Fairbury and the Fight at Rock Creek Station

Six miles southeast of Fairbury, Nebraska, a creek cuts through rolling prairie where, in the summer of eighteen sixty-one, a stockhand named James Butler Hickok shot and killed three men. That incident would be mythologized into the founding legend of one of the most famous gunfighters of the American West.

Rock Creek Station was established in eighteen fifty-seven by a settler named S. C. Glenn as a road ranch along the Oregon and California trail. It served emigrants heading west: a general store, blacksmith shop, stage stop, and eventually a Pony Express relay station on the route between Saint Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California. In eighteen sixty, a Texan named David McCanles bought the east ranch and began leasing it to the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company.

July twelfth, eighteen sixty-one. Hickok, then known as Duck Bill Hickok for an unusually wide upper lip, was working at the station. McCanles arrived with two companions to demand overdue payment on the lease. What followed is disputed in nearly every detail, but the result was not: Hickok shot and killed McCanles, and two of his companions were killed in the struggle as well. Hickok was wounded. He was tried for murder and acquitted, the court ruling the killings justified.

The legend that emerged around the incident, amplified by dime novels and frontier journalism over the following decades, bore almost no resemblance to what actually happened. Hickok was refashioned as a fearless lawman who had singlehandedly gunned down a gang of desperadoes. The real McCanles was a settler trying to collect a legitimate debt.

Fairbury itself was founded in eighteen sixty-nine, eight years after the shootout. Today the three-hundred-fifty-acre Rock Creek Station State Historical Park preserves the site with reconstructed buildings, interpretive exhibits, and trails through the original prairie. The Oregon Trail ruts are still visible from the path.