Angry Planet - Deadwood: The Town that Made the Wild West

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comThis week on Angry Planet we’re taking a break from the horrors of the present to explore horrors of a past distant enough now that they’re entertaining. But then, America found those horrors pretty entertaining at the time, too. Even when it was still a thriving community and a going concern, the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, was the subject of dimestore novels and tall tales.Peter Cozzens is here with us to talk about his new book Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West. Cozzens is a historian who has written 17 books that focus on the U.S. Civil War, the Wild West, and the American Indian Wars. His latest work is all about Deadwood and the wild cast of characters who inhabited it. Come sit with us a spell and learn about the real Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok, and Al Swearengen.“Power comes to any man who has the color.”Black Elk and how the West Was LostConflicting perceptions of Wild Bill HickockProfessional gamblersCreating Calamity JaneSoftening George Hearst“In the West, women didn’t wear underwear.”Deadwood burnsHow history becomes a dime store novel“The most diabolical town on the face of the earth.”Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American WestSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, and welcome to an episode of Angry Planet that's going to be a little different this week, because we're just going purely historical. So you can actually sit back, relax. You will not be hearing Donald Trump's name. And very few. This is a cozy, angry planet episode, a nice comforting. Well, I'm wearing a sweater and a collared shirt. So yes, it's going to be a cozy episode.

So with us is Peter Cousins, who has written a number of books, history books. And we're going to talk this week about Deadwood. Deadwood, I really hope most of you know, but maybe you don't, is a town in the West that has its unique history, and they turned it into a fantastic HBO series. So you may have heard of that. But I would love it if you could just sort of introduce us to Deadwood itself and let people know what's all about.

Sure. The title of the book, the full title for those who are interested, is Deadwood, Gold, Guns and Greed in the American West, which pretty much sums up what Deadwood was all about. Deadwood was settled in 1875 illegally in the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota. What was then, Indian land, it belonged to the Lakota, Sioux Indians. It had been granted them. by treaty in perpetuity, but an expedition under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills in 1874. That resulted in a out-of-control chaotic gold rush to the Black Hills. The principal place in which gold was found was in the vicinity of what became the town of Deadwood. It was unique in many ways, but most importantly, in that it was the only town in American history, at least that I know of, that was inherently illegal. That is to say, it was settled on land that belonged to the Indians, that was recognized as Indian land

by the government, and the people were subject to no laws, neither federal nor state or territorial. So it was basically anything goes settlement. Well, maybe we should start with the way the land was just absolutely stolen. Um, I mean, I, one of the things in the book that really struck me is that it's actually a very sad story in a lot of ways. Um, and, uh, you know, little familiar with the history of, uh, westward expansion, but it, I mean, it's, it's more like westward intrusion. And, um, could you tell us a little bit about that? I mean, Matthew actually, uh, you can talk about your family at some point if you'd like. but um no that's that's so far there's there were many different tribes jesus i knew that i didn't mean that's a vast and varied tapestry i know i'm an idiot okay please it um it is indeed a tragic story and the story of the Lakota's loss of the black hills and the attended great sue war that was foisted on them by the government in an effort to uh to wrench the black hills from

them is a subcurrent throughout the book. In fact, I bookend the story, the prologue and the epilogue with the experience of a great Lakota mystic named Black Elk, who's been recognized as one of the great mystics worldwide of the 20th century. And the book begins with a vision he had of the Washishu, the whites displacing the Lakota from the Black Hills. And it ends with the story. involving him that I don't want to, I don't want to spoil right now. But it was really a tragic story. The Lakota, in 1868, they negotiated a treaty with the U.S. government called the Treaty of Fort Laramie, by which almost all of present-day North and South Dakota, as well as a portion of northern Nebraska, was seated to the Lakota in perpetuity, the better part of it as

what was called the Great Sioux Reservation, where no white man was allowed to trespass. And that is precisely where gold was discovered by Custer in this expedition, which it was ostensibly launched to look for a place in the Black Hills to set up a military post. That was legal under the treaty, but mining for gold was not, which he also did. And yeah, it was a very tragic story because even if, best intentioned person in Deadwood was acting in, you know, completely contrary to Indian rights. So when you consider even the finest of the characters in Deadwood, you have to bear in mind that that kind of tragic understory. It's kind of an original sin of the town, right?

Precisely, precisely. So what? another thing I was struck with in the book is that yes it was a lawless town except that it seemed like people wanted to establish laws pretty quickly and you talk a lot about the sort of rough justice system that they came up with and I was surprised also just how many lawyers were involved in the story but there are so many lawyers in Deadwood

in 1876, which was really the year of its founding, so to speak, that when the lawyers, when all the lawyers were called into the judges, the, this was 1877, actually, when they finally did get a judge, when they became part of the Dakota Territory, apologies for getting that wrong. Anyway, when all the lawyers were welcome to the second floor office of the judge for swearing into the bar, the floor started to cave in, and everybody had to run out into the street for fear of the whole building collapsing. So the lawyers were there principally because they knew at some point all these, this tapestry of mining claims that were made throughout the Deadwood area, they were all made when the countryside still belonged to the Lakota. So none of the mining

claims were legal under federal binding law, and the lawyers knew that they at some point would have to be re-adjudicated. So they were there like vultures on carrion waiting for all these claims to be negotiated. And surprisingly, very few were negotiated a gunpoint. I got to say this for the people that they, by and large, accepted the results of civil suits. How much gold are we talking about? It's hard to say exactly. A lot of the gold, this was a problem throughout the West. A lot of the gold was lost in what are called tailings, which is kind of the residue rock from mining.

The processes of the time were pretty rudimentary, at least in the early days in Deadwood. And they weren't particularly adept at getting all the gold. They probably lost 30, maybe 40% of the gold in course of mining. But roughly a couple billion dollars worth in today's money. And that was very significant for a number of reasons. Most pointedly, the U.S. economy was on the gold standard at the time, and we were still suffering through the effects of the panic of 1873, as is to say, a widespread depression. And, of course, the economy could only grow as a gold supply group.

And that's one of the reasons why the Black Hills gold rush was particularly important. That plus it gave prospects of riches and work to a lot of unemployed men at the time as well. So the gold standard, okay, I just not, I won't go on a real digression. It's just, I just want to say how stunning it is that a country can only be as wealthy as how much yellow metal they happen to find. Those were the days, yep. So as far as the town goes, another thing you talk about is just how fast it went of. Can you talk about how they actually made this town and give us a sort of a picture of what it might have looked like in its first year? Well, if any, for those who haven't seen Deadwood, at least watch the first episode because they really did an outstanding job of conveying the

the filth, the muck, the mire, the rickety, false front buildings, cabins, tents, you name it that were just set up hodgepodge almost overnight in Deadwood Gulch. Deadwood was established in this very narrow gulch. You could fire a pistol shot accurately from one end, from one side of the gulch to the other, from the one bluff to the other. So it had kind of a claustrophobic feel to it. Everything was congregated along two dirty, filthy, mucky streets. It was founded, if that's the right word, in December 1875, January 1876, when a few handful of miners first stumbled on gold in what was, again, to become Deadwood in Deadwood Creek. And by April, there were nearly 3,000, perhaps as many as 5,000 minors who had descended on the area, not only minors, but those who hoped to mine the miners like gamblers, prostitutes, card sharps, you name it, all the underworld of the West.

And it was remarkable. Again, four months, you went from a handful of miners to this sprawling mess along a two-mile stretch of Deadwood Gulch of nearly 5,000 people. Again, in tents, in canvas shelters, and crudely made cabins, and there was a start of construction of false front buildings. So it was a pretty wild, pretty wild scene. When you say false front, just, I'll just... False front is a typical building you see in Westerns where you see, you see, you know, the wooden front to a kind of an elaborate, elaborate front. But the rest of the building can be as simple as a roughly timbered, timbered building or even just a oversized cabin. And the false front gives you the sense that the building is much bigger and deeper than it really is.

And that was typical out west. Sorry, I just think that's so great. It's like, it's a set. It's a Western movie set. Exactly. Except that's actually how people. And that's exactly how it was. The Western movie sets got their ideas from the real West.

That's how some of the Indian casinos in Oklahoma are still set up that way, Jason. Is that right? Yeah, you got a chalk tall. And it's this, it's exactly like that. these long, huge, big, enormous, beautiful sets, set fronts. And then behind it, it's just like an iron tube that contains all of the machines and the smoke and everything else. Yeah, like a good example of that, one of the falls front buildings that became famous

in Deadwood in 1876. It was called the number 10 salute. And that was where Wild Bill Hickok was assassinated, which, of course, is a very important part of my story. it had a real elaborate false run it made it look like an enormous building he went inside and it was 20 feet wide by 60 feet long

that was a number 10 saloon I mean it was like going from a home plate to a pitcher's amount why why write about dead wood and I ask because like your output is generally I would say like

these in-depth historical explanations of America's various Indian wars. And now, like, same setting, same general time period, but a more narrow focus, I would say, in a different focus. Well, I think, as Jason alluded to, there was a sense in deadwood of time passing so rapidly. People felt that those who survived into the 20th century would recollect how they felt that they were living in a motion picture of it.

It seemed like a year was condensed into a month, and it just developed so quickly. And the three-year period that I cover from 1876 to 1879 is a time when Deadwood, the iconic Wild West, Deadwood existed. And it's just such a rich story, and it conveys every aspect of life in the Wild West. I don't just deal with the famous characters like Calamity Jane and Wildewick Hill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Sheriff Seth Bullock, and others. I deal with the Chinese community, with the lives of prostitutes, with the lives of common women and men, with the Japanese community, with the opium trade in the West.

every aspect of life in the Wild West is represented in Deadwood and in a very intense accelerated sort of way and I think it's an ideal lens for viewing in the entire Wild West experience through the story of Deadwood again not only was it one of the three iconic Wild West towns along with Tombstone and Dodge City but again for the reasons I explained earlier, it was unique as well. And that inherent lawlessness added a whole, another layer to the story and to the Wild West experience as it occurred in Deadwood. Why is the...

Sorry, go ahead, Jason. I was just going to say, talking about the lawlessness. I was thinking about Wild Bill Hickok. who is not exactly, he's portrayed in the TV series as almost a Western saint. You know, he's very, he's, while he's stoic, he seems to be a very good man. He wants to, you know, make things better for people. And I just thought it was interesting because, really, have you seen, Matthew, if you watch the show. Oh, multiple times.

I didn't know that. He just seemed cool. He just seemed to me like he was such a positive figure. And of course, he was just not that necessarily at all. No, Wild Bill Hickok was kind of an enigma. He was created. I mean, the legend of Wild Bill Hickok was created in 1865 by a journalist who came to Kansas looking to create a Western legend. He was looking to create a gunslinger legend. And he was introduced to Wild Bo Hickok, who at the time

was a marshal in a Kansas town. I forget which town at that time. And he'd already notched a few kills. He had this tendency to draw first and ask questions later. Unfortunate tendency, He was pretty quick on the trigger. And this journalist who wrote an article about him for Harper's Monthly, which was leading magazine in America at the time, turned him, turned this guy who had killed maybe four or five men in questionable gun fights in his capacity as a lawman, and turned him into this saintly figure, really, essentially this guy who supposedly had been a hero in the civil war, which he wasn't, who had killed upwards of a hundred men, always in a fair fight, which he hadn't. And he became instantly a legend, except in the Kansas towns where he was either

marshal or sheriff. And eventually, within a few years, Kansas got so sick of his brand of justice, as quick on the trigger of brand of justice. And he was eventually run out of town in the last place in which he was marshal. And by 18th, by 18th, 70, he was an itinerant, gambling, drinking, his eyesight was failing in, which of course is a critical asset for any gunfighter. He was essentially a celebrity on the skids drifting from place to place. And when the Black Hills Gold Rush came along, he saw an opportunity, sort of, you know, one last opportunity at the main chance to go to the Black Hills and to, as I said, of other. earlier to mine the miners to become a to make money gambling and that's what drew him to

deadwood it was not to establish law and order it was not to you know bring any kind of decency to deadwood it was to make a killing gambling and didn't quite work i didn't quite work out for the way he hoped no inevitably the gambling killed him yeah uh See, this is one of the things I liked about Caradine's portrayal of him, Jason, is that I did feel like a lot of that comes through in the show, is that this is a guy in the Deadwood TV show that he, like has that reputation and like Calamity Jane definitely looks up to him and the Bill Utter, is that his name, looks up to him. Charlie Utter. Charlie Utter, thank you. Charlie Utter looks up to him and they revere him and put him up on a pedestal. and he really he is there to try to strike it rich and just gamble and kind of wants to be left alone

these people almost feel like hangers on to him like the times that he's drawn into things it's got it always feels like begrudging um sorry go ahead it's interesting you mentioned charlie utter and clammy jane and they're a feeling of story wild bill and i spent a lot of time talking about that and also a lot of uh a lot of ink on clammy jane and how her legend of That's a fascinating story, how she became a legend by age 22. But actually, Hickok had little use for clammy chain. He couldn't stand her. And they really knew each other for a very short period of time,

just about three weeks when she tagged along with Charlie Yutter and Wild Bill's caravan to Deadwood to the day he was gunned down in the number 10 saloon. You know, Hickok, I have to say, he was, I mean, he was gentlemanly. He was good nature when he was either sober or when he was not confronted with any kind of a threat. He just had a hair-trigger temper and was too quick on the, literally too quick on the trigger. But, you know, 99% of time, he was a gentleman. He was a decent man. There was an episode in the book when this woman who's becomes a, an important figure, Deadwood, meets Wild Bill in the streets of Cheyenne, Wyoming,

and at first sort of insults him for his reputation, then kind of comes away thinking, well, maybe he's not quite as bad as he's portrayed to me. He's actually quite gentlemanly toward me. So he was an enigmatic figure. I think he played him very well as well. What happened to, so McCall, who's the person that shot him, had two trials, is that right? Like, what was the, what was, how did all of this fall out after, you know, he, he shoots this, this Western legend? Well, that's, that was one of the, um, drawbacks, if you're a criminal, uh, of Deadwood being inherently lawless.

Because after he shot, he shot Wild Bill, the back of the head, clearly a case of murder. There was a lynched mob foreman, but they were distracted when a Mexican rode into town carrying a Indians severed head. At the time, Deadwood had offered a reward for any Lakota Indian severed head because there were Indian raids in the Black Hills. That disrupted all the thought of lynching McCaw. And so he was held over for trial the next day. And the trial was gotten up. I mean, there was no legal authority for it. There was a former Cheyenne attorney and judge who became presiding judge. They got together one of the numerous lawyers to be prosecutor,

another to be defense attorney. They threw together a jury of questionable honesty and held a trial. And McCall's claim was, well, I killed Wild Bill because he killed my brother. And the jury acquitted him. And McCall rode off, just completely delighted with himself and boasted to anyone who cared to listen and how he got over on the, the court in Deadwood because, you know, he had no brother. And unfortunately, McCall, the prosecuting attorney who was disgusted with the results of the trial

shadowed McCall as he traveled around the Dakota Territory, sharing his story, and was able to get charges brought against him in the state, in the territorial capital. McCall was tried again, convicted, and hanged, and it was not double jeopardy because the first trial was illegal, but McCaw was too stupid a character to understand that. Can I ask about gambling? You talk, there are many gamblers in the book, and not all of them by name, but just the idea that it was a profession, and it seemed to be a somewhat widely held profession was it all cheating?

No. How do you win as a gambler? It wasn't. And I don't think, I mean, I think some of the gambling houses, you know, had rigged tables and things like that. But by and large, it wasn't. And it didn't really have to be because in these miners who, men who suddenly found themselves with hundreds, thousands of dollars a month in their pockets in gold dust, very few of the miners, even those who again found. several thousands of dollars would be close to maybe even a million dollars worth of gold today in their claims. Very few of them held on to their money. They just were incapable of that for the

most part. And they ended up spending their gold dust as fast as they could make it on soil dives, as prosecutors were called, on drinking on gambling. So, you know, these guys would come into the gamble, what they were called then gambling hells, not gambling halls, into the gambling hells, into the gambling hells and plunk their gold dust down, play some poker or, or, um, uh, pharaoh, whatever game it may be. And these guys were, they were, uh, uh, neophytes for the most part of gambling. So it didn't take the most skilled gambler in the world to beat these guys and to make it, you know, make a decent living off it. Who's your favorite character?

My favorite character, I mean, the character I find most interesting is Calamity Jane. Yeah, tell us the Calamity Jane story. Yeah, then I'll tell you my favorite is. Calamity Jane, very tragic story. She was orphaned at age 12, and then within a year, she was a prostitute working the railroad lines in the West. Fast forward a few years, and it's 1876. this summer of 1876, and Charlie Utter and Yelope Hickok are leading this caravan of gamblers, would-be miners, soil doves, and so forth, north from Cheyenne to Deadwood.

They stop off at Fort Laramie, and the officer of the day asked if they wouldn't mind taking one more soil dove off his hands. They said, sure, and they find this half-naked inebriated. 20-year-old girl in the guardhouse. She'd been on a bender with the soldiers, you know, having been payday. And she's Calamity Jane. And she travels to Deadwood with Wild Bill and Charlie Utter. And as Charlie Utter goes about trying to set up a pony express business. And while Bill goes off gambling, she begins working as a prostitute. And she is no different from, And the other prostitutes, except that she is really good at tooting her own horn.

She is a larger-than-life character. The personality is larger than life. She did one thing that would forever be to her credit. She helped nurse sick during a smallpox epidemic in 1876 in Deadwood, and nobody else would do that. And she kind of became like the spokeswoman of the prostitutes and deadwood. kind of making sure that nobody was cheated. Nobody was given brass filings instead of gold dust for their services, things like that. And in 1877, a journalist came to Deadwood to write a book about the Black Hills to try to boost emigration to Deadwood in the Black Hills in general.

And he, I don't know whether he met Plamity Jane horizontally and vertically or strictly vertically. But he came out with this book called Maricopo's Wonderland, the Black Hills. And here's Calamity Jane, on horseback in full buckskin with six shooters blazing. She's the heroine of the Black Hills, former Indian scout, fought with the soldiers against the Lakotas, had been married, had been wealthy and married, lost her ranch when her husband died, you know, blah, blah, blah. This larger-than-life figure, this is all from a 21-year-old clammy Jane. And other journalists picked up on that story and interviewed her. And then dime novelists, dime novels were in the fault fiction of the day. Dime novelists picked up on her.

In fact, the most popular dime novel character in the American West was Jesse James. The second most popular was a fellow named Deadwood Dick. who was supposed to have been a, he was a fictitious road agent, you know, stagecoach robber who robbed stages on the Deadwood line. And every, every month a new issue

of Deadwood Dick, dime novels would come out. And they sold, I mean, they sold like bestseller fiction today. And in half of those magazines, Calamity Jane figures as sort of his heroic sidekick.

So here she is, by fast forward to 1878, she's 22 years old and is already a legend and people in deadwood who shake their heads they're like you know what is this i mean this can't be our calamity jane in fact one editorial i was talking about this saying that they just uh the editorial writer run into calamity jane in chinatown the other night and she'd uh she had a bloody nose it was staggering and the uh editorial writer asked her clamity where are you going and she said God only knows I sure is hell

don't and staggered away you know in the sunsets so to speak and the editorialist said and that's the kind of heroin calamity Jane is so people in dead we couldn't quite understand it but there that's how a legend was born it was remarkable

how does she get I'll leave that for readers of the book oh does she I guess I can say she died that she died before her time. Yeah, okay. How do you pick up a name like Calamity? That's a good question.

No one knows for sure. There are several schools of thought. One is that her life resembled a human calamity, starting as a prostituted age 12, pretty calamitous upbringing. Another was that anywhere she went, calamity followed. And a third was that she had venereal disease. And if you were intimate with calamity, a calamity would befall to you. So you can take your choice of those three. You need those pills of white mercury to get through that.

Exactly. All right. I got to know. All right. Well, first of all, like, listening, like, hearing you talk and, like, reading through the book, I'm kind of shocked by, like, any TV show is going to take liberties. Things are going to be changed and different. It's weird how much of the TV show Deadwood, like, actually happened, given that. Like, can you kind of give me, give us your read on the show? It's historical accuracy, like, how you feel, about it as someone who is a Deadwood scholar. And that's, interestingly, all the book reviews that have appeared on my book, from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post or whatever,

have compared my book infamorably to the series and saying, you know, what's remarkable is that all these things in the series that happened in real life, I mean, they're even more unbelievable when you learn the true story, which was, again, liberties were taken. to the course of the show, but so much of it was true and so much of the true story was even more remarkable than what was conveyed in the series that it's a,

you know, if it weren't true, it would be a relatable type story. But I think they did a good job in general with the, again, the atmosphere of the Deadwood, with the majority of the characters, Al Swarendon, Seth Bullock, They took some liberties, as I say in the book without referring to the show. But what I call, I call Swerin's something like the, I don't know, the most, I can't call it, I can't call it precise wording, but bastard ever to follow the Black Hills. And Sweringen in the TV series, he owns the Jim Saloon.

He runs prostitutes, often underage, and is a scurrilous figure, but he does have some good qualities. And there are some moments in the show when he does some relatively honorable things. The real-life housework engine was a complete SOB. He didn't have a single redeeming quality. And the show, he's single, in real life, he was married. And he strong-armed his wife into helping him procure prostitutes, preferably underage. from Chicago and elsewhere with bogus newspaper advertisements. And when, you know, God forbid if she would not do his bidding,

because he would beat her within an inch of her life, he, that was swearing. He had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Seth Bullock, on the other hand, in the series he's portrayed as having had a long-term affair and being married to the sister of his deceased brother out of of convenience, which really kind of tarnished his reputation of an otherwise admirable figure in this series. He's kind of, he personifies good and lawfulness, just like Swerrington does evil and lawlessness. The real life, Seth Bullock, did not have any affairs. He was married to essentially his high school sweetheart. She was a dynamic personality. She brought the first

free public library to Deadwood she started a choir in the town she was very active in the town's social life a real dynamic character so set bullock becomes even more i mean he becomes even more admirable in real life than he was in the series so you you have these cases of some of the nuances being lost in the series or layers being added that don't necessarily make the characters who's that much more attractive or appealing or compelling? Well, I think for the purposes of the show, it's a weird television program. Not a lot of TV shows do kind of what Deadwood did

because it is about a community that's being built and the threats to that community. And it kind of, at the beginning of it, it makes you think that this is going to be a show about, The Virtues and Villains of the West as personified by Sweringen and Bullock. And, like, as the show progresses, it becomes kind of about their relationship. And they're both of their defenses of the community from, like, rapacious capitalists. And, like, not a lot of TV shows are doing that.

It's kind of a weird thing for them to do. Right. It was Shakespearean, to say the least. To say the least. interestingly the rapacious capitalist george hurst father of william randolphers figures prominently in my book and in the show he's portrayed as being surrounded by by thugs and pinkerton agents and obtaining control of these small mines in the deadwood area by any means he could usually through violence that's not the way it happened that's that's the greatest liberty this

series took. The real George Hirsch, he was already a millionaire, already well, well known in the West as a gold and silver millionaire. He came to Deadwood in 1877, like what he saw. He was welcomed by the town, by and large. The town's, the lawful element of town, Seth both included, and the newspapers included, realized that if Deadwood was going to prosper, these placer mines, these surface mines that were being worked by by individual miners or small groups of miners. A lot of gold was buried into the earth and required a lot of capital to get to this gold. And no one then in Deadwood had that kind of capital. And if they were going to grow and prosper, it would be a long-term concern.

They had to attract that kind of capital. And George Hurst brought that kind of money onto the scene. and Hearst, he had a real foxy way about him. He was still a gold miner at heart. He dressed like a gold miner. He dressed in, you know, in sloppy clothing, even though he was a millionaire. He hung out in saloons with the miners talking their language. And he did not employ the gun to get mines, but lawsuits.

He brought with him a retinue of well-seasoned, San Francisco mining attorneys who invariably defeated the small claims holders in court in Deadwood. And that's how Hurst got all these small claims and turned them into the greatest gold mine in American history. And he also would make offers on the claims before he went to court. And they were generally fair offers. So I hate to say it, but Hearst actually was not a bad guy. When Prish came to show, he's a very important character in Deadwood, but not for the reasons that are portrayed in the show. Was Sight Oliver a real person?

No. So they kind of extracted all of the worst qualities of Swayringen and then deposited them in Sight Oliver. Yes, Sight Oliver. They deposited the worst characters' characteristics of a number of gambling, hell owners and sluineners who I talk about by name in the book, apart from Sweringen and they're all condensed into the side tolerant of a character. Can you like, sorry, go ahead, Jason.

No, I guess Matthew, you follow that up. I just, in a minute it would be great to talk about like what entertainment was. Well, yeah, let's do the gambling hells and stuff. But go ahead. Yeah, tell me about some of these other,

other than Sweringen, who's obviously the most well known, like who are these people that were condensed into Tolliver. Like, what are some of their names and what are some of their stories? Well, you caught me in a moment, in a senior moment, because I can't grab the names out of the air right now. But the typical saloon or dance hall owner would have legitimate or semi-legitimate entertainment with women who did have talent as singers

or performed acrobatic acts or can-can dancers, things of that nature. The problem was that they also could be had for a certain price after the show. And things like the can-can dance were particularly popular because in the West women didn't wear underwear. And so you had a kind of a veneer of respectability

in these dance halls. But, and saloons, but again, they also doubled as places of prostitution. There also was a really outstanding legitimate theater in Deadwood. The Jack Langreys, who was a famous Western Thespian, came to Deadwood in 1876 and established a legitimate theater that had mostly Shakespearean performances. And he's a real amusing character in the HBO series, and he was, And that's one character they nailed perfectly. He was just that way in real life,

a real gregarious, kind-hearted, talented comedian and the Thespian who brought first-class entertainment to Deadwood. I mean, his theater was, the first theater was a large log cabin that leaked during rainstorms, but the show went on, and eventually upgraded to it to a nicer theater. But Deadwood could claim to have theater at least, but that shows that they were had on the bill

to be equal to those on Broadway. It's not the atmosphere, at least the entertainment. The picture of Jack on Wikipedia, which I will link in the show notes, he's wearing the biggest hat I have ever seen in my entire life. It is a comedically large cowboy hat.

Yeah, it's a huge sombrero. Yes. Wild Bill Hickok was known for his huge sombreros. Jack Langer says it was much, much bigger. And he had this talent where he could kind of tweak his nose back and forth and his ears would wiggle. And that was one of his favorite stage tricks. I mean, he was just, and he could also come up with poetry at the drop of the hat. He could walk into a newspaper office during his snowstorm and kick the snow off his feet and sit down by the stove and put together a poem on,

on snowstorms, just like that. I mean, he had to have to be hilarious. He was quite a large life character. So what happens to Deadwood? Well, by 1879, the fast time, so to speak, in Deadwood were slowing down. The Placer mines, as to say, the surface mining, or the mining just below the surface.

The simple mining, it did not require a lot of heavy equipment and capital to dig deep into the earth, those mines were drying up. I mean, they were playing out as the year 1879 began. And prospectors were starting to look elsewhere from mining. And as the summer progressed, a lot of these prospectors left Deadwood. Most of them went to a town called Leadville, Colorado, or had just silver and gold ore just been discovered. In fact, that summer, Jack Langerich took his theater troupe to Leadville to entertain there.

He never returned to dead. So kind of the handwriting was already in the wall. You had, as the miners left, so did a lot of the elements that played on the miners. You know, the gamblers, the prostitutes, the confidence men. They all they followed the miners. And so things were starting to become a little more civilized as the fall of 1879 approached. And then in September 1879, what was referred to at the time as a fire theme struck Deadwood and burnt most of Deadwood to the ground in a spectacular, spectacular fire.

And that kind of was like the punctuation mark on Deadwood's days as a wild west town. town because when Deadwood rebuilt and rebuilt fairly quickly, it never retained its prior size or status. George Hurst was partly responsible for the slow passing of the Wild West Deadwood as well because he had built this huge industrial mine in neighboring town of Leed, Dakota Territory, and that was bringing industrial mining to the area. So Deadwood, was being relegated to kind of a service community for the wage earning minors in LEED. So you had this dramatic and pretty rapid change in Deadwood from the Deadwood of the HBO series, the Deadwood of Wild West Shore, to a more sedate community.

And interestingly, the people in the town recognize this because in early 1880, just a few months after the fire, one of the newspapers in Deadwood started a series of recollections of old-timers, Deadwood Pioneers. I mean, this is four years after Deadwood was settled. But they already recognized that an era had passed, and they wanted to preserve the legends, preserve the story before it was lost. So there was a sense among the inhabitants, too, as well, that Wild West days had passed. Why, it's so funny that people were nostalgic for this period so fast.

what is it about I mean this is something that you've kind of been writing about your whole life is this period of American history what is it about this time and place that you think captures the imagination? I think it's a sense rightly or wrongly that you can pretty much be your own man or woman and do what you do what you

damn well please and that your chances are compared to your chances you know, back in, back in the states, so to speak, your chances out West are almost limitless. I mean, they're limited only by your own talents, ingenuity, crookedness, guile, you name it. And I think that's one of the Endurings Appeal of the West is to read about these larger-than-life characters and how they cut a swath across the Wild West and how they either prospered or came to a glorious ends. And at the time, the feelings were the same, which was why these dime novels were so, so popular because people back east, they imagine what it would like if they were living out West, if they could be living the life of a Deadwood Dick or a Jesse James or Calamney Jane. I mean, it was already in the 1870s, Deadwood was, it was, you know, regular, regularly the news in the New York Times,

and the New York Herald Tribune and other, in fact, the New York Herald Tribune called it with the most diabolical town on the face of the earth. And so there was already legends growing up around it at the time. And it was the same reason then people have now, I think, for being so fascinated with the West, the sense that you can make it on your own out there in a way that you couldn't anywhere else.

Freedom. Freedom. Big American freedom. And reading the book, you can see to what degree that is true or not true. Things are always, the historical record is always much more complicated than a dime store novel and even the best written HBO show, right? More nuanced, I guess. More nuanced. You can kind of see the appeal when you think about what eastern cities were like at the time.

You know, I mean, people working for barely any wages, you know, I mean, terrible factories, terrible overcrowding and slums and all that. I mean, the West must have looked amazing. There's that vastness out there that vastness that they only knew through dime novels or through news, through magazines, through, you know, illustrations, magazines. Or from those who wrote letters to their hometown newspapers about, you know, the glories of the West. The sky is bigger out there somehow. Absolutely. It is. It is, Jason. I know. No, I've seen it. I've seen it. And it does. It's wonderful.

You feel like I can touch the clouds out there in the northern plains. Mm-hmm. All right, Jason. Do you have anything else? or do you think we, we wrap it there? All right. I've never had us or never been in the show where, like, there was a nice, nostalgic, peaceful note to a show. We've been having, as the world's situation rapidly deteriorates, we've been having

more pleasant, upbeat endings to the program lately, I've noted. Well, that's one who agrees with you guys entirely that this country's going to hell and best. It's nice to talk about something that is not inherently partisan. It doesn't maybe want to throw up. I think we have to, we got a long haul in front of us, so it's important to step back every now and then and take pleasure in a little history

and talk about a good show and some fascinating characters. So thank you so much for coming on to Anchorage. Angry Planet and talking to us about all this. Thank you guys very much. I enjoyed it. War. War never changes. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet,

is me, Matthew Gold, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. If you like the show, please go to angry planetpod.com and sign up to get commercial-free early versions of all the mainline episodes and some written work and some other stuff that's coming down the pipe. We will be back again with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet next week. Thank you for indulging us taking a little break from the horrors of the news cycle. Stay safe. Until then.