Gold, Guns, And Greed: The True Story Of Deadwood

Historian Peter Cozzens, author of Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West, joins Cowboys & Indians’ Writing the West podcast to discuss the real Deadwood beyond the HBO drama and dime novel myths. From the Lakota’s struggle to the town’s fleeting three-year heyday, Cozzens offers a vivid look at the forces—lawlessness, entrepreneurship, and greed—that defined one of the West’s most iconic places.

Transcript

C&I: You’ve written extensively about the Civil War and the Indian Wars. What drew you to Deadwood for your latest book?

Peter Cozzens: Well, after my last book, my editor was encouraging me to return to the West, and I didn't need much encouragement. I wanted to return to the West as well, and I've always been a big fan of the HBO Series Deadwood, and I watched it and rewatched it and was always contemplating, well, how accurate was this? How much did it reflect the real Deadwood? I had that in the back of my mind, and a good friend of mine, Tom Clavin—I don’t know if you know him—wrote very successful books on Dodge City and Tombstone as well. And I thought, well, it looks like there's an interest in Wild West towns, and we still have one of the triumvirate of what I consider to be the real iconic Wild West towns remaining. So, I decided on Deadwood.

C&I: Did your previous work on the Plains Indian Wars give you a different perspective on the Black Hills Gold Rush?

Cozzens: Yeah, I think so. It definitely did. It made me more acutely aware of the Lakota's plight and just how great the injustice was that was done to them—in terms of, for lack of a better word, robbing them of the Black Hills. I approached it with greater sympathy toward the Lakota than I think I otherwise would've. If I had just jumped into the book cold, I would have been focused much more on the whites and perhaps downplayed the events leading up to the settlement of Deadwood and then the subsequent extermination of Lakota title to the Black Hills. It  was very important in my writing what I hope was a balanced book that reflects the Lakota perspective on things.

C&I: You note in the prologue that gold discoveries and the federal government’s actions set the stage for the Great Sioux War. How so?

Cozzens: Sure. There wouldn't have been a Great Sioux War had there not been gold discoveries and illegal white settlement in the Black Hills. The Black Hills were part of the Great Sioux Reservation that had been set aside in 1868 by the federal government for the exclusive use of the Lakota in perpetuity. And by the end of 1875, early 1876, it was clear that one, the Lakota were not going to surrender the Black Hills voluntarily, in part because the so-called roving bands of Lakota—the Lakota under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull most notably—were putting intense pressure on the reservation chiefs like Red Cloud not to surrender the Black Hills for religious reasons and for economic reasons. The Black Hills were a great source of foodstuffs and other supplies to the Lakota.  

It was clear that the government tried to negotiate, tried to buy the Black Hills at a ridiculously low price as they did with everything else when they were buying from the Indians, and the situation had reached an impasse. The Lakota weren't going to sell. The whites clearly were not going to leave the Black Hills voluntarily. The Army had tried but could not expel them from the Black Hills. Grant got together a cabal of like-minded people from the government and really planned provocations against the Lakota that would lead to a war that he hoped would then result in the defeat of the roving bands and thus make the reservation chiefs more pliable and amenable to parting with the Black Hills.

C&I: So, the government essentially saw war as the fastest way to seize the Black Hills?

Cozzens: Absolutely. It was unprovoked. There was no excuse for it other than the sheer greed and the desire to rob the Lakota of the Black Hills.

C&I: Once Deadwood was established, was there any Lakota presence or involvement?

Cozzens: Once Deadwood was established in early 1876, the Lakota were already pretty well occupied with fighting the Army, and there were occasional raiding parties in the Black Hills, and they were sufficiently strong in 1876, and they were led by Crazy Horse. This was after the Little Bighorn when the Indian bands who had combined to fight there were breaking up, and Crazy Horse led a number of raids in the Black Hills that caused people in Deadwood to actually fear for the town's very survival. That fear was exaggerated. The Lakota never penetrated the Black Hills in sufficient numbers to pose an existential threat to Deadwood, but obviously the people in Deadwood didn't know that. And so, there was a real uproar for a time in Deadwood over the Lakota threat, both in 1876 and also in 1877 when the final roving bands were defeated as they broke up. Some of those warriors also penetrated the Black Hills and came pretty close to the vicinity of Deadwood and once again threw the town into a scare.

C&I: Deadwood was never part of a U.S. territory, which made it a true outlaw town. How did that legal vacuum shape its legacy?

Cozzens: Oh, a great deal. One of the things that actually surprised me is, as you say, Deadwood from its founding—the first prospectors arrived in December 1875, January 1876—until March 1877 when the Lakota were officially stripped of the Black Hills, was an outlaw town. It literally was not subject to any federal or territorial or state laws. It was out there on its own. And one of the things that I found surprising was not that there was a great deal of lawlessness, but rather how anxious the better part of Deadwood's population was to establish a rule of law, how they kind of floundered about trying to do this, but their desire to do that and do it quickly in a vacuum made Deadwood unique. And it really impressed me that, hey, people in the Wild West, the great majority didn't necessarily want it to be wild. They wanted it to be orderly so they could get about their business—in this case, prospecting for gold—as quickly as possible. And that's one of the enduring legacies of Deadwood, I think, is that this outlaw town did not avail itself of its outlaw status to become a complete hell-raising mess as it's portrayed sometimes like in the show Deadwood. There was enough of that to make the book exciting, but the struggle between the lawless elements and the majority who wanted law and order makes for a really fascinating story.

C&I: Beyond the desire for law and order, what misconceptions about Deadwood did you uncover?

Cozzens: One was the extent of the violence. The HBO series, which I love—I mean it's a great and gritty series and it's what propelled me to write this book—but there was a lot of corrective history necessary from that and from the dime novels that circulated at the time. Deadwood was the subject of dozens and dozens of these so-called dime novels, which were a popular form of written entertainment for those back East. And there was a character named Deadwood Dick, and the books dealt with his supposed exploits in the Black Hills. And if you believe the HBO series and the Deadwood Dick series and also a lot of the Eastern press of the time, there was a killing a day in Deadwood, and you couldn't walk the streets without a bullet flying by you. That wasn't the case. Again, there was enough violence to make an exciting story, but that wasn't the case. Most people could go about their business. 

So that's one of the misconceptions that I tried to lay to rest in the book. Also, there's the conception that miners worked against one another and that it was a free-for-all, and it really wasn't. The miners did establish mining laws among themselves. There was order and respect for one another's claims, which I found really interesting too, considering the vast wealth there was to be had. And a lot of the correctives in the book deal with individual characters like Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok, and then for those who know a little more about Deadwood's history or watch the series, people like Al Swearingen, the pimp saloon keeper, or Sheriff Seth Bullock or the merchant Sol Star. There were a lot of correctives that needed to be applied when I was talking about their characters.

C&I: Your book opens with the death of Wild Bill Hickok. Why begin there?

Cozzens: I don't think I need to apply a spoiler alert, but I decided to start with Hickok because I mean, he, I think, is the first character that comes to mind when people think about Deadwood. And so, what I did was the method I used, the guy that Jack McCall used a defective revolver. I mean, it was an old Colt Navy .36. And in fact, after he killed Hickok, he tried to empty the other five cylinders into the crowd in the saloon, and they all misfired. I start off with McCall waking up in the morning on the fateful day of August 2, 1876, getting ready to go into town, going into the Number 10 Saloon, sitting down to begin playing cards, McCall approaching from behind, and I talk about the unreliability of the Navy .36 and how it was so prone to misfire. And the episode ends with McCall pulling a trigger. And if you can suspend your knowledge of history, suspend disbelief, you don't know what happens. He pulls a trigger and then I pull away from that scene and then I readdress it again a little differently in terms of the narrative in the proper place in the book. It just seemed like the ideal tense way to start the book.

C&I: Many figures—Hickok, Calamity Jane, Al Swearingen, George Hearst—loom large in Deadwood’s story. Did your research reveal anything surprising about them?

Cozzens: Oh, we could spend the next hour on that. I'll highlight a few, and this partly will be in the context of the HBO series because that's kind of inevitable. George Hearst, the mining king who came into Deadwood in 1877 and began buying up mining properties, eventually consolidated them in the great Homestake Mine that became one of the richest gold mines in history. He's portrayed in the series as being this ruthless son of a bitch who would kill or do anything necessary to obtain the mines. And in reality, it wasn't like that. He was a very shrewd businessman. He was actually well liked by most people in Deadwood because they appreciated the outside capital, the California capital that was coming into Deadwood, that was necessary really to propel the town forward and to ensure its prosperity after these placer mines—which were the simple mines where you're prospecting for gold on or near the surface—were going to be exhausted inevitably and probably sooner rather than later. 

So, Deadwood's city fathers were actively seeking out capital from California and from the East, so they welcomed Hearst. And his method of acquiring mines was not to bring in a bunch of vigilantes or gunmen, but rather to sue the owners in court, because the claims were very shaky and a lot of the original claims were made before Deadwood was subject to federal or territorial law. They were very shaky. Basically, he offered fair prices for the mines, and when miners refused him, he took them to court, and he had this array of rich, expensive California lawyers that ran roughshod over the miners. That's how he acquired his mines. Other characters, Al Swearingen, who was one of the two principal characters in Deadwood, was portrayed fairly accurately as this real mean-spirited, underhanded saloon keeper, pimp, very violent. And actually, in real life he was all that and more. I mean, he was even worse. He was married and he involved his wife in soliciting prostitutes and encouraging or tricking girls from Chicago and elsewhere into prostitution in Deadwood. He had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane—we could go on forever about the misconceptions that I tried to correct about them. I'll leave it to the reader to read the book and come away with a clearer picture of Hickok and Calamity Jane, both of whom, not to say, were through the media at the time, through dime novels, blown into something that they never were. 

Seth Bullock, the other principal character of the series who was sheriff of the town for a time and one of the leading forces for law and order, was probably my favorite character that emerged from the book. He was a real stand-up guy, and unlike in the series, he never had an affair, never cheated on his wife. On the contrary, his wife was a real powerhouse herself. When she came to Deadwood, she established the first choral group, established the first public library. She was a real dynamo herself, and they were a real love match from teenage days. So, there was none of this marriage of convenience and cheating that you have in the series. And one last guy I'll mention, I think really gets a bad rap. That's E. B. Farnum. If you've seen the series, E. B. Farnum, he was not a hotel owner as he's portrayed in the series. He's portrayed as kind of a lackey of Al Swearingen, almost kind of like a Gollum character from Lord of the Rings, kind of sleazy, willing to do anything underhanded and necessary. On the contrary, there was a reason why he was elected the first mayor of Deadwood. He had been an officer in the Civil War. He was one of the first to bring his family to Deadwood. He was married, had children, was a really sharp entrepreneur. He bought up a lot of the original town sites when they first went up for sale, including the site that Sol Star and Seth Bullock eventually established their store on. He built the first road in the Black Hills, raising capital from other businessmen in Deadwood. He was a real good guy. And so, I really think, if nothing else, I hope I've done justice to him.

C&I: You also highlight lesser-known groups in Deadwood—Chinese merchants, Black entrepreneurs, even stagecoach robbers. What roles did they play?

Cozzens: Right. Deadwood had a Chinatown, a Chinese population that fluctuated, probably was around 200 to 250 during most of the time about which I write. But they played an outsized role in the town in many ways. Most of the Chinese who settled in Deadwood spoke at least some English. They had been in the West for a good many years. Many of them had worked on the railroad, many of them came from California. So, with the exception of maybe some of the Chinese prostitutes, very few were new to the United States. They participated in Deadwood's social life. They made a point to do so. For instance, one year, I think it was 1877, maybe 1878, when the town was short of funds for the Fourth of July celebrations, the Chinese stepped forward and made up the difference. The leading Chinese merchant in Deadwood, a fellow named Wong Fong Lee, spoke fluent English, was one of the original settlers of Deadwood, and was extremely well respected by everybody in town and helped bridge the gap between the Chinese and townspeople. And while in the larger West you had calls for the expulsion of the Chinese—from California, from Washington, from different parts of the West, violence against Chinese—there was none of that in Deadwood. 

And in fact, the Chinese, where in many parts of the West they were prohibited from owning property, were free to own property in Deadwood, and Wong Fong Lee owned his store. There was a woman, a very high-class courtesan, who owned three houses and another property. And Sol Star, the well-known merchant who eventually became several-term mayor of Deadwood, worked with the Chinese to help them establish title to property. It helped that a lot of the Chinese were Masons, so you had a tie between many in the Masonic order among the whites and also among the Chinese. So, there were a lot of ties that bound them together. And I think that was really fascinating. The Black population, which you alluded to, was never very large in Deadwood, about maybe 50 to 75 people. But again, there was very little racial prejudice in Deadwood. There was a real live-and-let-live climate in Deadwood, in which the Chinese and Blacks could flourish. Now, I say that with a caveat: both generally took jobs that didn't threaten the white population, like housekeeping, laundry, hotel stewards, things like that. But there were Chinese doctors. There was a Black doctor. One of the leading milk deliverers and owners of a dairy in Deadwood was Black. 

There was, I say, a real live-and-let-live environment in the town. The stagecoach robbers, you mentioned that. I devote an entire chapter to that. That was really something. The stagecoach line between Deadwood and Cheyenne, Wyoming—which was the largest town near Deadwood and a source of much supply to Deadwood, and also a jumping-off point for most people on their way to Deadwood—was subject, it's hard to quantify, but as best I could, I think it was subject to more robberies than any other stage line in the West. And during a very short period of a couple of years, it was a real fascinating phenomenon, and I encourage people to read that in my book. But one of the things that surprised me about the stagecoach robbers was how averse they were to violence and really how polite and gentlemanly, relatively speaking, a lot of them were. I mean, they knew that if they shot somebody, they faced the possibility of hanging, whereas if you were just arrested for stagecoach robbery, you might get five to seven years in the state penitentiary, but not much more than that. 

It was a cost-risk analysis going on there. But oftentimes when they stopped the stage and there was no gold from the mines or any money worth taking, they wouldn't necessarily search the passengers. They oftentimes would return things from the passengers that they had half a mind to take. They would joke around with passengers, pass whiskey or foodstuffs among them. And it got to the point where, when you were coming to or leaving Deadwood—mostly leaving—you expected to be held up. 

People took steps to mitigate against losing anything. Instead of taking cash, they would take bank drafts. Women would hide their jewelry inside their clothing. And it got to be a routine—okay, it's time for the stagecoach robbery. It's part of our journey from Deadwood, something exciting to tell the family. But there was enough violence, again, to make it interesting. There was one robbery called the robbery of the Treasure Coach that turned into a very violent affair. In fact, there was a movie, The War Wagon starring John Wayne, which was based on the Treasure Coach. And that's a whole chapter in the book, and that's the exception to the rule of the stagecoach robbery. That was a real violent affair.

C&I: Deadwood’s heyday lasted only about three years. What made it extraordinary, and why did it fade so quickly?

Cozzens: I read in countless letters from people who lived in Deadwood comments on the sense, the feeling, that time was accelerated, as if they were living in a motion picture. Those who wrote subsequently after movies were invented felt like they were living in a motion picture, that things were just happening so fast. You went, within a period of maybe the first five or six months of its existence, from one tent and a cabin to several hundred false-front buildings. Everything was accelerated. What ultimately led to its demise—partly the principal reason for the rootin’-tootin’ rough character of the town—was the placer mining, the easy-to-access gold that was in the streams or close to the surface all around Deadwood. And when the placer mining started to wind down, when the placer mines started playing out in 1879, just three years after the town's foundation, a lot of these characters who had made for a colorful Deadwood moved on to other placer mining places, newer placer mining places like Leadville, Colorado. And there was already a sense in Deadwood that our pioneer days, so to speak, were passing. And then in the fall of 1879, you had a great fire, and all mining towns inevitably had a fire at one time or another because they were constructed almost entirely of wood, so they were just giant fire hazards. 

I devoted a chapter to the Great Fire of Deadwood, which was really a pretty vivid affair. Deadwood rebuilt and it rebuilt pretty quickly, but a fair number of people abandoned Deadwood after the fire. But clearly, the fire occurred just as the placer mines were playing out, as people were starting to leave Deadwood. And as George Hearst and the big Homestake Mine and other large quartz mines were asserting themselves, the atmosphere was changing—from the Wild West environment toward a more orderly, settled, business-like environment, a big industry. And in fact, people in Deadwood recognized that, because in 1881 one of the newspapers started a series of recollections of pioneer days. 

By 1880, just four years after the town's founding, its inhabitants realized that something, maybe something precious, had already passed, and they wanted to preserve it in print. They recognized that there was a profound transition occurring in Deadwood. It seemed like the logical place to end the story, because Deadwood was no longer the queen of Wild West towns that it had been for those three and a half years.

C&I: How did you sift through myths from dime novels and the HBO series to uncover the real story?

Cozzens: One of the primary sources in my book were the newspapers of Deadwood. I was fortunate that Deadwood at one time had three viable newspapers going, three daily newspapers. And I read every single issue of every single one of those papers for the time in question—maybe not every column, but I perused every issue. I could see the town unfolding from the beginning, all the way through this period. Those were wonderful sources. Also, newspapers from all across the country, because a lot of the people who settled Deadwood would write to hometown newspapers about their experiences. And they were generally factual, matter-of-fact letters about what was really happening in Deadwood. 

I have maybe 125, at least 100, newspapers that I drew on for primary source material on Deadwood. And there are a number of manuscript collections that helped. The greatest find was the Seth Bullock collection. Yale University, during the early days of COVID, purchased Seth Bullock's papers. And I was the first person to ever use those in telling the story of Deadwood. And they were a treasure trove—everything from official correspondence while he was sheriff, to letters between him and Sol Star, to his personal correspondence with others, to correspondence dealing with political shenanigans that he was involved in with the governor of Dakota Territory. Just a treasure trove of material. And that really helped shape a lot of the narrative. I even found in those papers the complete inventory of what was inside Al Swearingen's Gem Saloon—from the number of chairs, number of tables, number of chandeliers. I could recreate these places exactly as they were. It was fascinating stuff.

C&I: With so much material, how did you decide what to include and what to leave out?

Cozzens: I ended up probably winnowing down about maybe 25–30 percent of the research material, largely because a lot of it was redundant. But fortunately, because I was focused on a relatively short period of time, even though it was a tremendously eventful period, I didn't—and I should caveat that by saying the book opens with the Wild Bill Hickok episode, but Chapter One begins with the Lakota still in possession of the Black Hills, moves through Custer's Black Hills gold expedition. The book really covers a period from the 1860s to 1879. But the concentration, of course, is on those three and a half years, because the main action of the book occurred during a compressed period of time. It wasn't necessary to jettison as much material as it would be if I were covering a larger chronological period.

C&I: Your book is rich in sensory detail—you can almost smell the whiskey and gun smoke. Was that intentional?

Cozzens: Exceedingly important. I really wanted to engage all the reader's senses. Fortunately, I had sources that talked about the filth in the streets, the awful smell, the animal manure, human excrement that got stuck in drains. People would complain about it constantly, about the horrible smells that were arising from Deadwood's streets. And I wanted, again, to engage all the senses, and the olfactory sense is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful sense. I thought: I have the material, I'm going to engage that sense, I'm going to make the reader feel like they're walking the sloppy streets of Deadwood, put them right in the middle of it. And I also tried, along that line, to deal with classes of people—like what was it like to be a woman in Deadwood? What was your daily life? What was it like to be a prostitute in Deadwood, since it was so well known for prostitution? What were the daily challenges like for these people? What was it like to be a miner, to be a stagecoach robber? I really tried to put you into the environment as much as I possibly could.

C&I: After years of research, what’s your perspective on Deadwood? Is it a triumph of entrepreneurship, a cautionary tale, or something else?

Cozzens: I think it's a triumph of frontier entrepreneurship and desire for law and order. I see it as a cautionary tale to a lesser degree, in terms of the fact that there were so many warnings that there was going to be a major fire in Deadwood. There were so many little fires breaking out. The editors of the newspapers were constantly saying, look, we're going to burn to the ground one day if we don't get organized, folks. And the town just couldn't get it together. There was a cautionary tale in the sense that the notion of community only extended so far. But in a larger sense, it really was a case of the triumph of law and order and entrepreneurship in the quintessential “most diabolical town on Earth,” as the New York Tribune or one of the New York papers called it. The triumph of law and order in a town that for many months had no law. And you can extrapolate that to the rest of the West, where it was easier because you did have federal laws in place—something for lawmen to fall back on—and you weren't in such an isolated location as the Black Hills and Deadwood. So, I think it is relevant to the larger tale of the West because it showed, again, the desire for law and order and how people went about achieving it and what the obstacles were in the way. I think it's a microcosm of the entire Western experience.