News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
I am on my third rewatch of HBO’s legendary series, Deadwood. I have found this perambulation along the muddy thoroughfare of that Dakota Black Hills mining camp more resonant than ever, given the tenor of our times. Strangely comforting, too.
Deadwood is not for everybody. It is as raw as the lumber that built Al Swearengen’s Gem Variety Theater (a theater, yes, but also a saloon and brothel), notoriously violent and foul-mouthed. As was the historical town — although the rampant cursing was different in form than that used in the show. What scorched the ears of contemporary observers would probably sound downright quaint to us today: As a friend described it, “cussing by Yosemite Sam.”
Anyways… consider this your trigger warning if you decide to plunge in.
The historical Deadwood was founded in 1876 — illegally — in a gulch among the pine-clad slopes of the Black Hills, which had been ceded to the Lakota people in the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868. The Black Hills treaty still stands, for all the good it’s done the Lakota.
Anyways…
There was gold in them thar hills, and it drew prospectors in a flood that the federal government could not stop. In the classic boomtown manner, prospectors were swiftly followed by the folks who mined the miners — from legit shopkeepers, to pimps and prostitutes, to gamblers. The legendary Wild Bill Hickock showed up, not to bring law and order to Deadwood, but to play poker. A ne’er-do-well named Jack McCall shot him in the back of the head in the No. 10 Saloon.
There was a lot of lurid business in Deadwood — which is where the resonance (and the comfort) come in. The year 1876 was a wild one in American history. It was the nation’s centennial year. George Armstrong Custer got himself and a third of his 7th Cavalry command wiped out in the Battle of the Little Bighorn; Jesse James got his gang shot all to hell trying to knock over multiple banks in Northfield, Minnesota; Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call; the Chicago White Stockings topped the National League standings in the new sport of baseball.
The 1876 election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency was perhaps the sketchiest in history. Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, and appeared to have won the Electoral College, but there were 20 electoral votes unresolved. Congress formed an electoral commission made up mostly of Republicans, who awarded all 20 votes to Hayes and tipped the election into his lap. There were many complaints of disenfranchisement and stolen votes — of a rigged election.
Corruption was rampant in these early years of what came to be called The Gilded Age. The wealth gap between ordinary working folks and super-rich tycoons was cavernous, and every institution was for sale. Raw mining camps were merely the starkest version of a society that was caked in mud from top to bottom.
And we can take a bit of comfort in that. Really. We tend to think that our own times are especially fraught, that politics are especially nasty and stupid, and that our institutions are sullied by partisanship and undue influence. All of that is true. My morning scroll through the news feed usually elicits language that would make Calamity Jane blush.
But we’ve been here before — only worse. And we got through it, and we got better. It takes courage, and it takes work to climb up out of the muck and walk tall.
The anti-trust laws that in the early 20th century broke up giant conglomerates that wielded extraordinary political and economic power have been watered down — but strong anti-trust legislation can be revived. We can take our modern-day George Hearsts down a peg or two. We can regain our common sense about crime and punishment, and law and order. Vigorous anti-trust legislation, banking reform that promotes small business, and open primaries would go a long way toward a better republic.
It’s on us to do it, but it can be done. Even in Deadwood, there were civic-minded folk who got tired of corruption and violence and put the joint to rights. More or less.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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