History in towns: Deadwood, South Dakota

Magazine Antiques, July, 2004 by William Nathaniel Banks

The town of Deadwood is cradled in a narrow gulch between pine-covered bluffs in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Main Street (see Pl. III), the principal commercial thoroughfare, snakes down the ravine cut by the Whitewood and Deadwood creeks. Overlooking it are the residential streets that were carved from the precipitous slopes. Forest Hill on the west and Ingleside on the east. Crowning the eastern slope is Mount Moriah Cemetery where James Butler Hickok, better known as Wild Bill Hickok (Pl. I), and Martha Jane Cannary Burke, whose sobriquet is Calamity Jane (Fig. 1), are buried (see Pl. II).

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Wild Bill is the local hero, but it was Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) who was inadvertently responsible for the creation of Deadwood. In the summer of 1874, he led ten companies of cavalry and two of infantry into the Black Hills, then part of the Great Sioux Reservation, to find a site for a military post. When his men discovered gold in the creeks that course through the hills, Custer reported to the adjutant general of the Dakota Territory that "gold was obtained in numerous localities." (1)

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Custer's report triggered a gold rush. As news of plentiful gold deposits spread across the nation, easterners impoverished by the financial panic of 1873 and midwestern farmers suffering from a devastating drought, as well as frontiersmen and veteran prospectors, began pouring into the Black Hills. The Sioux understandably resented the invasion of their territory, and the United States Army made largely ineffectual efforts to deter the horde of gold seekers. During the first year of the gold rush, makeshift settlements materialized along many of the creeks in the hills, but by early 1876 the richer deposits in Deadwood gulch lured most of the prospectors there. Indeed, it is estimated that by summer the population of the previously uninhabited gulch was between five and ten thousand. (2) These pioneer prospectors practiced surface mining, obtaining gold from the alluvial deposits called placers. Their essential equipment included pick and shovel, a pan for separating gold particles from gravel and sand, rubber hip boots, and a strong back.

Most of the miners lived in canvas tents, some of them large enough to accommodate several men, and there were a few log cabins. Wood was abundant, and, after a sawmill was established in Deadwood in 1876, the commercial buildings--stores, hotels, saloons, and domiciles for compliant ladies--were frame structures with wood sides and shingle roofs. The gable ends faced the street, and some of them had false fronts and wooden canopies over the sidewalk (see Fig. 2). The Ladies' Illustrated Newspaper described Deadwood as "a city of a single street.... The buildings which grace its sides are a curiosity in modern architecture, and their light construction is a standing insult to every wind that blows." (3)

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When Wild Bill Hickok arrived in Deadwood in the summer of 1876 with several disreputable companions, possibly including Calamity Jane, he was a national celebrity. His exploits had been lauded, if exaggerated, by the journalist Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) in dispatches to the New York Herald. (4) Hickok's friend Lieutenant Colonel Custer rhapsodized that he was "the most famous scout on the Plains. Whether on foot or on horseback, he was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw." (5) According to Custer, Hickok always carried two handsome ivory-handled revolvers, and Custer was especially impressed that on one occasion, after dispatching a miscreant in a duel, Hickok paid for his funeral. "What could be more thoughtful than this?," Custer asked, "Not only to send a fellow mortal out of the world, but to pay the expenses of the transit." (6) Estimates of the number of adversaries Hickok killed as a Union soldier, Army scout, and United States marshal range from fifteen (not counting Confederate soldiers or Indians) to seventy-five.

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Calamity Jane was also a well-known character when she lurched into Deadwood wearing buckskin trousers and a fringed jacket in the summer of 1876. Lewd, alcoholic, and rambunctious, she was a terror around the mining towns and military forts on the western plains. (7) Few of the stories told about her are verifiable, least of all those she told herself in a seven-page pamphlet published a few years before her death. Describing the murder of Wild Bill Hickok she wrote:

On the 2nd of August, while setting at a gambling table ... he was shot
in the back of the head by the notorious Jack McCall [c. 1851-1877], a
desperado.... I at once started to look for the assassian [sic] and
found him at Shurdy's butcher shop and grabbed a meat cleaver and made
him throw up his hands. (8)

Only the fact of Wild Bill's murder in 1876 is accurate. He was indeed shot by McCall while playing poker in a Deadwood saloon (see Pl. IV), holding what is known as a deadman's hand--aces and eights. However, McCall was hardly a notorious desperado and his motive for the killing is unknown. McCall was captured, though not by Calamity Jane, tried in Deadwood by a makeshift court, and acquitted because he falsely claimed that Wild Bill had killed his brother. A few months later, when he drunkenly bragged about the feat, he was arrested, tried again, and hung on March 1, 1877.