Buffalo, bison and the search for Wild Bill

DEADWOOD, South Dakota — Wild Bill Hickok was killed right there. At least that’s what the woman who sold me the $10 ticket said.

I’m in a basement exhibit area of the Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood. Hickok, an Old West lawman, scout, pistoleer and gambler, a long-haired legend in his own time, was shot to death in Nuttal and Mann’s Saloon No. 10 on Aug. 2, 1876. Wild Bill was playing poker when Jack McCall, a loser at cards and life, shot him in the back of the head. Hickok was 39.

The basement display is an imaginative recreation of that infamous day. A table showcases a representation of Hickok’s final poker hand, the cards covered in blood that looks more like maple syrup. There’s a pistol and a hat on the table, also. Cheesy? Maybe. But I’m OK with it. I feel as if I am standing among ghosts I have lived with all my life.

Hickok was here

Since my childhood days in my native Mississippi, I have been obsessed with the history and adventure of the frontier West. That passion certainly played a role in my settling in Albuquerque in 1976 to pursue my newspaper career in the land of the Pueblo, the Apache and Navajo, to search out the haunts of Kit Carson, Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett and Elfego Baca.

I was in Deadwood on June 21, a cloud-shrouded, drizzly day, because I’m a member of the Western Writers of America, a national organization made up of 700 men and women who write about the American West. Since I joined WWA in 2008, trips to the organization’s annual conventions in different Western states have made it possible to visit places I read about when I was a kid.

I have been to the Little Big Horn battlefield in Montana; North Dakota’s Fort Abraham Lincoln, where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer was commander; Nebraska’s Fort Robinson, where the enigmatic Lakota war leader Crazy Horse was killed in 1877; the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona; the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming; Western painter Charlie Russell’s studio and home in Great Falls, Montana; and more. For me, all of it was a dizzying, exhilarating experience.

This year’s WWA convention in Rapid City, South Dakota, featured an excursion to Deadwood and put me on the trail of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok. It is difficult to say with certainty that Hickok was killed in the subterranean space I paid to see. Deadwood burned down in 1879, three years after Hickok’s death, and was flooded twice. After the second flood, the town’s street level was built up one full story, so that’s why I was in a basement, which would have been street level when Hickok cashed in his chips.

There are several locations around Deadwood that are touted as the place Hickok was killed. There is even another Saloon No. 10 in town. But my friend Bill Markley, a fellow WWA member and author of a book about Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody, believes the saloon I stopped in is the most likely site of the original Saloon No. 10. It doesn’t matter where exactly Hickok died. He was here, and he walked these streets, even if they were much lower then. And he’s buried in Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery, which I visited as part of the WWA tour.

After returning home from the convention, I had dinner with friends, a married couple and their 16-year-old son. They asked me about South Dakota. I was pumped to tell them about my adventures.

“I went to Deadwood,” I said. “What’s Deadwood?” the 16-year-old asked. “That’s where Wild Bill Hickok was killed,” I said. “Who’s Wild Bill Hickok?” he said.

Road trip

I rode to the Rapid City convention with friends Jim Jones and Susan Buescher of Rio Rancho and Allan Chapman of Decatur, Texas. We set out from Rio Rancho on the morning of June 19.

Jim and Susan are a couple. Jim and Allan are Western singer-songwriters and sometimes writing partners. Jim has received three WWA Spur Awards for songwriting, one of which he shared with Allan for a song they wrote together.

Allan comes from a Texas ranching family, but is something of a maverick. He was at Woodstock, did a 16-year stretch as a songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, and has been nominated for Grammys. He also earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Texas Christian University and taught English literature at Oklahoma State. If you don’t keep a tight rein on him, Allan might start talking about Chaucer or German poetry.

During our ride, the four of us discussed writing, movies, music, childhood memories, TV, newspapers, politics and religion. And the only thing on which we disagreed is what to call the huge, shaggy beasts we saw in increasing number as we got farther north. Allan, renegade intellectual that he is, insisted they are bison, offering no more foundation for his stand than that happens to be the proper name for them. Jim and I argued for buffalo because it’s “give me a home, where the buffalo roam”; Buffalo Bill Cody; Buffalo, New York; and Buffalo wings.

Susan, a Montana native and a budget specialist with the U.S. Forest Service, kept us pointed in the right direction and pulled together as best could be. She brought us our hats when we left them behind on cafe tables or under chairs, made motel reservations for us along the way and found places for us to eat — Brothers Bar & Grill in Fort Collins, Colorado; the Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Wandering Bison Coffee in Hot Springs, South Dakota.

Yeah, the Wandering Bison. Allan couldn’t help rubbing that in.

Packing the West

The highlight of WWA conventions is the Spur Award Banquet. New Mexico members did pretty well this year. Albuquerque’s Melody Groves, who is the WWA president, won a Spur Award in the biography category; Bob Rosebrough of Gallup received a Spur for contemporary nonfiction book; Larry D. Thomas of Las Cruces took the Spur Award for poetry; and Randy Huston of Rociada claimed the Spur for songwriting. Four other New Mexicans were Spur Award finalists, and Tom Clagett of Santa Fe’s Eldorado community was honored with the Branding Iron Award for exceptional support of WWA and its goals.

Another highlight of the convention for me was a presentation about WWA’s Packing the West program, which is designed to educate young people about the history of the American West. WWA has made eight short films in which contemporary American youngsters travel back in time to meet Old West figures such as mountain man Jim Bridger, Black cowboy Nat Love and frontier trader William Bent. These programs do not emphasize the shootouts and Indian-soldier battles that stirred me when I was young. They go deeper in their exploration of everyday life on the frontier, but also depict important turning points in the West’s history.

There are films about women who experienced the West as pioneer travelers, teachers and gold miners. One film tells about Ponca chief Standing Bear, who in 1879 successfully argued in federal court that Native Americans are persons within the meaning of the law. Still another film is about Susan La Flesche Picotte, a member of the Omaha tribe, who was the first Indigenous woman to become a physician in the United States.

WWA plans to make these films available very soon to schools free of charge. The target grades are third to eighth, but the films can be used in any grade up through high school and in home schools, too. Interested persons should check out the website, packingthewest.org and go to packingthewest@gmail.com for more information and to obtain the films when they are ready for distribution.

It makes me proud to be a member of an organization that is making this effort. It makes me wish I had talked about the Old West with my 16-year-old friend when he was littler. I would have told him who Wild Bill Hickok was.