A Gentile’s Been Telling Tales: Wild Bill Hickman & The Murder of Horace Bucklin
by Ben Boulden
ca.
November 29, 1857 – North Salt Lake City and Bennion, Utah
Bill
Hickman crouched in a clump of scrub oak at the eastern edge of the dirt track.
The desolate Oquirrh Mountains had eaten the sun’s bleached winter light an
hour before and Wild Bill’s fingers were stiff and cold.
He whispered,
“Hurry your damn ass, Dalton.”
Hickman smacked
his right hand, palm open, against his thigh. The meaty clap rang loud across
the barren landscape and the prickling sensation in his fingers unnerved Bill. He
cursed again at his late-arriving partner. It was a damned easy job, but he’d
never worked with George Dalton before, and he wouldn’t again if the toe-headed dirt
farmer didn’t hurry his ass up to this lonely stretch of road with the man Hickman
knew only as Buck sitting beside him.
Bill shifted
his weight. His toes hollering as loud as his hands about the icy cold night. The
snow crunching loud as thunder beneath his riding boots. He opened his mouth to
curse Dalton’s mother, but caught the words just shy of his tongue.
In the
distance, a spring squeaked – iron and wood popping and rubbing clear as
daylight. A moment later a horse snorted. A snatch of conversation rose and
then faded. Hickman forgot the cold and studied the southern approach where the
track disappeared into a crease that dropped into the Salt Lake Valley below.
Hickman pulled the Colt from his belt and waited.
He
tensed as the draft horse rose above the horizon shimmering ghost-like in the
starlit night. Dalton was perched on the front bench, the reins held loosely in
his hands. The shadow next to him must have been the man named Buck. The two
chatted like old maids.
“…reckon
on getting my second wife in a year or two.” Hickman recognized Dalton’s unpleasant
rasping voice.
“You
choose ‘em, George?” the stranger said. “Or is they—”
Buck sat
up straight. His mouth wide and silent when Hickman stepped onto the road.
***
The day had
started the same as any other for Hickman. The U.S. Army’s march into Salt Lake
City had been halted by early snow at Jim Bridger’s trading post and Brigham
Young had released him from duty a week earlier. Hickman’s eight wives had been
warming his old bones every day since. Bill shivered with pleasure at the
thought of his youngest wife Mary. Twenty years his junior, Mary’s softness –
her voice, her skin, and her plump roundness – gave him more joy than God could
have intended when she’d been given to him in that sacred doctrine of plural marriage.
A shadowy
movement in the pre-dawn yard interrupted Hickman’s pleasant but sinful notions
about Mary. He arose and peered through the glass window facing the graded road
slithering across his land. He knew the skinny little man beneath the stupid
looking stovepipe hat but couldn’t put a name to him.
He
stepped to the door and with his right hand grasped the cut-down scatter gun that
lived there, its short barrel gaped at the floor. The stock resting lightly on his
shoulder. With his left hand, Hickman opened the door as the man stepped onto
the plank porch.
Stovepipe
stopped
as the door opened. His eyes darted to the menacing short-barreled shotgun in Hickman’s
hand.
“What do you want?” Hickman said.
The man ruffled
his long coat with nervous and stubby fingers. “I-I” he stuttered through
blistered lips. “I g-got a message from Brother Brigham.”
Hickman kept his silence.
Stovepipe
took a nervous half-step left and another back to the right, repeating the movement
over and over. Hickman figured his legs would be trembling like a sheared lamb’s
and he considered asking if directions to the outhouse were needed but settled
for watching the little man’s fear. Wild Bill enjoyed the distress he caused in
other men more than about anything else in life; except maybe his latest bride,
but he was sure his enthusiasm for Mary would fade in time.
“Well?”
Hickman said just loud enough for the man to hear.
“He, um…”
Stovepipe leaned closer, reached into his coat. A shaking hand came out with a neatly
folded paper. A rough-edged wax seal held it shut. The man said, “This is meant
for you, B-Brother Hickman.”
Bill
yanked the letter from the man’s hand and flicked it open with a single smooth
motion:
The boys made a bad job of putting
a man named Buck out of the way. He’s a gentile and has been telling tales. A Saint
named George Dalton has gained his trust. Dalton’s waiting at the Townsend.
There
was no signature, but the scrawl belonged to Brigham Young. The letter’s opaque
words were Young’s too, but Hickman understood the meaning well enough. The
Mormon prophet wanted this Buck in a lonesome grave.
Hickman grunted.
With satisfaction, he noticed the little man flinch. Hickman would miss out
on bellying-up Mary again after her morning chores were done, but it’d be a lie
to say he didn’t enjoy being one of Young’s rough boys. He liked calling himself “Brigham’s Destroying Angel,” and the relationship gave him cachet with
damn near everybody in Zion.
He said
to Stovepipe, “I’ll be there at noon.”
The
little man scurried down the track to where his mount stood. He struggled into
the saddle and the horse was clopping away before his ass hit leather. Hickman
chuckled.
Maybe
he’d go to the barn and see about Mary. She’d be milking the cows on this early
Saturday morning. Hell, she might even be alone.
***
Hickman strode
onto the lonesome road, raising his left hand high.
“Hold up
now, Dalton!”
Dalton
pulled back on the reins and spoke to the draft horse, “Whoa!”
The
wagon creaked and rattled, stopped. The gelding shuffled its hoofs, wagged its long
head, and snorted. The man called Buck glanced from Hickman to Dalton and back
again. His mouth agape.
Dalton
clicked his tongue; wide eyes betrayed his nervous nature.
Hickman stepped
to the wagon, the gun in his hand at belt height. With an easy voice, he said,
“That you George?”
Dalton
coughed. He shot Buck a sideways glance, his pupils bouncing with tension.
Hickman figured the dirt farmer was going to give the plan away and make Buck’s
death harder than it should be.
But Dalton
came back with a hoarse whisper, “Yup.”
“It’s
about time you got here.” Hickman stood at the corner of the wagon. He looked
Buck in the eyes. “I’ve been waitin’ here for some time.”
“We was
held up in the city...”
Hickman
said, “Ah—”
“Who are
you mister?” Buck’s eyes bobbed with fear. He turned to Dalton and said,
“George?”
Hickman
took a quick step around the wagon and raised the revolver, its ugly snout sniffing
at Buck. “My name’s Bill Hickman” – Buck ducked his head and raised his hands
in the air – “and Brother Brigham’s sent me.”
“Goddam,”
Buck shrieked, “I ain’t done nothin’.”
Hickman
smiled, a devil on his lips. “Blaspheming’s unforgivable to the Lord and your
soul will burn in hellfire.”
As the
Mormon gunman stepped closer, Dalton dropped from the wagon. His boots clattering
on the hardpan dirt track. Hickman raised his .45 to Buck’s head – “May God
forgive your sins,” he said – and pulled the trigger. Lightning flashed and
thunder echoed across the dark landscape.
Buck
jerked. The side of his face shattered into a dusty moonlit mist. He crashed
against the wagon’s bench, teetered, his hands clasped like a praying demon,
and then slumped to the ground.
Dalton’s
face went rigid. He rushed to the road’s edge, bent low and heaved. The steam
rising off his dinner like smoke.
Hickman holstered
the gun and said, “Shit, Dalton.” He jabbed Buck with the toe of his boot. “When
you’re done over there, what say we find a hole for this poor soul.”
Bill was
in a hurry to finish the job because he knew Mary’d be waiting at home, but it
was a two-hour ride and every second of it would seem like a damnable nuisance.
|
a little more about Horace “Buck” Bucklin… Horace Bucklin – or simply Buck –
sailed from Boston to California in the early days of the California Gold
Rush. In the early-1850s, Buck “located a ranch and inn on the trail across
the Sierra Nevada, north of Donner Pass” and in early-1857 he “had drifted
north to Richmond in Honey Lake Valley” and hooked up with a ruffian named
“Big John” Chapman. For unknown reasons the two men headed for Salt Lake City
and by happenstance joined a group of four men – the brothers Thomas and John
Aiken, John Eichard, and A. J. “Honesty” Jones – at “the Humboldt Sink – west
of today’s Lovelock, Nevada[.]” These four original members of what has
become known as the Aiken Party were carrying somewhere between $4,000 to
$8,000 in gold coin and currency, and most historians believe they were entrepreneurs
hoping to do business with the approaching U.S. Army upon its arrival in Salt
Lake City. At the time, Brigham Young and the Utah Mormons were in full
revolt against the United States Government, and President Buchanan had
dispatched the U.S. Army’s Tenth Infantry to remove Young as the territorial
governor and enforce federal law in the territory. But an early winter stopped the Army at
Jim Bridger’s trading post, in modern-day southwest Wyoming, and the Aiken
Party entered a country whipped into a frenzy of fear and violence. On
October 31, 1857, the men were arrested by the Nauvoo Legion – the Mormon
controlled territorial militia – at Fort Box Elder (Brigham City, Utah) and
transported to Salt Lake City under the charge of acting as federal spies. The Aiken brothers, Eichard, and Jones
were murdered by the notorious Mormon gunman Orrin Porter Rockwell, with
support of a few cohorts including a Mormon named Sylvanus Collett, in central
Utah on November 25 and 28, 1857. Both Collett and Rockwell were indicted for
murder by a federal grand jury in 1878, but Rockwell died of heart failure
before he could be tried and Collett was acquitted. Although, recently
unearthed documents show Collett’s defense – which essentially relied on his
being in Idaho at the time of the murders – was based on false witness
testimony. Hickman was never charged with the
murder of Horace Bucklin and there are two accounts of how the murder
happened. The first is from Bill Hickman’s memoirs, Brigham’s Destroying
Angel, which is the primary basis for the fictional vignette above, and the
other comes secondhand from a California saloonkeeper named Thomas N. Long.
Long claimed “Big John” Chapman said he had escaped the Mormons when he and another
man – likely Buck – were being transported in a wagon by “The Destroying
Angels”. Buck tried to escape, “but his clothes caught on a single-tree hook,
and he was overpowered and put back into the wagon.” Chapman “jumped out of
the hind end of the wagon” and ran and hid until he was able to join a train
of teamsters heading towards California. “Big John” Chapman escaped the
territory but was shot dead in California while arguing over a woman on March 7, 1860. a
note on “A Gentile’s Been Telling Tales: Bill Hickman & The Murder of Horace Bucklin”
… In his memoirs, Bill Hickman claimed he was ordered by Brigham Young in person to kill Horace Bucklin, but in this
fictionalized recreation, their interaction was changed to a written letter;
however, much of the language used in the letter came from Hickman’s book. |
Sources:
Bigler, David “The Aiken
Party Murders and the Utah War,” Confessions of a Revisionist Historian (edited
by Will Bagley), Tanner Trust Fund and J. Willard Marriott Library, 2015
Fairfield, Asa Merrill, Fairfield’s
Pioneer History of Lassen County California, H. S. Crocker Co., 1916
Hickman, Bill (edited by Beadle, J. H.), Brigham’s Destroying Angel, Shepard Publishing Co., 1904
A Gentile’s Been Telling Tales: Bill Hickman & The Murder of Horace Bucklin is the second installment of The Bill Hickman Chronicles.
Copyright © 2022 by Ben Boulden / All Rights Reserved
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