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John "Jack" McCall

c. 1852-1877. Killer of Wild Bill Hickok

AI-generated illustration: weathered man in a worn hat and dusty coat
AI-generated illustration, not a likeness.

Little about Jack McCall is secure. Born John McCall in 1852 or 1853, probably in Jefferson County, Kentucky, he drifted west as a buffalo hunter and by 1876 was living near Deadwood under the alias Bill Sutherland. “Crooked Nose” or “Broken Nose Jack” were other names attached to him, and the Park Service’s landmark study uses the first.

The shooting

On August 2, 1876, he shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back of the head at the No. 10 Saloon. No one has shown that it was anything like a fair fight, though he later bragged in Wyoming that it was.

Two trials

An impromptu court tried him the next day, and after about two hours it acquitted him. He told the court Hickok had killed his brother in Abilene. The accounts offer no independent evidence for this, and there were rumors of bribes. Popular retellings sometimes describe the second trial as a case of double jeopardy. The legal position was simpler: Deadwood stood inside an Indian reservation, its court had no legal standing, and the acquittal therefore carried no legal force.

He left for Wyoming, where he was arrested in Laramie on August 29, 1876. On October 18 he was indicted for murder in Yankton, the territorial capital, as a federal crime on reservation land. After a failed escape attempt on November 9 he claimed that a man named John Varnes had hired him. Encyclopedia.com records no defense witnesses at the trial of December 4 to 6, and McCall did not testify. The jury returned a guilty verdict after about three hours.

Execution

He was sentenced on January 3, 1877, and the territorial supreme court denied his appeal on January 20. Yankton residents objected to a hanging in town, so the gallows went up just north of it, on school section land. He was hanged on March 1, 1877, in his middle twenties, in what Prairie Public calls the first federal execution in Dakota Territory. A priest stayed with him the day before, and he reportedly died holding a crucifix.

He was buried in a Catholic cemetery near the gallows. When that cemetery was moved in 1881, his body reportedly still had a noose around its neck, a detail that lacks a firm source. His final resting place is now unknown.

Sources