DEADWOOD

A rootin’-tootin’ history of the famed Western town.

Think of Deadwood, South Dakota, and you’re likely to conjure up an image of Wild Bill Hickok. Cozzens wisely opens with Deadwood’s most famed citizen, but with a few surprises—for one, that Hickok had given up his old gunfighting ways, his eyesight failing, and was attempting to make his fortune more or less legitimately in a town that, Cozzens writes, was “journey’s end.” Alas, he was gunned down in a saloon while playing cards. That’s fitting, perhaps, for, as Cozzens notes, Deadwood not only appealed to outlaws and drifters, but the town itself was “an outlaw enterprise,” founded against orders from the federal government to stay out of territory that was sacred to Native nations. Gold overrode such concerns, and in any event the government would soon wage war on those Native peoples. Deadwood spawned numerous characters who would become famous through popular culture (not least the HBO show of that name), among them the saloon keeper Al Swearingen and the prostitute Calamity Jane, as well as a madam, Mollie Johnson, who “genuinely loved baseball, and she enjoyed treating her girls between Deadwood and Fort Meade,” where the girls would relieve soldiers of their pay. Yet Cozzens demonstrates that, for all its reputation as a den of iniquity, Deadwood was, in the words of a visiting New York reporter, “a remarkably quiet, orderly, law-­abiding town.” Some of that calm and prosperity came from deliberate action on the part of citizens who liked the place and wanted to make it something more than a mining camp. Today, of course, the town is a tourist draw—not least for its casinos—though its famed brothels were shut down years ago.

A vivid, and corrective, study of a place better known for its transgressions than its ordinariness.