The cards were already on the table when the shot rang out. Jack McCall did not give Wild Bill Hickok a chance to reach for his revolvers. He walked up behind the man who had become a living legend of the frontier and put a bullet into the back of his head. Hickok slumped forward over his poker hand, dead before he hit the floor of the saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory.
It was August 2nd, 1876, and the man who had built his reputation on being faster than any man alive had been killed by someone he never saw coming. James Butler Hickok had not always been Wild Bill. He had grown up in a world where vigilante justice was commonplace, and that world shaped how he looked at law enforcement for the rest of his life. In 1855, at the age of eighteen, he fled to the Western frontier because he mistakenly believed he had killed a man during a fight.
He took whatever work he could find, driving stagecoaches, scouting for the army, and playing poker for a living. In the Old West, a man with a quick gun and steady nerve could make a name for himself, and Hickok did exactly that. His reputation for shooting prowess earned him an appointment as Deputy US Marshal of Kansas, and later Marshal of Hays, Kansas. Within weeks of taking that position, he killed two men.
Each of them, by the accounts that survived, was trying to kill Hickok first. An inquiry was held into each killing, and in both cases the juries found the deaths justified, though the record did not prove that Hickok had been acting to restore peace rather than simply defending himself. The findings did not matter much in the end. Hickok was not re-elected to the position.
He moved further west to Abilene, Kansas, where he took over as marshal only because the previous marshal had been killed in the line of duty. Hickok may have been a skilled lawman, but he was an even better storyteller. He told highly exaggerated tales of his own exploits, building a larger-than-life persona that spread across the frontier. He bragged about his adventures and his gunfights, and in doing so he wrote his own name into the lore of the American West.
His place in that history was sealed forever on that August afternoon in Deadwood, when a man he had beaten at poker the day before decided to settle the score. The Earp brothers shared something of Hickok’s conflicted relationship with the law. Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp upheld the law in Wichita, Kansas, in Dodge City, Kansas, in parts of Texas, and down into Arizona Territory. History remembers Wyatt Earp’s name most clearly in connection with the shootout at the OK Corral, but it was Virgil who served as city marshal of Tombstone at the time, in addition to being deputy US marshal for the territory.
All the brothers were described as skilled lawmen, but they also carried reputations for settling disagreements with violence. While serving on the police force in Wichita, Wyatt Earp got into a physical altercation with a political rival and had to leave his post because of it. Even the shootout at the OK Corral was seen by many as a personal confrontation between the Earp brothers and a group of locals rather than a clean fight between lawmen and outlaws. After the shooting, the brothers did not wait for the courts to finish their work.
They embarked on a vendetta to hunt down the outlaws who had survived, taking the law into their own hands. One of those outlaws, a man known as Curly Bill, was shot and killed. The Earp brothers were arrested and charged with his murder. The charges were eventually dropped when the judge ruled that the men had been performing their duties as lawmen when the incident occurred.
The Earp brothers earned their place in history as dedicated lawmen of the Old West. Yet the line they walked was thin. More than once they crossed it, finding themselves on the wrong side of the law they had sworn to uphold. John Henry Holliday crossed that line too, though he never set out to be a lawman at all.
He was a dentist by trade, but for most of his adult life he was known simply as Doc. He befriended Wyatt Earp, the gambler and lawman, in Texas. According to some stories, Holliday saved Earp’s life, and that act of courage started their friendship. When Earp moved further west to Arizona, Holliday went with him, and the two eventually settled in the town of Tombstone.
By 1879, Tombstone had an outlaw problem. Members of the Cochise County Cowboys, a local gang, caused endless trouble across the area. Wyatt Earp had joined forces with his brother Virgil, the city marshal, to rid the town of the outlaws, but they needed more help. On October 26th, 1881, Virgil Earp deputized Doc Holliday.
Later that same day, the new lawman took part in the most famous gunfight in the history of the Old West. The shootout at the OK Corral lasted about half a minute. When it was over, Holliday and the Earp brothers had killed two members of the outlaw gang. Holliday had been wounded in the fight, but he recovered from his injuries.
Then he followed the Earps on their vendetta ride to track down and kill the remaining members of the gang. They rode out of their jurisdiction, taking the law into their own hands, and found themselves on the wrong side of it. Holliday was accused of murder and arrested. At his trial, he claimed self-defense and was acquitted.
His career as an Old West lawman was short, but it was enough to make him a permanent figure in the story of Tombstone, Arizona. John Coffee Hays never had to worry about being mistaken for an outlaw. A former land surveyor, soldier, and Texas Ranger, he earned the nickname Captain Jack and a reputation as one of the toughest lawmen the frontier ever produced. He rose through the ranks of the Texas Rangers because he was so successful at weakening the power of the Comanche people in the region.
In 1842, he led forces against an invading Mexican army, and he commanded a regiment during the Mexican-American War. When his service in Texas was done, he traveled to Arizona and New Mexico to serve as the government-appointed US Indian agent. In 1849, Hays joined the thousands of people streaming into California in search of gold. Just one year later, he was elected San Francisco’s first sheriff.
Before the Gold Rush, San Francisco had been a small, sparsely populated outpost. The town was not prepared for the sudden flood of newcomers. Captain Jack Hays applied his Texas brand of crime-fighting to the chaos, and he brought order to the region where others had failed. Later, he dabbled in politics, resumed his land surveying career, and earned a fortune in real estate, all while still wrangling outlaws and enforcing the law.
A different kind of order came to Oklahoma in the hands of three men known collectively as the Three Guardsmen. Bill Tilghman, Heck Thomas, and Chris Madsen were all US Marshals working under Marshal E. D. Nix.
In the 1880s, Oklahoma was riddled with outlaws and corrupt lawmen. The Three Guardsmen were chosen to clean up the territory based on their abilities, their experience, their determination, and their honesty. Starting in 1889, Tilghman, Thomas, and Madsen arrested more than three hundred outlaws and killed a dozen more. They became known for their ability to track escaping outlaws even through inhospitable terrain and harsh weather conditions that would have stopped lesser men.
Their greatest fame came from pursuing the Wild Bunch and the remaining members of the Dalton gang who had joined them. One by one, the Three Guardsmen tracked down the members of the Wild Bunch, arresting them or killing them, until the gang’s reign of terror was over. The Old West was not without order, but the order it had was bought at a price. Some lawmen, like Hickok, built legends that outgrew the truth.
Others, like the Earps and Doc Holliday, blurred the line between justice and vengeance until it became difficult to see where one ended and the other began. Men like Captain Jack Hays brought order to towns that had none, and the Three Guardsmen cleaned up a territory that most considered hopeless. They were not all heroes, and they were not all clean.
But they were the men who stood between the frontier and its own worst instincts, and their stories are the ones that survived.
