Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West

The true story of the Black Hills gold rush settlement once described as “the most diabolical town on earth” and of its most colorful cast of characters, from Wild Bill Hickok to Calamity Jane to Al Swearingen and Sheriff Seth Bullock.

“In these pungent pages, you can smell the whiskey, the gunsmoke, the horse lather, the gold dust, and the mining chemicals . . . A fine non-fiction narrative that’s as alluring as its subject.” –Hampton Sides

“If you thought HBO’s television series of the same name was hyperbolic, buckle in . . . The TV characters were all real and they’re all here . . . Milch’s  Deadwood is Shakespearean; Cozzens’s is all verifiable fact, yet it loses nothing in the straighter telling . . . [A] fast-paced and unbelievable-if-it-weren’t-true story.” –Carl Hoffman, The Washington Post

Sifting through layers and layers of myth and legend–from nineteenth-century dime novels like  Deadwood Dick, to HBO prestige dramas to the casino billboards outside of present-day Deadwood–Peter Cozzens unveils the true face of Deadwood, South Dakota, the storied mining town that sprang up in early 1876 and came raining down in ashes only three years later, destined to become food for the imagination and a nostalgic landmark that now brings in more than two and a half million visitors each year.

That Western romance, we’re reminded by Cozzens–the prizewinning author of  The Earth Is Weeping–retains its allure only as long as we willfully ignore the town’s foundational sins. Built on land brazenly stolen from the Lakotas, Deadwood was not merely a place where outlaws lurked, like Tombstone or Dodge City, but was itself an outlaw enterprise, not part of any U.S. territory or subject to U.S. laws or governance. This gave rise to the gunslinging, stagecoach robbing, whiskey guzzling, rampant prostitution, and gambling Deadwood is known for. But it also bred a self-reliance and a spirit of cooperation unique on the frontier, and made it an exceptionally welcoming place for Black Americans and Chinese immigrants at a time of deep-seated discrimination.

The first book to tell this complex story in full,  Deadwood reveals how one frontier town came to embody the best and worst of the West–a relic of humanity’s eternal quest to create order from chaos, a greater good from individual greed, and security from violence.