Deadwood, South Dakota: The Illegal Gold Camp That Refused to Die

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Deadwood was never supposed to exist. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota, so every prospector and merchant who arrived was a squatter breaking federal law. After the Custer expedition found gold on French Creek in 1874, the rush overwhelmed the army, and by 1876 as many as 25,000 people filled a narrow gulch with no government at all. This episode shows who filled the vacuum: freighters like Charlie and Steve Utter, brothel keepers like Dora DuFran, and Al Swearengen, whose Gem Theater combined saloon, stage, and brothel.

The town's real story is reinvention. It survived smallpox in 1876 and a fire in 1879 that destroyed over 300 buildings, then turned from placer camp to corporate mining center around the Homestake Mine, with a narrow gauge railroad and electric light only four years after Edison's lamp. The 20th century brought more fires, a bypass by Interstate 90, and a 1980 raid on its last brothels. In 1989 Deadwood legalized gambling to pay for preserving its 19th century buildings, betting on the vices that built it.

• Jack McCall shot Wild Bill Hickok on August 2, 1876, and was acquitted by a miners' court. Because that court had no jurisdiction, he was tried again, convicted, and hanged.
• A Chinatown of about 250 residents grew on Main Street, led by merchants such as Wong Fee Lee, with Black and white neighbors living in the same quarter.
• In September 1883 Judge Squire P. Romans ordered an Edison dynamo and 15 incandescent lights and hauled them into the gulch.
• The Homestake Mine, established in 1877, operated until 2002, the longest continuously operating gold mine in the United States.
• The 1959 fire burned 4,500 acres and took 3,600 firefighters to contain, and a 1987 blaze destroyed the historic Syndicate building.