"Wild Bill" Hickok: Rare Period Portrait....

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"Wild Bill" Hickok: Rare Period Portrait. Uncredited CDV, chest up pose. The frontier legend wears a suit and bow tie. Period ink title "Wild Bill" below image. James Butler Hickok (1837-1876) was born in Troy Grove, Illinois. Leaving the family farm at age eighteen in 1855, he became a stagecoach driver on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails. He honed his gunfighting skills while working as a town constable in Nebraska (1861) and Abilene, Kansas (1871) with a stint in-between as an army scout during the Civil War. He toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1872-1873. His penchant for alcohol and gambling would eventually bring about his demise. While playing poker at Nuttal and Mann's "Saloon No. 10" in Deadwood, he was shot in the back by Jack McCall, whose motives have been the subject of conjecture ever since. He is buried next to "Calamity Jane", another Wild West Show performer and Western legend with whom he was romantically linked. Ironically, he died the same year as Custer. Original, period photographs of Wild Bill are few and far between. From the estate collection of E. F. Mueller.