Short answer: today the dead man's hand is two black aces and two black eights, the hand Wild Bill Hickok supposedly held when he was shot at a poker table in 1876. There is no proof of that: the connection first appears in 1926, fifty years later.
What is the dead man's hand in poker?
The dead man's hand is the hand that gunfighter and gambler James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok is said to have held at the moment he died: aces and eights, in spades and clubs. Poker players still call aces and eights the dead man's hand today.
The murder in Deadwood
On August 2, 1876, Wild Bill Hickok was shot from behind in a saloon in Deadwood. He was sitting at a poker table with his back to the door, something he had avoided his whole life and could not manage on that particular day.
Ever since, supposedly everyone knows which cards he held. Except that not one single source from 1876 names his cards. No newspaper, no court record, no eyewitness. In a room full of people, at one of the most heavily documented deaths in the American West, nobody wrote down what was lying on the table.
Why is it called the dead man's hand?
The link between Hickok and aces and eights first surfaces in 1926, in a Hickok biography by Frank Wilstach. He relied on a correspondence with the barber who had prepared the body. A single witness, half a century later, secondhand.
The dead man's hand before Hickok
More interesting still is what the term meant before that, because it was already taken, just with different cards:
- In 1886 an American newspaper describes the dead man's hand as three jacks and two tens.
- In 1898 it is jacks and eights.
- In 1900 it is tens and treys.
- Even the 1907 edition of Hoyle's Games still lists jacks and eights.
Aces and eights do circulate from around 1900 onward, but without any connection to Hickok. So Wilstach did not invent the combination. He was the first to tie it to Hickok, and that was enough.
What was the fifth card?
Suits and the fifth card are pure invention, and fairly industrious invention at that. Depending on the source, the fifth card is the queen of hearts, the queen of clubs, the two of spades or the jack of diamonds.
What is actually documented
The killer was named Jack McCall. An improvised miners' court in Deadwood acquitted him; he was charged again in Yankton and hanged on March 1, 1877. That is the only part of this story that is documented without a gap.
By the way: when Benny Binion founded the Poker Hall of Fame in 1979, Wild Bill Hickok was one of the first seven members, famous chiefly for having been shot at a poker table.
Sources in the book: Wikipedia, "Dead man's hand", on the earlier meanings and the absence of any contemporaneous source; PokerNews, "The Long, Strange Life of the Dead Man's Hand". In the book this chapter carries the label "Disputed": two versions, one argument.