![]() Hickok countered that the sum was only $25 and said he had a “memorandum” in his jacket pocket to prove it, but Tutt was unconvinced. That night, Hickok was playing poker at the Lyon House hotel when Tutt confronted him about a $35 debt from a previous card game. Whatever the source of the enmity, the Hickok-Tutt feud finally boiled over on July 20, 1865. ![]() Some reports even alleged that Hickok had killed one of Tutt’s friends during the war. The bad blood may have originated in a dispute over the affections of a lady, but it’s also possible that lingering Civil War tensions were to blame. Both men were known to haunt Springfield’s poker rooms and saloons as semi-professional gamblers, and some witnesses claimed the pair had once been friends. Just how Hickok and Tutt came to be glaring at one another down the barrels of their six-guns is not entirely clear. The duel that followed vaulted “Wild Bill” to national fame. That would all change on July 21, when Hickok strode out to meet a former Confederate soldier named Davis Tutt in the Springfield city square. The 28-year-old Illinois native was already known locally as “Wild Bill,” but there was little at the time to distinguish him from the countless other would-be gunslingers and cardsharps drifting through the American frontier. James Butler Hickok arrived in Springfield, Missouri, in the summer of 1865, fresh off a stint as Union scout and spy during the Civil War.
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