James Butler Hickok was born May 27, 1837, in Homer, Illinois (present-day Troy Grove, Illinois) to William Alonzo Hickok, a farmer and abolitionist, and his wife Polly Butler. His father was said to have used the family house, now demolished, as a station on the Underground Railroad. He was the fourth of six children.

In 1873, Buffalo Bill Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro invited Hickok to join their troupe after their earlier success. Hickok did not enjoy acting, often hiding behind scenery, and in one show shot the spotlight when it focused on him. He was released from the group after a few months.  In 1876, Hickok was diagnosed by a doctor in Kansas City, Missouri, with glaucoma and ophthalmia. Though he was just 39, his marksmanship and health were apparently in decline, as he had been arrested several times for vagrancy, despite earning a good income from gambling and displays of showmanship only a few years earlier.  On March 5, 1876, Hickok married Agnes Thatcher Lake, a 50-year-old circus proprietor in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory. Hickok left his new bride a few months later, joining Charlie Utter's wagon train to seek his fortune in the goldfields of South Dakota. Martha Jane Cannary, known popularly as Calamity Jane, claimed in her autobiography that she was married to Hickok and had divorced him so he could be free to marry Agnes Lake, but no records have been found that support her account. The two possibly met for the first time after Jane was released from the guardhouse in Fort Laramie and joined the wagon train in which Hickok was traveling. The wagon train arrived in Deadwood in July 1876. Jane confirmed this account in an 1896 newspaper interview, although she claimed she had been hospitalized with illness rather than in the guardhouse.  Shortly before Hickok's death, he wrote a letter to his new wife, which read in part, "Agnes Darling, if such should be we never meet again, while firing my last shot, I will gently breathe the name of my wife--Agnes--and with wishes even for my enemies I will make the plunge and try to swim to the other shore."

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