On the Road with John Drake Robinson

On The Road

WITH JOHN DRAKE ROBINSON

Read this and other stories in John’s latest book, Souls Along the Road, and more road tales in his first two books A Road Trip into America’s Hidden Heart and Coastal Missouri, available at Left Bank Books. More of his stories are at johndrakerobinson.com.

Dead Man’s Hand: The Last Man to Beat Bill Hickok

ellefontaine Cemetery

Bis a history lesson. I’d seen this sprawling marble orchard from the air every time I landed at Lambert International Airport. But I’d never visited the graves, in the shade of 5,000 trees, including three state champions. Confederate General Sterling Price lies here. So does Susan Blow, the American Mother of Kindergarten, the explorer William Clark, teacher and abolitionist John Berry Meachum, poet Sara Teasdale, and a litany of storied Saint Louis names: Barnes and Benton and Busch, Eads, Maritz, McDonnell and Danforth, Lambert, Lemp, Wainwright and Mallinkrodt. Eleven Medal of Honor recipients. All of these iconic Saint Louisans buried in close proximity share one thing in common: each knew that the lifeblood of this land flows through the confluence of two great American rivers. Bellefontaine Cemetery holds stories that forged America. Good. Bad. Wild, like the story of Captain Bill Massie, the world’s greatest riverboat gambler. His unmarked grave belies his prowess. In the parlors of his riverboats, Captain Bill Massie could read the deadest poker face. His ability to count cards was the same skill he used to memorize every bend and snag on the treacherous Missouri River. From the wheelhouse he could read the signs on the water’s surface—ripples, colors, stream lines—and tell whether they hid snags or sawyers, planters or preachers, those sneaky hazards lurking beneath the waterline, closer to Hell, and he knew how they changed depending on weather.

Other pilots paid Massie so they could follow his course, and sometimes he’d lead a string of six or eight riverboats. In sixty years of piloting, Massie sank only one boat, when the giant sternwheeler Montana hit the Wabash Bridge at Saint Charles. “Steamboat Bill” Heckman tells a story about Massie's Montana and her sister ship, the Dacotah, in the December 30, 1939 issue of Waterways Journal. When Captain John Gonsallis hit a stump in Providence Bend and sank the Dacotah in 1884, Massie sneered: “Did Gonsollas not know an obstruction as prominent as that stump in Providence Bend?” Gonsollas responded that the stump wasn't near as prominent as the bridge where Massie wrecked the Montana, just three months earlier. Massie eventually retired from the river to his homestead in Berger, Missouri, just a few miles up Highway 100 from Washington. Tucked into this riverboat gambler’s colorful life, luck dealt him a strange hand. On August 2, 1876, Massie sat at a poker table in Deadwood, South Dakota, with Wild Bill Hickok and two other players. On this day Hickok’s back wasn’t against the wall, as was his custom, and Massie apparently refused to change seats with Hickok not once but twice. Massie was winning and Hickok was losing. In Hickok’s last game, as Massie laid down his winning hand, an assassin’s bullet smashed into the back of Wild Bill’s head. The bullet exited through Hickok’s cheek and lodged in Massie’s wrist. Wild Bill’s fists still clutched his last poker hand with two pair— aces and eights—known to modern poker players as the dead man’s hand. Massie carried that bullet in his wrist for thirty-four years and took it to his grave in Bellefontaine Cemetery. Nobody knew the rivers better than Captain Bill Massie. Although he loved the gambling parlors, it was a sure bet your boat would be safe following him up the river. Almost.