Harper’sarticle implied that Hickok had already killed two dozen men, and that he was the kind of shoot-first-ask-questions-later guy who was likely to kill dozens more before he was done.  Suddenly Wild Bill had a reputation to live up to wherever he went, and just as suddenly there were dozens of people out there who dreamed of killing him in order to enhance their own reputations and fortunes.  Sadly enough, Wild Bill Hickok would not be blessed even with that kind of glorious death.  Rather, his ailing health made it possible for him to be brought down by a cowardly little man with an imagined grudge.

Tom Clavin’s Wild Bill tells you how it happened – and what happened between that first gunfight and Bill’s last card game.

Bottom Line: If you are interested in this period of American history and those most dramatically involved in living it, Clavin’s book Is one you need to read.  It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what Hickok was thinking at the pivotal moments of his life so some of what the author says is necessarily built upon speculation, but Clavin does a fine job in filling in the blanks for his readers.

(Book Number 3,412)