After Deadwood

The Coward Jack McCall was found innocent after jurors retired to the whores’ rooms for two hours of deliberation by an impromptu court in McDaniel's Theater made up of local miners and businessmen, causing the Black Hills Pioneer to editorialize:

"Should it ever be our misfortune to kill a man ... we would simply ask that our trial may take place in some of the mining camps of these hills."

McCall then fled town to Wyoming, where he bragged, at length, about the details of how he had killed Hickok in a fair gunfight. Unfortunately for McCall, however, the Wyoming authorities refused to recognize the result of McCall's first trial on the grounds of Deadwood having been in Indian Territory at the time and contended that McCall could legally be tried again.

Because Deadwood was an illegal settlement, with no legally constituted law enforcement or court system, the federal court in Yankton, D.T. declared that double jeopardy did not apply.

He was retried in Yankton, Dakota Territory, for Hickok's murder, and was hanged on March 1, 1877 at the age of 24. McCall was the first person to be executed by United States officials in Dakota Territory. After his execution it was determined that McCall had never even had a brother.