“You need to take your time in a hurry in a gunfight.”
- Wyatt Earp
The old west quick-draw gunfight, two men facing off in the middle of a dusty frontier street, is as uniquely American as baseball and jazz. If you were a kid growing up in the 60s when westerns were hugely popular in the movies and on TV, chances are you saw dozens of gunfights depicted on screen.
In reality, gunfights in the old west were few and far between. Our idea of them having been largely created and romanticized in literature and by Hollywood. But they did occur, and did you know, the very first documented one took place right here in Springfield, MO on July 21, 1865?
That's when James “Wild Bill” Hickok faced off with a man named David Tutt on the downtown square and shot him dead. Hickok had been a police detective in Springfield until the last year of the Civil War when he left to become a Union scout. Upon the war's end he returned to town. Tutt had served in the Confederate Army and had moved to Springfield near the end of the conflict. Despite being on opposite sides in the war, Hickok and Tutt had struck up a friendship afterward. Both men were gamblers and that is where the trouble began.
On the evening of July 20, 1865, Hickok and Tutt played cards in Hickok's room at the Lyon Hotel on South Street. At evening's end, Hickok owed Tutt $45 which he did not have. Tutt agreed to hold Hickok's gold watch as collateral until the debt could be paid.
The following afternoon both men met on the Lyon House porch and had words about the debt, Hickok disputing the $45 amount and Tutt insisting he would keep the watch until he was paid. They parted ways but by 6:00 pm both men were downtown on opposite sides of the square, tensions still simmering from the earlier argument.
The details of what happened are unclear but it seems that Tutt started out into the square in Hickok's direction. Hickok warned him not to come any closer. Tutt drew his pistol and fired, missing Hickok who quickly drew and shot his weapon, striking Tutt in the ribs. Tutt reeled toward the courthouse where he collapsed and died on the steps.
Hickok was arrested, charged with murder and stood trial on August 5 and 6, 1865. The jury deliberated for 10 minutes, determining that Hickok had acted in self-defense and finding him not guilty.
Hickok ran for the Marshall of Springfield in September of that year but lost. He spent several years as a lawman in Kansas and was eventually murdered during a poker game in Deadwood, SD on August 1, 1876, shot from behind over a card game dispute from the day before. The moral, never sit with your back to the door. The story goes that when Hickok was killed the hand he was holding consisted of two black aces and two black eights. That's where the term “Aces and Eights” comes from. Also known as "The Dead Man's Hand."
RP