As the few existing photographs attest, Wild Bill Hickok’s appearance had changed little from the first descriptions of him. Henry Jameson, using J. B. Edwards’s diaries as a source, reported that Hickok’s appearance in Abilene was “striking and impressive. He stood six feet, one inch, weighed 175 pounds and his graceful, straight figure, brown, wavy hair down to his shoulders, piercing gray blue eyes, fair complexion, aquiline nose, flowing mustache and always expensive dress, made him a figure to attract attention.” His in-town attire of a Prince Albert coat, checked trousers, an embroidered waistcoat, and sometimes a cape lined with scarlet silk was topped off by a low-crowned, wide black hat.
Citizens of Abilene immediately noticed that not only did Hickok openly wear guns, but did so in a peculiar way. The Colts were fitted in smooth open holsters that were not worn low or tied down on the thigh but were positioned around the waist with the butts leaning forward. This allowed Hickok to cross draw or use a reverse draw with either hand. This worked well when the gunfighter wore a coat, which Hickok routinely did. In a cross draw, the hand brushes the coat away during the movement of jerking the pistol out of the holster. Also causing comment was that from time to time when the marshal put on exhibitions, onlookers marveled at his accuracy with both hands.
As marshal, Hickok returned to familiar habits. In a saloon or restaurant, his back was to the wall, and he sat or stood facing the door. When he slept, a pistol was within easy reach. Whenever he entered a building, one hand was on a gun. On the street, he used the same caution he had in Hays City. And he often had a shotgun to complement his Colt six-shooters, derringer, and bowie knife.
A man named John Conkie was employed as the city jailer. Though this was certainly not a full-time occupation given the size of the calaboose in Abilene—it had been built a third time during Tom Smith’s tenure—Conkie did get to know the marshal. One of his recollections was spotting Hickok “sitting in a barber’s chair getting shaved, with his shotgun in hand and his eyes open.”
Hickok found in Abilene a small but vibrant city surrounded by vast swaths of brown cattle. Stewart Verckler writes, “Wherever anyone looked, tremendous herds of longhorn dotted the spacious plains. Cattle covered every available acre of grazing land.” In what would turn out to be Abilene’s last year as a booming cow town before it gave way to Dodge City to the west and south, close to 121,000 head would be shipped out. One result: “The cowboys were wilder this year than they had ever been in the short history of Abilene.”
The Texas Street area saloons stayed open all day and night and never lacked for business. They offered a steady diet of whiskey and beer and gambling and women, and a few saloons provided musical entertainment. Wisely, Hickok continued to enforce Smith’s ban on weapons within the city limits, so gunplay was rare. Hickok may not have been quite the boxer Smith was, but he was quick and strong, and most of the men who wound up in the small jail had the imprint of Hickok’s knuckles on their chins or gun barrel on the top of their heads. Unlike Smith, Hickok did not hesitate to display his ivory-handled Colts, and his demeanor clearly indicated he would use them at any sign of serious trouble. Abilene, for a time, was relatively peaceful, with the cowboy rowdiness kept at a manageable level.
But there were those who continued to resist the rule of law—especially the Texans, who didn’t like the former Yankee scout who was now a marshal, anyway. One night in a saloon, several cowboys began a brawl. Hickok came in and finished it, tossing the bruised Texans out into the street. Back at their camp outside of town, the reports of the marshal’s rude behavior angered their fellow cowboys. They vowed to enter Abilene the next day, subdue and handcuff Hickok, and hang him from the tallest tree on the main street.
The marshal was tipped off that about two dozen Texans were riding in, and it was easy to guess their intentions. The cowboys were surprised to encounter Hickok waiting for them in the middle of the street, outside the Last Chance Saloon—the same establishment several of them had been evicted from the night before. His usual array of weapons included a Winchester, the repeating rifle first manufactured and distributed five years earlier.
Hickok aimed it at the men at the front and center of the group and said, “Hide out, you sons of bitches.”
Clearly, the cowboys had the odds. Even if Hickok emptied the rifle and both his six-shooters, there were more Texans than bullets that would find their mark in a chaotic gun battle. But the apparently fearless marshal had an almost hypnotic effect on them. And it was also clear that the men who led the hanging party would be the first to taste lead. There was a minute of tense silence as Hickok’s cold-steel eyes gazed at the mounted men. Then, in twos and threes, they turned their horses and rode back out of Abilene to their camp. Time to return to Texas, where it was a lot safer.
The mayor and city council may not have considered that hiring Hickok, a legendary man-killer, could attract other shootists looking to gain a reputation. Every so often, there was a rumor of such a gunman coming to town, but no one seriously challenged Wild Bill. According to Henry Jameson, “At least eight gunners from the south were known to have come to Abilene on a specific assignment to get him. To bump him off would have added to the prestige of any man who would get away with it. Bill knew most of the eight gunmen and would greet them cockily. ‘Sure am glad to see you, damn glad,’ he would say. ‘But hand me those guns.’ They lost their courage and did.”
The lawmakers also may not have considered that the marshal would enforce the law on them, too. His job description included attending city council meetings. If Hickok had to waste his time being there discussing his budget and the conduct of his deputies—one of whom was Tom Carson, a nephew of his old hero Kit Carson—the council members had damn well better be there, too. One day when the meeting time came and there was not a quorum, Hickok set out to find the missing lawmaker, S. A. Burroughs. The marshal returned with Burroughs, who promptly left again rather than remain for an important vote. Hickok set off once more. With delight, the local press reported on the outcome—the strong-shouldered marshal carrying Burroughs out of his place of business and to the council chamber, his head bouncing off Hickok’s back and his feet flailing in protest.
There were any number of saloons to choose from, but for Hickok, the Alamo was his headquarters. There was an official marshal’s office that Smith had inhabited, but Hickok stationed a deputy there. He preferred to be more in the thick of things to keep his eyes on cowboys where they were most likely to congregate. He could also do a little gambling and enjoy the occasional shot of whiskey.
And the Alamo was the most elaborate of the city’s saloons, which suited the more civilized tastes Hickok had acquired by this time in his life when he was spending less of it as a plainsman. The Alamo had forty feet of frontage on Cedar Street and faced west. The west entrance had three double glass doors. On the south side was the long bar with polished brass rails and fixtures. There was another bar at the rear, and above it was a large mirror. On the walls were paintings that imitated Renaissance nudes. Almost all of the floor space was covered by gaming tables. The saloon had its own orchestra, which performed from the afternoon until well into the night. Marshal Hickok usually sat at one of the tables playing poker, facing the nearest door.
More than a few residents objected—though only among themselves, certainly not to Hickok—about his use of the Alamo. It was not the appropriate place for the town’s top peace officer, and the marshal might be spending more time there than he should while his deputies did more of the patrolling. That summer, during the peak cattle drive months, they included James Gainsford, who had helped to track down Tom Smith’s killers; Brocky Jack Norton; and Mike Williams, in addition to Tom Carson. Hickok was probably aware of the gossip but didn’t care. Plus, he believed he had fine deputies, especially Williams, who had quickly become a good friend.
No record was kept of the gunmen who visited Abilene with the notion of taking on Wild Bill Hickok, then thinking better of it and riding on. But on two occasions, the man who had become the most famous lawman on the frontier encountered young men who would go down as some of the most infamous outlaws of the American West.
When John Wesley Hardin hit town, the precocious gunslinger was eighteen years old and on the run from an arrest warrant in Texas. Already, the son of a Methodist preacher was a veteran man-killer. His criminal career had begun four years earlier when he was expelled from school for knifing a classmate. The following year, he gunned down a former slave on an uncle’s plantation in Moscow, Texas. Three army soldiers were dispatched to arrest him. Hardin ambushed and, depending on the account, killed one or all of them. The saying “I never killed a man who didn’t need killing” has been attributed to Hardin, and he obviously lived in needy times because he is “credited” with sending as many as thirty men to the hereafter during his entire career.
When he arrived in Abilene, Hardin had no particular plans other than to see what all the fuss was about in this particular Kansas cow town. He knew who Wild Bill Hickok was, but it is possible that at least at first the marshal did not know Hardin. Or he didn’t care all that much, if the only outstanding warrant on him was from Texas, and Hickok was not all that fond of the state. Hickok did inform the newcomer of the no-gun ordinance. In his autobiography, Hardin claims he surrendered his six-shooters using the “road agent’s spin.” His version of meeting the city marshal:
He pulled his pistol and said, “Take those pistols off. I arrest you.”
I said all right and pulled them out of the scabbard, but while he was reaching for them, I reversed them and whirled them over on him with the muzzles in his face, springing back at the same time. I told him to put his pistols up, which he did. I cursed him for being a long-haired scoundrel that would shoot a boy with his back to him (as I had been told he intended to do to me). He said, “Little Arkansaw, you have been wrongly informed.”
I shouted, “This is my fight and I’ll kill the first man that fires a gun.”
Bill said, “You are the gamest and quickest boy I ever saw. Let us compromise this matter and I will be your friend. Let us go in here and take a drink, as I want to talk to you and give you some advice.”
Chances are, Hickok would not have fallen for this trick and allowed the teenager to get the drop on him. In any case, Hardin agreed to not wear his guns while out on the town and quickly came to admire the royally dressed, legendary lawman. Hickok made Hardin a deal—the marshal would pretend he had no knowledge of the Texas warrant if the teenager refrained from killing anyone while in Abilene.
The deal about not killing anyone did not last long. One night that summer while Hardin was asleep in the American Hotel, an intruder entered. Not waiting to learn of the man’s intentions, Hardin grabbed a gun and fired, killing him. And also not waiting long enough to even pull on pants, Hardin jumped out a back window as Hickok hurried into the front lobby. Hardin landed in a small wagon, which he drove south, possibly preferring lawmen in Texas to Wild Bill’s six-shooters. Along the way, he found a cowboy and took his pants and horse. Hardin told the cowboy to return the wagon and “give Wild Bill my love.” He never set foot in Abilene again.
Hardin continued to evade capture for quite a while. He even went straight, marrying a Texas girl in Gonzales County, and they had three children. But domestic bliss didn’t last. A killing spree in 1872 ended the lives of four men, and Hardin was arrested in Cherokee County by the sheriff. He escaped from jail and fled to Brown County, where he killed a deputy sheriff, Charles Webb, in Comanche, Texas, in May 1874. Furious Texas Rangers put John B. Armstrong on the trail of Hardin, who, after collecting his wife and kids, had gone east to Florida. It wasn’t until 1877 that Hardin was located and arrested in Pensacola by Armstrong. He was found on a train, and when he grabbed his pistol, it got caught in his suspenders. His companion, nineteen-year-old James Mann, was less clumsy but also less of a marksman. His bullet went through the hat of Armstrong, who shot Mann in the chest, killing him.
After being convicted, it was hard time for Hardin, seventeen years of it in the Brown County prison, where among other occupations he studied law and headed the Sunday school. When released, he was admitted to the Texas bar and opened a law practice. During his incarceration, his wife had died, so he was free to marry, which he did to a fifteen-year-old, but the union was short-lived. So were the rest of his days.
In 1895, Hardin was practicing law in El Paso. One day, when he was standing at the bar shooting dice with a local merchant, John Selman, a man with a grievance—and who the year before had killed the appropriately named Bass Outlaw—came up behind him. Right after Hardin said, “Four sixes to beat, Henry,” Selman shot him in the head. While Hardin was on the floor, Selman shot him three more times in the chest, just to be sure. Enough hometown jurors believed Selman’s ridiculous claim of self-defense in the Hardin homicide that he was released. Selman was killed the following year by lawman George Scarborough, who in turn was killed in 1900 while pursuing outlaws in Arizona.
The other famous outlaw encounter Hickok had while marshal of Abilene? Well, “encounter” is an exaggeration. Sometime during the summer of 1871, Jesse and Frank James, accompanied by Cole Younger, came to Abilene. They may have believed that Abilene would be a good place to hide out, because that June, the trio, accompanied by Jim Cummins and Clell Miller, had robbed a bank in Iowa. The outlaws took a couple of rooms at Drovers Cottage. The James brothers were recognized by the desk clerk C. F. Gross, who probably kept it to himself. Only decades later, after Frank James had passed away, did Gross write several letters revealing the visit. It has been reported that Hickok knew of their arrival in Abilene, but the bank robbers packed up and left before being confronted by the marshal.
Overall, like in the other Kansas cow towns during the 1870s, the stiffest challenge came from drunken cowboys. Not all of them were from Texas, but enough of them were that residents in and around Abilene feared them. At times, the cowboys did not wait to get to a saloon in town to begin their mischief—they raided farmhouses for food and liquor. The farmers south of the city offered up a prayer for protection when they saw a big cloud of dust approaching from the south, signaling that a herd would soon pass by.
In his 1964 biography of Hickok, Joseph Rosa quotes from a letter sent to him that was written in 1936 by Lucile Stevens about an incident that had taken place when she was a child and her family saw that cloud of dust getting nearer. The family had been befriended by Hickok, who visited on Sunday afternoons and brought a sack of candy for the children. Stevens recalled:
The dust cloud frightened us terribly for we knew a herd was coming up the trail and the cowboys with these herds would kill any settlers they found. Usually riders were sent out from Abilene when a herd was coming, and the settlers taken to town for safety, but this time there had been no warning.
We huddled around my father and then we saw a rider coming from the north.
“Tis someone coming to meet them with whiskey,” said my father. “That finishes it.”
“What can we do?”
“Nothing. There’s no way to get away or any place to hide on this prairie. We’ll just have to take it.”
He gathered us close and we waited. Then suddenly he cried, “Children, we’re safe! I can see the rider’s long yellow hair. Tis Marshal Hickok, and they’ll not harm us now.”
Even though that summer there were a lot of cowboys and just one marshal (with all of three deputies), Hickok and his Colt pistols and his reputation held the upper hand. He was quick to act, doing what he thought was right and damn the potential repercussions. “He often took justice in his own hands, contrary to all the conception of our courts,” wrote Stewart Verckler in Cowtown Abilene. “As he was not trained as a peace officer, he saw no harm in running a man out of town, instead of locking him in the small jail. He had many enemies and many admitted they were out to get him in any possible way.”
The toughest opposition Hickok faced in Abilene came from two men who would not strictly be considered outlaws … just entrepreneurs with dicey backgrounds. Their challenge, however, turned out to be more dangerous.
One of the more prominent saloons in town was the Bull’s Head Tavern. It had been founded by Phil Coe and Ben Thompson, the latter still in the midst of establishing one of the more notorious reputations in the West.
Thompson was not a man destined to see old age, and there was some doubt he would survive the summer of 1871 because of his dislike of the marshal. He had been born in West Yorkshire, England, on November 2, 1843. While he was a child, the Thompson family immigrated to America, settling in Austin, Texas. As a teenager, Ben learned how to set type, and he was bent on becoming a printer. The Civil War changed those plans—two months after the attack on Fort Sumter, he enlisted in the Second Regiment, Texas Mounted Rifles, H Company, and somehow his brother, Billy, barely sixteen, managed to join the Confederate army, too. Ben was wounded during the Battle of Galveston in 1863, but he returned to his regiment, and he and Billy saw further action.
When the war ended, Ben became a mercenary, finding work fighting for Emperor Maximilian in the Mexican revolution. Along the way, he acquired a wife, whom he shipped north to Texas. When word reached him in Mexico that his wife had been attacked by her own brother, Ben returned to Texas and beat up the abuser. The injuries were so bad that Thompson was tried and convicted of attempted murder and sent to the prison known as the Huntsville Unit. His stay was a short one, though, as he received a full pardon.
Ben Thompson hit the road as a gambler, working his way up into Kansas, and was recognized for his fine clothes, mustache, and top hat. Many years later, Bat Masterson would write that Thompson “was a remarkable man in many ways and it is very doubtful if in his time there was another man living who equaled him with the pistol in a life and death struggle. The very name of Ben Thompson was enough to cause the general run of ‘man killers,’ even those who had never seen him, to seek safety in instant flight.”
Along the way, Thompson had teamed up with Philip Haddox Coe, who was, according to Theophilus Little, a citizen who would go on to be a mayor of Abilene, “as vile a character as I ever met.” The Bull’s Head Tavern & Gambling Saloon—its more elaborate full name—was their pride and joy … and a reservoir of gambling profits. Set at the outskirts of town, it was the first drinking and gaming house the trail hands encountered as they entered Abilene. Whatever business it achieved was apparently not enough for the owners, because one day, they painted a huge bull on one of the outside walls … with the bull’s anatomy depicted in graphic detail. Shocked citizens complained. Marshal Hickok ordered it removed, and Thompson refused. Instead of going for his gun, Hickok went for a can of paint and a brush and covered the bull.
As tough as he reportedly was, Thompson was not about to go up against the legendary man-killer himself. (He later told a friend about Hickok that he “had two hells in his eyes.”) Instead, Thompson tried to convince John Wesley Hardin to do it, by telling him tall tales about Hickok’s hatred of Texans. The teenager really didn’t care and by now considered the marshal something of an idol. Finally, Hardin had enough of Thompson’s talk.
“I am not doing anybody’s fighting just now except my own, but I know how to stick to a friend,” he said. “If Bill needs killing, why don’t you kill him yourself?” Thompson demurred, increasing his life expectancy.
Neither was Coe about to try to outdraw Hickok, even though by the time of his residing in Abilene, Coe had acquired a reputation as a gunfighter. Born in July 1839 in Gonzales, Texas, he joined the Confederate army the first year of the war, and when he left in April 1863, he was a member of the Thirty-Sixth Texas Cavalry. He wandered south into Mexico, and it is believed it was there he hooked up with Ben Thompson, with both men being mercenaries for the embattled emperor, who was executed in June 1867.
Over time, Coe worked his way back north, through Texas and then up into Kansas, living and gambling in Salina in 1870. He arrived in Abilene a month after Hickok did, reuniting with Thompson. He had gotten to be friends with John Wesley Hardin, so Coe also suggested that Hardin show in the most emphatic way that the teenager could whip the thirty-four-year-old marshal in a fair gunfight. Again, Hardin was not so inclined.
When the two owners of the Bull’s Head did not paint another bull, or any other animal, on the side of their saloon, word spread that Hickok had intimidated them into submission. Hearing the gossip, an enraged Coe confronted the marshal and declared that he, too, was a stone-cold shootist and “I could kill a crow on the wing.” Hickok coolly gazed at him, then queried, “Did the crow have a pistol? Was he shooting back? I will be.”
Several accounts suggest that what escalated the tension between Coe and Hickok beyond Wild Bill’s having emasculated the Bull’s Head wall was that they were seeing the same girl. In a typical Kansas cow town like Abilene where the men far outnumbered the women, rivalries were common. Jameson even identified her as “a dance hall girl named Jessie Hasel.”
This was not uncommon for Hickok. Domestic bliss for any length of time was not his style. Henry Jameson reported that he “always had a mistress in every town. One of his favorites in Abilene was supposed to have been an Indian girl whom he kept in a nice little cottage on the outskirts of town.”
Whether or not this was true—she could have been another one of his “Indian Annies”—Hickok enjoyed consorting with several women while in Abilene. However, it was at this time in Abilene that his love life took a dramatic turn—when the circus came to town.