The Dead Man's Hand: A Poker Urban Legend Or the Death of Wild Bill Hickok
The world of Poker may seem mysterious and even legendary to people watching it from the outside. The stories of huge winnings and amazing hands have inspired myths, and it all plays into the fascination that anyone with a deck of cards might be able to strike it rich. Of course gamblers are superstitious, and between the ideas of luck, the actual history of the playing cards and the games they're used for there have been a lot of exotic urban legends spun. Perhaps one of the oldest ones is the story of the Dead Man's Hand, which became a part of the whisper stream of playing cards after the death of Wild Bill Hickok.
For those of you who didn't pay attention in history class and have never seen a movie or read a book in the Western genre, James Butler Hickok (called Wild Bill for the beak of a nose he had) was one of the big named gunslingers of the historical Old West. He'd made a living with guns, was more or less considered a white hat among the personalities of the Old West, and he had killed 36 men in his life. Confirmed, anyway. Now Wild Bill enjoyed a game of cards, which was one of the better diversions of the time before radio and television, and he was doing just that when he was shot in the back of the head by Jack "Crooked Nose" McCall. The hand Hickok was holding is said to have been the Ace of Spades, the Ace of Clubs, the 8 of Spades and the 8 of Clubs. Or more commonly referred to as Aces and 8s.
Now to separate a bit of the legend from the history, a hard thing to do when talking about famous men that lived by the gun. The facts are that Wild Bill was shot in the back of the head by Jack McCall while playing 5 card draw poker in the town of Deadwood Gulch in South Dakota on August 2, 1876. Apparently Texas Hold Em would never be played in a town with a name that even folks from down south wouldn't be able to take seriously. After the shooting the doors were locked up and town barber was asked to serve as an impromptu undertaker. Said barber's comments on the cards Hickok was holding, in addition to details of the crime, were put in a biography released in 1926 and written by Frank Wilstach. It was after this book identified the Aces and 8s hand that it became known as the Dead Man's Hand.
There are several questions that have to be asked here though. The first is; what was the 5th card? Speculation runs rampant on that, and everything from a one-eyed Jack to the Suicide King has been claimed at one point or another. Some people say that Hickok was drawing his last card when he was shot, and what makes that a case of double superstition is that the bullet fired by McCall's gun was supposedly the only one out of six in his .45 that would have gone off when the other shells were examined. The next question though is this; why did this term only come to refer to Hickok's hand in the 1920s when the slang "Dead Man's Hand" had already been in use for decades before that in reference to poker?
That's right, the term has been recorded in print as early as 1886, less than 10 years after Hickok's death. It originally referred to three Jacks and a pair of 10s, but later it would refer to Jacks and 8s as well as Jacks and 7s, which was especially unlucky if you won a pot with it. However in the 1920s the biography was released and it listed Aces and 8s (which had been mentioned before, but not in connection with Hickok) as the official Dead Man's Hand. It wasn't corroborated by others, but when the facts argue with the legend, you print the legend. Which is why today we still think that Christopher Columbus discovered America, why we think there's poisoned candy around Halloween and why we've perpetuated the idea that, at least in America, there are Satanists out to get us.
http://voices.yahoo.com/the-dead-mans-hand-poker-urban-legend-10149793.html?cat=37
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