What Swearengen failed to recognize – or recognized but ignored – was that though these claims were only modestly 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 truthfully 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 agencies 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 his services as sheriff, with political ties to Montana no less, was too valuable to forgo. He could have executed one of Tolliver’s lackeys for stealing from Mr. Wu, but instead he murdered one of his own, figuring it more important to maintain his business 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 community 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 never really the point. Swearengen may not have been villainous, 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 communities are imagined, so too are their instruments of power. The story of Deadwood is no exception. In 1876, gold was supreme. 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 extension 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 belief 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, 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 Watson 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 highly recommended.
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