My friend, the San Diego-based artist and tech geek Tim Schwartz, explores the losses that arise in the digitization of knowledge. One of his projects, "Wild Bill's Loss," examines the missing page of an 1867 article in Harper's about Wild Bill Hickock just after his showdown with Dave Tutt. The article helped turn the handsome gunslinger into a national legend. Having slipped past the gaze of the scanner, this page is now lost to posterity. In an effort to plug the digital hole of history, Tim asked several artists and writers to imagine what was on that page.
What follows is my version of that missing page. The italicized words at the beginning and end indicate what was on the preceding and proceeding pages, starting with "That man is the most remarkable charac-" and ending with "she must jump it; and at it she went with a big rush...."
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“That man is the most remarkable charac-ter artist I have ever seen. Just fix your eyes on that there cocktail napkin he was doodling upon. Why, he’s captured your likeness, Captain, in a most startling and peculiar fashion.”
“Yessir, Kernel, that’s Bill for yer,” replied the Captain. “Always fidgetin’ with his pencils. Ye can hardly can have a conversation or play a round of cards with the man without him scratchin’ out some pitchures, on nappins, barstools, hankerchiefs, what have yer. A feller’s got to mind his possessions, hell, even his person, when he’s in Bill’s company if he don’t want to end up sportin’ one of them funny faces.”
“You mean he draws on people?”
“I do indeed, sir.” Captain Honesty then leaned in close, puffing away at me with his whiskey-scented breath, and told me how a few months ago, before the showdown with Dave Tutt, Bill had drawn on Tutt’s cousin Edna as she lay passed out on the saloon bar.
Suddenly Mr. Tutt’s grudge against Wild Bill made more sense.
I held the damp drawing up to marvel at its masterly craftsmanship. Wild Bill had not once glanced at his hand the entire time he was conjuring the Captain’s portrait, which he had so casually dashed off and left to posterity in a puddle of beer. The Captain accepted his exaggerated likeness with a resigned humor. And a good thing, for many a lesser man might have failed to appreciate the artistic liberties Bill had taken in his depiction.
“Tell me, Captain, does he always draw his figures with such prodigious genitals?” I asked.
“Sure as a Rebel bleeds red,” he replied. “Bill slaps a pecker on anything with a face. Men, women, Injuns, politicians, horses, chickens, you name it. Hell, the whole damn town’s all marked up with Bill’s lead. And I don’t mean bullets, Kernel.”
It was true. When I departed the Captain’s company later that evening, I noticed in the red light of dusk how all the facades of Springfield bore the unmistakable mark of Wild Bill’s draughtsmanship.
“But why does he do it?” I asked.
“I asked him about it once,” Captain Honesty responded. I says to him, ‘Say, Bill, why come you always add a big ole peeder to every one of them pencil drawrins of yours?’ He told me he done it on account of a nervous affliction.”
“What?” I gasped. “An affliction of the nerves in that immaculate specimen? Impossible!” I asked the Captain just what sort of nervous affliction a man of such upright and masculine bearing and such a nobly sloped forehead as Wild Bill Hickock could have possessed.
“He says it was a habit he had acquired in his schoolin’ days and t’weren’t a thing he could do about it even he had a mind not to.”
“You mean to tell me, Captain,” I shouted, “that Wild Bill is an artist not by his own volition and is slave to uncontrollable and perverse urges?
“Please sir, keep your voice down!” the Captain begged me. “It’s not that Bill’s a madman, sir. Why, he’s as sober as a judge. But Bill wasn’t always a pistol man, you know. ‘Fore he came to the border, he growed up rich back in Baltimore, where his mother schooled him in the fine arts. Even taught him to play the viola. Well, Bill, as you now rightly know, had a fearsome talent for makin’ pitchures. He spent his days out in the gardens of the estate drawin’ neked marble statues or holed up in his daddy’s librurry copyin’ ole pitchures out of dusty ole books. Soon enough, he’d done drawn everything in the whole mansion, so his parents had no choice but to ship him off to Phillerdelphia for proper art schoolin.”
“That’s, as Bill told me, where the trouble begun. ‘When I showed up in Phillerdelphia,’ he said, ‘I fell drop-dead in love with the first girl I seen. A gal prettier than all them Roman goddesses I’d tickled with my pencil back in Baltimore. But there was one problem. She was the Mayor of Phillerdelphia’s daughter.’ Course, the mayor’s daughter fell harder n’ rocks for Bill, too. But the mayor would have none of it. Said he would sooner sell his daughter off to white slavers in Arabia ‘fore he’d give his daughter to a degenerate artist from Baltimore.”
“Course, Bill swallowed the mayor’s venom real calm-like. He just looked him square in the melon till the man shouted hisself hoarse. But then, sure enough, the next day, flyin’ atop city hall, draped over William Penn’s statue was a huge brightly-colored canvas depictin’ the mayor of City Hall neked as a jaybird, abusin’ hisself with the Liberty Bell. ‘Twas the only man who ever insulted Wild Bill and didn’t wind up with a bullet put through his heart. But ever since that day, Bill told me, he’s suffered from his nervous affliction.”
“And you can reckon what happened from there,” said Captain Honesty. “Bill had to skedaddle right quick, for there warn’t no brotherly love left for him in Phillerdelphia. But just to spite the mayor further, he had his daughter meet him one last time for a farewell tryst out in the woods and had her come with the mayor’s prize hoss, Black Nell. Bill kissed his gal goodbye and rode off on Black Nell.
"Now, you can be sure the mayor nearly burst his necktie when heard his best hoss was stolen. He sent his meanest henchmen after Bill. But Bill rode like black lightnin’ across them Alleghenies and by the time they caught up with him, Bill had swapped his paintbrushes for shootin’ irons and was clear over in Kentucky— where I was stationed at Fort Knox. In fact, that were the first time I laid eyes on Wild Bill. I was out on detail in the woods outside Louisville when I see Bill shoot through the clearing on Black Nell just ahead of the mayor’s boys and headed straight for a stone wall. But Bill didn’t slow one bit. Instead he just whispered in Black Nell’s ear, tellin’ her she must jump it; and at it she went with a big rush. I never saw a more magnificent sight. Bill gave the mare her head, and turning in his saddle fired twice, killing both of his pursuers….
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