Deadwood started as a lawless city, and then evolved into an American memory that had a street address. A gulch of dead timber in the Black Hills was the name-giver to the place, yet this discovery of gold gave it a heartbeat–a name that is still clodding the pavements of its brick sidewalks.
The settlement grew in the 1870s on what the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868 had declared part of the Lakota territory. When an expedition headed by a man called George Armstrong Custer in 1874 found that the Black Hills had gold, what could be gained in a short time was too tempting to be checked by a sheet of paper. Deadwood was made a mining camp because it is such a place that a tent may turn overnight into a store-front and that the rules, social, legal, moral, had to be improvised as fast as the streets were swept out.
Such speed can be used to explain why vice came early and remained in sight. Dance halls, gambling, saloons, brothels flock the commercial strip and operators like Al Swearengen established their enterprises that thrived on the raw flow of new residents in the town. The Gem Theater, by Swearengen, was not to serve drama, but to sell drink, gamble and give sex; later reports have women being pressured and manipulated within his business, a fact that reminds that the so-called wildness in Deadwood was at times organized and imposed, rather than just spontaneous. The mythology of the town is inclined to emphasize men who swagger around, but it also relied equally on the more anonymous labor behind the scenes, washing clothes, cooking, cleaning up rooms, and operating the day-to-day machinery of a boomtown.
There was one violence that put Deadwood in the national consciousness. Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back in a poker game at the Saloon of Nuttall and Mann on August 2, 1876. One of the details which survived Hickok sitting back to the door–was a portion of the town warning bible, and was repeated every time Deadwood was mentioned as a place where luck might take either side the chair. His murderer, Jack McCall, was initially tried in a local miners court and again in federal court, a legal mishmash which was a mirror of Deadwood itself in its early, insecure days.
The tales are not terminated at the saloon door.
Deadwood also had the so-called largest Chinatown east of San Francisco of the late 1870s. Although the local histories document a high population of Chinese with up to 400 people comprising of women and children who lived in densely packed houses which preserved the language, food, and communal support, they were at their highest. Some were employed in laundries, too many that in 1880 when county job books were the order of the day, the occupation took the first place, and the rest operated restaurants, shops, distributing tea and herbs, even silk and the commonplace articles of miners and merchants. Archaeological excavations of the former Chinatown footprint have been carried out in efforts to salvage objects and traces of buildings which printed legend seldom takes the time to document, providing a more subdued history of work, living family-wise, and cultural continuity amid the noise of Deadwood.
Then fire made Deadwood count on itself. On September 26, 1879, town was gutted down in flames and the total number of buildings that were destroyed was in excess of 300. It is recounted that there was a horrible follow-up in which people were so much lamenting the loss by taking drinks and butting heads together that order was forgotten even among those who had valued saving face. But the reconstruction was soon forthcoming and the materials were different now, the shreds of sap-laden pine giving way to brick and stone and mortar so the subsequent Deadwood appeared a little more enduring, although the legend remained flammable.
Permanence was more difficult to the Chinese community. National policy, particularly, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 limited immigration and family formation, and mining economic changes minimized opportunity. By 1900, there were only 73 Chinese, and by the first part of the 20 th century the enclave had subdued to mere remains, including artifacts, foundations, and names such as Fee Lee Wong, which complicate the standard gunmen-madame list.
The most celebrated residents of Deadwood are now resting upon a hill-slope at Mount Moriah the names of Hickok, Calamity Jane, of Seth Bullock–and the town proper bears another type of official sign. Later preservation regulations aided in protecting the remaining facades as Deadwood was declared a National Historic Landmark District in 1961. The boom passed, the gold became scarce, and the myths went on beyond either, embedded in the ground like tombstones, like renewed townships, and the hard-to-quell human need to transform an unsightly camp into a legend worth repeating.
