Jul 3, 2026 · 1 hr 34 min · 12 segments
Join us today as we discuss the Wild Bill Hickok & Davis Tutt shootout and what really happened on the square in Springfield, MO on that day in 1865 that launched a thousand legends in the history of…
Brandon BroughtonGuest
Champ HerrenHostMichael PriceGuest
Well, the legend of Wild Bill Hickok is something that has been central to sort of the folkloric identity of Springfield and the Ozarks for really well over a century.
Because a lot of the facts about this shootout and the events that occurred immediately before and after it had kind of gone unquestioned for quite some time.
To commemorate the 160th anniversary of the shootout, the local history and genealogy department decided to take on some programming and to make some material related to the shootout.
Former local history associate Claire Porter was tasked with creating a map that reconstructed the events of the shootout.
And she wasn't from Springfield originally, so she wasn't intimately familiar with the details.
And so she went to the period records, which in this instance were court testimony, or sorry, I should say coroner's testimony.
from immediately after the shootout that had recently, and by recently I mean in the 1990s, been rediscovered by archivist Robert Newman.
He works for the Greene County Archives and Records Center, and he discovered some court proceedings, but the important thing for us is the coroner's report in 1997.
So Claire has access to these coroner's reports, and she's cross-referencing them with period newspapers from 1865 that are accessible through newspapers.com. She's looking at advertisements for different structures downtown on South Street on the square just to get a sense of where everything is.
And so by cross-referencing this coroner report testimony with these period advertisements, she is able to reconstruct essentially a map of the shootout, where Hickok stood, where Tutte stood, and where they moved.
Of course, eyewitness testimony is famously unreliable, so there is some variation between the witnesses, but there is a general consensus that she was able to construct from that.
A couple of days later, myself and our department manager, Brian Grubbs, are looking over this map, and we see that she's placed Wild Bill Hickok on the southwest corner of the square.
There's been a marker there for nearly 50 years placing him there, and that enables him to take that famous 75-yard shot at Davis Tut from across the square.
Well, the legend of Wild Bill Hickok is something that has been central to sort of the folkloric identity of Springfield and the Ozarks for really well over a century.
Because a lot of the facts about this shootout and the events that occurred immediately before and after it had kind of gone unquestioned for quite some time.
To commemorate the 160th anniversary of the shootout, the local history and genealogy department decided to take on some programming and to make some material related to the shootout.
Former local history associate Claire Porter was tasked with creating a map that reconstructed the events of the shootout.
And she wasn't from Springfield originally, so she wasn't intimately familiar with the details.
And so she went to the period records, which in this instance were court testimony, or sorry, I should say coroner's testimony.
from immediately after the shootout that had recently, and by recently I mean in the 1990s, been rediscovered by archivist Robert Newman.
He works for the Greene County Archives and Records Center, and he discovered some court proceedings, but the important thing for us is the coroner's report in 1997.
So Claire has access to these coroner's reports, and she's cross-referencing them with period newspapers from 1865 that are accessible through newspapers.com. She's looking at advertisements for different structures downtown on South Street on the square just to get a sense of where everything is.
And so by cross-referencing this coroner report testimony with these period advertisements, she is able to reconstruct essentially a map of the shootout, where Hickok stood, where Tutte stood, and where they moved.
Of course, eyewitness testimony is famously unreliable, so there is some variation between the witnesses, but there is a general consensus that she was able to construct from that.
A couple of days later, myself and our department manager, Brian Grubbs, are looking over this map, and we see that she's placed Wild Bill Hickok on the southwest corner of the square.
There's been a marker there for nearly 50 years placing him there, and that enables him to take that famous 75-yard shot at Davis Tut from across the square.
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