Welcome to the American Story. Mostly true stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one, Last Hand.

Somehow as a boy I seemed always to know that aces and eights was the dead man's hand. And that you should always sit with your back to the wall when playing poker in a saloon.

I had never yet played poker or been in a saloon, but I knew more as received legend

and as confirmed fact, that when Wild Bill Hickock once

was holding aces and Aids, and did not sit with his back to the wall during a poker game,

things went badly. I learned later that on August 2nd,

1876, while Bill was sitting at a poker table in Carl Mann's number 10 saloon in Deadwood in the Black Hills of Dakota

territory. When a cowardly assassin came up behind him and shot him in the back of the head

with a Colt 45 revolver.

Bill was just 39 years old and had been one of the most famous frontiersmen in the country

for about 10 years.

He had been known on the frontier before, especially in Kansas, as a scout, gunfighter, and lawman.

But what made him nationally famous was an article published in the February

1867 issue of Harper's new monthly magazine. The article offered the

first widely circulated account of a gunfight between a 24-year-old Bill Hickock, not yet known as Wild Bill, and a man named David McCandless in Rock Creek and southeastern Nebraska Territory in July

1861 just a few months after the firing on Fort Sumter.

The account claimed to be in Wild Bill's own words, complete with contrived Backwood's

dialect, and it was astonishing.

Bill is ambushed by a gang of ten desperados, horse-steves, murderers, and regular cutthroats, who were savage mad at him.

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