This evocative historical image captures an intimate moment of grief and loyalty from the American Wild West. Taken in 1877 in the gold rush town of Deadwood, Dakota Territory, it shows Charles “Colorado Charlie” Utter (seated, right) and Arapaho Joe (standing, left) posing beside the original gravesite of the legendary gunfighter, lawman, and gambler, James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok.
Just a year prior, on August 2, 1876, Wild Bill Hickok was brutally murdered. While playing a game of poker at Nuttall & Mann’s Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, a gambler named Jack McCall walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head. When he was killed, Hickok was holding a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights, a combination ever since immortalized in folklore as the “Dead Man’s Hand.”
Colorado Charlie Utter, a flamboyant frontier dandy, trapper, and close partner who had traveled to Deadwood in the same wagon train as Hickok, stepped up to claim his friend’s body and oversee a dignified funeral. Hickok was initially laid to rest at the rugged Ingleside Cemetery. Utter paid for and placed the custom wooden headstone seen in this photograph. The handwritten epitaph clearly legible on the marker reads:
“Wild Bill, J. B. Hickock killed by the assassin Jack McCall in Deadwood, Black Hills, August 2, 1876.Pard, we will meet again in the happy hunting ground to part no more.Good bye, Colorado CharlieC. H. Utter.”
The site pictured above was not Wild Bill’s final resting place. By 1879, Deadwood’s rapid housing boom began encroaching on Ingleside Cemetery. Utter had Hickok’s remains exhumed and moved higher up the mountain to the newly established Mount Moriah Cemetery. When they opened the original coffin during the transfer, witnesses were astonished to find that Hickok’s body was remarkably well-preserved and had practically mummified due to the unique chemical composition of the local soil. The original wooden marker from this photograph was relocated to Mount Moriah but was eventually chipped away to nothing by aggressive souvenir hunters.
Today, Hickok rests at Mount Moriah under a bronze monument, where he is famously flanked by the graves of frontierswoman Calamity Jane and prospector Potato Creek Johnny.






























