Shane Larson
The most famous gunfighter in the West died with his back to the door - holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights.On August 2, 1876, in a log saloon in the muddy gold camp of Deadwood, James Butler 'Wild Bill' Hickok took the only open seat at the card table - the one facing away from the room. Twice he asked another player to switch. Twice he was refused. A drifter named Jack McCall walked up behind him and fired a revolver into the back of his head. The cards that spilled from his hand have been called the dead man’s hand ever since.This is the documented life behind that legendary death - the story of arguably the first true celebrity gunfighter in American history. Hickok was real: a Free-State partisan in Bleeding Kansas, a Union scout and spy, a deputy U.S. marshal, and the marshal who tamed the wildest Kansas cattle towns by reputation alone. But he was also a media invention. In 1867, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine turned a competent frontier scout into a superhuman killer who had supposedly slain hundreds of men - and the dime novels ran with it. Hickok spent the rest of his life as a man and a myth at the same time.The documented record is impressive enough without the inflation. From the murky killings at the Rock Creek station to the cattle-town badge in Abilene, Hickok lived the most dangerous jobs the frontier offered. His fearsome name kept order more effectively than his guns - right up until the myth had to be backed up with blood. Then came the slow decline: fading eyes, gambling to live, and a final gamble on the Black Hills gold rush that put him in the chair where McCall found him.Shane Larson separates the documented gunfighter from the legend the newspapers built - and argues that Hickok’s real significance is that he was the first of his kind, a frontier man whose fame was manufactured by the press, who lived inside his own myth, and who died, fittingly, with his back to the door.What you’ll discover:The Davis Tutt walk-and-draw in the Springfield square - one of the only real face-to-face duels in the entire history of the WestHow a single 1867 magazine article manufactured the legend of 'Wild Bill' out of a murky, disputed shootingThe Abilene tragedy: the night Hickok killed a man and accidentally shot his own deputy - and never wore a badge againThe failing eyesight that quietly doomed a man whose survival depended on his shootingHis humiliating turn as a stage actor, playing a dime-novel version of himself for eastern crowdsWhat really happened at the Deadwood card table - and the two trials of Jack McCallThis book is for you if:You love sharp, fast, accurate frontier history that refuses to recycle the legend as factYou watched HBO’s Deadwood and want the real Hickok, Calamity Jane, and the campYou’re fascinated by how journalism and dime novels manufactured American celebrityRead the true story behind the West’s most famous hand of cards. If you enjoyed The Dime Novel West and Wyatt Earp & the O.K. Corral, this is your next read.
