This record is not approached by that of any other known bad man. Many of them are credited with twenty men, a dozen men, and so forth; but when the records are sifted the list dwindles. It is doubted whether any other bad man in America ever actually killed twenty men in fair personal combat. Bill was not killed in fair fight, nor could McCall have hurt him had Bill suspected his intent.
Hickok was about thirty-nine years old when killed, and he had averaged a little more than two men for each year of his entire life. He was well-known among army officers, and esteemed as a scout and a man, never regarded as a tough in any sense. He was a man of singular personal beauty. Of him General Custer, soon thereafter to fall a victim himself upon the plains, said: "He was a plainsman in every sense of the word, yet unlike any other of his class. Whether on foot or on horseback, he was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw. His manner was entirely free from all bluster and bravado. He never spoke of himself unless requested to do so. His influence among the frontiersmen was unbounded; his word was law. Wild Bill was anything but a quarrelsome man, yet none but himself could enumerate the many conflicts in which he had been engaged."
These are the words of one fighting man about another, and both men are entitled to good rank in the annals of the West. The praise of an army general for a man of no rank or wealth leaves us feeling that, after all, it was a possible thing for a bad man to be a good man, and worthy of respect and admiration, utterly unmingled with maudlin sentiment or weak love for the melodramatic.
Frontier Wars--_Armed Conflicts of Bodies of Men on the Frontiers_--_Political Wars; Town Site Wars; Cattle Wars_--_Factional Fights_.
The history of the border wars on the American frontier, where the fighting was more like battle than murder, and where the extent of the crimes against law became too large for the law ever to undertake any settlement, would make a long series of bloody volumes. These wars of the frontier were sometimes political, as the Kansas anti-slavery warfare; or, again, they were fights over town sites, one armed band against another, and both against the law. Wars over cows, as of the cattle men against the rustlers and "little fellows," often took on the phase of large armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter; though the bloodiest of these wars are those least known, and the _opera bouffe_ wars those most widely advertised.