Cozzens Deadwood

Gold, Guns and Greed in the American West
Main
ISBN: 978-1-80546-068-8
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 432 Seiten

'What Peter Cozzens has done with this remarkable book is to show us that the truth about Deadwood is, in fact, even more interesting than the myth.' S. C. Gwynne, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of the Summer Moon Infamous for its stage-coach robbing, whiskey-guzzling and rampant prostitution, the gold rush settlement of Deadwood, South Dakota, was once described as 'the most diabolical town on Earth'. Built in 1876 on land brazenly stolen from the Lakota people, it was an outlaw enterprise not subject to US laws or governance. In Deadwood, award-winning historian Peter Cozzens sifts through myth and legend to recount the town's meteoric rise - a place where the currency was gold dust - and its stunning fall. He reveals how Deadwood's foundation bred a self-reliance and a spirit of cooperation unique on the frontier, making it an exceptionally welcoming place at a time of deep-seated discrimination. Along the way, Cozzens pulls back the curtain on legendary figures Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, and introduces us to colourful Deadwoodites: from Jack Langrishe to Judge Kuykendall, and Seth Bullock to Sol Star. This is the first book to tell Deadwood's extraordinary story in full, revealing the true tale of how one frontier town, in only three years, imprinted itself on our imaginations as the best and worst of the West.

Peter Cozzens is the author of over eighteen books on the Civil War and the American West. He recently retired after thirty years as a Foreign Service Officer with the U. S. Department of State. His previous book, The Earth Is Weeping, was awarded the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History and the Caroline Bancroft History Prize. The Warrior and the Prophet was the winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Biography.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cozzens, Peter

Leseproben

It was high noon, August 2, 1876. James Butler Hickok struggled through the fly-infested slop that passed for Main Street, Deadwood. The name suited the place, an illegal mining settlement perched in the Black Hills, land sacred to the Lakota nation.

Hard eyes stared at Hickok. From cabins and shacks, false-front stores and clapboard saloons, the people watched and wondered. There was no mistaking the slim-waisted, broad-shouldered, and sharply dressed six-footer with the flowing auburn hair and large sandy mustache, or the twin Colt Navy revolvers that he wore, handles forward. His likeness had graced the cover of the nation’s most popular magazine. Dime novels trumpeted his character as the epitome of frontier manhood, and his exploits with knife and gun as unrivaled.

Miners and merchants, gamblers and prostitutes pondered alike. What was “Wild Bill,” the legendary gunslinger reputed to have slain a hundred or more men, doing here? Did the former marshal intend to upset the lawless comfort of their mining camps? Did he intend to pacify the three-month-old town the way he had pacified Abilene, Kansas, in blood?

Hardly. All Wild Bill Hickok wanted to slay was a bottle of whiskey. Drinking, gambling, and a bit of half-hearted prospecting had become Hickok’s routine in the three weeks since he had ridden into Deadwood. He camped in deep brush on the edge of town. Sleeping in shirt, trousers, and boots, that morning he had awoken late from a makeshift bed in a wagon box. Hickok had tossed back a stiff drink or two before a campfire breakfast with his “pard” “Colorado Charlie” Utter and three or four other friends. He’d shaken out his Prince Albert frock coat, emptied his twin Colt Navy revolvers into a cottonwood tree, reloaded and holstered them, finished dressing, donned his trademark black sombrero, and then headed into town.

Hickok bore arms only for self-defense. His days of fast draws and provoking gunfights were over, and he knew it. Although he was just thirty-nine, Hickok’s keen eyesight—an indispensable asset to a gunfighter—was failing him. He wore a dull and listless aspect that his morning brace of whiskey did little to alleviate. Perhaps he might strike gold and grow rich enough to build a home for himself and his wealthy wife. Or the cards might turn in his favor for a change. In any event, pride prevented him from living off his wife’s charity. This was the American West, after all. Deadwood was journey’s end: Hickok would make it there, or not at all.

After traipsing a few hundred viscous yards, Hickok turned left off Main Street and entered the narrow, sixty-foot-deep, hewed pine-log No. 10 Saloon. Inside, he traded the choking stench of offal, animal urine, and manure for the tolerable odor of tobacco and sweat mingled with the sweet scent of pine. The burning gaslight from the saloon’s four chandeliers likely pained his eyes. Squinting at the gamblers, Hickok spotted an empty stool at one of the tables, and he joined the game in progress. Wild Bill wanted the seat against the wall, his preferred spot in any enclosed place, but the young claimant declined to surrender it. The two other players assured him he was among friends. Wild Bill relented. He sat with his back exposed to the rear door. For three hours, the men played intently for gold dust, the chief medium of exchange in Deadwood.

Hickok might have noticed a small and shabby man with a sombrero pulled over his eyes enter the saloon at 3:00 p.m. and sidle toward him along the twenty-foot bar. Wild Bill had beaten him at poker the night before, only to learn that the man’s buckskin bag of gold was too light to cover the bet he had lost. After warning him never again to wager more than he had, Hickok offered the man some loose change with which to buy himself a meal. The man, who went by the alias Bill Sutherland, scorned the money and left.

Now he was back, a .36-caliber cap-and-ball Colt Navy revolver tucked in his pants. It was an old and unreliable firearm, prone to misfiring, but the model was plentiful on the plains and cheap, about all that the twenty-four-year-old drifter, whose real name was Jack McCall, could afford.

McCall ambled toward the gold-dust scale atop the end of the bar. He hesitated a moment, then moved into Wild Bill’s blind spot a few feet from the back door. Hickok tossed his cards onto the table in dismay. “The old duffer,” he said of the player who had just bested him, “he broke me on that hand.” With that, McCall turned, stepped to within two or three feet of Hickok, drew his defective revolver, aimed it at the back of Wild Bill’s head, yelled, “Take that, damn you,” and squeezed the trigger.1

WHY DEADWOOD? What lured people like Wild Bill Hickok to the infant mining town? Hope, greed, and the chance for a fresh start. Three years earlier, the Panic of 1873 had triggered a crippling economic crisis. Industries shuttered. Unemployment skyrocketed. Railroads stood idle. Farm prices tumbled. Midwestern skies blackened with locust swarms of biblical proportion that denuded the land. A decade had passed without a new gold strike, and the nation ached for a bonanza that would offer the chance for renewed prosperity.

In the autumn of 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer tantalized the public with a glimmer of hope. He had discovered gold in the Black Hills of today’s South Dakota and Wyoming, on land that belonged to the Lakotas by treaty. Lakota rights, however, meant little to the common white man. Quipped one jobless fortune hunter, “A man can’t sit comfortably by the fire when there’s gold in the hills only five hundred miles from his door.”

As hopeful “tenderfeet” flocked into the Black Hills, they gradually coalesced around Deadwood Gulch, which promised the easiest and richest diggings, and its neighboring valleys and creeks. It was a place in which a man could live a decade in a year. Working at a feverish pace, miners extracted hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold from creek beds and gravel deposits. Merchants, gamblers, saloonkeepers, harlots, outlaws, and adventure seekers swarmed to the site. Within five months of the first gold strike, more than two hundred frame and false-front buildings went up, and Deadwood, the raucous center of the Black Hills mining districts, was born.

The country watched the proceedings with fascination both elevated and prurient. and other leading national organs wrote regularly about Deadwood, and the most popular dime novelist of his day created the enduring fictional character Deadwood Dick to thrill eastern readers with the supposed goings-on in the distant and dangerous Black Hills.

The setting was ideal for adventures. Unique among frontier towns, Deadwood was not merely a place in which outlaws lurked, like Tombstone and Dodge City, but itself an outlaw enterprise, not part of any U.S. territory, nor subject to U.S. laws or governance. Gunfights and vendettas defined the public perception of Dodge City and Tombstone; Deadwood came to represent not only danger but also the dream of amassing great wealth quickly, an allure that neither Dodge City nor Tombstone could replicate. In its early days, Deadwood and its inhabitants were criminal trespassers on land that the federal government had decreed to belong only and forever to American Indians. No other western community grew on such a wobbly foundation.

Deadwood was a blasphemous affront to the Lakotas, as was the entire white presence in the Black Hills. Something had to give. And so, in early 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant schemed to reward the white intruders and wrench the Black Hills from their rightful Indian owners. He and a like-minded government cabal secretly provoked the Great Sioux War, the bloodiest and biggest Indian War in the history of the American West. Deadwood became an island in a sea of hostile Lakotas.

Not surprisingly, Deadwood’s isolation fueled greater lawlessness. But there was a flip side. Seclusion bred self-reliance. It nurtured the better instincts of most Deadwood residents, creating a spirit of cooperation and racial amity unique on the frontier that survived beyond the immediate Indian crisis and came to characterize early Deadwood as profoundly as the fits of violent lawlessness that made it infamous. Decency battled expediency; morality wrestled with the basest vices; whites (including former Civil War combatants from both sides), blacks, and Chinese mingled with an ease uncharacteristic of the day, and roving Indian raiders and prowling stagecoach robbers rendered daily life precarious.

Early Deadwood thus came to embody the best and the worst of the West, and of the American spirit. The three years between its founding and the conflagration that devastated pioneer Deadwood encapsulate the American experience. From its story emerge enduring truths about man’s quest for creating order from chaos, a greater good from individual greed, and security from violence. The fire that destroyed pioneer Deadwood reflected the limits of community and the failure to take action to mitigate future calamities.

The dime-novel version of Deadwood unfortunately overshadowed an ugly reality of which the reader must not lose sight: that both the real Deadwood and the Deadwood of myth were built on land stolen from the Indians, as so much of our romanticism of the West is, retaining its romance and allure only as long as we willfully ignore its foundational sins.

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