Today in History—July 12: The Day Wild Bill’s Legend Started
On this day in 1861, in a postal station in Rock Creek, Nebraska, a legend was born. This was the day that the man who would become known as Wild Bill Hickok supposedly fought his first gunfight.
This story has everything: the Pony Express, the Civil War, the Wild West, even somebody fighting a bear.
Up to this point in the story, James Butler Hickok had already lived a life of adventure, not least of which included hand-to-hand combat with a bear. He survived the encounter but spent months bedridden afterward.
Once recovered, Hickok started working as a stablehand or assistant to the keepers of the Pony Express station in Rock Creek.
A group of men led by local bully and landowner David McCanles arrived at the station. Hickok, for all his later derring-do, was reportedly courteous, quiet, and perhaps a bit standoffish. McCanles, meanwhile, about whom none of those things could be reported, was likely responsible for Hickok’s other, much less famous, much less flattering nickname: Duck Bill, a jab at Hickok’s thin lips. (Hickok would later grow a mustache to hide them.)
McCanles and his men had come to collect rent on the station, and somehow the confrontation turned violent. The events are disputed, and it’s not clear if Hickok or the station keeper shot McCanles, but the melee that followed left McCanles and two of his men dead.
Hickok was tried and acquitted (as “Duck Bill” in court records, no less), ruled to have acted in self-defense.
Wild Bill once stopped a man from beating up an 11-year-old. That boy grew up to be Buffalo Bill Cody.
But a very different version of this day’s events appeared in Harper’s six years later and ignited Hickok’s fame. In that telling, the group pursued Hickok—as he led a Union cavalry regiment, no less—to the station keeper’s cabin, where Hickok shot McCanles in self-defense before single-handedly dispatching nine other attackers.
It’s clear why the latter version became the stuff of dime-store Westerns. Historians, however, agree that the first account is more truthful.
He didn’t need the embellishment, anyway: Over the next four years he served as a spy and sharpshooter in the Civil War, where he earned the nickname Wild Bill. A much-storied—and much mythologized—career as a lawman and gunslinger followed.
- 24: Hickok’s age at the gunfight in Rock Creek
- ~10: Number of men Hickok actually killed in his lifetime
- 6th cousin 6 times removed: Hickok’s family connection to Barack Obama
- 1776: British explorer Capt. James Cook sets out on his third and final voyage
- 1896: Revere Beach near Boston becomes the first public beach in the country
- 1984: Geraldine Ferraro becomes the first woman nominated for U.S. vice president by a major political party
