“Hanging of Jack McCall”

March 1, 1877

‘Wild Bill’ Hickock, famous gunman, was shot in the back of the head at Deadwood on August 2, 1876 by Jack McCall, who was tried for murder at Yankton on 4-5-6 December, found guilty, sentenced by Judge Peter C. Shannon on January 3, 1877. The story of the trial is to be seen on a marker at the site in Yankton.

Throughout the trial, the sentencing, the rejection of his appeal and on the scaffold he exhibited a demeanor best told by the reportorial words: ‘He put on a bold front and careless air’ – ‘the prisoner seemed least moved of all present’ – at the sentencing ‘he evinced no shrinking’ and was ‘more exuberant than his fellow prisoners’ when his appeal failed. He refused the ministrations of two Protestant ministers but accepted Father Daxacher.

Followed by every vehicle in town and hundreds on horseback, out Broadway to the school section two miles North to the gallows a few rods east of here, ‘he gazed out over the throng without exhibiting the least faltering or even a quiver of the lips’ and as Marshall Burdick adjusted the noose he said, ‘draw it tight Marshal’. He had destroyed a written statement he had made two days before but admitted to the Marshal that he was the Jack McCall, the brother of a girl, who had written the Marshal from Louisville.

The trap was sprung at 10:10 and he was dead ten minutes later, an unrepentant murderer of a man who had done him no wrong.

Yankton County, on Hwy 50 on north edge of town (1988)