“Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter”, by Tom Clavin

368 pages, Griffin, ISBN-13: 978-1250178169

Really, now, who hasn’t heard of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok? American legend, drover, wagon master, soldier, spy, scout, lawman, gunfighter, gambler, showman and even (bad) actor. All I knew of the man came from Hollywood, especially the 1995 movie “Wild Bill” starring Jeff Bridges in the title role, and the first season of the TV series “Deadwood”, with Keith Carradine as Hickok. We shouldn’t be surprised that this Gunslinger from the American West has stayed with us for all this time, for, as Clavin reminds us in Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter, Hickok was already a bigger legend to the people of his day than Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett or Kit Carson ever were, and by the time he was thirty, to boot. Make no mistake, though: Boone, Crockett and Carson were legendary in the minds of their countrymen, and rightly so, but Hickok was the first national celebrity to come along after the end of the Civil War, and only his good friend, the showman extraordinaire William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, would even come close to reaching that kind of celebrity – but barely two months after his 39th birthday, Wild Bill Hickok was dead.

I’ll admit right away that I was somewhat put-out by the fact that, according to Clavin, his biography mainly skims the surface of his subject’s life, due to the fact that it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to ole’ JB. Hickok didn’t necessarily mythologize his own life – although he was known to tell a tall tale or two around the campfire – but he didn’t discourage others from doing so, either, to every historian’s curse to this day. It appears he was a normal enough frontiersman (albeit particularly fast and accurate with his pistols); but when an Eastern reporter profiled him for a piece in Harper’s magazine, there was no turning back, and James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok became a legend in his own time. Clavin is a good storyteller, but I think sometimes he lets his quest for a well-told tale override the facts, his claims to the contrary otherwise; however, for the most part he seems to stick to facts better than most who have written about Wild Bill, and succeeds in separating the wheat from the chaff.

Clavin ends Wild Bill with an interesting theory that, even had Wild Bill lived, he wouldn’t have aged at all well in a post-gunslinger America: there was no practical occupation for Hickok, he wasn’t a very good gambler or any kind of prospector whatsoever, and he was slowly going blind, besides. This is perhaps why Wild Bill tarried in Deadwood instead of returning to his wife in Cincinnati: he was ashamed of what he’d lost.