Wild Bill was the son of New England parents, born in Vermont, who moved to New York immediately after their marriage, which occurred in 1829 or 1830. From New York they moved to Illinois, settling first in Putnam County and later in La Salle County. Here, near the village of Troy Grove, the son, James Butler, was born, on May 27, 1837. He went West when only a boy and for some time served as scout at different military posts and afterward as marshal and sheriff in various new towns in Kansas. He was a man of unflinching courage and a natural shot with the pistol and had many extraordinary adventures, in all of which he was successful. A remarkable incident told of him was the killing of Jake McCandless and his gang of twelve men in a hand-to-hand fight near Fort Hayes, Kansas. In 1873 or 1874, with William F. Cody and John Omohundro and a number of Pawnee Indians, he appeared for a short time on the stage in one of Ned Buntline's dramas of the plains, but his career as an actor was brief. In March, 1876, Wild Bill was married to Mrs. Agnes Thatcher Lake and that summer went to the Black Hills, where he prospected. Here, in Deadwood, South Dakota, August 2, 1876, he was murdered, while playing cards, by Jack McCall, who walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head. McCall was tried at Deadwood and acquitted. Subsequently he was rearrested by Colonel N. J. O'Brien, then sheriff of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and was taken to Dakota, tried, convicted, and executed during February, 1877. Wild Bill was in no sense a desperado. He was a mild-mannered, pleasant man who avoided trouble when it was possible, but when trouble came he met it with a strong heart. [C] Tom Carney, wholesale groceryman of Leavenworth City, was, a year or two later, elected governor of Kansas. [D] There were no metallic cartridge shells in use in those days, the cartridges for Sharp's rifles and all firearms being put up in paper. The Sharp's rifle carbine, which was one of the earliest breech-loaders brought into use on the frontier, had been adopted by the government for the cavalry service and was also a favorite buffalo gun among frontiersmen generally. Their extreme effective range was eight hundred yards, the longest-range guns then in use on the plains. The Colt's navy pistols we used then would shoot with the force and accuracy of a rifle for about three hundred yards. I remember seeing a sergeant in the Second Dragoons kill an antelope one day with a Colt's navy (taking a dead rest) at a distance of three hundred paces. The regulation "pace" is thirty inches. [E] This firm about this time minted private gold coins known as Pike's Peak coins. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: Italicized words are surrounded with underscores: _italics_ Obvious spelling and punctuation errors have been standardized. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wolf Hunters, by Robert M. Peck