THE GEOPOLITICS OF DEADWOOD: COLD WAR IN THE BLACK HILLS

S P E C I A L R E P O R T

The Geopolitics of
Deadwood
Cold War
in the
Black Hills
 THE GEOPOLITICS OF DEADWOOD: COLD WAR IN THE BLACK HILLS

The Geopolitics of Deadwood:

Cold War in the Black Hills
by Cole Altom

This April Fools’ Day, we pay homage to the HBO cult West-
ern that expertly blended fact and fiction, and the city that
inspired it. The long-awaited movie will be released in May.

I
f you could create a community from scratch, knowing all
that you know of what the land had to offer, understand-
ing everything you understand about human nature, what
would it look like? How would you create laws and rights in
a place that has neither? How would you transact business?
How would you instill in the community the value of the insti-
tutions that purport to serve it?

And if you decided to build these institutions, how would you

maintain and promote them? To what extent would you rely
on brute force as a necessary adjunct to their creation? Would
you consider other means? Would the short-term benefits of
your tactics outweigh the costs to your strategic interests?

Geopolitics may be the study of people in place, but what is

so often ignored in the arrangement, but is just as often true,
is the power of people. Not in their capacity to subjugate the
lands they live on but in their competence to sustain the com-
munities they build. Geography is fixed, more or less, but peo-
ple are mutable, even mercurial. Geographic forces and fea-
tures inform the decisions of those who are endowed with the
responsibility to make them, but those same forces and fea-

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tures can’t dictate what the decisions will be. Leaders always
have a choice. What happens, then, when they choose wrong?

The answers to these questions, no matter where they’re

asked, form a story. And the story of Deadwood, the mining
camp in South Dakota where there existed no legal authority
other than the one it made for itself, is perhaps the best exam-
ple of how people can fail in a place where they shouldn’t, and
how in their failure they can forfeit the community they built.
It’s a story of how a boomtown for the many succumbed to the
wills of the few, a story of how a community came to be and
how, in time, it came undone.

Deadwood is geopolitics at its rawest and most basic, for what

is geopolitics if not the tale of how certain people in a certain
environment fabricate something from nothing, how the deci-
sions they make, constrained though they may be by the con-
ditions in which they find themselves, build a society where
others prosper and fail and live and die and force upon them-
selves, however unwittingly, the responsibility of perpetuating
that community.

An Oasis in the Great

American Desert
By the early 19th century, the United States, the country to
which Deadwood would eventually belong, was beginning to
look less like a patchwork of discomposed communities and
more like a coherent nation. The central government was able
to consolidate control over nearly the entire eastern seaboard,
bringing all 13 colonies under one frayed banner. Yet the Unit-
ed States was insecure. Most of its territory lay along the At-
lantic coast, leaving it vulnerable to enemy navies and amphib-
ious attacks. The United States couldn’t guarantee its national
security without a navy, and it couldn’t develop a navy without

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 THE GEOPOLITICS OF DEADWOOD: COLD WAR IN THE BLACK HILLS

first developing and diversifying its economy. Economic devel-

opment demanded expansion. With nowhere else to go, early
Americans ventured west, eager to stake their claim in Ameri-
ca’s untamed frontier.

But when they finally looked upon the lands at their disposal,
they could barely comprehend what they saw: vast grasslands
stretching endlessly in every direction. Though they couldn’t
have known at the time, these great plains are some 2,000
miles (3,200 kilometers) long and 500 miles wide, covering
an area of about 500,000 square miles, equal to roughly one-
fifth of what would become the contiguous United States.
The plains encapsulate at least parts of present-day Montana,
North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Col-
orado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Much of the region
is treeless, semiarid and flat, with cold winters and warm sum-
mers, with low precipitation but high humidity, given to sudden
and sometimes violent swings in temperature. In time, these
conditions would earn it its nickname, the Great American

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Desert, and though the pilgrims can be forgiven for their igno-
rance, this “desert” contained some of the largest and most
productive arable lands on the planet. At the time, they saw it
for what it was: a barrier between the settlements of the east
and the promise of the west.

Yet the Great Plains are hardly uniform. Throughout much of

the north, they become more monotonous and less inviting.
The lands boast countless acres of short grass and stunted
shrubs, located at high altitudes on the leeward side of the
Rocky Mountains. The area receives a mere 15 or so inches of
rain each year, nearly 80 percent of which falls between April
and August. Droughts are not uncommon. The sun is unspar-
ing, the shade is sparse.

But, on the southwestern edge of what is now South Dakota,

the Northern Great Plains give way to a small but conspicu-
ous mountain range that rises thousands of feet above the flat
expanse as shadows on the horizon, a protrusion of rock cov-
ered in dark green pine trees known as the Black Hills. It is an
oasis in the Great American Desert.

The hills, which run roughly 60 miles wide and 100 miles long,
are enveloped by two branches of the Cheyenne River, the
South Fork and the Belle Fourche, from which several creeks
snake through the rock like tendrils. They carve lanky gulch-
es and valleys across the hills, and the towns that formed
here are similarly long and narrow. One such valley, known as
Whitewood Valley, located in the northern part of the Black
Hills where Deadwood would spring to life, is just 200-300
yards wide.

As local historian Watson Parker notes, “The deep valleys,

plentiful streams, rich mountain meadow pastures, and the
abundant pines combined with mineral resources to make
the Black Hills … a land of opportunity in a time of grief and

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troubles.” In other words, the hills had gold, and they had the
associated resources necessary to mine it. Soon it would
have miners. All it needed was trouble and grief, both of which
would arrive aplenty and both would, in time, call Deadwood
their home.

Deadwood, however, was not their first choice for encamp-

ment. That honor belonged to Custer city, located in the south-
ern portion of the Black Hills. In early 1876, the area in and
around Custer city was swarming with thousands of prospec-
tors, merchants, artisans, smiths, coopers, grifters, drifters
and others who had endeavored to stake their claim in these
promising lands. But as word of more prosperous diggings
in Deadwood made its way to Custer city, these prospectors,
merchants, artisans, smiths, coopers, grifters, drifters and oth-
ers went north. By 1880, when the official census was taken,
Custer city had only 200 or so residents left. Deadwood had
more than 10,000. A nearby newspaperman said that he “had
never witnessed … so sudden, so total and complete, a depop-
ulation of an old mining camp by a rush for a new one, as was
the stampede from Custer city to Deadwood in the early spring
of 1876.”

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Seven Nation Army

The geography of the Black Hills forged the gold that would
become the obsession of prospectors far and wide, but be-
fore the arrival of white settlers, it had been the bedrock upon
which one of the most iconic nations of the American frontier
lived and died, a tribe of horsebound nomads whose martial
acuity so angered and terrified its enemies that, according to
some accounts, it would inspire them to simply refer to it as
the “enemy,” or, more familiarly, the Sioux.

That’s the legend, anyway. Like so many things in and around

Deadwood, legend didn’t always comport with reality. In fact,
“enemy” is probably an ungenerous translation for “people of
an alien tribe” that became progressively more Latinized as the
Sioux intermingled with European settlers. The truth is that
they were no more monolithic than any other nation. Theirs
was a confederacy of seven bands and sub-bands collectively

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known as the Seven Council Fires that spanned the Northern

Great Plains and were broadly differentiated by three divisions
named for their respective dialects – Dakota, Lakota and Yank-
ton-Yanktonai – each with their own customs and traditions.
The largest and most dreaded of these council fires was rep-
resented by the Lakota, and since they occupied the lands on
which the Black Hills were situated, they became the primary
belligerents against the U.S. in the Great Sioux War of 1876.

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They were well prepared for the fight. The Lakota were nomad-
ic hunters, experienced in the art of war, who ranged an ex-
panse of land from the Platte River to the Heart River, from the
Missouri River to the Bighorn Mountains. Many of their lead-
ers – Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Red Cloud – are among
the most celebrated and most infamous in Native American
lore. Citing resource scarcity, economic despair and a general
dissatisfaction with white encroachment, they and countless
leaders like them had been fighting the U.S. government inter-
mittently since the 1850s and would continue to do so until
1890. Twice they proved so formidable in these wars that they
forced Washington to the negotiating table, culminating in the
Fort Laramie treaties of 1854 and 1868, the latter of which
deeded the western portion of South Dakota, including the
Black Hills, to the Sioux.

Sitting Bull and Red Cloud, however, ignored the treaties and
continued to fight, undertaking new uprisings in the early
1870s – around the time white settlers discovered gold on
their lands. Settlers flocked to southwestern South Dakota in
clear violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty. Washington offered
to buy the land but the Sioux refused, and so, in early 1876,
the United States launched a military campaign to force them
back onto the reservation. Though the U.S. would eventually
win the Great Sioux War, the campaign suffered early defeats,
once at the Battle of Rosebud and again more famously at the
Battle of the Little Bighorn, provoking notions of revenge that
would be one of the biggest motivating factors in Washing-
ton’s reclamation of the Black Hills.

white fright

But it wasn’t the only factor. Rumors had circulated for de-
cades that the hills were flush with gold, and in the summer
of 1874, when Gen. George Custer was sent to reconnoiter the

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Sioux reservation for a suitable outpost from which his compa-

ny could pacify the Indians, the rumors were confirmed. They
didn’t find a fort, but they did find gold. Custer’s soldiers told
tales of small but promising mineral deposits to a country that
was all too eager to hear them. His failure to locate an outpost,
and his subsequent failure at the Little Bighorn, sparked the
gold rush of 1874.

But if Custer’s failures were the spark, the socio-economic con-

ditions of the 1860s and 1870s were the tinder. The Civil War
had torn the country apart, and it took four years and more
than half a million lives to stitch it back together. Yet many of
the injuries the war inflicted – indeed, some that led to war
in the first place – never really healed. Reconstruction was a
necessary attempt to reintegrate the South into the American
body politic, but it largely failed to accomplish its mission. Its
most lasting legacy was corruption, resentment and distrust
at nearly every level of government.

The U.S. was, moreover, financially

destitute. Back then, currency was
based on specie; banks issued notes
backed by precious metals. Washing-
ton didn’t have enough in its coffers
to finance all the war’s expenses, so
it printed money hand over fist, cre-
ating massive levels of inflation that
outlasted the conflict itself. Com-
pounding the problem was a decision
made by the U.S. Congress in 1873 to
demonetize silver. Once it was no lon-
ger legal tender, its value decreased
dramatically. With paper money and
silver worth less than they once were,
gold became even more desirable.

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As the U.S. struggled to regain its economic balance, Wash-

ington encouraged growth through speculation, especially
through railroad speculation, something the desecration of the
Civil War had hitherto made impossible. Banks raised millions
in bonds to finance their projects. But trouble brewed in Eu-
rope, where many of the bonds had been purchased. The stock
market there crashed in the early 1870s, and investors sold off
what they had sunk into American railroad projects. With more
bonds available than could reasonably be bought, the railroads
went bankrupt, as did the banks that supported them. Many
others followed suit. Businesses failed. Unemployment sky-
rocketed.

Thus began the Panic of 1873. The crisis had many causes –
certainly more than are enumerated here – but the effect was
singular: It left a lot of people impoverished, people who in their
desperation to better their lives ventured into unfamiliar lands
for promises of riches such that the Black Hills could provide.

By 1876, western South Dakota had ceased to be a refuge for

the Sioux. The Indians still held title to the land deeded to them
by the Fort Laramie Treaty, including the Black Hills, but they
held it in name only – de facto ownership passed to Washing-
ton. Yet the land had not yet been incorporated into the United
States. With the Sioux dispersed and the army close behind,
and with the Dakota territories in legal limbo, the hills became
a bastion for pioneers and profiteers, a sanctuary for the dis-
placed and the misbegotten, a place where enterprising men
and women could chart their course in ways they could not
elsewhere, for the Black Hills lacked what much of the east did
not: laws.

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A Lie Agreed Upon

The absence of laws attracted exactly the sort of crowd one
would expect it to. It drew in marauders, preachers, thieves,
whores, pimps, saloonkeepers and opium merchants, a truly
unsavory assortment of miscreants, none of whom was more
sordid than Al Swearengen, a local purveyor of spirits whose
business operations served largely as a front for his criminal
enterprises. (In the early days of Deadwood, there was scarce-
ly a difference between the two.) Shifty but silver-tongued, he
became a local power broker, and his knack for forging politi-
cal alliances would serve him well in the pursuit of his ultimate
goal: brokering, on his terms, the annexation of the camp.
Swearengen believed that bribing and blackmailing politicians
would earn him more money than his current operations ever
would. He believed he could more effectively game the system
by being a part of the system, and nearly every move he made,
many of them brilliantly executed, brought him closer to that
goal.

To that end, he made friends of enemies and enemies of friends.

He killed his employees when they jeopardized his arrange-
ments and did worse to strangers. He hated government, yet
he created one anyway after he learned that doing so would in-
crease his chances of accession. (The Northwest Ordinance of
1787 granted legal rights to otherwise unclaimed land so long
as it was worked and improved upon. That Deadwood was lo-
cated on Sioux territory complicated matters somewhat, so,
acting on the legal counsel of a corrupt magistrate from the
Dakota Territory’s provisional legislature in Yankton, Swearen-
gen formed a municipal organization whose sole purpose was
to collect bribes for the legislators. It had the added benefit of
legitimizing the camp’s existence.) The government was a lie,
but it was a lie agreed upon.

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With the formal structures for political transition now in place,

Swearengen fully leveraged the informal ones at his disposal..
He enlisted the help of the newly minted sheriff, Seth Bullock,
and deputy Charlie Utter to give himself the appearance of le-
gality; A.W. Merrick, editor-in-chief of the Deadwood Pioneer, to
sway the opinions of the masses; Silas Adams, chief diplomat
of the provisional legislature, to commend Yankton to his trust;
Alma Garret, owner of the most productive mining operation in
the camp, to strengthen himself with another pillar of support;
Mr. Wu, the crime boss of the Chinese minority upon whose
labor the gold mines depended; and countless other spies who
together comprised an intelligence network that informed him
of the camp’s activities.

So deeply did Swearengen believe that his fortunes were tied to

the camp’s, and so steadfastly did he act on his belief, that he
missed the emergence of a rival whose interests would chal-

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lenge his own. Cy Tolliver, who opened

a competing saloon and brothel, was
a force to be reckoned with. He had
more money and guns than Swearen-
gen and a more polished appearance,
and since his goal was not to annex
the camp but to utterly dominate it
for financial gain, he was unbound by
the constraints that sometimes bur-
dened his rival. He murdered children
who stole from him. He tried but failed
to take over the Chinese community.
He propositioned the army to donate
to his cause a contingent of soldiers
that would serve as his private secu-
rity force.

To be sure, Swearengen wasn’t above

doing the same if he thought it suited
his purpose. But because he wanted
to get Deadwood annexed by the United States, which, unlike
the camp, had laws he could someday find himself afoul of,
he at least had an obligation to conduct his crimes in secret
so as not to tarnish Deadwood’s reputation. Thus he forewent
certain nefarious activities – including stealing Alma Garret’s
claim and murdering Seth Bullock after one of their many dis-
agreements – so that he would always have a sliver of plausi-
ble deniability and a glimmer of legality.

Despite Tolliver’s superior wealth and arms, Swearengen more

or less outmaneuvered him at every turn, using all the afore-
mentioned means at his disposal, earning Yankton’s favor by
turning Adams to his cause. But Yankton favored him only for
want of other options. Officials there grew suspicious of the
saloonkeeper because they believed he had murdered one of
their own. (And he had, for reneging on a bribe.) They went

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with Swearengen for now, privately hoping that when the time
came to move against the camp, they would have a different
fifth column. Tolliver alone couldn’t help them. But with the
right backing, perhaps he could.

New backing materialized quickly, for the potential wealth that

lay in the Black Hills captured the attention of someone more
resourceful, more cunning and more ruthless than anyone
who had yet set foot in the camp: the mining baron George
Hearst, who had made a name for himself some years before
striking it rich in the Comstock Lode in Nevada. Hearst’s rep-
utation preceded his arrival, as did his chief geologist, Francis
Wolcott. Wolcott was more of a political operative than a sci-
entist, though, and his presence was central to the upheaval
Deadwood would soon undergo.

So was Tolliver’s. He had appeared on Hearst’s radar some

months before, when Tolliver tried to hire Chinese immigrants
from San Francisco for his attempted takeover of Deadwood.
He didn’t know it was Hearst’s laborers that he had tried to
poach – to steal workers from Hearst was to consign yourself
to death. But instead of punishing Tolliver, Wolcott recruited
him, enlisting him to be funder and frontman in a scheme to
covertly purchase every gold claim in the camp – which they
achieved by circulating lies as to whether Yankton would hon-
or existing claims once Deadwood was annexed.

Yankton had every intention of honoring the claims – at least,

that was the arrangement the legislature had made with
Swearengen. But once the legislators caught wind of Hearst’s
plans, they figured it would be better to own the land outright
than to settle for whatever bribes the lands might produce. So,
they dispatched their county commissioner to cut out the mid-
dleman they never wanted to deal with in the first place. The
commissioner brokered a deal whereby Yankton would extend
the full support of the incoming government in exchange for

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certain lands Hearst, through Tolliver and Wolcott, had recent-

ly procured.

It was a sensible plan that if not for Swearengen’s tactical bril-

liance may have even worked. Realizing he was being cut out,
Swearengen tricked Yankton into thinking that the Montana
Territory was interested in claiming the Black Hills, and the gold
therein, for its own. He engaged Seth Bullock to validate the lie.
(In addition to being the local sheriff, Bullock was formerly a
U.S. marshal in Montana, where he still had political connec-
tions.) He conspired with Silas Adams too, and together they
concocted a story of Montana overtures that Yankton, in its
paranoia and greed, had no choice but to believe. The legisla-
tors there knew the Montana gambit was probably a ruse, but
dismissing it entirely was a risk they couldn’t afford to take. So,
they brokered an agreement in which the camp was annexed
on Swearengen’s terms, not Hearst’s – terms that included
the holding of local elections that Swearengen would, as best
he could, manipulate to his benefit, and terms that would pit
Swearengen directly against Hearst.

Amalgamation and Capital

Early in the camp’s history, before the arrival of Tolliver and
Hearst, before the Pinkertons and before elections, Swearen-
gen duped an eastern dude into buying a bogus gold claim. To
give the ploy a sense of gravity, he set up a fake buyer to try to
outbid him. To give it a sense of urgency, he warned the dude
that the buyer would act quickly, saying “Things sort out fast in
Deadwood … while you were out winning the battle, I hope you
didn’t lose the fucking war.”

It was a fateful quote and, in retrospect, a little ironic. Swearen-

gen made his play against the agents of Yankton and got ex-
actly what he wanted. And in doing so, he secured the camp’s

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well-being, however temporarily. His

intentions were never entirely altruis-
tic, of course, but his interests were
largely aligned with the camp’s. It’s
why he went against the Pinkertons
by protecting Alma Garret and why
he went against a man as powerful
as George Hearst – indeed, it’s why
he formed a government he had ev-
ery intention of ignoring. For better
or worse, his material benefit was
Deadwood’s, and Deadwood’s his, so
he was compelled to rally the titans of
the community to his cause. When he
fought, his allies fought with him – not
for fear of retribution but for a sense
of duty to and the mutual benefit of
the community he was creating. Thus
is the basis of enduring alliances.

But in winning the battle, Swearengen

himself lost the war. For all his tacti-
cal ingenuity, his strategic vision was fundamentally flawed,
for he never saw how important gold really was.

It was easy to overlook. Though the greater Deadwood area

boasted as many as 10,000 residents in 1876, only 1,300 or
so were actually employed, according to an account from a
New York Times correspondent. Some were working their gold
claims, others were capitalizing on industries such as hard-
ware and sundry goods that always arise in boomtowns, but
the rest of them were just milling about, waiting for fortune to
find them.

Moreover, the gold claims that were being worked in the ear-
ly stages of the gold rush weren’t especially productive. Esti-

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mates suggest the 15 most profitable ones yielded only about

$30,000 to $80,000 worth of gold (valued at $20 per ounce).
These figures exclude additional costs such as wages, tim-
ber, supplies, and so on. And many of the claims were joint
ventures, so the proceeds were sometimes divvied up among
their several co-owners. That kind of money was nothing to
sniff at, and was perhaps enough to retire on at the time, but it
was hardly the payout the prospectors had hoped for. Further-
more, most of the mines they worked were what are known as
placer mines, which are meant to scrape gold deposits from
the surface and the streams. Their owners were glorified and
sometimes even sophisticated panners, but they were pan-
ners nonetheless. Far fewer claims proved lucrative enough
to warrant the drilling and milling necessary to explore what

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lay beneath the surface. (The Garret claim being an obvious

exception.) Lode mines were eventually built, but they required
more capital than the panners could generate and depended
on technologies that had yet to be invented.

What Swearengen failed to recognize – or recognized but

ignored – was that though these claims were only modest-
ly fruitful on their own, they collectively represented the true
promise and power of the camp. Hearst was not so naive. As
Wolcott noted prior to his employer’s arrival, “I look forward to
showing you every aspect of what I believe soon may be truth-
fully described as the largest and most forward-looking gold
operation in the world.” When Hearst did arrive, he described
Deadwood to a subordinate thusly: “Very, very rich … for pure
scale, maybe the richest find I’ve seen.” Hearst understood
that the consolidation of the gold trade, not political entree,
was the key to power in the camp. He knew that in a town such
as Deadwood, which had no laws to speak of, wealth would
facilitate political power, not the other way around.

And Hearst used his power to great effect. He purchased every

remaining claim in the camp. He hired the Pinkertons to serve
as his private mercenaries, intimidating those who would think
about challenging him and killing those who already had. He
forced Yankton to fix the elections so that local officials would
be beholden to him. He vowed to install his own media agen-
cies to spin the news his way. He accomplished, in other words,
everything Swearengen had – only faster and more effectively.
And he did it because he had the money and the muscle to do
it. He became the despot Swearengen never could.

To be clear, there’s no evidence to suggest Swearengen ever

wanted to be Deadwood’s dictator. He could have continued
to strongarm Alma Garret into selling her gold claim, but he
stopped as soon as he heard annexation was in the offing. He
could have killed Seth Bullock, but he didn’t, determining that

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his services as sheriff, with political ties to Montana no less,

was too valuable to forgo. He could have executed one of Tolli-
ver’s lackeys for stealing from Mr. Wu, but instead he murdered
one of his own, figuring it more important to maintain his busi-
ness ties with the Chinese community than it was to start a
costly and bloody war that would tear Deadwood asunder.

And there’s no reason to believe the camp needed a dictator.

Thomas Hobbes would have surely noted that life in the camp
was nasty, brutish and short, but not nearly so much as it was
in the wilderness. Self-interested though he may have been,
Swearengen proved fully capable of bringing a semblance
of order and then surrendered his control by making way for
elections. The camp was developing slowly, but it was still
developing. That is until Hearst, that consummate prophet of
capitalism, transformed the camp by enacting laws not for the
people but for his own material benefit, relegating the city that
Deadwood would become to a life of mercantilist servitude, a
proto-colonial trough for Hearst and Yankton to feed on.

In that sense, the damage Hearst inflicted on Deadwood was

irrecoverable, for it stunted Deadwood’s growth at a critical
juncture in its lifespan. Time and again, history has shown that
even when communities rid themselves of their masters and
tear down the structures that exploit them, it can take years,
even generations, to replace them with new, more equitable
structures. There’s still a chance that Swearengen et al. can
retake control, but even if they do, it’s merely the beginning of
a long-term process to reform the community, for the commu-
nity they’d be taking over is antithetical to their interests.

Imposing his will on the community, without the purchase of

its people, made Hearst a villain. But in a camp like Deadwood,
where lofty ideals were inimical to self-interest, the difference
between villainy and heroism was always minute and was nev-
er really the point. Swearengen may not have been villainous,

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 THE GEOPOLITICS OF DEADWOOD: COLD WAR IN THE BLACK HILLS

but neither was he heroic. He merely chose to align himself

with those he believed best served his interests. His affinity for
the camp, however sincere it may have been, was incidental to
that decision. That he made the wrong decision places on his
shoulders at least part of the blame for Deadwood’s ruination.
He held the power in the community, and sometimes guilt is
the price you pay for power.

Which brings us back to where we started: the power of people

in geopolitics. The story of a community is at least in part a
story of how people there wield power, but because all com-
munities are imagined, so too are their instruments of power.
The story of Deadwood is no exception. In 1876, gold was su-
preme. But to the indigenous peoples who lived in the Black
Hills well before the arrival of white settlers, gold would have
been as useful as the bow and arrow would have been to
Hearst. In time, it became the cause of their displacement. It
was the reason Swearengen came to camp, and the reason he
failed to secure it.

In that sense, Deadwood is prototypically American. The city is

a byproduct of a gold rush and in some ways a natural exten-
sion of the United States’ need for strategic depth. Yet it was
also a consequence of ideology. Deadwood existed because
white settlers set forth to tame the west, animated by the be-
lief that their ideals, those inalienable rights and equalities they
talked so much about, ought to be spread, and that a Manifest
Destiny should at all costs be realized. There’s power in that
belief, even if the belief is a lie, even if the place to which it
brought them is imagined.

There’s also an undeniable sense of freedom evoked by that

belief. But even for the citizens of Deadwood, who abided by
no law for as long as they could, freedom was never absolute.
They slowly surrendered it as they cohered into a community,
trading liberty for the necessities of organized life. Eventually,

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 THE GEOPOLITICS OF DEADWOOD: COLD WAR IN THE BLACK HILLS

everyone cedes freedom to a power greater than themselves

– or they die trying to defy it.

Editor’s note:
This analysis – and indeed the HBO series that inspired it – owes a
great deal to “Deadwood: The Golden Years” by the late historian Wat-
son Parker. It’s an excellent historical accounting, to be sure, but as a
written work, it is absolutely singular. Folksy and irreverent, old-timey
yet familiar, sometimes somber but always affectionate, “Deadwood”
is written with the kind of fondness only a native son such as Parker
can provide, and with a liveliness few other subjects demand. It is high-
ly recommended.

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