Deadwood Gold, guns, and greed in the American West

Cozzens, a historian who's written numerous books about the nineteenth-century American West (most recently A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South, 2023), takes on a subject dear to the heart of Western fans: Deadwood, South Dakota. Founded during the Black Hills Gold Rush, the city still exists, but it's famous for a brief period in its history, roughly 1876--79, when it was a thriving and dangerous place, home to Wild Bill Hickock (who died there), lawman Seth Bullock, entrepreneur Al Swearengen, and Calamity Jane. Cozzens brings the town to life, but he doesn't just focus on Deadwood's heyday: his story spans seven decades, beginning in the pre-Deadwood years and running deep into the twentieth century. Although the book will certainly catch the eye of readers who enjoyed the HBO series Deadwood (many of the show's characters, like Bullock and Swearengen, were based on real people), its broader focus makes it perfect for anyone who enjoys learning about the exciting history of the American West.

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.