Wild Bill Hickok at the Cards

Luck, in Wild Bill Hickok’s West, was measured by the draw—of pistols or cards, it made no difference to the hardened frontiersman who kept order in the streets and command at the poker table. His nerve and precision, sharpened in the lawless towns of Kansas and the smoky saloons of the frontier, became the stuff of legend, carried east in the pages of Harper’s and the tall tales of dime novels. Hickok embodied the duality that fascinated a nation still defining its own character: lawman and risk-taker, gunslinger and gentleman. His reputation traveled faster than the telegraph lines that trailed westward, transforming a man of quick judgment and steadier hand into the prototype of the American hero. Among those who carried his story forward was none other than William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a friend and fellow scout whose fame remains central to the legacy of the West. Through his writings and later his Wild West show, Cody further propelled Hickok’s name into the wider mythology of the American frontier, folding him into the pantheon of men whose courage, real or embellished, became national lore.

Commissioned in 1916 for Hearst’s Magazine, N.C. Wyeth’s Wild Bill Hickok at the Cards was one of ten paintings created to illustrate Cody’s autobiographical chronicle of life on the plains, The Great West That Was. The commission drew on Wyeth’s stature as one of the foremost American illustrators of the early 20th century—best known for his dramatic adventure illustrations, including Treasure Island and, a few years later, The Last of the Mohicans—as well as on his firsthand familiarity with the West, gained during extensive travels through Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona in 1904. (He would later pass this pictorial legacy to his children, including his son Andrew, extending the family’s enduring influence on American art.)

By then, Hickok—who had died 40 years earlier—was a legend in his own right. His name was bound to stories of guns and gambling, notably the 1865 duel with Davis Tutt in Springfield—long hailed as the first quick-draw gunfight, said to have begun over a poker debt—and his own death ten years later at a table in Deadwood, holding the now-infamous “dead man’s hand.”

For Cody, his own firsthand account of a similar encounter offered a scene that fit seamlessly into the grand Western narrative he had spent nearly a half century shaping. “I was a personal witness to another of his gun exploits,” Cody wrote in his memoir, “in which, though the chances were all against him, he protected his own life and incidentally his money.” Hickok, he continued, “was an inveterate poker player,” drawn to games with “big players and for high stakes.” One night in Springfield, Cody observed him sitting “sleepy and inattentive” at the table. “I kept a close watch on the other fellows,” Cody recalled. “Presently I observed that one of his opponents was occasionally dropping a card in his hat, which he held in his lap.” As the pot kept growing, “Bill stayed right along,” Cody remembered, “though he still seemed to be drowsy.” When the cheater finally reached for his hidden cards and raised the bet, Hickok raised again. Then, in one swift motion, Hickok “shoved a pistol into the man’s face and said, ‘I’m calling the hand that is in your hat.’” No shots were fired; none needed to be. The deception collapsed under Hickok’s steady aim, and with it came that rare frontier quiet—order was once again restored. (An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill, New York, 1920, p. 54)

In Wild Bill Hickok at the Cards, Wyeth translates Cody’s anecdote into a tableau of pure tension. The saloon is sparse, shadowed; the light falls across the table, picking out the faces of the players. Hickok sits at the center, his revolver trained on the man opposite him, whose hat is seemingly illuminated by the force of revelation. Around them, the other gamblers freeze mid-gesture. At the back of the room, a younger Cody stands by the door observing, his face half obscured. Wyeth’s handling of the scene is quiet, almost austere. The drama comes not from movement but from stillness—the charged pause between exposure and consequence. The lighting is baroque, almost Caravaggesque. Shadow encloses the group in a pocket of light, isolating the moral clarity of Hickok’s act from the murk of the room around him. Where Cody’s prose relished the anecdote, Wyeth distills it to essence: the moment where control, justice, and danger meet.

When the story appeared in Hearst’s that autumn, readers saw Hickok’s calm at the card table refracted through three eras of storytelling. Hickok had lived the legend; Cody had written it; Wyeth, painting from a distance of both time and place, gave it form. Together they shaped the mythology of the American West—one that blurred the line between historical record and collective memory, fact and fable. More than a century later, that lineage remains intact, with the lawman, the showman, and the painter joined in a single act of authorship—their story still unfolding wherever the West is imagined.