When the West Was Young

by Frederick R. Bechdolt

They came on crouching and their knives gleamed through the thick smoke-clouds. His own bowie-knife was in his hand now, and he stabbed the foremost 286 through the throat. The other fled. Hickok stumbled out through the door after him, and Doc Brinck came riding back from his hunting expedition in time to lend his rifle to his partner, who insisted profanely that he was fit to finish what he had so well begun.

So young James Hickok shut his teeth against the weakness which was creeping over him and lined his sights on the last of his enemies; for the man whom he had felled with his fist and he with the broken arm had escaped some time during the latter progress of the fight. That final shot was not so true as its predecessors; the outlaw did not die until several days later in the little town of Manhattan, Kansas.

When the eastbound stage pulled up that afternoon the driver and passengers found the long-haired young station-keeper in a deep swoon, with eleven buckshot and thirteen knife wounds in his body. They took him aboard and carried him to Manhattan where he recovered six months later, to find himself known throughout the West as Wild Bill Hickok.

How many men he killed is a mooted question. But it is universally acknowledged that he slew them all fairly. Owning that prestige whose possessor walks amid unseen dangers, he introduced the quick draw on his portion of frontier; and many who sought his life for the sake of the dark fame which the deed would bring them died with their weapons in their hands.

In Abilene, Kansas, where he was for several years town marshal, one of these caught him unawares as he was rounding a corner. Wild Bill complied with the order to throw up his hands and stood, rigid, expressionless, 287 while the desperado, emulating the plains Indians, tried to torture him by picturing the closeness of his end. He was in the midst of his description when Hickok’s eyes widened and his voice was thick with seeming horror as he cried,

“My God! Don’t kill him from behind!” The outlaw allowed his eyes to waver and he fell with a bullet-hole in his forehead.

As stage-driver, Indian fighter, and peace officer Wild Bill Hickok did a man’s work in cleaning up the border. He was about to go and join the Custer expedition as a scout when one who thought the murder would give him renown shot him from behind as he was sitting in at a poker game in Deadwood. He died drawing his two guns, and the whole West mourned his passing. It had never known a braver spirit.

The silent ranks grow thicker: young men, sunburned and booted for the saddle; the restless souls who forsook tame Eastern farm-lands, lured by the West’s promise of adventure, and received the supreme fulfilment of that promise; the finest of the South’s manhood drawn toward the setting sun to seek new homes. They come from a hundred boot-hills, from hundreds of solitary graves; from the banks of the Yellowstone, the Platte, the Arkansas, and the two forks of the Canadian.

There are so many among them who died exalted that the tongue would weary reciting the tales. This tattered group were with the fifty who drove off fifteen hundred Cheyennes and Kiowas on Beecher Island. The Battle of the Arickaree was the name men gave the 288 stand; and the sands of the north fork of the Republican were red with the blood of the Indians slain by Forsythe and his half hundred when night fell.

These three who follow in boots, jean breeches, and Oregon shirts are Billy Tyler and the Shadler brothers, members of that company of twenty-eight buffalo hunters who made the big fight at Adobe Walls. The sun was just rising when Quanah Parker, Little Robe, and White Shield led more than eight hundred Comanches and Kiowas in the first charge upon the four buildings which stood at the edge of the Llano Estacado, one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest settlement. The Shadler boys were slain in their wagon at that onslaught. Tyler was shot down at midday as he ventured forth from Myers & Leonard’s store. Before the afternoon was over the Indians sickened of their losses and drew off beyond range of the big-caliber Sharp’s rifles. They massacred one hundred and ninety people during their three months’ raiding but the handful behind the barricaded doors and windows was too much for them.