In 1927, though, when South Dakota was negotiating with Calvin Coolidge to get him to spend his summer in the Hills, the stable hand, whose name happened to be Dick Clarke, was sent to Washington to extend a personal welcome to the President. Patently a publicity stunt, it fooled nobody but old Dick himself. The rigors of the trip and the succession of tongue-in-cheek honors heaped upon him somehow tilted the old man’s mind, and from that day until his death a decade later he fully believed that he was the original Deadwood Dick. Frowning down any suggestions that he doff his beaded finery and return to the care of the oat bins, he betook himself far from the gentle safety of the Deadwood that he knew and that knew him, and took to touring the backwoods with fifth-rate medicine shows and Wild West pageants. Somewhere along the line he got up a small pamphlet which he sold to the gawking audiences who thought they were seeing a genuine frontiersman. In this amazing tract he spelled out such of the facts of Wheeler’s stories as were coherent and in logical time sequence. The rest, including a date and place of birth, he soberly filled in for himself. And that was Deadwood Dick. When he finally died, back in Deadwood in the early forties, much of the town had come to believe as he did that there had been a Deadwood Dick, just as there had been a Calamity Jane, and that this gaffer had been the very person. His cortege was solemnly followed, and to this day flowers are sprinkled on his grave by confused but loyal residents of the Hills. Wild Bill Hickok, on the other hand, actually lived, and actually died exactly as the legend goes, with aces and eights in his hand. It was this unfortunate occurrence, as a matter of fact, that gave to that particular poker hand its gruesome name, Dead Man’s Hand. Somewhat in the manner of Deadwood Dick, Wild Bill achieved a large part of his fame through the earnest efforts of Beadle & Adams. That is to say, much of his renown came after his untimely demise, and much of it was deliberately generated to satisfy the great western-yearnings of the avid book-buying public. In addition to the publishers’ efforts on Bill’s behalf, great impetus was given to his posthumous repute by Calamity Jane. Nevertheless, in all probability Hickok was actually the fearless and sterling character his legendeers have depicted, and had he not been brutally done to death by feckless Jack McCall he would doubtless have earned even greater fame through his own efforts in later years. James Hickok was born into a farming family in Illinois in the year 1837, and passed a quiet and respectable boyhood in the ordinary pursuits of such an existence. In his nineteenth year he, like so many other young men of that day, felt the urgent call of the Far West. He hired himself out forthwith as a teamster in a wagon train to the Pacific Coast.