The ead man's hand is a two-pair poker hand, namely "aces and eights." The hand gets its name from the legend of it having been the five-card-draw hand held by Wild Bill Hickok at the time of his murder (August 2, 1876). It is accepted that the hand included the aces and eights of both of the black suits although his biographer, Joseph Rosa, says no contemporary citation for his hand has ever been found but the "accepted version is that the cards were the ace of spades, the ace of clubs, two black eights (clubs and spades), and either the jack of diamonds or the queen of diamonds as the "kicker". The term, before the murder of Hickok, referred to a variety of hands. The earliest found reference to a "dead man's hand" is 1886, where it was described as "three jacks and a pair of tens."