Hickok was born and raised on a farm in northern Illinois at a time when lawlessness and vigilante activity were rampant because of the influence of the "Banditti of the Prairie".

Drawn to this criminal lifestyle, he headed west at age 18 as a fugitive from justice, working as a stagecoach driver and later as a lawman in the frontier territories of Kansas and Nebraska.

His work included identifying and counting the number of troops in uniform who were drinking while on duty, verifying hotel liquor licenses, and tracking down individuals who owed money to the cash-strapped Union Army.

[26] The 1883 History of Greene County, Missouri described him as "by nature a ruffian ... a drunken, swaggering fellow, who delighted when 'on a spree' to frighten nervous men and timid women.

"[28] While in Springfield, Hickok and a local gambler named Davis Tutt had several disagreements over unpaid gambling debts and their common affection for the same women.

At the end of the trial, Judge Sempronius H. Boyd told the jury they could not find that Hickok acted in self-defense if he could have reasonably avoided the fight.

Under the name "Wild Bill Hitchcock" [sic], the article recounted the "hundreds" of men whom Hickok had personally killed and other exaggerated exploits.

[9] Henry M. Stanley, of the Weekly Missouri Democrat, reported Hickok to be "an inveterate hater of Indian People", perhaps to enhance his reputation as a scout and American fighter.

But separating fact from fiction is difficult considering his recruitment of Indians to cross the nation to appear in his own Wild West show.

[6][35] Witnesses confirm that while working as a scout at Fort Harker, Kansas, on May 11, 1867, Hickok was attacked by a large group of Indians, who fled after he shot and killed two.

Witnesses confirm that the story was true to the extent the party had set out to find whoever had killed the four men,[e] but the group returned to the fort "without nary a dead Indian, [never] even seeing a live one".

Writing in 1911, he detailed his admiration for Hickok and included a paragraph on the shooting that differs considerably from the reported account: "Phil" Coe was from Texas, ran the "Bull's Head" a saloon and gambling den, sold whiskey and men's souls.

As vile a character as I ever met for some cause Wild Bill incurred Coe's hatred and he vowed to secure the death of the marshal.

[7] In 1872, Hickok recruited six Native Americans and three cowboys to accompany him to Niagara Falls, where he put on an outdoor demonstration called The Daring Buffalo Chase of the Plains.

[54][55] Charles Snyder, the Lucien Howe Librarian of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, said "Granular conjunctivitis, ophthalmia, trachoma—call it what you will—was common on the Western Frontier.

[57] Although he was just 39, his marksmanship and health were apparently in decline, and he had been arrested several times for vagrancy,[58] despite earning a good income from gambling and displays of showmanship only a few years earlier.

Hickok left his new bride a few months later, joining Charlie Utter's wagon train to seek his fortune in the gold fields of South Dakota.

[64] McCall then entered the saloon, walked up behind Hickok, drew his Colt Model 1873 Single Action Army .45-caliber revolver and shouted, "Take that!"

[citation needed] Leander Richardson, a reporter, interviewed McCall shortly before his execution, and wrote an article about him for the April 1877 issue of Scribner's Monthly.

[72] As I write the closing lines of this brief sketch, word reaches me that the slayer of Wild Bill has been rearrested by the United States authorities, and after trial has been sentenced to death for willful murder.

At the [second] trial it was suggested that [McCall] was hired to do his work by gamblers who feared the time when better citizens should appoint Bill the champion of law and order – a post which he formerly sustained in Kansas border life, with credit to his manhood and his courage.

[75] Hickok is currently interred in a 10 ft (3 m) square plot at the Mount Moriah Cemetery, surrounded by a cast-iron fence, with a U.S. flag flying nearby.

Moriah Cemetery, as Deadwood was granted permission by the U.S. Congress during World War I to fly the flag 24 hours a day to honor all veterans who have served their country.

Four of the men on the self-appointed committee who planned Calamity's funeral (Albert Malter, Frank Ankeney, Jim Carson, and Anson Higby) later stated that, since Hickok had "absolutely no use" for Jane in this life, they decided to play a posthumous joke on him by laying her to rest by his side.

He wore his revolvers butt-forward in a belt or sash (when wearing city clothes or buckskins, respectively), and seldom used holsters; he drew the pistols using a "reverse", "twist", or cavalry draw, as would a cavalryman.

2 Army revolver, a five-shot, single-action, .32-caliber weapon, innovative as one of the first metallic cartridge firearms and favored by many Union officers during the Civil War.

[84] The movie The Plainsman (1936), starring Gary Cooper as Hickok, features the alleged romance between Calamity Jane and him as its main plot line.

Hickok was sent from Abilene to arrest Matt Dillon (William Conrad) for the murder of a man he had thrown out of Dodge earlier that month.

The episode correctly relates Hickok's vision problems late in his life, and also includes his murderer, Jack McCall, in a highly fictionalized role.

It ends with Hickok surviving the murder attempt due to wearing body armor when shot in the back, then secretly leaving for a ranch in California.