Est. 1876 · Murder of Wild Bill Hickok (1876) · The Dead Man's Hand · Deadwood Gold Rush History
On August 2, 1876, James Butler 'Wild Bill' Hickok was playing poker at Nuttal and Mann's No. 10 saloon in the new gold-rush camp of Deadwood. Jack McCall walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head. Hickok died at the table. The cards he was holding, a pair of aces and a pair of eights, became known afterward as the 'dead man's hand.'
McCall fled and was caught. An impromptu miners' court acquitted him, but because Deadwood was an illegal settlement on Lakota treaty land, that verdict carried no legal weight. McCall was later arrested in Dakota Territory, retried in a federal court, convicted, and hanged in 1877.
The original No. 10 burned in the fire that swept Deadwood in 1879. The name lived on: today's Old Style Saloon No. 10 operates on Main Street as a working saloon and Western museum, billing itself as the place where Hickok was killed and displaying memorabilia from the era. The exact original spot of the shooting is generally placed nearby rather than at the present saloon's address, a distinction Deadwood's history-minded sources are careful to note. Hickok is buried at the town's Mount Moriah Cemetery.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Style_Saloon_No._10
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Bill_Hickok
- https://www.kotatv.com/2024/10/09/haunted-history-deadwood/
Phantom piano musicSense of a presence
The killing of Wild Bill Hickok gave Deadwood one of its defining stories, and the saloon that carries the No. 10 name has become a fixture of the town's haunted reputation. Ghost-tour operators and local press include it among Deadwood's paranormal stops, with the most-repeated claim being a piano that plays without anyone at the keys.
The lore grows directly out of the documented history rather than around an invented figure. The man at the center of the story, Hickok, was real, his death is one of the best-recorded events of the frontier West, and the saloon trades openly on that connection through its memorabilia and its seasonal reenactment of the shooting.
The paranormal claims themselves are anecdotal and come mainly from tour and travel coverage. The verified weight of the site is the 1876 murder and its place in Deadwood history; the piano-playing spirit is the saloon's bit of accumulated lore.
Notable Entities
Wild Bill Hickok