The Standoff

The street showdown is mostly an invention of novels and film, but one is well documented. A few minutes before six on the evening of July 21, 1865, James Butler Hickok and Davis Tutt faced each other across the public square in Springfield, Missouri. The quarrel was over a gambling debt and a Waltham pocket watch Tutt had taken as collateral.

They were about seventy-five yards apart. Each fired once, at nearly the same moment. Tutt missed. Hickok's bullet hit him in the side, and Tutt died there. A jury acquitted Hickok, and in 1867 a Harper's profile titled "Wild Bill" made him famous.

This painting holds the moment before anyone moves. The nearer man stands at the left edge, half turned away, in a black hat with a red bandana at his neck and a revolver at his hip. The other waits far down the street on the right, small and dark against the glare. Between them a dust devil twists up out of the road into a pale sky.

False-front buildings with balconies line both sides and fade into haze. The whole picture is cream, tan and black, laid on in thick, cracked strokes, and the bandana is the only real color in it.