To describe the life of one Western town marshal, himself the best and most picturesque of them all, is to cover all this field sufficiently. There is but one man who can thus be chosen, and that is Wild Bill Hickok, better known for a generation as "Wild Bill," and properly accorded an honorable place in American history.
The real name of Wild Bill was James Butler Hickok, and he was born in May, 1837, in La Salle county, Illinois. This brought his youth into the days of Western exploration and conquest, and the boy read of Carson and Frémont, then popular idols, with the result that he proposed a life of adventure for himself. He was eighteen years of age when he first saw the West as a fighting man under Jim Lane, of Free Soil fame, in the guerrilla days of Kansas before the civil war. He made his mark, and was elected a constable in that dangerous country before he was twenty years of age. He was then a tall, "gangling" youth, six feet one in height, with yellow hair and blue eyes. He later developed into as splendid looking a man as ever trod on leather, muscular and agile as he was powerful and enduring. His features were clean-cut and expressive, his carriage erect and dignified, and no one ever looked less the conventional part of the bad man assigned in popular imagination. He was not a quarrelsome man, although a dangerous one, and his voice was low and even, showing a nervous system like that of Daniel Boone--"not agitated." It might have been supposed that he would be a natural master of weapons, and such was the case. The use of rifle and revolver was born in him, and perhaps no man of the frontier ever surpassed him in quick and accurate use of the heavy six-shooter. The religion of the frontier was not to miss, and rarely ever did he shoot except he knew that he would not miss. The tale of his killings in single combat is the longest authentically assigned to any man in American history.
After many experiences with the pro-slavery folk from the border, Bill, or "Shanghai Bill," as he was then known--a nickname which clung for years--went stage driving for the Overland, and incidentally did some effective Indian fighting for his employers, finally, in the year 1861, settling down as station agent for the Overland at Rock Creek station, about fifty miles west of Topeka. He was really there as guard for the horse band, for all that region was full of horse thieves and cutthroats, and robberies and killings were common enough. It was here that there occurred his greatest fight, the greatest fight of one man against odds at close range that is mentioned in any history of any part of the world. There was never a battle like it known, nor is the West apt again to produce one matching it.