Hickok's Twist of Fate

WILD BILL'S 1870 DRUNKEN BRAWL WITH CUSTER'S TROOPERS IS AS LEGENDARY AS THE MAN OF MANY NAMES HE KILLED.

- JEFF BROOME

On Drum's saloon in Hays City, Kansas. What makes this fight arguably Hickok's most important is that he killed a trooper in Custer's 7th Cavalry who had earlier been awarded the coveted Congressional Medal of Honor. The truth of the brawl and cavalrymen involved has only recently surfaced from military records in the National Archives. Biographers of Hickok injected so much fiction in recounting this brawl that the truth seemed forever lost.

July 17, 1870, Wild Bill Hickok had one whale of a brawl in Tommy James W. Buel's Heroes of the Plains (1885) produced a narrative wrong in every detail including saying the fight occurred in Paddy Welch's saloon. Buel claimed Wild Bill's widow gave him Hickok's diary and thus the brawl is straight from Hickok. It started on February 12, 1870, as a fistfight in the street with a 7th Cavalry sergeant, but as Hickok was winning, 15 soldiers joined the fracas, pummeling Hickok until Paddy handed Hickok his pistols. Hickok then killed several soldiers and was wounded seven times and escaped across the Smoky Hill River 11 miles distant.

Later biographers followed Buel with certain emendations until William Connelley changed it to a different February date and said the brawl was caused by George Custer's drunk younger brother Tom. A greater fiction could not be told. Connelley's notes on his book, housed in the Denver Public library, cite the source as a letter written in 1926 by a man who was not even born when Tom Custer was alive. Eugene Cunningham also used this story in his popular book Triggernometry: A Gallery of Gunfighters (1934) and now the mighty legend became "fact. It is all bunk.

Uncovering the Truth-Ryan's Report