1876: Year of the Gun

Steve Wiegand

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• Local history
• US West
• True crime
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Bancroft Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781610885829
• Langue: English

Extrait

1876
YEAR OF THE GUN
THE YEAR BAT, WYATT, CUSTER, JESSE AND THE TWO BILLS (BUFFALO AND WILD) CREATED THE WILD WEST, AND WHY IT’S STILL WITH US

Steve Wiegand
1876: YEAR OF THE GUN
Copyright: © 2022 Steve Wiegand—All rights reserved. This book is an original publication of Bancroft Press.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.
To request permissions, contact Bancroft Press at [e-mail] .
978-1-61088-580-5 HC 978-1-61088-581-2 PB 978-1-61088-582-9 Ebook 978-1-61088-583-6 PDF 978-1-61088-584-3 Audio
FIRST EDITION: July 2022
Cover & Interior design: TracyCopesCreative.com Index: Deborah E. Patton ( [e-mail] )

Published by Bancroft Press “Books that Enlighten” [phone] 4527 Glenwood Avenue La Crescenta CA 91214 www.bancroftpress.com
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To my wife Cecilia, who is living proof that some human beings can endure almost anything—or anyone.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE–The Year
1. “He was a good shot, and not afraid” January: Bat Masterson and the Sweetwater Shootout
2. “I never heard him laugh” May: Wyatt Earp comes to Dodge City
3. “Rascality so shameless” Interlude: Money, politics, and other entertainments
4. “Thou of the sunny flowing hair” June: The end of George Armstrong Custer
5. “First scalp for Custer!” July: Buffalo Bill and the Duel at Warbonnet Creek
6. “My God, it talks!” Interlude: Inventions, innovations, and the Philadelphia Fair
7. “Damn you, take that!” August: Wild Bill’s Last Hand
8. “Grab your guns, boys, they’re robbing the bank!” September: The last ride of the James-Younger Gang
9. “Seven can’t beat eight” Interlude: Stealing a president–and the presidency
PART TWO–Aftermath
10. “The last of the greatest” The two lives of Bat Masterson
11. “The bloke from Arizona” Wyatt goes Hollywood
12. “The women who weep” Two widows and a Calamity
13. “Is that you, Buck?” Old outlaws and a “dirty little coward”
14. “Cody…you have fetched ’em!” The world meets the Wild West
15. Keepers of the Flame
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the author
Index
INTRODUCTION
“Contemporary man has rationalized his myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.”
—Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz
“Events themselves are unimportant: it is the perception of events that is crucial.”
—American historian John E. Ferling
“I never seen anybody but lied one time or another.”
—Huckleberry Finn
Growing up in the 1950s, there were three things I knew for sure about Wild Bill Hickok:
He had a fat, sandpaper-voiced sidekick named Pete “Jingles” Jones.
He loved Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops for breakfast.
He was a good guy.
I learned these things while watching the televised adventures of Mr. Hickok on a small black-and-white set, precariously perched on a wheeled stand in my grandparents’ living room. At the time I’m thinking of, my mother, younger sister and I were living with my mother’s parents in their tiny house in Seaside California, while my father was sailing around the Pacific Ocean with the United States Navy. Despite my father’s occupation, and the fact my grandparents’ house was only a few blocks from Monterey Bay, I had no aspirations toward a nautical life. I wanted to be a cowboy.
Every Saturday morning—or so the generally accepted family story goes—I would prepare for my hero’s TV show by donning a red cowboy hat and a pair of brown cowboy boots. Strapped around the waist of my pajamas, which were decorated with cactuses, lassoes and bucking broncos, was a pair of Mattel “Fanner 50” revolvers.
These were the crème de la crème of toy pistols at the time. Their costliness reflected the high esteem in which I was then held by my parents. You could actually load the revolving cylinders with metal-clad bullets! You could stick caps on the metal shells so they would make a convincing bang! The one flaw was you could not stick them securely in the holsters with the handle butts facing toward your belly button, as Wild Bill wore them.
No matter. As soon as the corpulent fuss-budget Jingles yelled his plaintive “Hey Wild Bill, wait for me!” at the beginning of each episode, I was transfixed for the next 30 minutes. My grandfather, a diminutive man known to his friends as “Little Al” (and who seemed to always be dressed in a stiffly starched white dress shirt and in dire need of a shave), would sit behind me in his padded rocking chair and watch me watch Wild Bill.
Granddad knew something about the Old West. His grandfather and great uncles had ridden the Chisholm Trail as real cowboys. He had lived in Oklahoma before it was a state. Prior to it blowing away during the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930s, the family farm adjoined a real Cherokee reservation, and Granddad was a good friend to several of the Cherokee Nation’s leaders. So, as the show progressed, and Wild Bill would shoot the pistol out of the bad guy’s hand or fight his way across the saloon without losing his hat, my grandfather would snort “foolishness” or “ridiculous.” But every once in a while, even Granddad would grunt approvingly at some action on the screen, particularly if it involved fancy horsemanship.
These idyllic mornings were made all the sweeter when I got to consume some of the Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops endorsed by Wild Bill during every show. In hindsight, this may have been due less to Bill’s endorsement and more to the fact they were “shot with sugar, through and through.” If there was enough milk on the table and my mother and grandmother weren’t looking, I would sneak a second bowl. Granddad would smile, and not say a word. He even dubbed me “Sugar Pops Pete,” after the cereal’s mischievous gun-toting prairie dog mascot, and rarely called me anything else.
At least that’s the version of events most often recited when my family gathered over the years and someone dragged out a photo album, or began reminiscing with vivid detail about events only dimly recalled.
In this particular family legend, however, there are undeniable factual discrepancies, quickly revealed by a cursory internet search. The Wild Bill television show was not on Saturday mornings in the Monterey area when I lived there, but on weekday evenings. The “Sugar Pops Pete” character didn’t debut until 1959, the year after the television series ended. And it’s possible I didn’t get the costly Mattel revolvers until we moved to San Diego in 1960. But the legend’s essence is true: I loved Fanner 50s, Sugar Corn Pops, Bill Hickok, and the Wild West.
There was plenty of fuel to feed my fever. In the 1950s, Hollywood churned out more than 650 Western movies, an average comfortably more than one per week for the entire decade. They ranged from Abilene Trail (starring Whip Wilson, who in actuality was an Illinois-born singer named Roland Meyers and was renamed in hopes of emulating the success of the already-established cowboy star Lash Larue), to Yukon Vengeance, (starring Kirby Grant, who would become TV’s Sky King, the only Western star to employ a Cessna T-50 instead of a horse.)
There were Academy Award-winning films, such as High Noon, featuring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, and somewhat less-heralded efforts, such as The Beast of Hollow Mountain. This film featured a stop-motion dinosaur and Guy Madison, the very actor who played Wild Bill on my favorite show. Madison apparently squeezed in making the movie between Wild Bill episodes. As an actor, he probably regretted having done so after seeing how cheesy Hollow Mountain’s beast was. But at the age of seven, I much preferred the movie with the dinosaur to the one with Grace Kelly.
The movies were abetted in fanning the flames of Wild West Fever by their rival, television. The 1950s saw at least 90 TV Westerns debut, many in prime time. They were followed by 82 more in the 1960s and 1970s. The small-screen shows ranged from the beloved and durable Gunsmoke, which ran for 20 years and 635 episodes, to Wrangler, which lasted only six episodes but was notable for being the first Western to be videotaped rather than filmed. For what that’s worth.

Eventually, the Navy moved us to San Diego. I succumbed to the lure of the sea, and became a surfer/snorkeler/fisherman. But my love for the Wild West remained unabated, even as I grew older and learned that guns can be dangerous, (at least in the hands of people like me); sugar is bad for you, and Wild Bill was not exactly as Guy Madison portrayed him.
For one thing, the real Wild Bill’s sidekick was not a garrulous fat guy named Jingles. At the time of Hickok’s death in August, 1876, his partner was a short, fastidiously groomed hunter, guide and freight service operator named Colorado Charlie Utter. And if there was any grain in the real Wild Bill’s breakfast, it was far more likely to have been distilled and poured into a shot glass than infused with sugar and poured into a cereal bowl.
As for Hickok’s character, a Wyoming newspaper opined two weeks after his demise—which occurred from being shot in the back of the head while playing poker in a saloon—that “Bill Hickok was a desperado, and had a fair share of faults, but he also had good qualities, such are seldom met in a man of his stamp.” To buttress their point, the paper’s editors added a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”
But the Bard and the Cheyenne Daily Leader missed the mark when it comes to America’s Wild West. It’s not the evil or the good that lives on. It’s the legend. And 1876, the year of Hickok’s death was a big one for Wild West legends.
Six months before Hickok was blasted into history, a 22-year-old buffalo hunter and freight hauler shot and killed a U.S. Army corporal, in