A Talk for the Ages

The interview that made Wild Bill famous.

In September 1865, Col. George Ward Nichols was in Springfield, MO—it’s not clear why. But he took the opportunity to interview Wild Bill Hickok, who was fresh off his face-to-face gunfight with Davis Tutt. The subsequent talk wasn’t published for nearly two years. But when it did, Hickok’s reputation spread world-wide. And Nichols became known as an important chronicler of one of the West’s great characters (although there was a lot of fable in the story).