‘Deadwood' Review: Outlaw Capital

Wall Street Journal

2 days ago

The city of Deadwood, in present-day South Dakota, was a raucous icon of the Wild West, rife with gamblers and gunslingers, prospectors and prostitutes, robbers and rustlers. In his rollicking yet nuanced book 'Deadwood,' Peter Cozzens pans the gold-mining boomtown's history while sifting out some popular misconceptions.
An 1874 expedition led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer confirmed rumors of gold in the Black Hills. By late summer of the following year, some 800 hopefuls were working claims. The prospectors would eventually congregate around Deadwood Gulch, named for its profusion of fallen timber. When diggings there proved especially fruitful, the area emerged as the center of Black Hills gold mining.
Mr. Cozzens, the author of previous histories of the Civil War and the American West, shows how the rush to the goldfields was spurred by events far from the Dakota Territory. Since the fall of 1873 the U.S. had suffered a crippling financial depression, with the collapse of banks, railroads and thousands of other businesses. Because Congress had recently voted to transition to a gold standard, credit and currency were limited by the amount of gold held in the U.S. Treasury. 'The nation ached for a bonanza that would offer the chance for renewed prosperity,' Mr. Cozzens writes. Desperate, unemployed men stampeded into the Black Hills guided by 'hope, greed, and the chance for a fresh start.'
The prospectors overlooked the inconvenient truth that, under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Black Hills formed part of the Great Sioux Reservation and belonged to the Lakota people, who had long held the mountains sacred. When several Lakota leaders, notably Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, refused to cede their bands' claims, President Ulysses S. Grant launched the Great Sioux War in February 1876. The following year's spring, after the loss of hundreds of lives on both sides (including the annihilation of Custer's Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn on June 25-26, 1876), the U.S. forces prevailed. A wide strip of territory, including the Black Hills, reverted to federal ownership, and the Native Americans were removed to smaller reservations.