This Red-Handed Wretch:
Bill
Hickman and The Murder of Richard Yates
by Ben
Boulden
In the dying minutes of
October 18, 1857, the notorious lawman, lawyer, and admitted murderer, William
Adams Hickman – labeled, “this red-handed wretch,” by the New York World
and popularly known as Wild Bill – “used up” the mountaineer Richard E.
Yates. The Mormon militia, called the Nauvoo Legion, had arrested Yates on a
charge of spying for the approaching U.S. Army during the Utah War. Hickman
claimed Yates’s killing had been ordered by Mormon prophet Brigham Young. A
claim contradicted by the men Hickman implicated in Yates’s murder, and by
Mormon historians ever since, but the conditions in Utah at the time, gives a
ring of possibility to Hickman’s claim anyway. ...
