Legends of the Old West - DEADWOOD Ep. 3 | "Fire, Flood and Gold"

Episode Date: June 9, 2019

The true stories of the fire that destroyed Deadwood in 1879; the flood that devastated the town in 1883; the mining baron, George Hearst, who consolidated the mines of the Black Hills into the richest gold mining operation in North America. Featuring an interview with Darrel Nelson, the Deadwood History Exhibits Director. Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Lego Fortnite. Lego Fortnite is the ultimate survival crafting game found within Fortnite. It's not just Fortnite Battle Royale with minifigures. It's an entirely new experience that combines the best of Lego play and Fortnite. Created to give players of all ages, including kids and families,

a safe digital space to play in. Download Fortnite on consoles, PC, cloud services, or Android and play Lego Fortnite for free. Rated ESRB E10+. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws. Like Fresh Promise. Produce is carefully selected and checked for freshness. And if it's not fresh, it's free. Yes, you heard that right. From the crispest lettuce to the juiciest apples, Loblaws is committed to fresh, so you get the best fruits and veggies. Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online., a fire erupted in a bakery while the town of Deadwood slept.

It proved to be the most destructive fire in the history of the city, but certainly not the last. destructive fire in the history of the city, but certainly not the last. Four years later, torrents of water rushed through the gulches of the Black Hills. Some towns were nearly wiped off the map. Downtown Deadwood was completely flooded. So you might not have to strain very hard to see why the creator of the HBO show Deadwood drew parallels between the Old Testament towns of Sodom and Gomorrah and Deadwood of the 1870s and 1880s. David Milch, the series creator, latched on to the twin pillars of vice and depravity and played them for all they were worth in the show. And if the drama had not been abruptly canceled, fictional Deadwood seemed likely to suffer the same fates as the real Deadwood. Punishment by disaster.

As you may have heard or read, the original plan for the Deadwood TV show was to run five seasons, according to actor W. Earl Brown, who played Dan Doherty on the show. Season 4 would have seen Deadwood hit with a biblical flood, and Season 5 would have seen Deadwood leveled by an apocalyptic fire. Those events really happened in Deadwood, though not in that order. In this episode, I'll tell you the stories of the fires and floods that ravaged early Deadwood, and then I'll switch gears to give you the real history of the mining baron, George Hurst. This one's going to unfold a little different than normal episodes. I'm going to tell it like a novella with short chapters. And at the end, stick around for my

interview with Daryl Nelson, the Deadwood History Exhibits Director. We had a great discussion about that pivotal fire of 1879 and a couple of the others that did serious damage in Deadwood History Exhibits Director. We had a great discussion about that pivotal fire of 1879 and a couple of the others that did serious damage in Deadwood, including the one that ended up saving Deadwood's history. So as we dive back into the town's past, here's a message from our friends in Deadwood. Explore the Adams Museum, the Days of 76 Museum, the Adams House, and Mount Moriah Cemetery to fully understand Deadwood's raucous past. At the Adams Museum, get up close and personal with the legends and outlaws who brought Deadwood international notoriety and see Deadwood's own one-of-a-kind Wild Bill Hickok collection.

Wild Bill Hickok collection. Visitors to the days of 76 museum become acquainted with an astonishing collection of wagons and carriages including the infamous Deadwood stage along with an extensive collection of historic firearms and American Indian artifacts. The Adams house built in 1892 is an elegant Victorian era home with original contents that chronicles Deadwood's transition from a lawless mining camp to a prosperous and technologically rich metropolitan city. And finally, Deadwood's Boot Hill, Mount Moriah Cemetery, provides a tranquil location to pay homage and respect to such notables as Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Seth Bullock. Let your journey through the Wild West begin in historic Deadwood, South Dakota.

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It's likely that most businesses were closed and most people were asleep. But Deadwood being Deadwood, it's also possible that the lower end of Main Street, known as the Badlands, was still awake and kicking. The Badlands was the infamous home of dens of iniquity and vice, the saloons that offered gambling, drinking, prostitution, and sometimes opium. But if they were still alight with entertainment, they wouldn't be for long. A raging inferno was headed their way shortly. Up on Sherman Street, which intersected with the upper end of Main Street, a simple accident was about to start a fire that would engulf the entire town. In the Empire Bakery, a coal oil lamp fell off a table and shattered,

splashing fire and oil on the pine walls, which were covered with canvas. There probably wasn't a better combination of elements to launch the most destructive fire in Deadwood's history. The blaze ripped through the canvas and the walls. It devoured the bakery, and its appetite kept growing. It spread to the building next door. And then it reached across the street to the Langrish Theater, the home of the acting troupe of Jack Langrish, who had arrived three years earlier in the summer of 1876. At 3.30 a.m., the first alarm bells rang out.

If they weren't already awake, citizens now jumped out of their beds. As they raced out of their homes, they would have been greeted with an eerie sight. From the hillsides, it would have looked like a giant torch had been lit in downtown Deadwood, and the torch was growing larger. Townspeople rushed to Main Street to fight the fire, but it kept spreading. It tore through newspaper offices, feeding off reams of paper that must have seemed like tasty meals in a fancy restaurant. It ran to the county recorder's office and consumed vital records of Deadwood's early history. It spread to the Overland Hotel, and then it reached the Jensen and Bliss hardware store.

Now the growing nightmare turned into an apocalypse. As the flames burned through the wood structure, they discovered a stockpile of gunpowder. They greedily consumed it, and the hardware store exploded. The explosion launched the fire in every direction, and now the wind picked up and helped drive it through the Gulch. A newspaper reported later, then it was that all knew the city was doomed as no power on earth could have successfully opposed the progress of the devouring flames. The fire sliced through Lee Street and tore down Main Street. Nearly every building in the Gulch was made of wood at that time, and each new business was another course of the meal.

Not even brick buildings were immune to the blaze. R.C. Lake's hardware store was a three-story brick structure, and it exploded just like the Jensen and Bliss hardware store. brick structure and it exploded just like the Jensen and Bliss hardware store. As the Inferno ate building after building, the townspeople hurried to stay ahead of the flames. They created firebreaks by destroying buildings that were in the path of the fire. The gaps deprived the blaze of food and it slowly began to die. The people of Deadwood grabbed as many of their belongings as possible and dragged them up into the hills to keep them safe from the flames. The sight from above the town must have been incredible.

What had looked like a giant torch before, now must have looked like the end of the world. The entire length of Main Street was engulfed in fire. Nearly one mile of homes and businesses were crackling and burning and smoldering at the same time. But as the sun slowly rose, the inferno burned itself out. People stood in the streets and on the hillsides and stared at the charred ruins of a town that had risen in record time and had fallen even faster. A newspaper said, Men who had not tasted liquor for years imbibed freely to drown their sorrow, and the number of intoxicated men seen on the streets was appalling. Fights were of frequent and hourly occurrence, and disorder and discord was beginning to get possession of the town.

It was estimated that the fire wrought $2 million worth of destruction in the currency of 1879, which would be more than $50 million today. And it was thought that 5 million pounds of goods had been incinerated. But with all that devastation, the death toll was remarkably low. In the immediate aftermath, it was thought that just one person died. The number likely rose in the coming hours, but overall, it was considerably lower than it could have been. Since we all know the city of Deadwood is alive and well today, it clearly didn't perish in the fire. Just hours after the flames burned out, the people of Deadwood began rebuilding their homes and businesses.

While the wood was still warm, they dragged it out of the way to begin construction. Seth Bullock and Saul Starr rebuilt their hardware store in the same place on the corner of Main Street and Wall Street, but now they added a brick warehouse behind the wooden store to take care of their excess goods. And they put fire shutters on the outside to protect the windows. And the warehouse and the shutters are still there today. In 1894, the store was destroyed by another big fire that swept through

the town, and after that calamity, Bullock gave up on the hardware business. He and some investors erected the nicest hotel in Deadwood on the spot of the old hardware store, and that's where the Bullock Hotel stands today. Al Swearengen built a bigger, swankier Gem Theater after the Great Fire of 1879. The Gem was the de facto headquarters of entertainment in the Badlands of Lower Main Street, and like every other building, it had been leveled by the fire. It was said Swearengen spent $225,000 on the new Gem Theater, which would have been more than $5 million today. But the second version fell in the fire of 1894. When he built a third version after that fire, it went down in another fire in 1899.

And that was the end of Al's time in Deadwood. He pulled up stakes and headed for Denver. end of Al's time in Deadwood. He pulled up stakes and headed for Denver. Within six months of the fire of 1879, the town of Deadwood was completely rebuilt. It certainly wasn't fireproof by any means, as you've just heard, but the people of Deadwood had no intention of quitting. Nearly 100 years later, another in a long line of devastating fires hit Deadwood, but this one came with an unexpected consequence. It led to legalized gambling in the Black Hills, which saved Deadwood's history. Hear that story in my interview with Daryl Nelson at the end of the episode. Chapter 2. The Great Flood In the spring of 1883, newspapers across the country ran dispatches from Deadwood after another catastrophe.

A headline in the New York Times read, A Black Hills Calamity. More than half of Deadwood swept away. A destructive torrent from the hills. Houses and mines destroyed and several lives lost. Other towns completely wrecked. The Atlanta Constitution said, Down the gulches. The water from the mountains rushing down upon the cities below. A special article to the paper in St. Paul, Minnesota began, The most disastrous flood that has ever been known in the history of this section has just visited Deadwood and the surrounding country. the surrounding country. Just three years after Deadwood completed its resurrection from the Great Fire, it was

hit with the Great Flood. The spring of 1883 had been miserable, as far as the weather was concerned. From mid-April to mid-May, it had rained nearly every day. The roads were impassable swamps. The creeks looked like rivers. The ground was so saturated it spewed back excess water it couldn't handle. And then it snowed. Snowstorms are common in the Black Hills in May,

and now a heavy, wet blanket of snow covered the waterlogged ground. And after that, the rains came back. Torrential rains pounded the Black Hills on Wednesday, May 16, 1883, and that was the breaking point. The warm rain melted the snow, and the combined force of water plunged down from the mountains. It rushed through the gulches, flattening trees and tearing up hillsides as it went. But unlike the Great Fire, the residents of Deadwood received a precious warning. Because of the amount of wealth in Deadwood, thanks to its gold mines, it was one of the first cities in the country to have telephone lines.

thanks to its gold mines, it was one of the first cities in the country to have telephone lines. At four o'clock in the afternoon, a man at Ten Mile Ranch up the gulch from Deadwood called down to the town to warn it of the moving wall of water. Of course, there wasn't much the citizens could do. They couldn't pick up their businesses and move them out of the way, but they could at least grab some of their goods. and moved them out of the way, but they could at least grab some of their goods. The floodwaters buried gold mines and washed away houses. The Homestake mine, the biggest in the area, had nine feet of water in it. Newspaper reporters said the Golden Gate mine and the South Bend mine were washed away. The flood tore down telegraph lines and all but cut off the town from

communication with the outside world. One lone telephone line was left standing, and it was overwhelmed by traffic. Whitewood Creek and Deadwood Creek, which converged on the town, surged over their banks and gushed into downtown Deadwood. They pushed hundreds of gallons of mud and water into businesses and pushed some of the businesses clear out of town. The bridge on Lee Street collapsed. Sidewalks caved in. They turned into gullies with water 12 feet deep. The Black Hills Daily Times said the water moved with the velocity of a cannonball. Terraces on the hillsides gave way. The ground beneath the livery stable began to slide.

The building leaned to the side, then stalled at a 45-degree angle, and then fell into the floodwaters and washed away. Seth Bullock rallied a group of men to build a levee made out of sacks of oats near his hardware store. They constructed a barricade to keep the water out of his brick warehouse. The upper end of Main Street fared better than the lower end, the Badlands. One report said cheap tenement houses, second-class hotels, laundries, small traders, sporting houses, and livery stables were all destroyed in that portion of the town. Articles in the days that followed said other towns got it even worse. They said Pennington was swept away.

Half of Spearfish was said to be washed away, and Crook City was nearly gone. The losses in Deadwood were estimated at $600,000 to $700,000, which would have been upwards of $16 million today. In the immediate aftermath, the death toll was pegged at four people who had drowned in the flood, but that number was expected to rise. Estimates said 70 buildings were destroyed or simply washed downstream during the ordeal. But the volume of destruction wasn't as bad as in the Great Fire, and once again, the city of Deadwood rebuilt itself with sturdier buildings and stronger bridges. Chapter 3 The Boy the Earth Speaks To It seemed like everything George Hearst touched turned to gold, even if it was silver or copper or lead.

His father died when George was 26, and the man's parting gift to George and the family had been $10,000 of debt. George was then responsible for caring for his brother, his sister, and his mother. He quickly turned the family farm in Missouri into a profitable enterprise, and then he turned his attention to the local lead mines. He had always been fascinated by mining, but he had no education in geology or mining or anything else. As the nation would soon learn, he just had an instinct for it.

His instinct, legend has it, led native tribes to call him, Boy the Earth Speaks Too. He bought or leased lead mines in Missouri, and within three years, he was able to pay off his father's debt. With his family in a good position, he went west to chase his fortune in the gold mines of California. His first mining venture in California didn't go very well, but his second started a role that never stopped. In the decade between 1850 and 1860, he prospected and mined the area around Grass Valley in Nevada City, California. He discovered veins of ore, built mining operations around them, and then sold them for profits. At the end of the decade, in 1859, he heard the whispers that swept through the West. There was silver across the Sierra Mountains in Nevada.

Hurst rushed to the site of the strike that was called the Comstock Load and paid $3,000 for a one-sixth interest in the Ophir Mine. That investment made him rich. The Ophir mine produced so much silver and gold that the mining camp around it soon grew into a permanent town, and today it's Virginia City. After the Ophir, Hearst bought into the Ontario mine in Park City, Utah, which of course was hugely profitable. It made him millions of dollars. And then came the gold strikes in the Black Hills. Brothers Fred and Moses Manuel built up the Homestake mine themselves, and then they sold it to George Hearst in 1877.

Hearst went on to buy more than 250 gold claims in the area and eventually consolidated them into one giant mining operation. That operation became the largest and most profitable gold mine in North America. Five years later, he bought into the Anaconda mine in Montana. He was told it would produce silver and gold, but it ended up being the richest copper mine in the world. Over the course of 30 years in the West, George Hearst built himself into the premier mining baron, and he became the richest man in America. And for those who might be wondering about his portrayal in the TV show Deadwood, no, he was not the murderous megalomaniac he was made out to be.

He was a no-nonsense businessman, that's for sure. And yes, he bought up the competition whenever possible, but he didn't kill people to do it. He simply had more money than everyone else. Along the way, he married a school teacher from Missouri named Phoebe Apperson, despite the protests of her parents because he was more than 20 years older than she was. They were genuinely in love

and she moved to California with him. In 1863, they had their only child, William Randolph Hearst. As George Hearst's wealth grew, he branched out from mining to invest in real estate and cattle and horses, and in 1880, the newspaper business. He acquired a small newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, though he never had much interest in it. But his son William loved it, and he used it to build a publishing empire that still exists today. Toward the end of George Hearst's life, he became a senator from California, and he and Phoebe spent the last six years of his life in Washington, D.C. He passed away in 1891, at 70 years old.

at 70 years old. And now, here's my interview with Deadwood History Exhibits Director, Daryl Nelson. All right, Daryl. The audience has heard several stories about various disasters in Deadwood. Obviously, the Great Fire, I led off with that. So what I didn't go through for them that I would love to hear from you,

it's something you teased me with earlier that I want to try to fully explain here. So I think anyone who knows anything about towns, especially really fast mining camps in the 1870s assumes they're all built with wood. Obviously they're all very flammable. One little fire can do a ton of devastation and a lot of damage. We heard about how that happened,

but because that's kind of the obvious thing that could happen, there was warning about it. Everyone knew this was a possibility. So before, long before the fire actually happened, people were warning about the fire. Tell me about the article that you discovered that was a prominent one that said, hey guys, we might have a problem here. These are some things we should try. Okay, just behind

that is this mystique of fires in the hills. Well, of course, there's gonna be a fire in Deadwood. The name of the city comes from the fact that, according to Forest Service records, there had been a major fire in the area. So there was the evidences of natural fire. The Deadwood fire wasn was a different animal altogether. It was a bunch of human choices. I can imagine a fictitious Lakota wise man on the hill saying, what are you people doing down there? Because it would have been obvious

they were asking for trouble. So May 26, 1877, which I should say is the entire venture is illegal. Everybody there knows this is Indian land, which means that the lines of communication and lines of moving of any supplies is distant and risky and expensive. So May of 1877, the local paper, Pioneer Times says, and this is interesting, it's a Saturday publication, and and it says in view of the fire yesterday the day before then we should be talking about fire it's on everybody's lips so there were

fires and fires and fires that they knew right and so the article says the editorial says in view of that fire we should be talking about the eventuality there will be a fire someday so we should get a host company they had nothing apparently no equipment and any equipment they were going to get was going to come a mile an hour on a bull train from Sydney or Cheyenne it was a lot of expense to get that to happen so they said we need we need trained people, we need a water supply, because there's going to be a fire. And interestingly, this kind of plays into my take on it. The very

next paragraph, the editor says, by the way, this city is filthy. There's crap all over the place. We need to address this. So what I'm suggesting is, in more than one way, these were they're they're miners and they're legendary characters they tend to not be very neat people right and

they trash the place so this sets up both the the power of the fire why it spread so quickly and then what the city people wanted to do in response to the fire so what's what's one of the first either steps or missteps that you've and then what the city people wanted to do in response to the fire. So what's one of the first either steps or missteps that you've discovered with regards to the actual fire itself? There was two years of warning before it actually happened. And anyone with half a brain knows that the possibility is huge that this can happen. So what are some of the most immediate steps that happen when the fire starts to break out? Well, in between those two years, some of them got the message.

There were a few brick buildings, but a lot of business had fireproofs, which are brick structures in which they put their safes. They proved to be not that safe. So there were a bunch of those around. Those were reported after the fire, which one survived, which one had blown up. And they did establish some kind of a hose team. So there was a fire apparatus and they also built some some fire tanks up on the hill and they had hose and in fact, the nearby city lead had fire equipment because after the fire, they asked lead for help.

Couldn't get there soon enough. But the point is, they had some things in place. So two o'clock in the 26th of September, 1879, a fire starts. Two o'clock a.m. Two o'clock a.m. It's the middle of the night for everyone. So people are not ready. They ended up running out in the streets in their pajamas. It was chaos. So the fire starts and it burns in a place that the newspaper later said, well, yeah,

there's been a fire in this place six times in the last year. So right away, the human element, a bunch of decisions and the lack of ordinances immediately begins to play. It continues because the fire moves building to building. And then it goes to a hardware store where the newspaper people said later on, you know, if we had had city stat statutes they would not have had all their black powder in the building so in three different buildings there was black powder not only did it blow up the fire it fragmented a whole bunch of fireproofs so these brick structures suddenly had ways for fire to get in toasted everything inside so immediately um and and the newspaper people were pretty judgmental about saying, you should have done this, you should have done this.

Oh, and another layer to this, which is fascinating, four days after the fire, the newspaper writes another editorial and says, we don't want to dig up this sore topic about the Homest state gold mine and this met mine providing water to us. It hadn't been done yet. They were under contract. And so the editor was trying to say, don't blame them because the supply of water to the city was in the works. It just wasn't fast enough. So there are a bunch of moving parts to this. They weren't totally unprepared, but mostly unprepared. Right. So like a lot of things, if you had taken this road instead of that road,

if all these things had not lined up in the perfect order, if the mines had been providing the water they were supposed to have provided, if the hardware store had not had its black powder stored inside, if X, Y, and Z had not happened, at least some of the mega disaster could have been avoided, but of course it wasn't, so we had this complete devastation of downtown. And in relation to the water, that too has other layers to it because there were tanks in place, they weren't full, and there's miscommunication about who was responsible for which line. There were hoses that burned up, they asked for nearby city of Leeds for help,

they couldn't get there in time, the host cart burned up, and this is an interesting story, in one of the water pipes from a tank, somebody had plugged it with a bunch of branches, like what? So there are a whole bunch of, not necessarily false starts, miscommunications and people not being able to work together fast enough.

So according to the paper, that would have made a difference. But what really would have made a difference is if those first three stores had not put black powder in their buildings, they could have managed, once the fire was going, it was a wall of flame. People came apparently screaming out of their houses. Of course. Yeah, of course.

And for a while they thought, oh, there's going to be this horrendous loss of life. After the first few days, they said, well, no, no one has been killed in this. Yeah, I've read that maybe one person was, a man was found dead in a structure. He was apparently deaf and didn't hear the alarms going. I didn't hear the panic and the chaos around him.

He ended up, I'm not sure whether, not to get too morbid and graphic, whether he actually burned alive or whether he died of smoke inhalation. Oh, yeah. But he was just, he was one of the victims of the whole thing. But there were extenuating circumstances to that. Another story about that is a Molly Johnson, whoson who was a madam was going the fire had it was coming and she ran into her building to retrieve the dead body of one of her girls who had died really so this whole thing is layered with people making choices like oh you shouldn't have done that or

you should have been more prepared or we talked about this and so eventually well within you know the flyer only lasted two hours yeah two uh two yeah by five o'clock incredibly they were rebuilding um they were they were digging foundations um by six harris franklin who came you know later was a very wealthy man he apparently lost everything as they say because I'm sure on his back by six o'clock he had guys re-digging his foundation so immediately all over town they had they had not only decided to stay and in fact the paper said very few businesses are leaving right and they had all by the end of the day end of that first day they had already contracted with sawyers and and brick and wood sources all over the area.

So people were flooding in to rebuild, make some money. Because Deadwood was then, and they were making a lot of money, and they continued to do so quickly again. Amazing. Yeah, of course, as the audience also will have heard in this episode, the consolidated mining operation of George Hearst became the largest gold mining operation in North America. Clearly, everyone knew there was a fortune to be made here. Nobody was going to give up. No one's going to let a little fire flatten the town, get in the way of everything. So you're saying if we assume the fire started around 2 a.m. by 6 a.m. that same day, four hours after the fire has raged through town, an hour after it's kind of burned itself out and leveled the town, people are already not only planning for how to build up, they're starting to clear out the old dead wood.

I use an awesome pun right there. And by mid-morning, the saloons are open. Of course. Just throw, as they used to say, throw a plank of wood on two barrels and you've got a saloon. And later in that day, many businesses in Main Street, where there were just cinders behind them, they were standing in front of their fireproofs selling stuff. And immediately, there were some who said, I'm going to buy all the flour and sell it at 10 times the price. Sure, of course. And other businessmen said, hell no, you're not going to do that.

And they worked together, and they ruled out that. So they advertised within two days we're selling our stuff we had this much stock there's anything you want from oysters on ice sure to women's clothing from Paris it's all here and we're keeping the same prices right again it's it's humans doing things with each other it could have been different yeah I'm impressed by how much, why they didn't give up. They should have left.

Yeah, I'm actually, I'm glad you brought that up too because I was surprised at how many people, how many, many, many of the same businesses just simply rebuilt right in the same locations. Same location.

As people have heard me, if they were present at the Deadwood presentation I gave earlier in the month, as on other episodes of the podcast, we've talked about the history of essentially the Bullock and Starr hardware hardware store that it was leveled in this fire yeah they rebuilt it in the same place but again with wood for some reason yet they built a

warehouse of brick behind it but they built the same the actual store in wood it got wiped out by another fire and then the bullock hotel was built on top of that they just kept rebuilding sometimes in bigger and better ways. For instance, the Gem Theater, elsewhere in Jim went bigger and better, but they just kept saying, okay, well, that happened now. Let's just put it back together.

You wonder about the confidence they had. My hunch is that they knew we're remote. We're having an adventure. We're going to do this. And there must've been a certain amount of bravado in the fact that they were all doing it together. S Star and Bullock were two who were in front of their fireproof selling goods within days. Man, I would have paid money to see that. Again, I don't want to beat a dead horse and keep coming back to the Deadwood TV show,

but it does remind me of the very first episode of the Deadwood TV show where Bullock and Starr are selling goods just out of a tent yeah they have brought a wagon load of goods they're selling it out of a basic canvas tent and of course then they build the store but it is it's funny that three years after they arrived with their tent store they're right back to selling goods out of a raw little structure of some kind it's amazing what businesses thought it was important to start immediately. You could buy cigars, you could buy liquor, you could buy shoes. Everything that the town had before was pretty much still available. And I'm curious, I think if I had been a young man like our own

Mr. Adams, he came in his 20s, I think I might have said, yeah we're gonna do this and start again. Well, I mean, that is indicative of the pioneer spirit, if we want to keep using that phrase that many of us who study the Old West have heard so many times. They were pioneers. They were in a place. They were there to build their fortress.

At the same time, you also have to look at it as there really is no safety net when it comes to this thing. We're here. We probably spent everything to get here. Our livelihoods are dependent on this. What are we going to do? Now that we just lost everything, where are we going to go? Move somewhere else with nothing and do nothing?

That's a good point because, as I began this conversation, everything then, before the fire and afterward, everything but the bricks and the pine they used came in a bull train so when they were getting supplies they were paying a great deal of money to haul this stuff so right after the fire um adams had something like 10 000 pounds of flour uh a whole bunch of gallons of uh of cooking oil ham, a lot of stuff. So my impression from them and the other goods that were already in town is, this must have been a really productive

money-making operation to have all that stuff immediately. And then one of the first thing they did was to re-establish the telegraph. So there, stuff started to come in. To get the word out. To get the word out. Hey, we just lost everything, send us all your stuff basically.

And they did. Yeah, it's incredible that there's this story about these kind of wild, courageous, sort of lawless, but just adventure-seeking people in Deadwood. True, but that was the tip of a bunch of corporate reach because all these freighting operations were corporations. Sure, sure. And then even in mining, early, early, early, 1876, the first stamp mail comes in. Big-time corporations.

So Deadwood is not purely this individual entrepreneurship, I'm going to go strike a rich. It was the byproduct of and supported by big money. Who would have thought? Yeah. You look through all American history, nothing stays independent for very long. Right. Everything becomes a company and a corporation and a conglomeration and grows. And all of that stuff comes in after a while.

So if you're in that first generation, you get a little taste of it but then eventually yeah i think i think that may be some of the wistful memory of the whole deadwood thing some of the pioneers saying oh man back in the good old or esteline bennett's book about groin deadwood the last comment on in her book was her dad she or her dad saying no we're gonna our doors. So the good old days, even Deadwood had the good old days, which, because we're the white guys, we won. So we get to remember it with some feeling of success. Yeah, there's always a whole other side to this. If you're a native person, it's a different trajectory altogether.

Yeah, I've done a little bit of that with the podcast, but that's not the point of this discussion here. But yeah, obviously anyone who knows this history and loves this history knows that there's a whole other flip side to this story. So we can talk about this and the resilience and the pioneering spirit here, but there is obviously a whole separate side to it. Yeah, I think if things had not gone well, the memories wouldn't be the same. But as it turns out, Deadwood prospered. I was looking moments ago at a picture of Deadwood 1880, a year

later. You'd never know it'd been a fire. Sure. And you'd never know it'd been a fire because so many buildings and because so many rebuilt in wood. Like, what are you thinking? Yeah, that's what has endlessly fascinated me. Especially guys like Bullock and Starr, I keep coming back to the example, clearly had the wherewithal and the forethought to build a brick structure to warehouse their goods with fire shutters. But yet they built their store out of wood. I mean, who knows what the rationale for that. There could have been other reasons that I can't think of. But you think if you're preparing for fire on the back end of the structure, why not also prepare for it on the front?

Yeah. So I loved all the information there about the series of fires. We really were honing in on the fire 1879. But of course, there have two more big fires that led to two, well, one big pivotal event in Deadwood's history, but another one that was very reminiscent of that in 1987. So tell me about 1952. Okay, so 1952, a building which appeared to be brick, it looked like it was fireproof, burned to the ground.

It was the city hall, and of all places, the fire department was in there. There was a theater in there. It was a huge structure that was central to the core life of the city, totally destroyed. And importantly, all of the city and county records were gone. And that was the second time

because the first time, in the first fire in 1879, all the records disappeared then too. So twice the city just about lost its entire legacy. Right, yeah. Much of the documentation was lost in 1879 and then again in 1952. Oh, the stories we don't have. Oh, of course, yeah. The great stories, the amazing stories that we do have.

Can we only imagine how many more things were written down in both of those places at the time that we've now lost? Right, right. So skipping forward now 30 more years and almost 100 years after the original fire was the Syndicate Fire of 1987. The Syndicate building burned down here in downtown Deadwood. That led to a prominent effort to pass a law to legalize gaming here in South Dakota. And I'll throw in a couple of quick stats and I want to hear some more of the good stuff from you. couple quick stats and i want to hear some more of the good stuff from you that when that happened when gaming was legalized in south dakota south dakota deadwood the city of deadwood was the third place in the country where you could gamble legally outside of las vegas nevada and atlantic

city and deadwood those were the three oh yeah it was novel stuff and and the fact that what happened in south dakota is like what you got wrong state. So tell me about the effort. It was called You Bet, if I'm not mistaken. A Deadwood You Bet. And some local leaders were committed, and they worked tirelessly, as I've been told, around the state telling people, we need to do this. We need to do this. It's for the benefit of the state. Good revenues for the entire state.

And how would some of that revenue be used then? My understanding is a lot of the lion's share, one of the driving forces of this was historic preservation. Right, right. My understanding is that this was the first time that gaming was allowed for the purpose of historic preservation, not just as an entertainment. Right. So Deadwood was a national leader.

Deadwood was able to bring in gaming so that they could help fund the preservation of Deadwood. Right. A certain percentage every year since then has gone to the Historic Preservation Commission. And a lot of organizations, including us, apply every year, submit a budget. And so Historic Preservation Commission in the city and around the state sponsors historic activity. It's an amazing— I don't know if any other state does that. I'm not familiar with one. We might get some listeners right into us and say, oh yeah, our state does it or our city does that, something like that. I am certainly not familiar with it. But one of the great things, another thing that one of our dear friend Rose Spears

here was talking to us about earlier was that the renovation of Deadwood, thanks to that gaming money, was second only to the renovation of New York City. Right. Between 1987 and, well you could say now, the overhaul of the city has been immense. Oh yeah, yeah, and it continues. There's ongoing efforts and a person could walk down the street and say historic preservation, historic preservation, lots preservation, historic preservation. Lots of visual evidence of that group and those decision makers valuing, preserving the character of the city.

So we are what we are today because of a bunch of tragedies and some literate, committed people to say, not anymore, and establishing a whole new system. Finally, 100 years after the 1879 fire, the community of Deadwood, the state of South Dakota, came together and said, we have to do something about it. We can't keep losing our history. So gaming was legalized to be able to help fund

the reclamation and resurrection of some of that history. And even that committee that fought and formed around the state, that was a bunch of people who gave their time. The mayor was involved and a bunch of other leading citizens. And I'm not sure, well, the average visitor to Deadwood today doesn't know that. But those of us who've been around, others more than me, know that the city just barely got by because before that money came through as i'm told there were a lot of empty storefronts potholes in the street uh deadwood was not going to survive without a handful of people totally committed and just not giving up it's a great

story of persistence i'm certainly glad they did it yeah me too thank you very much for your time thank you i enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to this special mini-series about Deadwood. We'll see you down the road for the next full season of the Legends of the Old West podcast. As always, if you like the show, please give it a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening. You can check out our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, for more details, and follow us on social media for news of the show. Our Facebook page is Legends of the Old West Podcast,

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