Career
At eighteen, he ran away from home, mistakenly believing he had killed a fellow teamster in a fist fight. Halting his flight in Kansas, he worked as a farm laborer in Johnson County. A fervent abolitionist, he fought in the border war between the Free-Soil Kansans and the proslavery Missourians during the ensuing several years.
In the summer of 1861, while working as stock tender at the state station in Rock Creek, Nebr., he became involved in a shooting incident which, magnified by dime novelists, was the foundation of his legend as the greatest of the Western gunfighters. The stories assert that he "wiped out" Dave McCanles and a dozen members of his "gang." Actually he shot and killed only McCanles, who had come to the station to collect a long-standing debt from the stage line. Two men accompanying McCanles were also shot during the fight. They were subsequently killed by friends of Hickok.
Several months later - known as "Wild Bill" - he joined the Union Army of the Southwest as a spy and scout. Here he distinguished himself by roving behind the enemy lines disguised as a Confederate officer, gathering information on the army's movements. He served to the end of the Civil War as one of Maj. Gen. Samuel R. Curtis' most reliable operatives.
Shortly after the war, in Springfield, Mo., he became involved in a gambling feud with a noted gunman named Dave Tutt and killed him in the courthouse square with most of the townspeople watching. He served for a time as a deputy federal marshal at Fort Riley, then as a scout for Lt. Col. George A. Custer in his Indian campaigns. Custer called him "one of the most perfect types of manhood I ever saw."
Hickok's reputation as one of the greatest of the peace officers of the post-Civil War West was built in the years from 1868 to 1871, when he was sheriff at Hays City and city marshal at Abilene, during the wildest days of their history. Unaided, he kept the cowtowns under control, walking the streets with .44 revolvers on his hips, a Bowie knife tucked in his sash, a rifle or shotgun cradled in his arms, and dressed in the height of frontier fashion, with his hair at shoulder length. At a conservative estimate, he killed 17 men in gunfights (exclusive of Indians and Confederates during his military service). As the guardian of law and order, Hickok established himself as the prototype of the iron-handed marshal who held the line until civilization caught up with the frontier - the man who showed the way for Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and others.
For the next several years, with his eyesight failing, Hickok was a gambler, the producer of the first "Wild West" show, and an actor in Buffalo Bill Cody's dramatic troupe. On Aug. 2, 1876, while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, he was shot in the back of the head by a notoriety-seeker named Jack McCall. The poker hand Hickok was holding - aces and eights - has come to be known as the "dead man's hand."