This Red-Handed Wretch: Bill Hickman and the Murder of Richard Yates

 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. ...

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