Imagining Wild Bill: James Butler Hickok in War, Media, and Memory (Engaging the Civil War) - Softcover

 
Both Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill are professors emeritus of journalism at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They have co-written Inventing Custer: The Making of an American Legend; Sherman’s March in Myth and Memory; The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest; and The Mosby Myth: A Confederate Hero in Life and Legend. Ashdown specializes in literary journalism, international communication, and popular culture, and Caudill focuses on media history, the Civil War era, and the history of ideas in public memory and the press.
 

INTRODUCTION

Wild Bill Hickok liked to tell stories, and one day in Springfield at the end of the Civil War he told Lt. Col. George Ward Nichols a whopper as big as Missouri. What Hickok left out, his friends added and embellished. Nichols scribbled all of it down in the diary he had carried with him during William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea through Georgia the previous autumn. The fantasy the colonel concocted appeared in a national magazine some seventeen months later, making Wild Bill so famous as a gunfighter that some men wanted to kill him. Nine years later, one man did. Almost a century and a half later, we’re still telling tales about Wild Bill—imagining him all over again—and we still don’t know who he really was or what we want him to be.
 
Historical records on Western characters such as Hickok reveal a sharp contrast between the probable historical reality—“probable” because unas­sailable records are scant—and the mediated history. Barring an improbable unearthing of a lode of Wild Bill primary documents, we know as much now as we will ever know about that real, historical Hickok. The vein of Hickok lore appears to be unimaginably deep and rich, however. He remains instantly and universally recognized, not so much for what he did as for what has been presented about him.
 
Our purpose is not to find a misunderstood James Butler Hickok or add much new information about his enigmatic life story. Rather, we must ex­plain how his story was imagined and interpreted, primarily by journalists, especially those doubling as novelists, screenwriters, biographers, and histo­rians. Our interest is more in the legend than in the man, the mythic nimbus projected by the media and not the cold-eyed countenance staring from the many striking photographs of Wild Bill. We consider historiography as much as history, mythobiography as much as biography, and secondary as well as primary sources. Those secondary sources immerse Hickok history in the brine of popular culture.
 
Hickok lived, mostly in obscurity, from 1837 to 1876. Only in his last decade did he become a celebrity. The storytellers had to discover what his life meant to a mass audience. Imagining that story meant fitting it into a marketable frame of reference. In the fall line of history, where the documen­tation disappears, the cultural river keeps flowing to the churn of media and imagination below, and continues onward. Over the falls of history, more imaginative sources of information—newspapers, magazines, fiction, film, folklore, theater, poetry, and pageantry—mix with, and sometimes take over, academic history. And the farther downstream one gets, the less one realizes what has shaped the river. At the falls, history and biography stop, and myths and memories begin. 
 
We’ve explored aspects of the media mythmaking process in previous books about Civil War–era figures: Sherman, John Singleton Mosby, Nathan Bed­ford Forrest, and George Armstrong Custer. Their paths crossed often. Mosby fought Custer in Virginia; Sherman fought Forrest in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. Sherman’s aide and chronicler, Nichols, discovered Hickok, who scouted for Sherman on a Western expedition. Hickok scouted for Custer too, and Custer wrote about him. Mosby was sent to Colorado and Nebraska as a federal agent to help settle a range war involving powerful cattle bar­ons. Hickok participated in the first widely publicized walkdown gunfight— an 1865 showdown in the town square in Springfield, Missouri—with Davis “Little Dave” Tutt. It became the prototype for walkdowns in hundreds of Western films and novels. But Forrest, the future Memphis slave trader, may have preempted him with a battle against four miscreants in Hernando, Mis­sissippi, in 1845 when Mississippi and Tennessee defined the West. 
 
Their reputations rose and fell with the times. Sherman, arguably a military realist who shortened the Civil War, has been linked to the German blitzkrieg campaigns, the Vietnam War, and genocidal policies toward Native Ameri­cans. Custer, a Civil War hero, disobeyed orders and sacrificed his command at the Little Bighorn, his vainglorious “Last Stand” immortalized by a beer company’s lithograph displayed on the wall in hundreds of taverns. Mosby was lauded by Churchill, mythologized by Melville, despised by Custer, con­demned by the press, and branded a political traitor by the South. Forrest was condemned for starting the Ku Klux Klan and praised for ending it. Denounced as the butcher of Fort Pillow, he was hailed as a military genius, praised and denounced as a Southern apologist. The equestrian statue above his grave in a Memphis park was removed in 2017. Soon thereafter, monuments and memorials were tumbling down all over.1 
 
As the nation resumed its expansion, the popular press was about to make gunfighters both the agents and enemies of civilized morality. The Civil War hastened the transformation of the vast landscape beyond the Mississippi River. Out of the war came public fascination with the Wild West, itself a press invention. The frontier violence that presaged the Civil War in “Bleeding Kansas” and other Western states and territories continued after the formal ending of hostilities. The West in 1861 was a vast garrison state occupied by some ten thousand federal soldiers. By 1865, not just Native American tribes but also Mormons, Mexicans, the Emperor Maximilian and the French, and disgruntled Confederates had to be watched. Ordinary outlaws and potential troublemakers needed to be “controlled” not just by army units and militias but also by the “lawmen” of popular imagination. The gunfighter-hero was a short-lived icon of the post–Civil War West, when tensions and animosities still ran high. The war lasted about four years, but in memory, like the gun-fighter and the Western, it has lasted much longer.2
 
While Hickok fought for the Union during the Civil War, he fits better within an expanded framework of the Civil War era. He was peripheral to the war, even in the West, but not to the era. The war created Hickok, and its aftermath provided the helium that inflated his reputation. If he didn’t win the war singlehandedly, he later won the West on television, in the movies, and in popular culture. Some Western historians have claimed that Civil War histories constrain the war era geographically and chronologically. They have viewed the conflict as more continental than Eastern in scope, beginning perhaps with the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War and ending with Reconstruction in 1877, or even later. They have drawn attention to the West as central to a proper understanding of the war and its legacy. Richard Maxwell Brown, for example, posited a “Western Civil War of Incorporation” beginning about 1850 and ending about 1920 with the consolidation of federal power in the West. Elliott West’s work on cultural pluralism rebranded the Civil War era as “Greater Reconstruction” (1845–77). William Pencak called “Civil War” a self-congratulatory term that fit the romance of reunion trope. It was not used widely until the twentieth century, and even then it competed with “War Between the States,” the preferred term in the South. He proposed “Era of Racial Violence” (1854–77) as a more useful term. These chronologies and arguments about periodization are worth discussing, but not here, except to say that Hickok and the Wild West were products of the time and place, existing under the umbrella of that historical period spanning the whole continent and more than half a...