My Review of Peter Cozzens' "Deadwood: Gold, Guns and Greed in the American West"

 Gold in Them There Hills

As an enthusiastic fan of the Deadwood HBO series, I was looking forward to Peter Cozzens’ book on the same subject. Except for the book being too long, I was not disappointed. Cozzens’ “Deadwood” has everything. His cast of characters include Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane, Sitting Bull, President Grant, and George Hearst. We witness Indian wars, cattle rustling, horse thieves, stagecoach robberies, gun fights and water wars. As in the HBO series, the two leading protagonists are Seth Bullock and Sol Star who own a hardware store. Bullock would become sheriff and U.S. Marshall and Star would remain a pillar of the community.

 In four short years 1876-1879 Deadwood sparked the imagination of the entire country with the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The town was founded by would be miners illegally squatting on Indian land that was later legalized. The miners largely came from the vast army of the unemployed caused by the long depression of 1873-1879. Following them was a smaller army of “soiled doves,” prostitutes in the vernacular of the day, who populated the Deadwood’s notorious brothels.

 Two facets of Deadwood’s short history bring out the economist in me. First Deadwood represents a case study in spontaneous order where the town was created out of nothing. Of course, quite a bit of disorder went along with the order, but Deadwood worked more or less. Indeed, Deadwood was one of the few places in the U.S. where African Americans, Jews and Chinese got along with the majority white Christian population and were respected to varying degrees.

 Second, with the passage of Grant’s Specie Resumption Act of 1875 the United States was put on a path to the gold standard. One of the problems with the gold standard is that the growth in the money supply is contingent the success of miners in finding gold. Hence, the importance of Deadwood. In part, Deadwood helped put the U.S. back on the gold standard in 1879.

 Cozzens highlights the role George Hearst the mining magnate who struck it rich in nearby Lead City. His Homestake Mine would form the foundation of his wealth and it enabled his son William Randolf to become a press lord and leading politician in the early 20^th Century. He was far from the most scrupulous person, but his mine produced gold through 2002. It truly was the mother lode.

Deadwood’s day in the sun ended with a fire in late 1879 which wiped out the town. However, absent the fire the decline in placer mining made decline inevitable. Capital intensive hard rock mining took the place of the very labor-intensive panning for gold. Cozzens tells a great story of this small mining town that captured the attention of the nation.