The bullet entered the back of Wild Bill Hickok’s head and came out through his cheek. He dropped without ever seeing the man who killed him, the cards slipping from his hand onto the saloon floor. When the players looked down, they saw two black aces and two black eights. No one ever confirmed what the fifth card was.

From that moment on, that combination carried a name that would outlive every man in the room: the dead man’s hand. It was the middle of the afternoon on August 2nd, 1876, at Nuttall and Mann’s Saloon in Deadwood. James Butler Hickok had a habit that had become a rule: never sit with his back to the door. That day, the seat facing the entrance was already taken.

He asked twice to switch chairs. The men at the table said no. He shrugged and kept playing poker. Jack McCall walked in, came up behind him, and shot him point-blank.

Hickok was 39 years old. The bullet that killed him also wounded another player before it stopped. An improvised jury of miners acquitted McCall, who claimed he was avenging a brother. But Deadwood sat on Indian land, outside United States law, and that court meant nothing.

McCall left town bragging about what he had done and talked too much in Laramie, Wyoming. A federal marshal heard him. Since the first trial had been illegal, he could be tried again. This time the jury took a little over two hours, and they found out the brother had never existed.

On March 1st, 1877, McCall was hanged in Yankton, the first federal execution in Dakota Territory. They buried him with the rope still around his neck. Jesse James died the same way Hickok did, from behind, unarmed. On the morning of April 3rd, 1882, the most wanted outlaw in the country was living in St.

Joseph, Missouri, under a fake name. To his neighbors, Thomas Howard was an ordinary family man. It was hot that day, and Jesse did something he almost never did: he took off his gun belt and set it aside so he would not draw attention if someone walked by outside. In the room were Charlie and Robert Ford, two brothers from his own gang.

What Jesse did not know was that weeks earlier, Robert had made a deal with Governor Thomas Crittenden, who was offering $10,000 for him. Jesse noticed dust on a picture hanging on the wall, stepped up onto a chair, and turned his back. Robert Ford pulled his gun and shot him behind the left ear. He died right there at 34 years old.

The brothers were sentenced to hang and pardoned by the governor the same day. Ten years later, Robert Ford died the same way, shot by surprise in a saloon in Colorado. Billy the Kid’s end came in the dark, not in the high-noon showdown of the movies. On the night of July 14th, 1881, in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, Sheriff Pat Garrett went into Pete Maxwell’s bedroom to ask some questions.

He sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and spoke quietly. Billy showed up by chance, barefoot, with a knife in one hand and a revolver in the other, looking for a piece of meat. He saw a figure sitting there and asked in Spanish, “Quien es? ” He asked twice.

Garrett recognized the voice, pulled his gun, and fired twice. The first shot hit near the heart. Billy dropped on the bedroom floor and died within seconds, without ever knowing who had shot him. He was 21 years old.

Two deputies waited on the porch and never came in. The next day, they buried him in the town cemetery next to two friends who had also died from gunshots. The hunter became the hunted 27 years later. On February 29th, 1908, Pat Garrett was traveling by wagon toward Las Cruces, New Mexico.

He was 57 years old, deep in debt, and at odds with just about everyone over a land lease he could not get out of. No one knows for sure what happened on the road. Garrett got down to relieve himself and was shot once in the back of the head and once in the stomach. Wayne Brazel, the cowboy who raised goats on Garrett’s land, admitted to the shooting and claimed self-defense.

He was acquitted after just over half an hour of jury deliberation. But the wounds did not match his story. There was a third man in the group that day, and around the area people talked about Jim Miller, a hired gun known for jobs like that. The man who buried a legend of the Old West ended up killed in an ambush over grazing land, and the case was never solved.

John Henry Holliday graduated from dental school in Philadelphia, but tuberculosis shut down his practice before he was 25 and pushed him west, where he became a professional gambler and one of the most feared gunfighters on the frontier. For more than ten years, he lived convinced he would die with a bullet in his chest. Instead, on November 8th, 1887, at 36 years old, he lay in a room at the Glenwood Hotel in Colorado. He had gone there for the hot springs, trying to buy a few more months of life.

The sulfur steam may have made his lungs worse. He spent nearly two months bedridden, unconscious much of the time. In the Old West, dying with your boots on meant dying in a fight. They say Doc woke up, asked for a shot of whiskey, looked down at his bare feet, and got the joke.

The man who made it through the gunfight at the OK Corral was checking out in a nightshirt in a hotel bed. His last words were supposedly “This is funny. ”

Wyatt Earp, the only man to walk away from the OK Corral without a scratch, ended his days in a modest apartment in Los Angeles surrounded by the noise of cars. On October 26th, 1881, in Tombstone, bullets flew past him.

He survived ambushes, lost a brother to murder, and hunted down those responsible one by one. No bullet ever took him. He died in bed on January 13th, 1929, at 80 years old, from a chronic bladder condition. By his side was Josephine, his companion for nearly 50 years.

Few neighbors knew who the old man really was. In his later years, Earp made a living as a Western consultant in Hollywood, showing actors how to draw a revolver for real. Actor Tom Mix cried at his funeral. Two years later, writer Stuart Lake published the book that turned Earp into a legend, but Wyatt himself did not live to see the myth they created.

William Barclay Masterson was sheriff in Dodge City, Kansas, back when the town was the end of the line for Texas cattle drives. He carried a gun, arrested drunks, and survived shootouts. He was friends with Wyatt Earp. He saw his own brother Ed get shot and killed on a city street.

But the Old West came to an end, and he moved to New York, where he became a sports columnist for the Morning Telegraph. The man who used to hunt buffalo started writing about boxing three times a week. Theodore Roosevelt liked him so much he appointed him a deputy US Marshal. On the morning of October 25th, 1921, Masterson sat down at his desk and wrote about boxing like always.

He finished the piece. When his co-workers looked over, he was slumped over the desk, pen still in his hand. Heart attack at 67. The last lines he wrote were about ice: everyone gets the same amount in life, except the rich get theirs in the summer and the poor get theirs in the winter.

Calamity Jane was already a legend while she was still alive. Cheap dime novels sold the story of a woman who could shoot better than any man and rode with the army. The truth was that in her later years, Martha Jane Cannary made a living trading stories for drinks in roadside saloons. On August 1st, 1903, she died in a room at the Callaway Hotel in the small town of Terry, a few miles from Deadwood.

She was around 47 years old and left behind nothing but the clothes she was wearing. Doctors said pneumonia and inflammation of the intestines, a body worn down by alcohol and years on the road. Before she died, she made one request: to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickok, the gunfighter who, according to her, had been the great love of her life. He never confirmed any of it.

Even so, they honored her request. Today the two graves sit side by side at Mount Moriah Cemetery. The life that became an adventure on paper ended in poverty and illness. The last name most widely accepted by historians is Cannary, not Cannery, and the exact place of death was Terry, a mining town near Deadwood.

The son of a Methodist preacher, John Wesley Hardin became the most feared gunfighter in Texas. He himself claimed to have killed more than 40 men. He served 17 years in prison, studied law behind bars, and walked out a lawyer with a pardon signed by the governor. On the night of August 19th, 1895, he was at the Acme Saloon in El Paso shooting dice at the bar with a businessman.

Hours earlier, police officer John Selman’s son had arrested the woman who was living with Hardin, and the two men had exchanged threats in the street. Selman walked into the saloon and shot Hardin from behind. The bullet entered the back of his head and came out through his eye. Hardin fell with the dice still in his hand.

His last words were not about death. They were about the game: he told his partner he had four sixes to beat. Selman went on trial, the jury could not reach a verdict, and less than a year later, he was also shot to death. Robert Parker and Harry Longabaugh robbed trains and banks all across the West until the Pinkertons started closing in.

In 1901, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid took a ship to South America, raised cattle in Argentina, and when money got tight, went back to their old line of work. In November 1908, they robbed the payroll of a mine in Tupiza, Bolivia. They stopped for the night in a small village called San Vicente. Someone recognized the mine’s mule.

Soldiers surrounded the room, and the night turned into a shootout. By morning, there were two bodies inside. The official story says one killed the other and then himself so they would not be captured. The problem came afterward.

No one ever identified those bodies for sure. In 1991, an American team opened the grave in San Vicente, and testing pointed to someone else. Butch’s sister swore until the day she died that he came back home and lived quietly for decades. More than a hundred years later, no one knows for sure who is buried in that grave.

Myra Maybelle Shirley was born in 1848; the world knew her as Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen. On February 3rd, 1889, she was riding home in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. Near a stretch of road, someone hiding in the brush fired a shotgun into her back. Belle fell off her horse.

The second shot came while she was already on the ground. She was two days away from her 41st birthday. She died before help arrived. Her neighbor, Edgar Watson, was arrested but released for lack of evidence.

Her husband, Jim July Starr, became a suspect. And there was the name no one wanted to say out loud: Ed Reed, her own son, who had gotten into a serious fight with his mother shortly before. Whoever fired the shots knew Belle’s routine and knew where to wait. No jury was ever called.

No one was convicted. The case remains open to this day, more than 130 years later. On July 14th, 1882, a wagon driver passed through West Turkey Creek, Arizona, and saw a man sitting in the fork of an oak tree. He looked like he was resting.

It was John Peters Ringo, the gunfighter Tombstone feared. He had a bullet hole in his right temple, and his revolver was still in his hand with one spent cartridge. But the details did not add up. His boots were off, and he had wrapped strips of his shirt around his feet like someone who had walked a long way without shoes.

A piece of his scalp was missing. His horse showed up days later, far from there. The coroner’s jury ruled suicide, case closed. Years later, Wyatt Earp told friends he was the one who pulled the trigger.

Others pointed to Doc Holliday or Buckskin Frank Leslie. The legendary duel between Ringo and Holliday that the movies sold never happened. What exists is a body under an oak tree and an unanswered question. Tom Horn tracked Geronimo, worked as a Pinkerton detective, and became a hired gun for the big cattle ranchers of Wyoming.

He handled problems quietly, and nobody asked how. In July 1901, near Iron Mountain, a gunshot brought down 14-year-old Willie Nickell. The boy was wearing his father’s coat and hat. His father was a sheep rancher the cattlemen wanted gone.

A lot of people believed the bullet had been meant for someone else. The case turned against Horn during a drinking conversation. He said too much to Deputy US Marshal Joe Lefors while a stenographer wrote everything down in the room next door. That was enough for the jury.

Horn had managed to escape from jail months earlier but was recaptured within minutes. On November 20th, 1903, one day before his 43rd birthday, he stepped onto the gallows in Cheyenne. The weight of his own body triggered the trapdoor. To this day, some historians are convinced he did not pull that trigger.

He died on the gallows, not on the prairie. Curly Bill Brocius led the Cowboys, the gang that ruled Cochise County, Arizona. In October 1880, he killed Marshal Fred White right in the middle of a Tombstone street and walked free; the jury accepted the story that the shooting was accidental. His end supposedly came on March 24th, 1882, at Iron Springs.

Wyatt Earp said the two came face to face and that he hit Curly Bill with a shotgun at almost point-blank range, nearly blowing the man in half. But nobody ever found the body. The Tombstone Epitaph offered a thousand dollars to anyone who could prove he was dead. Nobody came forward to collect.

Sheriff Johnny Behan said Curly Bill was still alive. Cowboys swore they had run into him in Mexico and Texas years later using another name. There is no grave, no death certificate, and not a single confirmed photo of the man. More than a hundred years later, nobody knows where he ended up.

A year before he died, Sam Bass had taken $60,000 in gold coins from a train in Big Springs, Nebraska. He planned his last robbery without knowing his own friend had already given everything away. Jim Murphy, one of the gang members, had made a deal with the law to save his own skin. On July 19th, 1878, Sam Bass rode into Round Rock, Texas, to take a look at the bank.

A deputy noticed the gun on his hip, and the shooting started. Deputy A. W. Grimes went down right there.

Bass was shot in the back; the bullet passed through his body and destroyed his kidneys. He still managed to get on his horse and ride out of town, leaving a trail of blood on the ground. He spent the night alone in an open field. The next day, they found him sitting under a tree, pale and weak.

They asked for the names of the gang members. He said he did not rat out his partners. He died on July 21st, 1878, the day he turned 27. There was no duel, no movie ending.

It took him two days to die. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid became famous, but the Wild Bunch was much bigger, and almost all of them met the same end. Harvey Logan, known as Kid Curry, was the most violent of the bunch. In 1903, he escaped from jail in Knoxville, Tennessee, and went straight back to robbing trains.

In June 1904, after robbing a train near Parachute, Colorado, he was surrounded by a posse. Wounded and with no way out, he shot himself before they could catch him. He was about 37 years old. News Carver was killed in an ambush in Texas in 1901.

Ben Kilpatrick, the tall Texan, died in 1912 while trying to rob another train; a Wells Fargo employee killed him with an ice hammer. Butch and Sundance fled to Bolivia and, according to the most widely accepted version, died surrounded by soldiers in 1908. One by one, the gang was hunted down. In just over ten years, the Old West made every one of them pay the price.

In May 1887, Deputy US Marshal Dan Maples was shot in Tahlequah, Indian Territory. An informant named Ned Christie, a Cherokee leader and member of the Nation’s Council, denied everything. There was never a trial. Christie refused to surrender, went back into the hills, and spent five years being hunted.

He built a log house with double walls, which the newspapers nicknamed a fort. Regular bullets could not get through. In November 1892, a group of 16 men showed up with a cannon and dynamite. The cannon could not do the job.

The dynamite did. On November 3rd, he came out through the fire and went down right there. And it did not end there. They tied his body to a door ripped off his own house, took it to Fort Smith, and posed for a picture beside him, rifles in hand.

He became an attraction. Years later, new evidence pointed to another shooter. Ned Christie was probably innocent.