Deadwood, Where the Law Arrived Late

Deadwood was not supposed to exist. When the first miners staked claims in the gulch in the winter of eighteen seventy-five and eighteen seventy-six, they were squatting on treaty land, in violation of the Fort Laramie agreement the federal government had signed just seven years earlier. The army tried to expel them and failed. By the summer of eighteen seventy-six the population of the gulch had swelled to several thousand, and Deadwood had the character it would carry for years: lawless, vertical, loud, and extraordinarily profitable.

Wild Bill Hickok arrived in July of eighteen seventy-six. He was thirty-nine years old, a former lawman and showman whose reputation had preceded him by a decade. He had been in Deadwood less than a month when, on August second, a drifter named Jack McCall shot him from behind at a poker table in Nuttal and Mann's Saloon. Hickok was holding black aces and black eights. That hand has been called the Dead Man's Hand ever since. McCall was tried, acquitted by a miners' court that had no legal standing, then tried again by federal authorities in Yankton, the capital of Dakota Territory. He was convicted and hanged there in March of eighteen seventy-seven.

Calamity Jane, the frontierswoman and scout whose real name was Martha Canary, arrived in Deadwood that same summer of eighteen seventy-six. She outlived Hickok by twenty-seven years and was buried beside him on the hill above town, according to the most repeated account, though some sources dispute whether this matched her actual wishes. South Dakota granted Deadwood legal gambling in nineteen eighty-nine. The saloons are still there.