Talk:Wild Bill Hickok
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By Uri Ridelman - Journalist
I have been working on a project regarding the life of Wild Bill Hickok, and while doing that I've noticed the inconsistencies regarding his incident with the McCanles Gang. Some say the McCanles were not a gang but just some unfortunante souls who had some disputes with Wild Bill and ended being shot by him. Others claim that they were indeed ruthless criminals and that they deserved to die at the hands of the famous gunfighter.
Here I present to you information I found while surfing the Internet. Hopefully, together we can reach a satisfactory answer and then create a page for them here at Wikipedia. Please feel free to post any info you have on this matter.
From our own Wikipedia on the Wild Bill Hickok page: "He became well-known for single-handedly capturing the McCanles gang, through the use of a ruse."
From About.com on the Wild Bill Hickok page: "The incident that began his claim to fame. While employed at the Rock Creek Pony Express Station in Nebraska he got into a gunfight with an employee looking to collect his pay. Wild Bill shot and killed McCanles and wounded two other men. He was acquitted at the trial. However, there is some question on the validity of the trial because he worked for the powerful Overland Stage Company." http://americanhistory.about.com/library/timelines/bltimelinehickock.htm
From AOL Hometown on the Wild Bill Hickok page: "The incident at Rock Creek Station, Nebraska was what began his legend. The station was an important stop for overland stages and as Pony Express station. It had been owned by David McCanles before he sold it to Russell, Waddell, and Majors, of the Pony Express. After that, the station was operated by Horace Wellman and his common-law wife, Wild Bill, a stock tender, and J.W. "Dock," Brink, a stable hand. That summer the station was almost bankrupt and could not pay McCanles. Wild Bill had just arrived when an altercation took pl ace. It happened on July 12, 1861.
McCanles, cousin James wood, and hand James Gordon showed up at the station to collect money owed him. After a short argument, Wild Bill shot and killed McCanles from inside the house. He also wounded Woods and Gordon. Wellman finished Woods off by beating him with a hoe. They both ran after Gordon and killed him with a shotgun blast. A trial was held but it was a farce. 12 year old Monroe McCanles, who witnessed the shootings, was not allowed to testify, nor was he even allowed in the court room. Wild Bill and Wellman were allowed to put forth a defense of self-defense. Since they were employees of the Overland Stage Company, the most powerful corporation west of the Mississippi, they had a lot of friends.
Four years later, writer Colonel George Ward Nichols wrote about the event, and he didn't much care if he got the details right. Wild Bill didn't seem to care either. This was the start of his gunfighter legend. Nichols wrote that there was a "McCanles gang" of terrorists. He write that Wild Bill held off and killed ten men, in a bloody one-sided fight. He also said Wild Bill was gravely wounded himself and later had eleven bullets removed. None of it was true, but it made Wild Bill's reputation." http://members.aol.com/Gibson0817/WildBill.htm
From The World According to Jerome "Brilliant Brief Lives": "The McCanles outlaw gang was wanted for train robbery, murder, bank robbery, cattle rustling, and horse theft. In 1861 word came to Wild Bill that they had set up a camp at Rock Creek Station, in Jefferson County -- just outside his limited jurisdiction." http://www.abacom.com/~jkrause/hickok.html
Answers.com has them on their "List of Western Outlaws" under the category of Outlaw Gangs, right next to those like the Dalton Gang. http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-western-outlaws
And finally they are portrayed as an infamous gang in the HBO series "Deadwood."
There are other sites that make the case one way or the other but I posted here only some of the ones I found more interersting.
Your help will be greatly appreciated, and at the same time we'll create a page for them on this site. Thanks
Contents |
[edit] Please add any comments you might have
Please feel free to comment on this subject. Your information, insight and opinion is welcome and needed.
I remember reading something about some showman threatening to exhume Hickok's body and take it on a tour, and Charlie Utter returned to Deadwood to stand guard over the body. Does anyone else remember this? Gorilla Jones 18:46, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
This article, while rather good overall, repeats a few things that are not proven.
1. "The saloon proprietor claimed that, at the time of his death, Hickok held a pair of aces and a pair of eights, with all cards black, and this has since been called a "dead man's hand".
I'm not sure where this info comes from. There are no contemporary cites about the poker hand held by Hickok, and Rosa(his biographer) says the cards are in dispute. Can anyone tell me where I can find the "saloon proprietor's" claim? And when was this combination of cards first referred to as a "dead man's hand?"
2. Under the trivia section, this is repeated as truth. Unless someone can supply a contemporary cite, or at least a time frame for the phrase, I see no reason to leave this in the article. Samclem 19:10, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
I think it is wrong to say he was shot by "the coward Jack McCall". This is biased. It would be better to say in a cowardly act he was shot by Jack McCall.
==Nonsensical sentence "Hickok was later, after his death, alleged to have met and been acquainted with later famous lawman Wyatt Earp, by Earp's biographer."
After whose death? Hickok's? And what did the biographer do?
An earlier sentence is missing the name of a marshall. I put question marks in to flag the missing name.--Tdkehoe 16:47, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, after looking into it, it seems that there really is no difinitive fact of what Wild Bill's poker hand was when he was shot, but many sources cite that "legend has it" that the hand was aces and eights, with some saying it is unknown what the fifth card was, or others saying that it wasn't dealt yet, and was interrupted by Wild Bill getting shot. Mabey it would be best to simply change the wording in the text, and trivia, to "Legend has it that Wild BIll's hand was Aces and eights." Because we will probably never know what it actually was, and even if there were sources citing what his hand was, you would have to question their validity. An7drew 18:38, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Some years ago I picked up a book titled "Triggernometry: A Gallery of Gunfighters" (originally published in 1934) on a lark because I thought it would represent the most outrageous of the dime store novel tales. But its author, one Eugene Cunnigham, was the consumate journalist in trying to sniff out what was fact and what may very well have been fiction in the tales of the famous gunfighters, including Wild Bill. He grew up during the tail end of the gunfighers' time, and so knew and interviewed many of the men and/or witnessess to the events in which the men got their fame. But the book is not at all boring. Cunnigham manages to capture both the realism and the spirit of the lawful and lawless gunslingers; these stories really have panache. I highly reccomend it for anyone wanting to l'arn a bit more about these men of lore. 66.57.225.77 02:37, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
This page has been vandalized. I am a new user and don't believe I have the permissions necessary to lock the page to new users. OverCee 19:29, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] IMDB Links?
I did a lot of copy editing to this article, which is an interesting entry but, in my opinion, could still use a lot of clarification and would benefit enourmously from additional citations. Some of the IMDB links A) are bad but B) I coudn't find them when I clicked edit on that section, so I wasn't able to fix them. funkendub 07:06, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
The footnoted links are found in the body of the text. Click the "^" link to jump back to the source location. Links fixed. 208.106.26.20 05:53, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] going blind
The History channel said he was going blind from veneral disease when he died. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.105.208.190 (talk) 07:36, 7 January 2007 (UTC).
[edit] Summary
What the hell was that "Summary" section doing there? It doubled the length of the page for absolutely no reason than to take all the information already there and smush it together. It's gone. If anyone can find some worthwhile information that I deleted, please re-add it in the appropriate place, not in a mega-section that looks like a copy-and-pasted high school research paper. --DCrazy talk/contrib 23:38, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
