Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier West
280
Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier West
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Overview
“Shootin’—Lynchin’—Hangin’,” announces the advertisement for Tombstone’s Helldorado Days festival. Dodge City’s Boot Hill Cemetery sports an “authentic hangman’s tree.” Not to be outdone, Deadwood’s Days of ’76 celebration promises “miners, cowboys, Indians, cavalry, bars, dance halls and gambling dens.”
The Wild West may be long gone, but its legend lives on in Tombstone, Arizona; Deadwood, South Dakota; and Dodge City, Kansas. In Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City, Kevin Britz and Roger L. Nichols conduct a tour of these iconic towns, revealing how over time they became repositories of western America’s defining myth. Beginning with the founding of the communities in the 1860s and 1870s, this book traces the circumstances, conversations, and clashes that shaped the settlements over the course of a century.
Drawing extensively on literature, newspapers, magazines, municipal reports, political correspondence, and films and television, the authors show how Hollywood and popular novels, as well as major historical events such as the Great Depression and both world wars, shaped public memories of these three towns. Along the way, Britz and Nichols document the forces—from business interests to political struggles—that influenced dreams and decisions in Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City.
After the so-called rowdy times of the open frontier had passed, town promoters tried to sell these towns by remaking their reputations as peaceful, law-abiding communities. Hard times made boosters think again, however, and they turned back to their communities’ rowdy pasts to sell the towns as exemplars of the western frontier.
An exploration of the changing times that led these towns to be marketed as reflections of the Old West, Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City opens an illuminating new perspective on the crafting and marketing of America’s mythic self-image.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806162041 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 08/23/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 21 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Roger L. Nichols is Professor Emeritus of History and Affiliate Professor of Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. He is the author of American Indians in U.S. History and editor of The American Indian: Past and Present, Sixth Edition.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Exciting and Violent Towns
Many present-day Americans think about the Wild West as a place with action, danger, and excitement. Creating those images became a business over a century ago, as historian Ann Fabian points out. It had "an economics and history of its own." Based on heroes and adventures, that effort began before the Civil War and expanded dramatically between 1865 and 1900 as millions of Americans moved west. It included the work of dime-novel publishers, popular magazines, newspapers, biographers, historians, and showmen such as William "Buffalo Bill" Cody. In the twentieth century, radio, motion pictures, and television added new images and excitement to the old stories. These businesses came to rely on each other as they replicated and overlapped standardized plots, characters, and images. Publishers and entertainers all understood the attraction of western stories for a national market. Blending fact and fiction skillfully, their portrayals brought the epic of conquering the frontier to their customers' imaginations. As the western industry gained sophistication, it created powerful literary and visual images of a "Wild West" that sold well across the country.
As businesspeople, producers of American literature and entertainment looked for subjects with wide appeal. From the earliest days of settlement, the frontier or Old West had offered reliable and profitable topics. In the mid-nineteenth century the California gold rush and the repeated mineral discoveries that followed lured hundreds of thousands of people west. Miners and those hoping to mine them moved repeatedly, establishing dozens of small, isolated communities. At the same time, railroads crisscrossed the land, attracting cattle drives and less exciting homesteaders. This spread of people created other towns, many of which survive as small quiet communities scattered across the West today. Unlike nearly all of those settlements, Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City became modern tourist centers. They achieved this status for three interrelated reasons. First, the history of each included colorful, exciting, and violent events. Second, national writers and entertainers brought repeated attention to their real and imagined Wild West experiences. Third, each of these communities eventually chose to build tourist-based economies using the real and fictional stories and events that gave them national reputations.
Their rise to prominence grew from early western fiction. The cattle and mining towns of the 1870s gave dime novelists good settings for their stories and eastern reporters plenty of material for their columns. Often writers set their novels in isolated small settlements populated with seedy characters involved in gambling, prostitution, and random violence. Many western communities shared those features during their formative years because they attracted mostly mobile working-class young men. That group had generated conflict in communities across the country as early as the eighteenth century, which continued a hundred years later. Gradually the local elites used town ordinances, questionable lawmen, vigilante action, and prohibition to remove the troublemakers and bring calm to their towns. Then they established schools, churches, and other elements of a stable society. Once that happened, the towns lost the colorful and dangerous people who had given them notoriety. Rather than being "wild and woolly" places they resembled dozens of other rural small communities across the country.
Fiction writers and journalists ignored or missed those social changes but kept their focus on the earlier situations even beyond the frontier era, giving readers the excitement that they had come to expect. For them Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City had plenty of exciting stories and fascinating characters. With overblown prose featuring brave heroes and colorful plots, they helped create national reputations for each town. Although based on repeated tales of disorder and violence these perceptions had only a slight factual basis. Yet these ideas refused to die because, like all myths, they often contained at least some element of truth. Stories of these towns' actual newsmakers (Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson) helped each of the three communities develop an appealing historical identity with a solid market value.
Changing public attitudes helped to shift the towns' identities from the edges to the center of popular fiction. Americans began to realize that their society had mostly overcome the wilderness. At that point one literary historian wrote that "the prairie had disappeared into farm land and few wild spaces remained even on the high plains. The West was now a farm. ... You can't fool Americans about farm life — they know better." So did the publishers. By the 1860s dime-novel plots were shifting their locations quickly. Authors moved their settings from earlier eastern frontiers to the turbulent new western towns with the color and excitement that readers wanted.
Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City stood at the center of that change. While their individual histories differed, all three shared the same general pattern of early development. Each experienced boomtown conditions with violence and disorder brought by miners, hunters, or cowboys. They all had law enforcement officers or famous gunfighters in their streets. In each case those individuals caught the attention of writers and reporters who spread their fame. Eventually all three of the three communities used their violent past to develop a thriving tourist industry.
Deadwood gained fame before the other two towns because of rumors of gold discoveries in the Black Hills. National officials hoped to avoid a major war with the Sioux, who considered the Black Hills their sacred land. When tribal leaders threatened to kill any whites who went there, the army tried to prevent would-be miners from entering the region and to remove those who were already there. However, George Armstrong Custer's 1874 expedition into the Black Hills confirmed prospectors' rumors of gold. The army could not halt the thousands of miners who rushed into the area. Despite this invasion, the Sioux refused to leave the Black Hills. By 1876 large numbers of them had joined camps led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. That summer western army commanders received orders to force the Indians onto reservations. In the summer 1876 campaign that followed Lieutenant Colonel Custer led the Seventh Cavalry into a reckless attack on a Sioux and Cheyenne camp of several thousand people. At the resulting Battle of the Little Bighorn or Greasy Grass the warriors destroyed most of Custer's command.
The disaster captured national attention and persuaded the government to force the Sioux bands out of the Black Hills and onto reservations. In August 1876 the federal government sent the Manypenny Commission west to negotiate. The comissioners were to extract an agreement from the Sioux that would give the Black Hills to the United States and legally open the land for the miners. They ignored the earlier provisions of article 12 of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty requiring that "at least three-fourths of the adult male Indians" had to sign any further land cession. To get an agreement the negotiators threatened to withhold promised food rations unless the Lakota Sioux accepted the new boundaries. Although all of the Indian leaders opposed the cession and most spoke against it, they had little choice and signed the papers giving the Black Hills to the United States.
News of Custer's defeat and the land cession attracted dozens of reporters into Deadwood to get the details. There they found a series of local mining districts scattered along the creeks running through small Black Hills valleys. By April 1876 the discovery of rich surface deposits of placer gold had attracted miners to Deadwood Gulch, reportedly clogged with downed timber that gave the camp its name. Merchants, teamsters, assayers, lawyers, saloonkeepers, gamblers, and prostitutes followed quickly. As people rushed in during April 1876, leaders organized and platted the town. By summer's end it boasted 173 businesses, including hotels, drugstores, general stores, a theater, a newspaper, temporary churches, and even two small schools. Residents built a Congregational church in November of that year and a Catholic church the next spring. At its peak, during the boom summer of 1876, Deadwood may have had as many as 10,000 residents.
The boom faded after miners had taken all the profitable claims, almost as quickly as it had begun. By autumn 1876 the population had fallen to about 3,000 as miners drifted away to nearby strikes at Lead, Spearfish, Custer, Hill City, Belle Fourche, Sturgis, and elsewhere. Although violence occurred, including the murder of Wild Bill Hickok, local leaders quickly established a working government. It tried to deal with fire hazards from shoddy construction, a smallpox epidemic, and ongoing disorder. The leaders held an election, organized a provisional government, and reduced crime effectively. They appear to have succeeded. Two years later, in 1878, Louis Janin, a visiting mining engineer, reported that the town was "by no means the rough mining camp that exists in the imagination of many. On the contrary, it is one of the pleasantest of all mining localities I have visited, and in no other district is justice more ably administered, or greater security afforded to life and property."
The rush of miners lasted less than two years, as they exhausted the easily located surface ore. The underground or lode mining that followed required major investment and scientific engineering skills that few of the itinerant miners had. Most of them left, with little desire to work as underground laborers. The hardrock mining that followed required expensive stamp mills to crush the ore and reduce it for gold extraction. In 1878 Deadwood had 47 mills that produced $404,000 of gold each month. These mills and the smelters that went with them helped the community to become a banking and supply center for the area. In 1890 the first railroad arrived. By then the town Directory listed 20 percent of the residents as business owners, 12 percent as business employees, and 18 percent with skilled trades or professions. Only 18 percent were listed as unskilled laborers. At the turn of the century, most of the population worked for businesses that served the local mining enterprises. By then the mining boom had long ended.
Most journalists and writers who visited Deadwood during the early mining rush gave the town its violent reputation. Many sharply criticized it as a center of lawlessness and depravity. A visiting French author looking for book material commented on Deadwood: "like all towns of the frontier, this one has had a boisterous infancy. The rising tide of civilization, like the sea, has a foam of scum, and it is by this scum that it announces its arrival." Some visiting American journalists had the same impression. Writing for Scribner's Magazine, Leander Richardson wrote: "I never in my life saw so many hardened and brutal-looking men together — Every alternate house was a gambling saloon and each of them was carrying on a brisk business." James Butler Hickok, already made famous as a gunman by novelists, reached Deadwood in 1876. His murder there that same year gave the town a local western hero that it has used ever since.
A reporter for Wisconsin's Manitowoc Pilot observed that "every man in Deadwood carries about fourteen pounds of firearms hitched to his belt. The fellow that gets his gun out first is best man, and they lug off the other fellow's body." He guessed that "the average deaths amount to about one hundred men a month." The town's reputation for violence persuaded a Cheyenne newspaper to suggest changing its name from Deadwood to Deadman. News reports that filtered east reinforced this vicious image. A New York Times column entitled "Deadwood Described: A Disorderly, Sinful, Sickly City" concluded that "there is no such place anywhere" and criticized it as the worst example of the "fast and flash American trait." The author wrote that the town had "about 1,500 houses and huts, and hundreds of tents up the hillsides." The column warned readers that Deadwood was a place "where the few prey on the many" and thousands live in poverty and crime. The reporter assumed that most of the business owners expected to leave town quickly, because they had the saloons and stores put up in sections "ready to be taken apart at a day's notice." Few real homes existed, and the families that he saw looked as if they were "waiting for the next train" out of town. "There is not much law or order in Deadwood," the reporter noted. "Courts have just been established, and the city is policed; but Police happen to be in league with the gamblers, who rule the town and so criminals are apt to go unwhipped by justice."
Not all newspapers agreed. A correspondent for Frank Leslie's Illustrated labeled Deadwood fascinating. "The frailty of human nature," he observed, "is illustrated in the buildings which grace its sides. These are a curiosity in modern architecture, and their light construction is a standing insult to every wind that blows." He did agree with his Times counterpart that "a keen-eyed, money-grubbing set of men make up the population," but he argued that "they are far from the blood-thirsty scoundrels the average newspaper correspondent would make them out." Rather than seeing the dangerous and violent town portrayed by the Times reporter, the Leslie's Illustrated correspondent observed that "shooting is not frequent, fighting only occasional, and property is perfectly secure."
This kinder and milder picture had little impact on other would-be writers. The idea of Deadwood as a violent, corrupt, and wide-open town made it attractive as a dime-novel setting. Shortly after the August 1877 New York Times piece appeared, Edward L. Wheeler placed his Deadwood Dick series in the boomtown. In Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road he built directly on the early negative reports. Describing the scene in August 1877, the narrative began: "The streets are swarming with constantly arriving newcomers; the stores and saloons are literally crammed at all hours; dance-houses and can-can dens exist — all along the gulch are strung a profusion of cabins, tents and shanties." The novel focused on the town's disorder: "Saloons, dance houses, and gambling dens keep open all night and stores do not close until a late hour. ... Fighting, stabbing and hideous swearing are some of the features of the night; singing, drinking, and dancing and gambling are the others."
Wheeler's Deadwood Dick became an overnight success and helped make the town a favored locale for other authors. The stories proved so profitable that in 1885 his publisher created a Deadwood Dick Jr. series to cash in on the character's popularity. Even while enjoying the strong sales of his Deadwood Dick stories, in 1879 Wheeler tried to capitalize on the town's popularity with a second hero based there. His new character appeared in Rosebud Rob; or Nugget Ned but lacked Deadwood Dick's attraction. After only after three novels the author dropped the series later that same year.
Although Wheeler's stories continued to use the Wild West image, other reports gave a different picture. In an 1879 article entitled "No Idling at Deadwood" the New York Times noted that "times have quieted down a good deal" and that the "surplus population has pretty much all departed, ... and while times are not very dull, yet there is not the buoyant feeling that existed two years ago." In place of the wide-open and dangerous scenes presented earlier, now the paper described a stable community. Idlers no longer thronged the streets and "the keno men, tramps, and sharpers of all classes who infested Deadwood and the other camps two years ago have left for more promising fields of operation." The Times assured its readers that it "is as orderly as any Eastern city of its size, ... the haunts of vice have been rooted out," replaced by "sociables, sing schools, and literary clubs." In fact, Deadwood had become a city with respectable citizens, "well-attended Congregational, Episcopal, and Catholic churches, and good schools." Although this rosy view of the community may have been accurate, church-loving citizens did not sell newspapers or dime novels. Tales of gore and adventure were popular, so most writers continued to emphasize the wild and lawless events in Deadwood history well into the twentieth century.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. Exciting and Violent Towns,
2. Creating Wild West Heroes,
3. Rewriting Town Histories,
4. Early Tourism,
5. Boot Hills as Attractions,
6. Old West Celebrations,
7. Movies, Television, and Tourism,
8. Museums and Preservation,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,