CHAPTER FIVE

History II: Deadwood Days

Sam left where he was working one pretty morn in May, a-heading for the Black Hills with his cattle and his pay. Sold out in Custer City and then got on a spree, A harder set of cowboys you seldom ever see. —“Legend of Sam Bass”

It has become the literary custom to recall our bonanza frontier less as an economic phenomenon than as a backdrop for bloodshed, mayhem, and assorted turns of vigor and violence. Early California, for example, is today known less as the scene of the accomplishments of James Fair, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford than as the arena for the armed forays of Joaquin Murietta, Black Bart, Dick Fellows, and various other gunmen. Since this is the accepted practice, it is entirely appropriate to introduce the gold-rush days of the Black Hills with a brief account of the banditry and thuggery which accompanied the early growth of that last frontier.

The quotation at the head of this chapter is one verse of an old folk ballad, “The Legend of Sam Bass,” the not particularly inspiring saga of the life and death of an Indiana-born horse thief and road agent. Actually, Bass had little to do with the history of the Hills, and as anybody knows who has ever whistled or sung his song, the bulk of the chronicle concerns his struggle against the Texas Rangers.

On the other hand, Sam Bass will long live in Black Hills history, for regardless of his other accomplishments he went to his glory bearing the credit for having originated the fine art of stage robbery in that Dakota wilderness. The Black Hills, like every other gold region, enjoyed but scant holiday from the pestiferous road agents. During 1875 and 1876, when the region was filling up, it seemed that there was plenty to occupy the imagination of every individual who was able to make the tortuous trip from the railroad. But by 1877 the area had calmed down to such an extent that idle hands could occasionally be counted in the dram shops, and the time was ripe for the devil to get in his work.

From the point of view of geography the Hills presented ideal conditions for armed assault. The two major stage lines leading into the region were the Cheyenne-Black Hills Line, running through two hundred miles of desolate emptyland, and the Sidney Short Route, less long by some thirty miles, but passing through equally lonely country. In addition, one freight and stage line came in from the east, from Fort Pierre, and another from the north, following the general heading of Custer’s 1874 expedition. The gold, though, most often traveled the fastest route, out to the Union Pacific at Cheyenne or Sidney.

During the first twenty months or so of the Black Hills gold rush, armed guards were not normally counted among the personnel of the stage coaches. As a matter of fact, in most instances it was to be questioned whether or not any gold rode the stages, for the going was generally thin in the diggings, and the average operator accumulated his bullion for several months before amassing a shipment large enough to be worth the trouble and worry. For all the wealth of the Homestake, the Hills by no means repeated California’s early history, when every stage worth tying a horse to carried at least some treasure. And yet, in the springtime most of the miners cleaned up their winter’s take, it was commonly understood, and ... well, Sam Bass must have thought, every good thing must have a beginning.

In March, 1877, Bass organized a gang of cutthroats in Deadwood, and the brief period when one could ride the coaches in comparative safety came to an end. It was not much of a gang that the legendary bandit gathered around him, the five other men being mostly cowardly and quite worthless, either as adventurers or as strategists. Bass himself was little more than a “punk,” as he would be called today, and, as a matter of fact, did not earn his immortality until much later, in Texas, where he was shot down in a barber chair by a Ranger.

The gang, if they might so be called, foregathered on the snowy night of March 25 in Deadwood and, after consuming sufficient whiskey to enable them to stand the cold, made their way down the south road to a point a few miles from town where they might intercept the incoming stage from Cheyenne. What genius of diabolical planning led them to attack an inbound conveyance, which could be carrying little more than ordinary mail, rather than the “down” stage, which might possibly be loaded with bullion, has never been figured out, but at any rate they camped themselves in the snow and waited.

At last the stage hove into sight, and Bass, the trusty leader, cautioned his hoodlums not to shoot, but merely to stop the coach and demand the mail pouch. Presumably the sentiments of the period held that robbery without gunfire was quite condonable, and an entirely different affair from burglary accompanied by shooting. It is also quite possible that Bass was only minding his own safety, for the night had already been marked by one misfortune—one of his men had managed to shoot himself in the foot while putting on his deadly hardware.

As might be expected, however, Bass’s well-laid plans went very much agley. In the excitement of calling “Halt!” one of the bandits proved a bit too eager-fingered, and even as the stage driver was reining his team to a stop, a shotgun blared out, emptying its charge at close range into the driver’s chest.

With the shot the horses bolted, and shortly thereafter they pounded into Deadwood, guided by a hatless passenger who had managed to secure the ribbons as they dangled. Within a matter of minutes a posse had been formed and riders were making their way into the woods. Inasmuch as Bass and his companions had been acting suspiciously during the afternoon and evening, the finger of accusation pointed altogether correctly in their direction, and before the moon was down Sam Bass was well on his way to Texas, escaping Deadwood’s justice only to go to his lathered doom.

This tragic foray against law and order set the stage, so to speak, and before long the spruce trails of the Black Hills, once so still and harmless, could be passed over safely only in the company of “shotgun messengers,” as the armed attendants were called. It did not take the stage companies long to come to this way of operating, for Wells Fargo, which contracted for the express business, had had a quarter-century of rugged experience. Bringing their brave talents swiftly to bear on the situation, the Wells Fargo men steel-plated the coaches to be used for bullion shipments, and brought into the Hills the famed treasure chests which had figured so largely in the history of the coming of law and order to California—metal-bound cases too heavy to be transported quickly from the scene of crime, and too sturdy to be opened except after arduous work with chisels and crowbars. The chests had been developed with the idea that a posse could be gathered at the spot where a stage had been held up before the gold could be removed from the chest or the chest itself taken far away.

A more important safety factor than the chests was the reputation of the shotgun messengers. The express companies went to great lengths to engage only the most fearless and law-abiding men they could find for this dangerous task, and time and time again thousands upon thousands of dollars in bullion rode across the lonely trails with no more than one man, his shotgun, and his reputation for bravery guarding it.

Wyatt Earp, perhaps the most noted of these messengers, entered his long tour of Wells Fargo duty through that firm’s Deadwood office. Earp, as any lover of western legend will tell, earned his vigorous reputation as marshal in the bloody Kansas cattle towns of Dodge City and Abilene. After the excitement of these Gomorrahs had worn off, he made his way to Deadwood in 1876—not as a gold-seeker, but apparently merely in search of honest and not too dangerous employment. At any rate, his brief stay in the Hills was given to the profession of coal and wood dispensing rather than to law enforcement. Either the weather or the lethargy of the place suited him poorly, for within the year he was casting about for some means of making his way back to his own plains country.

Taking advantage of the public clamor against road agents after the Sam Bass affair, he offered his services to the express agent and was hired for the single trip out for fifty dollars cash and free passage. The agent was by no means doling out any charity in this exchange, for he knew the value of Earp’s reputation and looked upon the fifty dollars as a cheap form of insurance. He advertised in the local newspaper: “The Spring cleanup will leave for Cheyenne on the regular stage at 7 AM next Monday. Wyatt Earp of Dodge will ride shotgun.”

Bullion shippers were quick to take advantage of this extra protection, and it was recorded that no less than two hundred thousand dollars in bullion was weighed in for that special trip. It would be most dramatic to recount that Earp’s one trip was marked by attempted mass raids, burning coaches, and wounded drivers, but the truth of the matter is that the journey was made on time and in good order. Only one shot was fired, and that by Marshal Earp, who took offense at the suspicious actions of a rider whose course seemed to parallel the stage route for an unaccountable distance. Without stopping the stage or otherwise alarming the passengers Earp dropped the offending horseman a few miles out of Deadwood, and the rest of the trip was made without incident.

Despite the vigor with which the treasure coaches were protected, armed robbery continued to take place sporadically all during the final decade before the rails pushed through from the East. By and large these forays, while bloody, were unsuccessful, and not a single desperado was able to rise to any sort of fame during that period. On the other hand, there was one robbery which must go down in history for the strange way in which the loot was recovered.

This particular villainy, remembered as the Canyon Springs robbery, took place on September 28, 1878. The locale of the outrage was not far out of Deadwood on the rough way through Beaver Creek and Jenney Stockade into Wyoming and thence to Cheyenne. The coach, on this fateful occasion, was rumored to be carrying nearly one hundred thousand dollars in ingots from the Homestake, as well as from other works; and although shipments of such size were not altogether rare, they were sufficiently out of the ordinary to suggest the services of additional shotgun messengers. It may well have been the mere fact of the scheduling of additional guards that called the attention of the bandits to this particular manifest.

The holdup took place in midafternoon, as the driver was stopping the coach to water the horses. In the gunplay three men were killed, and the bandits escaped with the loot from the treasure chest, which they apparently managed to chisel open. Ten miles away one of the guards came upon a party of horsemen, who returned to the scene of the carnage; but upon their arrival they found the coach despoiled of its gold.

In many such cases the bandits would have been recognized as local or near-local citizens; but in this instance all of the desperadoes appeared to be strangers to the Hills, and consequently the law officers had very little except guesswork to guide them in their pursuit. Guesswork coupled with just plain snooping soon uncovered a trail, however, for one of the stage agents turned up a ranch owner who gave the information that a small group of men had, on the very evening of the holdup, bought a light spring wagon from him. Such a transaction was unusual enough to indicate that the purchasers were by no means individuals of legitimate calling, and in all probability were the actual bandits. Setting out on this trail, the agent managed to trace them and their wagon all the way to Cheyenne, where the group had apparently turned to the east.

By that time persons who had seen them in passing had recognized them, and their names were broadcast to the marshals and sheriffs of all the eastern regions of the plains. Day after day the stage agent followed their trail east, across the Missouri, across the border of Nebraska, and on to the pleasant town of Atlantic, in Iowa. By that time the wagon had been discarded and the gang had broken up, and the agent was following only one spoor—the track of a young man who was always seen with a strange, heavy pack on his back.

In the town of Atlantic the trail came to an abrupt end, and indeed the mystery might never have been solved had it not been for a strange display in the street window of a local bank. Pausing to see what it might be that was engaging the attention of a crowd at the window, the agent was astounded to behold part of the very loot he was pursuing—two bullion bricks stamped with serial numbers which identified them beyond a doubt as part of the Canyon Springs treasure.

Upon questioning, the banker proudly asserted that his son had only the day before returned from a successful adventure in the Black Hills, and had, as a matter of fact, found a gold mine, which he had sold for the very bricks making up the exhibit.

Gently the agent disabused the banker of this sad misapprehension, and, enlisting the aid of the local Sheriff, had the prodigal son arrested.

The unfortunate conclusion to this tale of detective expertness is that although the gold was eventually returned to the Homestake, the young bandit escaped from the train which was carrying him back to Cheyenne, and was never thereafter apprehended. As for the other four robbers and the rest of the treasure, no further trace of either was ever discovered.

Although banditry and skulduggery played a very great part in the tales of most of the other bonanza gold fields, the Black Hills story was for the most part happily without extraordinary violence. Much more conspicuous in the history of the Hills than the desperate adventures of bandits are the exploits of the folk heroes who rode the Deadwood legend into immortality. Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Deadwood Dick, Preacher Smith, all of these amazing personalities achieved a lasting fame during the early days of this later frontier, not for any deeds of derring-do in the Sam Bass fashion, but for the old American custom of living and dying in a high and wide manner.

In all probability Deadwood Dick has carried the saga of the Hills farther and to a greater audience, both in this country and abroad, than any of the others, and for that reason, as well as for the strange circumstance that he never existed, it is perhaps well to tell his story first.

Dick, who never had a last name, was nothing more nor less than the happy creation of an overworked literary side-liner eking out a living in the late seventies. Having exhausted the possible plot complexities of such heroes as Seth Jones and Duke Darrall, Messrs. Beadle and Adams, proprietors of that stupendous literary zoo, The Pocket Library (published weekly at 98 William Street, New York, price five cents), urged their hack, Edward L. Wheeler, to crank out a new character. This Shakespeare of the sensational, having recently heard of the brave doings in Deadwood, of the Black Hills, promptly created a latter-day Leatherstocking, Deadwood Dick.

Dick’s success was instantaneous, for there was a sense of truth in these stories which had theretofore been missing. Dispatches in every post brought the news of Deadwood as it was happening, and thus the weekly appearance of another Deadwood story was able to hang itself firmly on the coattails of reality. In one episode Dick courts Calamity Jane, who actually existed at the time, and finally marries her. In another, Our Hero is a frontier detective, fighting bravely on the side of law and order. In still another he has turned to robbery, and at one point is actually strung by his neck from a cottonwood gallows.

After exhausting the many plot possibilities of the Black Hills, Dick, who had become as real to his readers as George Washington, began to work both backward and forward in time and space. In one set of adventures he is shown to be an active Indian fighter; in another he turns up with Calamity Jane in the town of Leadville, Colorado, which came into its glory not long after the strike in Deadwood.

At last the many loose ends of the story so entangled author Wheeler that he gave up Deadwood Dick as a lost cause and out of nowhere fetched him a son, Deadwood Dick, Jr., who marched on to the turn of the century and down into our own time. Indeed, his noble features can still occasionally be found staring gravely up from a pile of old and dusty magazines in attic corners.

With such a heritage it is little wonder that as the town of Deadwood grew away from its infancy, and as its modern Chamber of Commerce turned to summer pageants as a source of tourist interest, Deadwood Dick should be revived and paraded. Deadwood’s summer festivals, the gay “Days of ’76,” are built around a town-wide re-creation of the gold rush, with the natives chin-whiskered, booted, and costumed within an inch of their lives. During this gusty week otherwise sober and retiring citizens turn themselves out as stage coach drivers, Indians, and pony express riders, and the nights are filled with such a bubbling halloo that the tourists, who come in ever larger droves, are able to go home and report that they have honestly spent time in a frontier town.

To heighten the effect, the impresarios of this gay divertissement many years ago decided to raise Deadwood Dick from Beadle’s pages and put him on the street like all the other self-respecting Calamity Janes and Wild Bills. Locating an oldster who looked not unlike the artist’s original concept, they dressed him in an assortment of western oddities and gave him time off from his duties as a stable hand while the festival was in session. For several years this simple pretense was carried on, and no sleep whatsoever was lost over the fact that a mild fraud was being perpetrated on the visiting Iowans.

In 1927, though, when South Dakota was negotiating with Calvin Coolidge to get him to spend his summer in the Hills, the stable hand, whose name happened to be Dick Clarke, was sent to Washington to extend a personal welcome to the President. Patently a publicity stunt, it fooled nobody but old Dick himself. The rigors of the trip and the succession of tongue-in-cheek honors heaped upon him somehow tilted the old man’s mind, and from that day until his death a decade later he fully believed that he was the original Deadwood Dick. Frowning down any suggestions that he doff his beaded finery and return to the care of the oat bins, he betook himself far from the gentle safety of the Deadwood that he knew and that knew him, and took to touring the backwoods with fifth-rate medicine shows and Wild West pageants. Somewhere along the line he got up a small pamphlet which he sold to the gawking audiences who thought they were seeing a genuine frontiersman. In this amazing tract he spelled out such of the facts of Wheeler’s stories as were coherent and in logical time sequence. The rest, including a date and place of birth, he soberly filled in for himself.

And that was Deadwood Dick. When he finally died, back in Deadwood in the early forties, much of the town had come to believe as he did that there had been a Deadwood Dick, just as there had been a Calamity Jane, and that this gaffer had been the very person. His cortege was solemnly followed, and to this day flowers are sprinkled on his grave by confused but loyal residents of the Hills.

Wild Bill Hickok, on the other hand, actually lived, and actually died exactly as the legend goes, with aces and eights in his hand. It was this unfortunate occurrence, as a matter of fact, that gave to that particular poker hand its gruesome name, Dead Man’s Hand.

Somewhat in the manner of Deadwood Dick, Wild Bill achieved a large part of his fame through the earnest efforts of Beadle & Adams. That is to say, much of his renown came after his untimely demise, and much of it was deliberately generated to satisfy the great western-yearnings of the avid book-buying public. In addition to the publishers’ efforts on Bill’s behalf, great impetus was given to his posthumous repute by Calamity Jane. Nevertheless, in all probability Hickok was actually the fearless and sterling character his legendeers have depicted, and had he not been brutally done to death by feckless Jack McCall he would doubtless have earned even greater fame through his own efforts in later years.

James Hickok was born into a farming family in Illinois in the year 1837, and passed a quiet and respectable boyhood in the ordinary pursuits of such an existence. In his nineteenth year he, like so many other young men of that day, felt the urgent call of the Far West. He hired himself out forthwith as a teamster in a wagon train to the Pacific Coast.

Returning at the end of this one visit to the golden shores, he managed to land in the Platte Valley of the eastern Rockies in the very year when gold was being discovered in that region. The following two years he spent in odd jobs around Denver and on the high plains to the east of that new city. During all this time, however, it seemed as if his heart were hungering for the lower country. He let his drifting carry him slowly back into Kansas where, at the beginning of the Civil War, he managed a station for Hinckley’s Overland Express Company, which was then staging from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Denver and into Central City.

All these adventures gave ample opportunity for any young man of spleen to entangle himself a dozen times over in killings, brawls, and assorted rough businesses, but through this entire period James Hickok gave evidence of being nothing but a stalwart and well-intentioned individual.

The harmlessness of his pursuits, though, came to an explosive end after one year in this genial work, when he indulged in pistolry with a certain McCanles gang. One version of the Wild Bill legend states that the “gang” were cutthroats, and that Hickok was only defending his company’s property. Another version, equally trustworthy, has it that the McCanleses were Confederate sympathizers, attempting to raise a cavalry unit in the region and thus offending Hickok with his Unionist leanings. Whatever the reason, the outcome was bloody. No one today knows for certain how many men were killed, for eyewitness accounts have included reports ranging all the way from one to six, all of them presumably slain by Hickok.

The doughty station manager, his helper, and another stage company employee were speedily brought to trial for the affair, and just as speedily acquitted of any crime. Shortly after that Hickok resigned his express company affiliation and joined the Union army, fighting the war out as a trusted though undistinguished scout.

After his discharge in 1865, he seems to have forsaken forever his once peaceful way of life, and thereafter blood was more than occasionally to be found upon his hands. His first postwar killing took place in Springfield, Missouri, in a duel with a gambler; and later that same year he was reported to have mortally wounded another card player in Julesburg, Colorado Territory. In the next year another report, unofficial like all the rest, had him killing three more men in Missouri, and in 1867—this _was_ official—he went to the booming cow town of Hays City, Kansas, where he was shortly offered the post of marshal.

That his reputation, whether truthful or legendary, was growing there can be no question. By 1867 he was accounted to be one of the best gunmen of his time and place, quite possibly for the simple reason that he had survived so many fights. For all the shadowy overtones of his story, he was also reputed to be a devotee of righteousness and order, although this facet of his character may or may not actually have existed. He was well known to be a gambler, and his victims were all (except the McCanleses) supposed to be cheaters at cards. Whether his vivacity with Mr. Colt’s revolver was intended to rid the earth of dishonest men or merely to avenge a lost hand is beside the point, for his acceptance of the position of marshal of Hays City indicates that for a time, at least, his inclinations lay in the direction of law and order.

From Hays City he went to a similar post in Abilene, where he bore the star until 1872. During all this time he was forced to kill but a bare minimum of unworthy citizens, his ever growing repute as a dangerous man with a gun apparently frightening would-be desperadoes out of his orbit. Three notches were all that he placed upon his weapon during his service in those two hell cities of the prairies—definitely a world’s record in reverse.

Apparently the inactivity came to bore him, for he soon gave up police work to return to the army for two years as a scout. This harsh calling also failed to satisfy whatever inner wants were making themselves felt, and in 1874 he resigned to join a traveling show with Buffalo Bill.

In 1875, however, he was to be found no longer behind the chemical lights, but idling his time away in Cheyenne. During this restless interlude he married a circus rider named Agnes Lake. Shortly after the ceremony, which took place in 1876, he followed the trail to Deadwood, arriving in April and setting up camp with another ex-army scout. The motives which drew him to that thriving boom town were, in all probability, those which drew the thousands of others—mere curiosity and the hope that something might turn up. Indeed, during the four months of his Deadwood hiatus he did very little but play poker in the famed saloon known as Number Ten. That he was as accomplished a gambler as he was a gunman was doubted by no one, and through his ability with the pasteboards he apparently kept himself in such funds as he needed. He did not attempt to look for gold, nor did he seek any official post in the town. He merely played the long hours away at cards.

One might expect such a man as Wild Bill Hickok to meet his nemesis in open battle with a murderous cutthroat seeking to pay off an old score. Western legend is filled with such fitting come-uppances. But in this rare case our hero was killed in a peaceful moment by a total stranger and for reasons which nobody was ever thereafter able to discern.

On the fateful day of August 2, 1876, he entered Number Ten shortly after the lunch hour to take up his everlasting hand of cards. Normally, being a prudent man, he insisted on a seat with its back to a wall, from which vantage point he could keep his eye cocked for trouble; but on this day, for some reason, he arrived just too late to take his customary position and had to accept a chair with its back to the door. The game proceeded amiably enough for a while, and there was nothing in the afternoon air to suggest violence of any sort. At last a normally inoffensive deadbeat, one Jack McCall, turned from the bar where he had been enjoying a quiet drink and, passing the gaming table on his way to the door, suddenly and without a word pulled his revolver from his vest and put a shot through Wild Bill’s skull.

The effect was instantaneous. When the news spread that Wild Bill had been killed, all work stopped in the city and men streamed in from every corner, expecting at the very least to find a major battle in progress. When finally the crowds were quieted down and it was learned that the killing was nothing more than a mere murder, the populace speedily hunted up the terrified McCall, whom they found huddled in a near-by stable, and arranged a formal trial. The facts that Deadwood was at that time still out of bounds to American citizens and therefore under no legitimate civil jurisdiction and that the judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney were elected on the spot by a show of hands, having therefore no official standing, did not dampen the ardor of the crowd. A trial was a trial, and its results would presumably be fair and honest.

As a matter of fact, Jack McCall must have been the most surprised individual of all at the ultimate fairness of the legal machinery which had been set up in his honor. With the acceptance of his fumbling plea that Hickok had, at a place unnamed and at a time unnamed, killed his brother, McCall was acquitted and turned free, and Wild Bill was sorrowfully buried by the admiring populace.

As soon as he was freed, McCall hurried back to Cheyenne to escape the reach of any of Hickok’s friends. Unfortunately the story of the killing followed him there, and under the mistaken impression that he had undergone a legitimate trial and was therefore no longer subject to additional jeopardy, McCall took no pains to deny the murder. This was a most foolish tactic on his part, for he was speedily rearrested and shipped to Yankton, the capital of South Dakota Territory, where he was held for a session of the proper court. Inasmuch as he had admitted before witnesses not only that he had killed Wild Bill, but also that his earlier plea had been fabricated from whole cloth, he had a very slender defense indeed, and was quickly found guilty and banged.

To the very end no clue could be found to any sort of sound reason for his having fired the fatal shot. It was quite definitely proved that he had never had any dealings with his victim and had never been in any way offended by him, and that he no more than knew vaguely who he was. It was apparently a completely aimless killing, the unhappy inspiration of the moment.

On the other hand, Justice seems forever determined to get to the bottom of the matter, for _The Trial of Jack McCall_ has become an institution of the Black Hills, played, like _Ten Nights in a Barroom_, all the summers long in a popular tavern. Where audiences elsewhere hiss their Legrees and other purely fictional villains, the proud residents of Deadwood have their very own and very real scoundrel for the target of their malisons—the miserable McCall. Tourists are cordially invited to join in the fun and thereby to spread ever farther the legend of Wild Bill Hickok.

On June 21, 1951, the legend was further enhanced and improved upon by the presentation to the city of Deadwood of a brand new statue of Hickok carved out of a massive chunk of native granite by the ebullient sculptor, Ziolkowski. An all-day celebration attended the unveiling of this statue upon its pedestal at the foot of Mt. Moriah, and the zenith of the day’s gaudy reverence was the reading of an “epic” poem to the hushed populace of the town over a loud-speaker system from the top of the mount. The statue is plain to be seen about a block from the Adams Memorial Museum, and copies of the epic can no doubt be had by soliciting the Deadwood Chamber of Commerce.

Of a somewhat different character from Wild Bill, but, it is good to report, no less revered in the Hills, was Preacher Smith.

Frontier towns have been notorious for their hallowing of persons, both male and female, who were either expertly good or expertly bad. This strange compounding of affections would suggest that the vice or godliness in itself was unimportant, but that the rough and crude citizens who populated our earlier settlements held a genuine admiration and regard for anyone of any calling who demonstrated authority and accomplishment.

And thus it was with the Reverend Henry W. Smith. A man of exceptionally little luck in life, he gave up his dwindling congregations in the States and journeyed into the frontier in 1875, partly because of a zeal in his heart to bring the Word into the lawless and godless gold camps, but also, it must be conjectured, to find some form of weekday employment which would enable him to care for his wife and two daughters. The wolf had been howling at many doors during those years, and parsonages which carried even a bare subsistence stipend were few and far between.

Smith went first to Custer, where he stayed but a short while, finding little in the way of work and less in the way of souls to save, since the rush to Deadwood was then in full force. Hiring onto a merchandise train as a cook’s helper, he made his way to that newer city, arriving early in May of 1876. In a town of such activity it was not difficult to locate work, and shortly his hide began to fill out and his purse to thicken. That purse, it was discovered after his death, was to be used for the purpose of bringing his family out to join him.

Working diligently and, of course, soberly at his menial tasks from Monday through Saturday, and bravely setting up his pulpit on the main street on Sundays, Preacher Smith soon won the respect and even the genial admiration of the roisterous townspeople. At first his congregations contained more wandering dogs than people, but week after week, as he determinedly kept after his work, an increasingly large crowd gathered of a Sunday morning to listen to his sermons.

Thus the entire town was shocked when he was brutally killed by Indians while walking to a near-by settlement to preach a sermon. Indians were bad enough at best, but killing a harmless and unarmed preacher was an act of violence which shook the consciences of the whole citizen body. It was on those consciences that the guilt began to press—the guilt of the knowledge that they had driven him to his death by their slowness to accept him in their own community and that he had gone to his rendezvous seeking a congregation, no matter how small, that would house him and the Master he served.

Belatedly gathering to his support, the citizens passed a sizable hat for the benefit of the unfortunate man’s widow and daughters. In addition to the gift of cash, the woman received an invitation to bring her grieving family to the Hills, where care would be arranged for them, including a teaching post for the eldest daughter. Unfortunately, neither the widow nor the daughters were in good enough health to be able to make the rigorous trip, and in consequence they could not avail themselves of the hospitality and generosity which were so late in coming.

Although they had failed to bring the parson’s family to Deadwood, the worthy citizens were undaunted in their efforts to memorialize this modest itinerant who had stumbled unwittingly into glory. A great chunk of sandstone was quarried and a local artist of more verve than ability proceeded to hack out the parson’s likeness. The statue was eventually propped over his grave atop Mount Moriah, the cemetery-museum where he lies alongside Wild Bill and Calamity Jane. Unfortunately souvenir hunters carried on their unworthy custom over the years, until finally the battered monument, no longer even recognizable, collapsed. In the Adams Memorial Hall of Deadwood, however, there can be seen a certificate signed in Preacher Smith’s very writing, and thus his handiwork lives along with his legend.

All stories of Deadwood in the Black Hills come, eventually, to the great riddle of Martha Jane Cannary (sometimes spelled Canary), known as Calamity Jane.

This gusty female, who rolled around the West for nearly half a century, has been the subject of more controversy and speculation than almost any other early-day character. In her lifetime she circulated a brief autobiography which successfully managed to hide the truth about practically every aspect of her history. In addition, she manipulated her drab story in such a way that a whole generation of legend-mongers accepted her as the “true love” of Wild Bill Hickok, and thus by no means to be thought of as the drunken harlot she most certainly was.

By dint of careful searching, however, some few definite facts of her early life and adventures have been isolated, and upon them at least the framework of her true story has been constructed. She appears to have been born in the neighborhood of 1850—add or subtract a year—in Missouri. Some accounts have it that her father was a Baptist minister, which is an unimportant sidelight, for young Martha Jane did not stay at home long enough for any such influence to gnaw its way into her personality.[2]

How she managed to get from Missouri to Wyoming while still in her early teens remains a mystery, but nonetheless her career as a camp follower started when, at the tender age of fourteen, she arrived in the roaring outpost of Rawlins. Some tales have it that she had gone west as the consort of a young army lieutenant, and that her mother, remarried to a pioneer, found her in that boisterous military town and took her to Utah. In any event she came back into circulation two years later, for in 1866 she was duly married to one George White in Cheyenne. Following this felicitous turn of affairs she and her husband journeyed to Denver, where he was able to support her in a fine, high style. Unfortunately, she did not take to this pleasant existence, but shortly began to yearn after the cavalry. Leaving her husband to his Denver duties, she appeared all during 1867 and 1868 in various forts throughout Wyoming. It was at this particular time in her career that she was supposed to have earned the nickname of Calamity Jane. Undoubtedly the title was bestowed upon her by barroom companions who had learned the sad truth that Martha Jane’s appearance on the scene boded a long and arduous night of drinking; but in her maudlin and confused autobiography she tells of assisting in an Indian fight and for her splendid services being gratefully given the name by a Captain Pat Egan. In a later interview Egan denied this, claiming that the only time he had ever seen the woman was while escorting her out of a barracks so that the men could get some sleep.

From Wyoming she went to Hays City, Kansas, still following the Seventh Cavalry, her chosen military unit. Six years later she turned up again, this time disguised as a man and marching with General Crook’s police force, which was trying to keep settlers out of the Hills. Her autobiography claims that she also accompanied Custer’s command on its famous exploratory march, but this does not appear to be true.

After the discovery of gold in Deadwood, she found the high life in that town so completely to her liking that she made it her home base. In time she fastened herself so securely among the legends of the metropolis that she was thereafter known solely as Calamity Jane of Deadwood.

Taking advantage of the high romance which surrounded Wild Bill’s name after his death, Calamity made haste to pass the story around that he had been her only true love; and although there was no evidence of any sort that he even knew who she was, her last words, when she died in 1903, were a plea to be buried next to him.

In the eighties she became restless again and forsook her beloved Deadwood for two decades, roving as far south as El Paso, and on one occasion being seen in California. Her activities at this time of her life are mostly lost from sight, but it may be presumed that as whatever charms she may earlier have had faded, her interest to and in the soldiers waned. During this period she married again, this time wedding a man named Burke, to whom she bore a daughter. She soon tired of Burke, however, and drifted slowly north again, passing considerable time in Colorado and then returning briefly to Deadwood in 1895. Even at that late date the citizens of the gold town had not forgotten her, nor had the esteem in which she had earlier been held dwindled; when it was discovered that she lacked funds to care for her daughter, the townspeople passed the ever present hat and arranged for the care of the child. This act of generosity was purportedly to repay a great sacrifice which Calamity Jane had made in the earlier days, braving the dangers of the smallpox scourge of 1878 to nurse whoever was ill and without help. This particular legend has had wide currency in the West, its closest variant being the tale of Silver Heels, a dancing girl who visited the mining camps of Colorado’s South Park in the sixties. Silver Heels is popularly supposed to have ministered to the miners during a similar plague, for which bravery a near-by mountain was named for her.

After placing her child in a school, Calamity, who was destitute, betook herself to the vaudeville circuit. Inasmuch as through the dime novels she had already become a well-known national figure, she was able for a while to draw large crowds. Had it not been for her unfortunate habit of getting dead drunk before show time, she might well have amassed a competence over the years. But her first contract was not renewed, and after a brief whirl at the Buffalo Exposition she returned to the West, spending the next several years in Montana.

At last she came home to Deadwood, a sick and broken old roustabout. By this time she was nothing more than a bar-fly, and she lived out her last days panhandling food and liquor money from strangers. At last, on August 2, 1903, she died of pneumonia.

Deadwood turned out in force for her funeral. As she had requested, she was buried near Wild Bill Hickok on Mount Moriah, overlooking the town. That she had never really known Wild Bill was quite beside the point, and anyway, there was none present who knew whether she had or not. The shoddy story of her “love” for Hickok was nothing that interested the old timers, but was saved for historians to untangle. That she was no more than an alcoholic old harlot was of no consequence, either, to the good citizens, for with her passing the last of the great names of the frontier was coming home to rest. That the townspeople were proud of her, and genuinely so, was not to be denied, although there was most certainly nobody present at that melancholy service who could have told why. The truth of the matter was that they were burying not a broken old woman, but the last of the Black Hills legends.