A dispute over payment for a stage station in Nebraska Territory in July 1861 ended with three men dead and sparked a controversy that has divided historians for more than a century. The central figure was James B. Hickok, the young man who would later become famous as Wild Bill. Hickok was working as an assistant stock tender at the Rock Creek Station, roughly 50 miles west of Topeka, Kansas, when the violence erupted.
The station was part of the Overland Stage Company’s operations, and the company had agreed to purchase the property from a local farmer and former North Carolina sheriff named David C. McCanles. The company made no payments on the property, and by July 1861, McCanles was demanding the money owed to him or the return of his property. On the afternoon of July 12, 1861, McCanles arrived at the station with his 12-year-old son, Monroe, and two neighbors, James Woods and James Gordon, to confront the station keeper, Horace Wellman.
According to George W. Hansen, who wrote a detailed account for the journal Nebraska History in 1968, McCanles went to the kitchen door and asked for Wellman. Wellman’s wife said her husband would not come out. Hickok then stepped to the door.
McCanles asked Hickok if they were still friends and requested a drink of water. Hansen wrote that while McCanles was drinking, he saw something that aroused his suspicions and walked to the other side of the cabin. Hickok, meanwhile, moved behind a calico curtain that divided the room. McCanles called for Hickok to come out and fight if he had a grievance.
Instead, Hickok shot him through the heart with a rifle. The boy, Monroe, watched his father fall backward and die. Hansen’s account states that McCanles, Woods, and Gordon were unarmed. When Woods and Gordon heard the shot and came running, Hickok fired at them with a revolver, wounding both.
Wellman then attacked Woods with a heavy hoe, crushing his skull, while Gordon, severely wounded, fled into brush near the creek. He was found and killed with a shotgun blast fired by a man named Brink. Wellman reportedly chased Monroe with the hoe, yelling, “Let’s kill them all,” but the boy outran him and hid in a ravine. He later ran three miles home to tell his mother what had happened.
Mrs. Wellman, the station keeper’s wife, was in the doorway during the chase, shouting, “Kill them all. ”
The next day, neighbors gathered the bodies and buried them. Hickok told the men who recovered the bodies that the killings were done in self-defense.
Three months earlier, the Civil War had begun, and tensions between Union and Confederate sympathizers were high. Hickok and Wellman quickly spread a story that they had been attacked by a gang of secessionists. That version, carried by stage and freight drivers, became exaggerated in the retelling. Later accounts, including one presented in an 1880 biography of Wild Bill by James W.
Buel, described the event as a gunfight in which Hickok faced a gang of ten outlaw cutthroats and killed nine of them. Buel’s book claimed the McCanles brothers were recruiting for the Confederate army and had threatened Hickok, who refused to join the Southern cause. The historical record contradicts this version. Jim McCanles, David’s brother, was not at the station that day and lived until 1922, serving for years as a state senator in Colorado.
Burial records and court documents confirm that only three men died on July 12, 1861. The two surviving eyewitnesses, Monroe McCanles and the station employees, gave conflicting accounts. The employees said they acted in self-defense. Monroe said his father and his companions were unarmed and were shot down without warning.
When James McCanles, David’s brother, filed a murder complaint, the justice of the peace, T. M. Coulter, issued warrants for the arrest of “Dutch Bill, Doc, and Wellman, their other names unknown. ” The defendants were arrested on July 15, 1861, and brought before Coulter for a preliminary hearing.
Monroe McCanles was subpoenaed to testify, but Coulter did not permit him to enter the room during the examination of the accused men. Instead, Coulter called Mrs. Wellman to testify for the territory, even though she was an accomplice and the wife of one of the defendants. She and the defendants testified that the killing was done in self-defense.
On October 7, 1861, Coulter filed his finding: the charge of murder was “not sustained. ” The case never went to trial. There were practical reasons for the outcome. It was the first criminal case in Gage County, and there was no jail.
Holding the prisoners for more than two years until the next district court term would have been costly, and the county treasury was empty. The Overland Stage Company was the most influential corporation west of the Missouri River, and many of its drivers were present during the hearing. Hansen concluded that Coulter, who was running for county treasurer, ignored the evidence. He argued that the killing of McCanles, Woods, and Gordon was not self-defense but cold-blooded murder.
The controversy remains unresolved. Some historians accept the McCanles family account that three unarmed men were murdered. Others argue that the earlier Wild Bill legend, though inaccurate in its details, preserved a version in which Hickok faced genuine danger from men who had made threats. What the records show is that McCanles had come to the station to collect a debt and reclaim his property.
He was a powerful man who had been a sheriff in North Carolina and was unafraid to take physical action. The stage company was failing financially and would lose all its properties to foreclosure within months. Hickok survived the encounter and went on to become one of the most famous figures of the American West, known as a deadly gunfighter and a Union scout during the war. He was killed in 1876 in Deadwood, Dakota Territory.
The shootout at Rock Creek, whether it was a desperate defense or a calculated killing, was the event that launched his reputation. The only eyewitness who was not part of the station staff, Monroe McCanles, carried the memory of his father’s death for the rest of his life.