John Dykes gambled away everything he had, then slid from pickpocketing into armed robbery on the road between Mile End and Bow. When he held up Charles Wright at gunpoint, his haul amounted to a penknife, a seal, and five shillings and eightpence, hardly a fortune worth a man’s neck.
He was convicted at Newgate and hanged on this day in 1721, just 23 years old, the end of a fall from gambling debts to the gallows that had taken only a few short years.
James Butler Hickok, known as Wild Bill Hickok, was shot and killed on August 2, 1876, while playing poker at a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. The killer was Jack McCall, an unsuccessful gambler who approached from behind and fired a single shot. Hickok, 39, had built a formidable reputation as a frontier lawman, Union army scout, marksman, and showman, though much of his legend rested on exaggeration, including his own.
The cards Hickok held at the moment of his death, two pairs of black aces and eights, passed into folklore as the dead man’s hand. McCall was initially acquitted but later retried, convicted, and hanged. Hickok remains one of the most mythologised figures of the American Old West.
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