Deadwood

History & Significance

Deadwood sits in a narrow canyon in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, a town that exists because gold was found in the creek gravel in 1876 and because the United States government failed to honor the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota Nation in perpetuity. The Hills were Paha Sapa, sacred ground at the center of the Lakota world, and the 1868 treaty had explicitly prohibited American settlement there. The gold rush that violated that treaty was one of the more nakedly illegal acts of American expansion in the nineteenth century.

General George Custer's surveying expedition into the Black Hills in 1874 found gold and reported it. The rush that followed was immediate. By the spring of 1876, thousands of prospectors were streaming into territory where they had no legal right to be, and the federal government, rather than enforcing the treaty, eventually abrogated it. Deadwood was established in April 1876 in a gulch beside Whitewood Creek, and within months it had grown into a raw frontier city of 25,000 people, none of whom held valid title to the land they occupied.

Wild Bill Hickok arrived in Deadwood in July 1876 and was shot in the back of the head on August 2, 1876, while playing poker at Nuttal and Mann's saloon. He was holding what has been called the dead man's hand ever since: two aces and two eights. Calamity Jane, the scout, frontierswoman, and performer Martha Jane Canary, was a Deadwood fixture in the 1870s and is buried beside Hickok on Mount Moriah above the town. The town's mythology was established within weeks of its founding.

Lawrence County was organized by the Dakota Territory legislature in 1875, in advance of the legal settlement of the Black Hills question, a political act that preceded the military resolution of the Lakota resistance by a matter of months. The county deed records from the 1870s document the informal property system that emerged in the mining camp before formal title could be established.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 was the United States government's formal agreement with the Lakota, Yanktonai, and Santee Sioux nations ending Red Cloud's War. Among its provisions was the establishment of the Great Sioux Reservation, encompassing all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River, with the Black Hills explicitly included and protected against American encroachment. The treaty prohibited any American settlement or travel in the Black Hills without Lakota permission.

The Custer expedition of 1874 violated the treaty directly. Its ostensible purpose was military reconnaissance, but it included mining engineers who confirmed gold deposits in the Hills' creek valleys. The reports attracted prospecting parties almost immediately, and the army's half-hearted efforts to turn back miners had little effect on a rush that was being driven by economic desperation in the aftermath of the Panic of 1873.

The government's attempt to purchase the Black Hills from the Lakota in 1875 failed when Lakota leaders, recognizing the value of what was being demanded, declined to sell at any price the American negotiators would offer. The government then shifted to military pressure, issuing an ultimatum requiring all Lakota to report to reservation agencies by January 31, 1876, and declaring those who did not to be hostile. The result was the Great Sioux War of 1876, which included the Battle of Little Bighorn in June and ended with the military defeat of the Lakota resistance and the forced cession of the Black Hills. The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the taking of the Black Hills was an unconstitutional taking without just compensation.

The initial rush to Deadwood was placer mining: prospectors working the creek gravel with pans and sluice boxes to recover the free gold deposited in the stream sediment. The placer deposits were rich in 1876 and 1877, but they were also finite. As the surface gold was worked out, the mining economy shifted to hard-rock extraction of the ore veins in the surrounding hills, which required capital equipment, shafts, stamp mills, and a larger workforce.

The Homestake Mine, opened in 1877 by a syndicate that included George Hearst, became the dominant enterprise in the Black Hills and remained in operation until 2002, producing roughly 40 million troy ounces of gold over its lifetime. The mine's operation transformed Deadwood and the surrounding area from a placer camp into an industrial mining district, with all the economic and social consequences that distinction implies. The Homestake hired thousands of workers, built its own town at Lead adjacent to the mine, and generated fortunes that funded newspapers, political careers, and cultural institutions across California and New York.

The Lawrence County deed records document the rapid consolidation of mining claims from individual prospectors into corporate ownership that characterized the transition from placer to hard-rock mining. The informal claim staking systems of the early rush, recorded in claim books at the local miners' court, gave way to formal patents issued under the Mining Law of 1872, which allowed mineral claimants to purchase their claims from the federal government for $5 per acre.

James Butler Hickok, known as Wild Bill, arrived in Deadwood in July 1876 with a reputation as a lawman, scout, and gunfighter built on a decade of service in Kansas cow towns and on the southern plains. He was not, in Deadwood, a law enforcement officer. He was a gambler, a tourist attraction, and a man whose reputation was beginning to exceed his actual circumstances. He was killed within weeks of his arrival.

The shooter was Jack McCall, who claimed Hickok had previously killed his brother. A hastily assembled miners' jury acquitted McCall, a verdict that was overturned by the Dakota Territory courts when it was pointed out that the miners' court had no legal jurisdiction in the Black Hills. McCall was tried again in Yankton, convicted, and hanged in 1877. Hickok's grave on Mount Moriah became a tourist destination almost immediately.

Martha Jane Canary, Calamity Jane, has a more complex historical record than the mythological figure suggests. She was a frontierswoman, army scout, and teamster in an era when those were exclusively male occupations, and she performed tasks that required the kind of physical toughness and practical competence that frontier conditions demanded. Her relationship with Hickok was probably not the romance of later popular culture, but they were contemporaries in Deadwood and are now neighbors in death on the hill above the town they both haunted.