Wild Bill Hickok

James Butler Hickok grew up on an Illinois farm amid the chaos of prairie banditry, then fled west at eighteen as a fugitive. He drifted through stagecoach driving, scouting, and spying for the Union during the Civil War before settling into frontier law enforcement across Kansas and Nebraska. Between 1861 and 1871 he killed six or seven men in shootouts - though he claimed far more - and parlayed his reputation into work as a gambler, showman, and actor. On August 2, 1876, an unsuccessful gambler named Jack McCall shot him dead while he played poker in a Deadwood saloon, holding two black aces and two black eights. The hand became known as the dead man's hand, and Hickok became the kind of myth he'd always tried to sell.