The Deadwood Trail Read online

  Quickly the Lone Star riders dismounted. Stoney was the first to catch his wind.

  “Some varmint name of Jack McCall just shot Wild Bill in the back of the head, there in Saloon Number Ten. McCall got away, but a miner’s posse’s after him.”

  “Maybe that will bring some law to Deadwood,” said McCaleb. “Lone Star’s goin’ back to Virginia City with the Story outfit. Mr. Story can help us market our horses to the military. Is everybody ready to quit this lawless place?”

  “Hell, yes,” Brazos shouted, “let’s ride. We’re Texans ever’ damn one, Injuns included.”

  AFTERWORD

  Much has been written about George A. Custer and that fateful Sunday afternoon in 1876. I failed to find any evidence that Custer and his 480 men were sent south along the Rosebud to engage the enemy in battle. Instead, they were to locate the enemy, which was a reconnaissance mission. History suggests that Custer may have disobeyed an order when he launched an attack on some three thousand Sioux. Commissioned when he was twenty-three, Custer was known as the “boy general,” and on more than one occasion was brash and impulsive. In 1867, he was court-martialed and busted for deserting his command, but through the efforts of General Sheridan had his commission restored a year later.

  I personally believe Custer needed the “glory” that would have been his, had his attack against the Sioux been successful. Custer, a Democrat, uncovered a scheme in which some high-ups in President U. S. Grant’s administration were accused of taking bribes from the Indian post traders. One such guilty official was Grant’s Secretary of War, William W. Belknap. Another was Grant’s own brother. Custer—to his credit—testified, but it earned him the undying hatred of President Grant. Custer sorely needed a victory against the Sioux to shore up his sagging career.

  Even against impossible odds, Custer might have emerged victorious if he and his men had not been armed with obsolete muzzle-loading rifles called Trapdoor Spring-fields. With a new Spencer carbine, a man could fire at least seven times while a muzzle-loader was being primed twice. At the end of the Civil War, the government had warehouses full of muzzle-loading Springfields, but little money. With these single-shot weapons, it’s unlikely that Custer or any of his doomed men got off more than one shot each.

  Aside from being slow to load, the muzzle-loaders had yet another fault that could leave a man unarmed, after a shot or two. The extractor sometimes tore the heads off the copper shells then in use, leaving the rest of the case jammed in the barrel. It generally happened when the Springfield was hot and fouled with burned powder. Until a soldier could take the time to pry out a headless shell, his single-shot Springfield muzzle-loader was nothing more than a club. Even some of the Sioux were armed with repeating rifles. Perhaps the attack by George A. Custer was foolish, but certainly no more so than the army’s decision to arm its soldiers with prone-to-fail single-shot muzzle-loaders. Despite Custer’s personal thirst for glory, the obsolete weapons on which they had to depend doomed him and his men that long-ago Sunday on the Little Big Horn.

  His name was James Butler Hickok, but they called him “Wild Bill.” In his early years, he was a Union scout and drove a stage for Butterfield. In 1866, at Fort Riley, Kansas, he became a deputy U.S. marshal. He became marshal of Hays, Kansas, in 1869, and marshal of roaring Abilene in 1871. There is no record of Hickok firing at another man after his days in Abilene. His eyesight was failing. Trading on his name, he spent a season with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He arrived in Deadwood with nothing more serious on his mind than poker.

  But the lawless element in Deadwood feared Hickok was there to become marshal and from what I’ve learned from several sources, paid two hundred dollars to have Hickok shot and killed. Jack McCall, an illiterate ne’er-do-well, shot Wild Bill in the back of the head as he played poker in Saloon Number Ten. Hickok’s cards—two aces and two eights—has forever since been known as the “dead man’s hand.” A miners’ jury acquitted McCall, but while he was in Laramie, a U.S. Marshal heard him bragging about killing Wild Bill. Jack McCall was then arrested, tried and hanged.