Wild Bill Hickok

Hickok and Holliday: Cautious or Craven Killers?

By Robert C. Trundle, Ph.D.

A gangly twenty-four year old James Butler Hickok’s legend began controversially on 12 July 1861. From behind a curtain and without warning, he shot and killed an unarmed brawny farmer named David McCanles after the latter challenged him to come out and fight if Hickok had anything against him. Choosing a course of action that was so successful that he followed it the rest of his life, ostensibly making him a craven killer, Hickok shot “to kill on his first suspicion of a physical encounter or personal danger.”1 Indeed, the famous Western historians George Hansen and James Horan agree that this first murder illustrates how there was not one authentic instance of Hickok fighting fairly, so “great was his fear of personal harm…”2 Notwithstanding all the dime-novel hyperbole that venerated his daring exploits, however, the question ensues of how so many witnesses over the next decade failed to note his fear! If a craven recklessness did typify Wild Bill, a name acquired on some accounts when he faced down a crowd of vigilantes, one wonders how he confronted and did not kill some of the frontier’s most feared gunfighters such as John Wesley Harden. Herein, Hickok’s killing of McCanles is compared to a similar case of John ‘Doc’ Holiday whose courage no historian doubts. And both cases are judged against today’s survival strategies prescribed for law enforcement officers.

The dubious ascription of cowardice to Hickok, even on Horan and Hansen’s analysis, begins when the fledgling young man was employed by a stage stop at Rock Creek Station in southeastern Nebraska. Owned by McCanles who had no previous encounters with Hickok, except for the harassment of calling him ‘Duck Bill’ because of his protruding upper lip, the stage stop was operated by Horace Wellman, his wife and two other men. Wellman had sought to purchase the stop and was late on payments, whereupon McCanles had gone to demand the money. His reputation for being aggressive and quick-tempered was evidenced by the fact that, after calling out for Wellman at the front door, Wellman sent his wife to talk with him instead. Hickok’s courage, by contrast, is equally clear because he followed her to the door and stood beside the woman. Given that he was aware of the woman’s immanent abuse, verbal if not physical, there is simply no way to understand Hickok’s action as other than heroically gallant. Without hesitation, he placed himself unarmed in the company of a man who, at the least, could have easily thrashed him before maltreating Wellman’s wife and others.

At the same time Hickok was cautious insofar as no witness said that he was anything but quiet, merely making his presence felt as a stabilizing influence in a potentially volatile situation. He knew that by introducing himself into the situation he had become involved as well as that “he and Wellman together were no match in a physical encounter with a man of McCanles’ well known strength and courage.”3 Indeed, one of the greatest temptations of historians in evaluating the vice or virtue of opponents is to suppose that the courage of one implies a cowardice of the other — a false dichotomy fallacy. The fallacy applies in this case because the record does not reveal that either Hickok or McCanles were anything other than generally virtuous. This holds for most historians as well as for Hansen and Horan in particular, despite Hickok’s flair for hyperbole and McCanles’ notoriously bad temper when he felt wronged. In spite of his feeling wronged in this incident, it is reasonable to suppose that Wellman’s wife thought she was safe since a man would not ordinarily mistreat a woman, at least not physically by McCanles who had a wife and children. But McCanles was unusually agitated, having reason to believe he was being scammed since payment had been previously deferred. And Hickok plausibly assumed that, whatever McCanles’ intentions, the woman would be intimidated. These points raise the specter of a tragedy, not the conclusion that Hickok was a villain with an undue fear of personal harm, making him a cold-blooded killer. The points do not merit a conclusion either that McCanles was a laudable figure by virtue of being “unafraid of any living man” upon who he would use only “his bare fists”.4

The use of one’s fists on a weaker man not only makes one a bully but also, in many legal contexts, an aggressor against whom deadly force may be used to prevent grave bodily harm. For example, Kentucky code KRS 503.050 notes that use of this force “is justifiable when the defendant believes that such force is necessary to protect himself against the use or imminent use of unlawful physical force by the other person.”5 Certainly, McCanles’ imminent use of physical force on the more frail Hickok and, possibly later, on Mrs. Wellman and her husband would have been unlawful and believably life threatening. Surely, adds a Kentucky attorney, “Just because you have the right to use [deadly force] does not mean that it is right to use it,” but not using it “may also place the individual at risk or may place others at risk.”6 And although the risk taken by Hickok may seem incautious insofar as he shot McCanles with a rifle whose penetrating power could imperil others, the remark by law enforcement tactical-trainer Ralf Mroz about the justified deadly force of police officers holds for civilians as well: “anyone who faults an officer [shooting under] dramatic circumstances simply doesn’t have the experience to know what he or she is talking about.”7 The circumstances in McCanles’ confrontation were clearly dramatic because he was known to be aggressive, far stronger and bigger than Hickok, and challenged Hickok to fight or retreat in a domain that McCanles had menaced, if had not threatened to enter unlawfully. It was unlawful since while he held deed to the property, the property was occupied legally only by Wellman and his employees who had not either initiated hostility or invited McCanles to enter.

Doc Holliday

Threatening to enter a building or menacing those in it under these conditions, besides its legal dubiousness, calls to mind the end (as opposed to the beginning) of Doc Holliday’s gun fighting career. His career ended by a jury acquittal of assault with intent to kill on 28 March 1885 at Leadville, Colorado.8 The incident was similar legally to that of Hickok since a much larger and stronger man named Billy Allen had entered a room, where he believed Doc was present, after being forewarned to avoid him by the sheriff because Allen had threatened him physically. The physical weakness of Doc led Bat Masterson to say that although Doc was unafraid of anything on earth, any healthy fifteen-year old boy could have beaten him up. And that was in previous years when he was twenty pounds heavier, on his slender five-foot ten-inch frame, and less close to death from consumption.

The worsening consumption suffered by Doc that now excluded strenuous gunfights, much more barroom brawls, was exacerbated by Leadville’s prohibition of carrying weapons. The weapons ban was serious since after Allen lent Holliday money that he could not repay by the agreed-upon time, Allen played the proverbial bully by bragging publically that he would give a good thrashing to the once famous Holliday who he knew was now unable to defend himself.9 Upon entering Hyman’s Saloon where Holliday was leaning on a cigar case in which he had hidden a revolver, Doc drew the gun and began shooting. One shot grazing Allen’s head and another hitting his arm, Doc walked straight at the man and tried to shoot him again.
But patrons grabbed Holliday before he could finish him. His effort to finish him off agrees with virtually all police and federal self-defense experts today who sympathize with civilians who are threatened by grave bodily harm. This harm is addressed by retired FBI Special Agent Art Krinsky who reports that most cop killers have no hesitation whatsoever about killing. So kill or be killed. “If you hesitate… you’re dead. You have the instinct or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re in trouble.”10 And the trouble is prevented by repeated shots. The shots are advised in light of sober field experience to stop determined would-be attackers, who may be unarmed in some cases, from renewing any intended violence.

Doc explained his violent “actions in the paper the next day and, being able to establish in court that his life was threatened,” was “exonerated due to shooting in self-defense.”11 Those who abhor self-defense such as anti-gun critics today would be appalled that Holliday was found innocent. His innocence by a medieval trial by torture would be proven only if he had been beaten to death or timidly retreated. To retreat in humiliation or die a victim, suggests psychiatrist Sarah Thompson, M.D., is actually preferred by those who are too craven to defend themselves. They would have a subliminal rage against Doc (or Hickok) because he reveals both their desire for sympathy as victims, in today’s victim-identity politics, and the delusion of their own self-respect.12 Luckily, the jurors respected themselves at Doc’s trial and would agree with present-day enlightened laws whereby, when one has a right to be somewhere, one “does not have a duty to retreat prior to the use of deadly physical force.”13 One historian reminds us, likewise, that sympathy should not be for the victim shot by Doc, but for Doc. He “was extremely ill at this point and was indeed being threatened by a much larger and healthier man.”14 Holliday elicited sympathy from the jurors by noting, in his usual soft-spoken southern style, the “disparity in body weights” and “that his life (such as it was) was still valuable to him (a comment bound to elicit pity from those present, who could see how obviously ill he was).”15

Why is there no historical criticism of Holliday in that incident as there is in the comparable case of Hickok? Juries in both cases failed to find any fault with Holliday or Hickok. Hickok’s historical record in the paradigm McCanles affair did not tend to be interpreted fairly, much less sympathetically, as was the record of Doc by the legendary Wyatt Earp. Earp’s third wife, Josephine Sarah (‘Sadie’) Marcus Earp, stated that “Wyatt was intensely loyal to Doc for having probably saved his life in Dodge City…”16 This event led to a life-long friendship between the two that resulted in interviews and memoirs of Wyatt, and of his famous friends, that inescapably gave the benefit of doubt to Doc.17 So Doc got an historical break that eluded Hickok. In the end, although Hickok was oddly incautious in a saloon on 25 October 1876, it is grievously more incautious by historians nowadays to suggest that he was a craven killer.18

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1 George Hansen, “An Investigation into the Wild Bill–McCanles Affair,” Nebraska History Magazine, April-June 1927. From James D. Horan, The Gunfighters: The Authentic Wild West (NY: Crown Publishing, 1976), p. 89. The late Pulitzer-Prize winner James Horan agrees with Hansen due to Hansen’s interview of witnesses and discovery of legal documents, although Horan expands on the account. Other accounts that dispute Hickok killing McCanles include admirable biographies such as Wild Bill Hickok Gunfighter (2003) by Joseph G. Rosa. Even if Rosa is wrong and Horan is right, and the author agrees that he is right, Rosa would presumably agree that Hickok did not behave cravenly, much less cowardly in all of his subsequent shootings.
2 Hansen, “An Investigation into the Wild Bill–McCanles Affair,” p. 89: a non-sequitur inference.

3 Hansen, “An Investigation into the Wild Bill–McCanles Affair,” p. 89. 4 Hansen, “An Investigation into the Wild Bill–McCanles Affair,” pp. 88, 89.

5 Nick C. Thompson, Esq. “Kentucky Castle Doctrine Deadly Force,” Lawyers Seeking Justice, Louisville, Kentucky 40223. See http://www.kentucky-lawyer-dui.com (2008). 6 Thompson, “Kentucky Castle Doctrine Deadly Force,” emphasis. 7 Ralf Mroz, Tactical Defense Training for Real-Life Encounters: Practical Self-Preservation for Law Enforcement (Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 2003), p. 121.

8 During this period, Doc travelled between Leadville and Denver, purportedly having a last meeting with Wyatt Earp in Denver at the Windsor Hotel in 1886 — although by then he lived in Glenwood Springs. When the author lived in Denver in the 1970s, he searched an old black leather-bound U.S. Census Directory at the University of Denver and found “Holliday, John H.” listed at a boarding house address. Later, the author went to that address, where by this time there was a Gart Brothers Sporting Goods Store. The author informed a university librarian in order to have the Directory protected, which the university subsequently did. In any case, Doc’s listing under his own name is an interesting fact since earlier in 1875 when he went to Denver he had used the alias “Tom Mackey,” apparently his mother’s maiden name!
9 Some historians claim that Holliday was not well known during his life, that his fame was a function of trumped-up stories after his death. But the well-established newspaper The Kansas City Evening Star reported on 7 June 1883 about a looming gunfight that, “[Bat] Masterson and Doc Holliday,” two of the potential combatants, “are too well known to need comment or biography.” See http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/WWhollidayD, 30 Sep 2009.

10 Art Krinsky, FBI (Ret.), “Deadly Force, Offender — New FBI Study,” Email Report to Author, 1 Sep 2009. Krinsky refers to Violent Encounters: A Study of Felonious Assaults on Our Law Enforcement Officers by FBI clinical forensic psychologist Dr. Anthony Pinizzooto, FBI criminal investigative instructor Ed Davis, and the LEO’s Killed & Assaulted Program-Coordinator Charles Miller III (Washington DC: FBI Gov. Publications, 2006).

11 See “Detail of Doc Holliday’s Travels and Encounters by Date (1875-1887),” Doc Holliday: Timeline, http://www.docholliday.info/timelineb, 16 July 2009. 12 Sarah Thompson, M.D., “Raging Against Self-Defense: A Psychiatrist Examines the Anti-Gun Mentality,” Bill of Rights Sentinel, Fall 2000, and http://www.vcdl.org/new/ raging, 16 July 2009. Dr. Thompson is an embarrassment to the anti-gun lobby that parodies all Second-Amendment rights supporters as uneducated six-pack pickup-truck rednecks.
13 Thompson, “Kentucky Castle Doctrine Deadly Force,” 2006 KY Statute 503.050. 14 Detail of Doc Holliday’s Travels and Encounters by Date (1875-1887). 15 Detail of Doc Holliday’s Travels and Encounters by Date (1875-1887).

16 Lisa Adolf, Josephine’s Description of Doc Holliday, http://www149.pair.com/marilynn/je, 16 July 2009. The centuries melt together in time: Wyatt died well into the twentieth century in 1929, his wife Sadie in 1944, and Doc’s mistress Big Nose Kate a.k.a. Mary Katherine Horony in 1940 at the Arizona Pioneer’s Home in Prescott, Arizona.
17 Bat Masterson noted in Gunfighters of the Western Frontier (1907) that justifications for Doc’s killings were debatable at best and that he often got Doc out of trouble, not because he liked him, but because of their mutual friendship with Wyatt Earp. Earp notwithstanding, Karen Holliday Tanner’s Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait (1998) indicates that Bat’s ambivalence about Doc was due more to personal distaste than to impersonal historical evidence.
18 To disagree with the interpretations of others is not to dishonor them and thus my conclusion is not meant to disparage James D. Horan whose works have inspired me.

Robert C. Trundle, PhD
Professor and Coordinator
Dept. of Social Sciences and Philosophy
Northern Kentucky University
Highland Heights, Ky 41099