Sunday Gun Day Vol. IV Ep. XVI — Wild Bill's Guns

Hickok arrived in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1855. Having inherited his parents’ abolitionist leanings, he fell in with Jim Lanes Jayhawkers, formally then known as the “Free State Army” and took part in the group’s vigilante campaigns in what became known as the “Bloody Kansas” uprisings. During this time Hickok picked up the nickname “Duck Bill,” due to his long nose and jutting upper lip. He detested the nickname and, in 1861, grew a long mustache to cover the lip and began calling himself “Wild Bill.” The name stuck. His reputation started to grow.

But enough about Wild Bill. Let’s take a look at his favored guns.

The Guns

His 1851 Navy Colts

Bill Hickok was known to carry two of these. The 1851 Colt Navy revolver was a scaled-up 1849 Pocket Model, but it differed in several significant ways: It fired a .36-caliber ball, yielding power roughly equivalent to the later .38 Special 158-grain RNL standard loads. It had a 7 ½” barrel, yielding a good sight radius while maintaining portability. Finally, it was lighter than the Dragoon models, making it easily portable in a belt holster. It did retain the odd sighting arrangement from the earlier guns, using a small conical brass front sight and a notch on the hammer as the rear sight; despite the rather crude sighting arrangement the new gun quickly developed a reputation for accuracy, and it’s regarded by many even today to be the best-handling single action revolver ever made. I had a replica one for some years, and it was fun; light, handy, slick as a snake. I practiced a lot of reflex shooting with it, and I could clear leather and empty the cylinder while maintaining pretty good accuracy out to 10-15 yards, shooing from the hip as fast as I could draw the hammer.

Wild Bill put that accuracy to the test. There are reports that, unlike a lot of guntwists at the time, Wild Bill actually practiced shooting daily, often setting up and mowing down rows of glass bottles or anything else he could use as a target. He shot with deliberate aim, he shot from the hip, he practiced, he trained, and his reputation was that, when faced with danger, he never hesitated; that was a man that the Navy Colt was admirable suited to, and Bill favored his guns enough to retain them even after the advent of cartridge revolvers.

One of Wild Bill’s most famous shootouts happened in 1871, presumably with Bill using his favored Navy Colts. His opponent was a saloon owner named “Phil” Coe. The fight started with a bunch of drunk Texas cowboys in Abilene, Kansas.

By 9 p.m. the hard-drinking crowd had reached the Alamo Saloon. A gun went off, and the diligent marshal quickly arrived on the scene, demanding to know who had fired the shot. Coe, with six-shooter in hand, said he had shot at a stray dog. To be sure, he was in no mood for a lecture from a lawman he didn’t like. Before the marshal could say another word, Coe pulled a second six-shooter and fired twice at Hickok, one shot striking the sidewalk, the other cutting through the tail of Wild Bill’s coat.

Hickok, “as quick as a thought,” according to a local newspaper, drew his own six-shooters and fired at least three times. Two of the bullets struck Coe in the stomach; the gambler would die in great agony three days later. The third bullet struck an armed man who had run between the two adversaries. Hickok, standing in the glare of kerosene lamps and surrounded by an armed and belligerent crowd, at first could not see who it was. To his horror, he soon discovered he had accidentally shot and killed his friend Mike Williams, who had served on the Abilene police force as a jailer that summer and had planned to leave town that evening to return to his ailing wife in Kansas City. A distraught Hickok (some reports say he was weeping) carried Williams into the Alamo and laid him out on a billiard table.

Hickok, some say, never recovered from the accidental shooting of his friend.

Bill also owned a Springfield Armory “trapdoor” rifle, in the .45-70 Government cartridge, the gun that was in use at the time by the United States Army. He liked the Springfield well enough to have it buried beside him, although it was later retrieved, and there are reports that it fetched nearly half a million dollars at an auction in 2021.

His Other Guns

Wild Bill was known to carry a few other sidearms from time to time, including a Smith & Wesson #2 Army revolver, a Sharps four-barrel derringer, and an Adams and Deane cap and ball revolver. But it was the Navy Colts that he’s best known for.

The Gun That Killed Him

In the end, Wild Bill Hickok was killed by a man using one of those very modern, cartridge fed revolvers he had eschewed – a Colt 1873 Single Action Army.

His Untimely End

On August 1, 1876, Wild Bill was playing poker at the Nutall & Mann’s Saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. A guy named Jack McCall, who was quite drunk, joined the game and started losing badly. Hickok reportedly advised McCall to quite the game and offered to stake him breakfast, which struck the drunk man as insulting.

The next day, Hickok was at the table again, but he had broken one of his own rules: Never sit with your back to the door. The drunk from the day before entered the saloon, pulled a Colt Single Action Army .45 and shot Bill in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Hickok was, according to contemporary accounts, holding aces and eights – the “dead man’s hand.” After a couple of missteps and irregularities in his first trial, McCall was eventually sentenced to death for killing Wild Bill, and was hanged on March 1, 1877.

This was the end of one of the American West’s most famous, and the most accomplished, gunfighters. Wild Bill proved that the gun you can hit with is better than a gun that poked holes in the air, and when that man was facing you with a Navy sixgun, you didn’t want to provoke trouble.