The Black Hills, Mid-Continent Resort

by Albert N. Williams

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.