A similar story is told about two other Wild West icons—Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok. They were friends, both working for General Custer—Hickok as a scout, Cody shooting buffalo to provide the troops with meat—but they disapproved of Custer’s handling of the redskins and were wise enough to quit his services not long before Little Big Horn.
    They made themselves legends helping to set up the Pony Express and then parted ways. Cody joined the circus and eventually built it into his famous Wild West Show, giving Easterners a taste of life on the frontier. Almost all the stories you ever heard about him were untrue and made up by his publicists. Much the same is true of his lady sharpshooters Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. In the same vein, most of the yarns told about Wild Bill Hickok are probably similar to the facts. He roamed the Wild West camps and towns as a professional gambler and gunfighter, became a lawman in some states and was wanted for murder in several others.
    Not long before he was indeed shot in the back when holding the dead man’s hand—a full house apparently although there is dispute about whether it was Aces and Sevens or Aces and Eights and how many of each—he turned up on Cody’s doorstep down on his luck and his old friend offered him a job. Here he was, the very epitome of the character that Cody’s show depicted—the real thing. But Hickok proved useless—he couldn’t do horse tricks, rope tricks or even shooting tricks despite his reputation as the deadliest gun in the West. He hit the bottle too hard to bring off stunts. In the end, Cody had to fire him. The real thing had no place in myth and legend.