Terry Alexander: Talking Westerns

Will Bill Hickok on the Screen: His poker hand may have ended, but his story rode on through film.

Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and Wild Bill Hickok are synonymous with each other. Deadwood was the final stop in the life of Wild Bill. Born James Butler Hickok in Homer, Illinois, in May of 1837, his first nickname was "Duck Bill" because his upper lip protruded so far. Through the years it became Wild Bill. He was murdered on August 2, 1876 when Jack McCall shot Hickok in the back of the head while he was playing poker in the Number 10 Saloon. Hickok was holding black aces and eights.

William S. Hart

Hickok has been portrayed on screen many times by several different actors. I’m going to discuss three of these actors. The first is William S. Hart, the first actor to play Wild Bill on the big screen. He played the character in a silent film of the same name in 1923.

William Surrey Hart was born in Newbaugh, New York on December 6, 1864. His father, Nicholas was born in England, and his mother Rosanna was in Ireland. Hart had two brothers who died young and four sisters. He spent his teen years in the Dakota’s where he learned to shoot and ride.

He made his acting debut in 1888 with the Daniel E. Bandmann Touring Company. He toured with various companies and finally became director at the showhouse in Asheville, North Carolina. During this time, his youngest sister, Lotta, died of typhoid fever in 1901. Hart had always been attracted to the west. At one time, he even owned Billy the Kid’s sidearms. He was a friend to Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. His first film, His Hour of Manhood, in 1914, led to his first starring role in The Bargain in 1917, which cemented his star status. Hart wanted to make realistic westerns. He insisted that the clothing and the props be correct in his pictures. His horse, named Fritz, began receiving fan mail, becoming as much of a star as Hart. Hart married Winifred Westover on December 12, 1921. She was twenty-two, and he was fifty-seven. Six months later, Hart ordered his pregnant wife to leave his home. His sister Mary, who served as his manager, lived in the house with them. When the couple divorced on February 11, 1927, in Reno, Nevada. Winifred testified that Mary stayed in the house with them, her bedroom was right next to theirs and a connecting door was always open between the bedrooms. Earlier in 1923, Winifred filed for divorce. That same year, William Hart was approached by his friend Wyatt Earp, about making a movie with him included as a character. Earp was concerned about the public opinion of him because of the shootout at the OK Corral and his refereeing of the Fitzsimmon versus Sharkey prize fight. Wyatt ruled a foul which led to accusations that he fixed the fight. Even though Hart’s career was on the wane, he agreed, if Wyatt would be on the film as technical advisor. The picture would be called Wild Bill Hickok.

The movie begins at the end of the Civil War with Wild Bill retiring to Dodge City. He’d hung up his guns to become a professional gambler. A lawless group of cowboys, led by Jack McQueen, moved into Dodge and ran rampant over everyone and forced Hickok to take up his guns again. He visited with George Custer to retrieve his sword and prepare himself for battle. Hickok enlisted some friends to aid him in ridding Dodge City of the criminal element. Calamity Jane, Bat Masterson, Doc Holiday, Charlie Bassett, Luke Short, Bill Tilghman, and Wyatt Earp pitched in to help their friend. Bert Lindley played Wyatt. This was the first time Wyatt Earp appeared as a character on the movie screen and the only movie made that featured him while he was alive.

Wild Bill Hickock was a disappointment at the box office. The movie going public became more attracted to the characters Tom Mix played on the screen. They were flashy, with much more action. Hart only made three more pictures and retired from acting in 1928. He moved to his ranch in Newhall, California where he died on June 23, 1946.

Wild Bill Elliott

This next actor played Wild Bill Hickok on the big screen more than any other person. He was born Gordon Nance on October 16, 1904, on a ranch near Pattonsburg, Missouri. His father, Leroy Whitfield Nance, was a commissioned cattle broker for the Kansas City Stockyards. His mother, Maude Myrtle, helped raise Gordon on a ranch near King City. After high school, he briefly attended Rockhurst college, a Jesuit school in Kansas City. He soon departed for California with dreams of becoming an actor.

He appeared in a silent film in 1925, and in 1927, he used the name Gordon Elliott when he made his first western, The Arizona Wildcat. He married Helen Josephine Meyers in February of 1927. His daughter Barbara Helen Nance was born on November 14, 1927.

In 1938, he appeared as the title character in the serial The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, which went on to become a hit. In 1940, he played the character again in the film Prairie Schooners, which catapulted him into the top ten of western actors, where he stayed for the next fifteen years. In the movie, Dub Taylor played his sidekick, Cannonball. Elliott’s final Wild Bill Hickok movie was Prairie Gunsmoke in 1942. Elliott then moved on to the Red Ryder series which also starred Robert Blake as Little Beaver. In total, he made thirteen Wild Bill Hickok movies, counting the serial and sixteen Red Ryder films.

In 1943, he took to calling himself Wild Bill Elliott since the movies he was starring in at the time had the main character of Wild Bill Elliott. He kept the name for the rest of his career and retired to a ranch in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1957. He became a spokesman for Viceroy Cigarettes and had his own show on local TV where he had guests and showed his movies. He divorced Helen in 1961 and married Dolly Moore that same year. Wild Bill died of lung cancer on November 26, 1965. He was sixty-one.

Guy Madison

He was born Robert Ozell Moseley in Pumpkin Center, California, on January 19, 1922. Robert had three brothers, Wayne, Harold, and David, and one sister named Rosemary. Robert attended Bakersfield Jr. College after high school and joined the Coast Guard at the onset of the Second World War.

Robert appeared in his first role while on leave in 1944. He was billed as Guy Madison and appeared for three minutes in the film, Since You Went Away. The studio received thousands of fan letters about him. The name stuck. At the end of the war, he played Henry Wilson in Till the End of Time in 1946. His acting style was described as wooden. In 1949, he married actress Gail Russell. They divorced in October of 1954. Later in ’54, he married Sheila Connolly in Juarez, Mexico. They divorced in April 1963. They had three daughters.

His big break came in 1951 when he was offered the role of Wild Bill Hickok in the television show, The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok. The series ran from 1951 to 1958 with 112 episodes and was picked up in syndication at first, then with CBS, and finally ABC. Andy Devine played his sidekick Pete “Jingles” Jones. The pair even had a suc- cessful radio show on the Mutual Radio station that ran from ’51 to ’56. During the run of the TV show, different episodes were combined to make a series of movies. In this way, Monogram Pictures released sixteen Wild Bill Hickok films. He won a Golden Globe award in 1954 for Best Western Star. In 1986, he was awarded a Golden Boot Award for his body of work in the western genre.

After the show ended in ’58, Guy appeared in some guest-starring roles, then went across the ocean to appear in a series of German and Italian productions. He appeared in several spaghetti westerns during the ’60s and ’70s. His last western TV appearance was in the 1988 remake of the movie Red River, with James Arness, Bruce Boxleitner, and Gregory Harrison. His last movie appearance was in the 1989 direct to video release of Crossbow: The Movie.

He retired to his home in Palm Springs, California. He died of emphysema at the age of seventy-four on February 6, 1996.

Wild Cards

Now for a few wild cards and coincidences. Gary Cooper played Wild Bill in the 1936 film The Plainsman. The movie was later remade in 1966 as a TV movie with Don Murray as Hickok. The plot was basically the same in both movies. Gunrunners were selling repeating rifles to the Cheyenne, and it was up to Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Calamity Jane to stop them. Both movies also had appearances by George Armstrong Custer. In the ’36 version, James Ellison portrayed Cody and Jean Arthur played Calamity Jane. In the ’66 TV movie, Abby Dalton was Jane and Guy Stockwell played Cody.

A father and son duo also played Hickok. In January 1964, Lloyd Bridges portrayed Wild Bill in the TV anthology series The Great Adventure in the episode “Wild Bill Hickok: The Legend and the Man.” The show also starred Larry J. Blake, Neil Burstyn, William Fawcett, Leo Gordon and was narrated by Van Heflin.

Lloyd’s son, Jeff Bridges, then starred in the 1995 release, Wild Bill. The movie told Hickok’s life story, in several flashbacks from his early days to his murder in Deadwood. David Arquette played Jack McCall and Ellen Barkin played Calamity Jane. Keith Carradine appeared in one of the flashbacks as Buffalo Bill Cody. Diane Ladd, John Hurt, Bruce Dern, James Remar, and Marjoe Gortner rounded out the cast. This was Gortner’s last film.

Charles Bronson played Wild Bill in the 1977 movie The White Buffalo, based on the novel of the same name by Richard Sale. This was a Dino DeLaurentiis Production and came at a time in cinema when mechanical animals were all the rage. Bruce, the shark in Jaws was mechanical, the giant ape in King Kong was supposed to be mechanical—although most of the scenes were filmed with Rick Baker in makeup. The Giant bear in Grizzly was supposedly mechanical, and so was the white buffalo. The trouble was the mechanical monster only had two moves. A straight-ahead charge on a track and a swishing of the head from side to side.

The movie took place on Hickok’s journey to Deadwood. He was plagued by nightmares of a white buffalo charging him in the winter. When he found out the animal really did exist, he went in pursuit of the beast. The great thing about this movie was the actors who guest-starred in the production—Clint Walker as a bad guy, Will Sampson as Crazy Horse, and appearances by Stuart Whitman, John Carradine, Slim Pickens, Jack Warden, Martin Kove, and Kim Novak. This was Bronson’s last true western.

Keith Carradine also played Wild Bill in five episodes of the HBO western series Deadwood, which told of his arrival and murder in the town. In this series, the town of Deadwood and its inhabitants are the stars, and it doesn’t concentrate on just a single character. The series starred Timothy Olyphant, Ian McShane, Molly Parker, Brad Dourif, and Powers Booth. Actress Robyn Weigert played Calamity Jane.

Bruce Dern had a great sequence in the movie Wild Bill. He was the man in the wheelchair that challenged Hickok to a shootout. He accepted and had two men carry him out into the street tied to a chair. Wild Bill won the shootout. Bruce Dern returned in 2017 in the movie Hickok which billed Luke Helmsworth as the title character with Trace Adkins as Dave Tutt. The movie also starred Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Dern. In the movie, Hickok was tasked with taming the wild cowtown of Abilene, Kansas. In the film, he and Tutt have their famous shootout. In reality, the shootout happened in Springfield, Missouri.

Wild Bill Hickok will live forever in the hearts and minds of anyone who loved the west and the movie westerns.

Terry Alexander and his wife, Phyllis, live on a small farm near Porum, Oklahoma. They have three children, thirteen grandchildren, and four great grandchildren. If you see him at a conference, though, don’t let him convince you to take part in one of his trivia games—he’ll stump you every time.