Agnes got his gun

摘要

HE WAS STUNNING, or so Libbie Custer, the famous cavalryman's wife, remembered. Wild Bill Hickok, a gunslinger said to have once killed ten men in a single fight, was "a delight to look on...the careless swing of his body as he moved seemed perfectly in keeping with the man, the country, the time in which he lived." Alas, the frontispiece of Tom Clavin's biography, "Wild Bill", belies this swooning description. Can the man with sleepy eyes and a moustache like a limp rodent be the Adonis recalled by Mrs Custer? Then again, her account was published 14 years after his death, and truth was a fungible commodity in the Wild West. Matters big and small were twisted and embellished. The myth of the frontier as a place of freedom and opportunity has, these days, been supplanted by a less romantic understanding that for many-notably Native Americans-it was rather less idyllic.