Two pair, black aces and eights, is the dead man’s hand for
those who don’t know. James Butler Hickok, better known as Wild Bill, supposedly
held those cards when he was shot in the back of the head playing poker at
Nutall & Mann’s Number 10 Saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota.
More than 120 years later, the shooting of Wild Bill is still
re-enacted daily in the saloon every few hours in the afternoons and evenings during
the summer tourist season. I wasn’t aware of this fact until Wild Bill himself asked if I’d
like to be the dealer while he got his head blowed off. Of course, I agreed.
Who in their right mind would ever pass up a chance to play poker with the Old
West’s most famous gunman and then watch him die a gruesome and violent death?
When Wild Bill requested my assistance, I was sitting at the bar
imbibing in a cold beer after doing a bit of gambling myself. It was late
afternoon and the bat-wing doors of saloon cast elongated shadows across the
uneven and worn wooden floor. Nutall & Mann’s is a fairly authentic western
saloon, and dates back to the mid-1880s. However, the existing stone and brick
building was built after a fire swept through Deadwood Gulch and leveled most
of the town’s rickety wood structures.
The current saloon was completed about 10 years after Wild
Bill was gunned down by a teenage boy named Jack McCall. After sneaking up and
blasting Hickok in the back of the head from point blank range, McCall told the
shocked bystanders that his mother had killed herself because of Wild Bill’s
misdeeds.
Turns out that was a lie, and McCall’s mother was some two-bit
whore in Cheyenne who had met Hickok maybe once and died either of a drug
overdose or syphilis, probably both. McCall was actually the worst kind of
murderous villain since he only craved fame. McCall thought he’d be famous for killing Wild
Bill and that people would pay to hear his story. Lucky for him, he wasn’t
strung up immediately. A kangaroo court of prospectors and gamblers acquitted McCall
of murder. The “court” seemed to buy the avenging his dead mother defense. Most
historians believe the jurors were actually very pissed at Wild Bill for
consistently beating them at poker and taking their money.
McCall left Deadwood a day or two after his “acquittal” and was
later arrested and tried in Cheyenne by a real court. The second trial didn’t
turn out very well for McCall, and he was found guilty of homicide. His
fame was pretty short lived and was hanged a few weeks before his 20th
birthday.
Hickok was buried in Deadwood, and people seem to think it
was his home. Truth is, Hickok had come to town about three weeks before he was
shot. He came to gamble because stories had spread of easy pickings from prospectors
who had flocked to South Dakota’s Black Hills. They came in a gold rush that started
when an U.S. Army expedition led by Lt. Col. George Custer discovered gold. It
was a rich strike, and the Homestake Gold Mine, just a couple miles up
Whitewood Creek from Deadwood, eventually became the deepest gold mine in the
United States and was still producing gold until it shut down in 2004.
Custer’s gold discovery indirectly led to his own death. As mining
boom towns like Deadwood began to spring up in the Black Hills, which was
sacred land to the Lakota and Cheyenne, hundreds of Indians bolted from their
reservations. White men had once again broached a treaty that guaranteed the
Black Hills would remain Indian territory in perpetuity. The renegade Indians eventually
banded together in a huge encampment along the Greasy Grass River (known to
whites as the Little Bighorn). Custer found them there in late June 1876 … and
that’s a whole other story.
When I arrived in Deadwood almost 120 years to the day that
Custer met his end, the town had made a rousing rebound. For years, you
couldn’t gamble or find an open saloon in Deadwood—which was strangling the
town slowly to death. Finally the town’s leaders realized they had to revel in
Deadwood’s rough-and-rowdy past and barter that reputation into tourism
dollars.
Saloons and gambling returned to Deadwood Gulch and so did
the tourists—and that was good thing for me because when I hit town, I had
about 10 bucks cash in my pocket and for some reason my bank card had stopped
working. The card’s magnetic strip might’ve been compromised by a slip and fall
into the plunge pool at the base of a waterfall in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming.
Still, I was able to acquire a room and buy dinner in downtown
Deadwood using my Amex card, but I had no access to easy cash from an ATM.
After a truly western style dinner of steak, baked beans and beer, I set off
down Deadwood’s main street and stepped into one of the saloons advertising
black jack and poker. The “casino” so to speak was a back room of another “authentic”
western saloon.
I laid down all the cash I had for $10 in chips and within
an hour had won about $150—which is quite a bit better than an ATM. I tend to
be a sensible gambler and knew that my luck wouldn’t hold out much longer—so I
left while the getting was still good.
I had passed Nutall & Mann’s on my way to the gambling hall
… for some strange reason there’s no gambling allowed in probably the most
famous Deadwood saloon. Still I wanted to soak in the history, and I took a
seat at the end of the bar and ordered a long-necked bottle of Bud. And that’s
when Wild Bill stepped up and asked if I would help recreate his assassination.
I’ve never been one to turn down an offer to participate in
a bit of weirdness, so I readily agreed. The Wild Bill who approached me bore
no resemblance to the actual James Butler Hickok. He had curly medium-length
hair and a goatee. He wore jeans and a western style red and blue shirt with
white piping on the collar and cuffs and a black leather waistcoat. He had a leather
gunbelt and holster that held a single ivory-handled peacemaker – aka the Colt
.45. His hat was a black Stetson with a braided silver hatband.
The real Wild Bill had long light-brown hair that cascaded
over his shoulders and a mustache that drooped below his jawline. He wore a
sombero type hat with a very wide brim and low crown with the brim tilted down to
one side. Wild Bill was a bit of a clothes horse and liked to wear a red
and white houndstooth checkered silk vest with a black wool frock coat. He never once wore a gun
belt or holster and tucked his two Navy .44 Colts into a red sash he tied
around his waist.
Still I was happy to comply with this errant Wild Bill, as
he told me that I would be the dealer for the fatal hand of poker. I shook
hands with the other re-enactors as we sat at a poker table in the middle of the
saloon. A narration of Wild Bill’s demise played over the bar’s sound system as
I dealt the Deadman’s hand to the pretend Bill. The faux Wild Bill jumped up
from the table a couple of times and drew his six-shooter and pointed it at the
faux Jack McCall. But then he holstered his gun and sat back down—allowing
“Jack” to stand behind him. When Jack fired the gun, I admit I jumped. It was
loud … a blank of course but still loud. I could see that Wild Bill had ear plugs—I
wish he would’ve shared.
Wild Bill sprawled on the floor, and every one at the poker
table jumped up and scattered. My ears were ringing a bit, and I got up to run,
which seemed the prudent thing to do. But Jack pointed his six-shooter at me
and shouted “Sit the hell down.”
Then I remembered, my primary duty in all this was to turn
the cards over and show all the tourists standing about in their t-shirts, shorts and
flip flops … black aces and eights, the Deadman’s hand.
