The story of HBO's Deadwood has long been one of television's great tragedies because
of its untimely end.
But with the release of the new Deadwood movie, many fans are revisiting the series, and the
real history behind it.
Here are the true stories behind Deadwood.
The dead man's hand
At a time when most people were hardened by the circumstances of life, Wild Bill Hickok
stood out as a unique outlaw.
A long-time associate, Captain Jack Crawford, described him as a kind soul, saying,
"He was loyal in his friendship, generous to a fault, and invariably espoused the cause
of the weaker against the stronger one in a quarrel."
Hickok headed to Deadwood in the Dakota Territory in 1876, and in a story that should sound
familiar to fans of the show, he did a ton of gambling.
He was on a hot streak in one August poker game, but found himself forced to sit with
his back to the door.
Jack McCall had arguably been humiliated when Hickok returned some of his money and told
him to get something to eat.
"You just bought yourself something with that."
McCall had already been drinking, and the perceived insult sent him over the edge.
He pulled out a pistol and shot Hickok in the back of the head, killing him instantly.
The composition of Hickock’s last poker hand has been the subject of debate and mythmaking.
The story goes that Hickok had been holding a pair of eights and a pair of aces.
That configuration has come to be known as the dead man's hand, but is that really what
Hickock was holding?
According to Arizona historian Marshall Trimble, that story wasn't told until the 1920s.
The only contemporary reference to the cards pegs Bill’s hand as a king full house.
The most likely scenario is that no one checked, and all this stuff was made up later.
A public hanging
The name Seth Bullock doesn't carry the same kind of weight as contemporaries like Wyatt
Earp.
Maybe it should.
according to the Theodore Roosevelt Center, Bullock was there for Hickok's death having
arrived just the day before.
He'd come from Helena, where he had presided over the first legal hanging in Montana.
The scene in Deadwood where Bullock confronts a mob hell-bent on hanging a man is based
on what's best described as a true legend.
According to the tale told by Kermit Roosevelt in the biography Seth Bullock: Black Hills
Lawman, the man who met his maker at the end of that rope was supposed to die at the hands
of a hangman.
A mob of vigilantes stepped in, and rather than let mob justice get the satisfaction,
Bullock held them off with a pistol and did the hangman's job himself.
"You called the law in, Samson!
You don't get to call it off just because you're liquored up and popular on payday."
The story is likely Bullock's own invention, because newspapers reported that the trouble
they expected never came.
The hanging was a very public affair, with hundreds of people lining rooftops to get
a bird's-eye view of the proceedings.
That was against territory law, which stated Bullock's duty was to perform the execution
in private with just a few witnesses.
Truth or caricature?
The Chinese population on the Deadwood TV series largely kept to itself, not getting
up to too much trouble aside from occasionally using pigs to dispose of bodies, but what's
the real story?
Jerry Bryant, research curator and resident archaeologist of Deadwood's Adams Museum,
says the real Deadwood's community of Chinese immigrants lived on a section of Main Street
called the Badlands, and many had moved from China to the U.S. in hopes of striking it
rich.
But when they got there, most weren't allowed to stake mining claims.
Even so, Deadwood ended up having a Chinese population of at least 110 people, according
to 1880 census records, and about half of Lawrence County's Chinese were in the laundry
business.
Why laundries?
Apparently, it’s because they could save the wash water, sluice it, and get gold dust
from the miners' clothes.
Most of Deadwood's restaurants were also Chinese-owned, and one of Deadwood's major general stores
was Fee Lee Wong's Wing Tsue Emporium.
Immigration slowed in the early 1880s with the passing of 1882's Chinese Exclusion Act,
but Deadwood continued to embrace its Chinese residents, especially a group that organized
into a firefighting force.
"Swedgin, Wu, hang dai!"
"Wu and Swedgin.
Hang dai."
Opium to hide the pain
Part of the appeal of Deadwood is its raw portrayal of frontier times, not dressing
up the story as some idealized wild west.
That’s something you can see in the unglamorous portrayal of alcohol and opium addictions
among some of the town's residents.
According to the Smithsonian, morphine was a brilliant new cure-all in the 1870s.
Doctors administered it for everything from headaches and asthma to stomach pains.
At its height, about 1 in 200 Americans were addicted to opiates, an addiction undoubtedly
encouraged by the 12.8 million doses of opium pills, powders, and tinctures handed out during
the Civil War.
Women made up the majority of opium addicts, mostly because it was so regularly used to
treat conditions from menstrual cramps to morning sickness.
Opium dens popped up across the U.S.,particularly in the West, where they tended to be operated
by Chinese immigrants.
According to the Adams Museum, Deadwood's opium dens were both medicinal and recreational,
and by 1882, newspapers were sounding moral alarm bells calling for the end of opium use.
It was finally made illegal in 1909.
Swearengen and his girls
Larger-than-life and not very nice, Ian McShane's Al Swearengen is a character that seems unlikely
to exist outside of fiction.
But the real Swearengen was just as bad as the show’s version, if not worse.
Ellis Alfred Swearengen was born in 1845, and found his way to Deadwood in 1876.
By the following April, he opened the doors to the Gem Variety Theater.
Though the business has been described as being kept neat, tidy, and tasteful, what
went on behind the scenes was anything but.
Swearengen's so-called "painted ladies" ran their business out of curtained rooms in the
back of the building.
By all accounts, beatings from customers, bouncers, and Swearengen himself were routine.
By the time it burned down in 1899, papers were calling it the, quote, "ever-lasting
shame of Deadwood."
"Where's the Gem?"
"You'll find it.
Everybody does."
They weren't just talking about women luring men away from their homes and into a den of
sin, either.
According to Black Hills Visitor, Swearengen recruited his painted ladies from around the
country.
He promised to give them respectable jobs working in his hotel or private homes, and
it wasn't until they got to Deadwood that they realized the job waiting for them was
actually prostitution.
Those who refused to take part were thrown out onto the street.
Taking matters into their own hands
In HBO's Deadwood, Trixie is one of Swearengen's girls, and it seems as though she did have
a real-life counterpart of sorts.
According to Legends of America, flying bullets were the norm at the Gem Variety Theater,
and sometimes it was the girls doing the shooting.
While details are scarce, there is record of one particular incident involving a Gem
worker known as Tricksie.
According to the story, she decided to take matters into her own hands after being badly
beaten, shooting her assailant in the forehead.
The story goes that he didn't die immediately, and the doctor was summoned.
But the doctor couldn’t do much beyond probe around in the man's head and marvel that he
was still alive, until he died about half hour afterward.
History has forgotten the rest of the real Tricksie's story.
The ill fate of a preacher
Deadwood's Reverend H.W. Smith was a very real person, too, and like many who ended
up in the real Deadwood, he had a bad end.
His might be the most tragic story of all, because by all accounts he was a very good
person trying to do his best to help those in a godless country.
"The Lord is our final comfort, but it's a…it's a solace having friends."
According to Black Hills Visitor, Smith was the first preacher in the area.
The Civil War veteran, doctor, and reverend went to Deadwood in 1876, worked odd jobs
during the week to support himself, and preached on Main Street every Sunday.
On August 20, 1876, Smith left Deadwood after pinning this note to his door:
"Gone to Crook City to preach, and if God is willing, will be back at three o'clock."
Smith never returned.
The reverend, who wasn't carrying a gun. was killed on the road to Crook City, and on the
following day Bullock wrote a letter to one of Smith's acquaintances, detailing the tragedy
of his death.
No one was ever brought to justice for the crime.
Some claimed he had been ambushed by a group of Native Americans or robbers, but another
theory suggests he was killed by a group of Deadwood residents who feared having a preacher
in their midst would put a damper on their sinful ways.
Calamity Jane, RN
Calamity Jane was also very real, although tracking down the facts is tricky.
Biographer and Dakota Wesleyan University professor James D. McLaird says her life was
probably not super exciting, summing her up as having a, quote, "uneventful daily life
interrupted by drinking binges."
There are, however, some pretty dark episodes in the life of the woman born Martha Canary.
One happened in Deadwood, when a smallpox plague swept through town.
She had already survived smallpox as a child and was immune.
Working Nurse reported that put her in a position to be a caregiver, and she did exactly that
at a time when being a nurse outside of a convent or other religious institution was
bizarrely frowned upon.
The illness was deadly, but she saved the lives of five of her eight patients, and was
later described by a witness to her work as, quote, "a perfect angel sent from heaven."
"I'm sorry.
I apologize."
"You got nothin' to apologize for.
You got a gift for this."
There are less angelic episodes in her life, too.
McLaird says she was a dance hall girl for at least some of her life, and was one of
Swearengen's Gem girls in the early days of Deadwood.
According to the testimony of Deadwood bartenders, she graduated from painted lady to recruiter,
sent by Swearengen to neighboring areas to bring back girls for him.
On one trip, she was said to have returned to Deadwood with 10 Nebraska girls, tricked
into working for Swearengen with stories of wealth and adventure.
No survivors
When news of a massacre reaches HBO's Deadwood, it's the Metz family who has been attacked
and killed.
One surviving girl is brought back to town.
The incident wasn't entirely made up for the show, as there really was a Metz family massacred
along the Cheyenne-Black Hills Road.
Author and retired National Park Service superintendent Paul L. Hedren said the 1876 Metz Massacre
claimed the lives of the entire party, which included Charles Metz, a baker headed to Deadwood,
his wife, their cook, and a teamster.
As in the show, it was first assumed the attack was the work of Native Americans, but that
wasn't the case.
"Too much ransackin'.
And too many goods left behind.
Someone was after money."
All the Metz family's gold and cash was gone, and word started circulating that it was the
work of a shady character called William F. "Persimmon Bill" Chambers.
Chambers was a well-known killer and horse thief, and the Cheyenne-Black Hills Road was
his haunt starting around 1876.
Not long after the Metz massacre, another attack put Chambers in the sights of the U.S.
Army, and newspaper reports seem to suggest he was killed sometime in the fall of 1876.
Snake-oil salesmen
The Old West was ripe with hucksters.
They tended not to stay in one place for too long for obvious reasons, but history hasn't
forgotten all of them.
Among the most notorious of the West's con men was Jefferson Randolph Smith, also known
to those he associated with as "Soapy."
One of his earliest cons was charging the public to see his epic discovery of a 10-foot
so-called "prehistoric man of Creede," which he'd buried in a Colorado town himself.
But he was most famous for what was known as his soap con.
"Soap!
Soap with a prize inside!"
Smith would head into town with bars of soap he'd be selling for $5, about $120 today.
Why would anyone pay that much?
For a chance at getting the bar of soap that had $100 in it, just like the one the first
purchaser, an accomplice, would conveniently find.
While it's not clear whether Smith passed through Deadwood before his death at the hands
of vigilantes in Skagway, Alaska, there were plenty more just like him who are sure to
have walked those streets.
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