"Wild Bill" Hickok, a famous gunman, was shot in the back of the head at Deadwood on August 2, 1876, by Jack McCall. McCall was tried for murder at Yankton on December 4-5-6, found guilty, and sentenced by Judge Peter C. Shannon on January 3, 1877. Throughout the trial, sentencing, rejection of his appeal, and at the scaffold, he was reported to show a bold, careless, and unshaken demeanor, refusing the ministrations of two Protestant ministers but accepting 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 looked over the crowd without faltering, and as Marshal Burdick adjusted the noose he said, "draw it tighter Marshal." He had destroyed a written statement made two days earlier, 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.