True West Magazine
Phil Coe
Have fun trailing the Lone Star outlaw from Texas to Kansas.
Charles E. Rankin, retired editor of the University of Oklahoma Press and astute historian of key figures of the Old West, posed a question a while back when we were having lunch and discussing James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok.
“What the hell was Phil Coe thinking?”
We agreed on the answer.
“He wasn’t.”
John Wesley Hardin
Coe’s decision to try to gun down Hickok on October 5, 1871, in Abilene, Kansas, might not have been the wisest choice for a 32-year-old, but it turned out to be a pretty good career move.