Frank Jenners Wilstach - Wild Bill Hickok

“While she was a-talkin’ I remembered I had but one revolver, and a load gone out of that. On the table there was a horn of powder and some little bars of lead. I poured the powder into the empty chamber and rammed the lead after it by hammering the barrel on the table, and had just capped the pistol when I heard M’Kandlas shout, ‘There’s that d—d Yankee Wild Bill’s horse; he’s here and we’ll skin him alive!’”

The scout stopped in his story, Nichols records at this point, rose from his seat, and strode back and forward in a state of great excitement.

“I tell you what it is, Kernal,” [Wild Bill is reported to have resumed, after a while] “I don’t mind a scrimmage with the fellers round here. Shoot one or two of them and the rest run away. But all the M’Kandlas gang were reckless, blood-thirsty devils who would fight as long as they had strength to pull a trigger. I have been in tight places, but that’s one of the few times when I said my prayers.

“‘Surround the house and give him no quarter,’ yelled M’Kandlas. When I heard that I felt as quiet and cool as if I was a-goin’ to church. I looked around the room and saw a Hawkins rifle hangin’ over the bed.

“‘Is that loaded?’ said I to Mrs. Waltman.

“‘Yes,’ the poor thing whispered. She was so frightened she couldn’t speak out loud.

“‘Are you sure?’ said I, as I jumped onto the bed and caught it from its hooks. Although my eye did not leave the door, yet I could see she nodded ‘yes’ again. I put the revolver on the bed, but just then M’Karidlas poked his head inside the doorway, but jumped back when he saw me with the rifle in my hand.

“‘Come in here, you cowardly dog,’ I shouted. Tome in here and fight me!’

“M’Kandlas was no coward, even if he was a bully. He jumped inside the door with his gun level to shoot, but he was not quick enough. My rifle-ball went through his heart. He fell back outside the door, where he was found afterwards holding tight to his rifle which had fallen over his head.

“His disappearance was followed by a yell from his gang and then there was dead silence. I put down the rifle and took the revolver, and I said to myself: ‘Only six shots and only nine men to kill. Save your powder, Bill, for the death-hug’s a-comm’!’ I don’t know why it was, Kernal,” continued Bill, lookin’ at me inquiringly, “but at that moment things seemed clear and sharp. I could think sharp. I could think strong.

“There was a few seconds of that awful stillness and then the ruffians came rushing in at both doors. How they looked with their red, drunken faces and inflamed eyes, shouting and cussin’. But I never aimed more deliberately in my life.

“One—two—three—four; and four men fell dead.

“That didn’t stop the rest. Two of them fired their bird-guns at me and then I felt a sting run all over me. The room was full of smoke. Two got in close to me, their eyes glaring out of the clouds. One I knocked down with my fist. ‘You are out of my way for a while,’ I thought. The second I shot dead. The other three clutched and crowded me on to the bed. I fought hard. I broke with my hand one man’s arm. He had his fingers round my throat. Before I could get to my feet I was struck across my breast with the stock of a rifle and I felt the blood rushing out of my nose and mouth. Then I got ugly and I remember that I got hold of a knife, and then it was all cloudy-like and I was wild and I struck savage blows, following the devils up from one side to the other of the room and into the corners striking and slashing until I knew that every one was dead.

“All of a sudden it seemed as if my heart was on fire. I was bleeding everywhere. I rushed out to the well and drank from the bucket and then tumbled down in a faint.”

Thus Wild Bill ends the story put in his mouth by Nichols.

Anybody would call it a pretty fine tale; but, examined closely, one would say either that Wild Bill was spoofing the Boston man, or else, which is more likely, the Bostonian had the entire story from the “officer of the regular army,” and pinned it on to Bill as a first-hand interview. The “officer of the regular army” turns up later on.

The next most important account of this event appears in J. W. Bud's sketch of Wild Bill in his “Heroes of the Plains,” 1881. In his preface he claimed that he had the main facts of his life from Wild Bill himself, and, more curious still, that he gleaned the main points from Bill’s diary, which he had borrowed from Bill’s wife, when she was residing in Cincinnati with her son-in-law, Gilbert S. Robinson. Mr. Robinson asserts, however, that if Wild Bill had a diary, as described by Mr. Buel, he would have heard of it; but he never did.

Mr. Buel describes Rock Springs as being at “a point on the Old Platte route fifty miles from Topeka.” The Rock Springs in question is one hundred miles distant from Topeka, and was on the Oregon Trail, a few miles from Beatrice, in southeastern Nebraska. Mr. Buel made two mistakes in McCanles’s name, since he calls him Bill, while as a matter of fact his name was David C., and his name was not McCandlas, as he spells it, but McCanles. The substance of Mr. Buel’s account is as follows:

Wild Bill, following his fight with the bear, became the manager of the Rock Creek Station of the Overland Stage Company. It was a relay post and provided accommodations for twenty-five horses. Bill’s chief employment was to guard the stock, owing to the depredations of horse-thieves, numerous in that section. Bill and his assistant, a young Irishman named Doc Mills, occupied a small log hut. McCanles and his followers are depicted as being desperate horse-thieves, highway robbers, and murderers. Mr. Buel also mentions the ill-usage of Parson Shapley, whom Mr. Nichols calls Shipley. McCanles, according to the Buel story, demanded the horses of Bill for the Confederate service, and it was on account of this that the fight occurred. Doc Mills was away at the time, leaving Bill alone. Bill, in this account, is provided with a Mississippi Yager rifle, two revolvers, and a bowie knife. Bill barricaded the door and McCanles ordered his men to batter it down with a log. The fight which followed in the cabin, accords with Mr. Nichols’s account. At the conclusion of the tremendous encounter the McCanles gang had been wiped out root and branch.

Buel, strangely enough, had corroborating evidence, as did Nichols. According to the former, about one hour after the fight the western stage rolled up, containing six passengers among whom “was one Capt. E. W. Kingsbury, who is now [1881] a resident of Kansas City, holding the position of U. S. Chief Storekeeper for the Western District of Missouri. The sight that presented itself to the gaze of the stage passengers, all of whom entered the cabin to view the havoc which one man had wrought, was most distressing to ordinary sensibilities. Bill was frightfully injured, suffering a fracture of the skull—the frontal bone; three terrible gashes in the breast; his forearm cut through to the bone; four bullets in his body, one in his hip and two in the fleshy part of his right leg; his right cheek cut open and the skin of his forehead cut so deeply that a large portion of the scalp dropped down so far over his eyes as almost to blind him. A surgeon was sent for and a Mrs. Watkins was called in to nurse the wounded hero through his dangerous extremity. By the following June he was able to walk about and he was removed to Denver and in about a year was fully recovered.

“This combat,” adds Buel, “of one man fairly whipping ten acknowledged desperadoes, has no parallel, I make bold to say, in any authentic history. The particulars as here recorded are unquestionably correct, for they were obtained from Captain Kingsbury, who heard Bill's first recital of the facts right on the battle ground. Jolly, the man who died a few days afterward at Manhattan, corroborated the facts and Dr. Joshua Thorne, who attended upon and was one of Bill’s confidants, repeated to me the same story as he himself had heard his parents relate it. These direct and most reliable sources, each affirming the same facts, leave no room for doubting the correctness of this account.”