Real vs Reel  

Let me at once describe the personal appearance of this famous scout of the plains, William Hickok, called Wild Bill, who advanced toward me fixing his gray eyes on mine in a quick interrogative way as if to take my measure.

As I looked at him, I thought his the most handsomest physique I had ever seen.  Bill stood six feet and an inch in his bright yellow moccasins, a deerskin shirt, or frock it might be called, hung jauntily over his shoulders. His small round waist was girthed by a belt which held two Navy Colt revolvers.

"In all your perilous adventures," I asked him, "have you ever been afraid?"

"I think I know what you mean, sir, and I'm not ashamed to say that I have been so frightened that it 'peared as if all my strength and blood had gone out of my body.  It was at the Wilma Creek fight.  I had fired more than 50 cartridges and I think fetched my man every time.  I was on the skirmish line and working up closer to the Rebs, when all of a sudden, a battery opened fire right in front of me.  It sounded as if 40,000 guns were firing and every shot and shell screeched within six inches of my head.

"It was the first time I was under artillery fire and I was so frightened I couldn't move for a minute or so, and when I did go back the boys asked me if I had seen a ghost."

"I would like to see you shoot."

"Would yer?" replied the scout, drawing a revolver, and approaching the window, pointed to a letter O in a signboard fixed to a building on the other side of the way, and without sighting the pistol with his eye, he directed six shots of his revolver.  I afterwards saw that all the bullets had entered the circle.

"Whenever you get into a row, be sure and not shoot too quick.  Take time.  I've known many a feller slip up for shooting in a hurry."

As General Smith and I mounted our horses, Wild Bill came over to shake hands goodbye and I said to him, "If you have no objection, I will write out for publication a few of your adventures."

"Certainly you may," he replied.  "I'm sort of public property.  But Colonel I have a mother at home in Illinois who is old and feeble.  I haven't seen her this many a year and haven't been a good son to her.  Yet I love her better than anything in life.  It don't matter much what they say about me here, but I'm not a cut-throat or vagabond, and I'd like the old woman to know what'll make her happy.

"I'd like her to hear that her runaway boy fought through the war for the Union like a true man."


--- George Ward Nichols, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, February 1867.