It took a global pandemic for me to truly appreciate Deadwood.
When I watched the iconic HBO Western television series for the first time in 2004, I was just one year into a Ph.D. program in 19th-century American literature and, therefore, fully attuned to its literary aspirations. The series creates the sense of being immersed in a fictional world – not through CGI, costuming, or well-choreographed action sequences – but through dense “smoking pen” dialogue that pits characters against one another in entertaining bouts of verbal display. Sometimes, Deadwood seems like a Renaissance play, complete with soliloquies.
The characters speak in the dialect of 19th-century American English, which is liberally punctuated with the obscenities one would expect to hear in a mining camp of that era. In an interview with actor Keith Carradine posted on YouTube, series creator David Milch said the dialogue was meant to reflect the language of the era, which he described as a “cohabitation of the primitively obscene” (like apes pounding their chests) with the kind of “ornate presentation” one might read in Victorian novels such as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) or Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Indeed, like the finest theatre, Deadwood draws its world in words
This world is a complicated place. A multi-ethnic brew of frontiersmen, Chinese immigrants, sex workers, contract killers, dope dealers, addicts, wealthy thrill-seekers, former lawmen, and shop owners mingle. Two murderous saloon owners dominate the town’s politics. In Deadwood‘s season two, big business appears in the form of George Hearst (Gerald McRaney), a gold-mining magnate. The series weaves a loose web of interdependent stories around its characters, all revolving around the town of Deadwood’s fitful struggle to become a civilized community. The series ended abruptly like an unfinished novel in 2006 after the third season, with its many fans clamoring for a fourth season. In 2019, the final chapter of Deadwood‘s series was a two-hour film, Deadwood: The Movie, directed by Daniel Minahan and written for HBO by David Milch.
Like a great novel, Deadwood reads differently each time you return to it. I watched Deadwood again recently in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of the series, and I saw something new: beneath the profanity-laden verbal fireworks beats a heart of moral optimism not found in the other signature HBO dramas of the time, such as Oz, The Sopranos, and The Wire. In Deadwood, collective action, mutual aid, and acts of kindness make life in this rough community more tolerable. Between viewings of the series, the COVID crisis had me looking beneath the surface of American life for such qualities. Rewatching Deadwood, I could see them everywhere.
Deadwood aired in March 2004. It ended over a disagreement between Milch and the studio about how to handle season four. Milch wanted the final season to include 12 episodes as the previous three had, but the studio was trying to get him to agree to six or eight episodes. The ensuing impasse resulted in the options expiring for key actors such as Timothy Olyphant and others moving on to new projects. Indeed, Deadwood might not have been a Western at all if Milch had followed through on his original plan to make a series about city cops in Rome during the reign of Emperor Nero. When he approached HBO with the concept, he learned that the network had just greenlit a drama titled “Rome”, created by John Milius, William J. MacDonald, and Bruno Heller, which ran two seasons from 2005-2007. Plan B was to make a Western that explored similar themes of civilization and law and order in a violent, rough-and-tumble city.
The series is set in the infamous Black Hills mining camp that settlers named Deadwood because of the dead trees they discovered in a nearby gulch. The land, currently located in South Dakota, had been ceded to the Sioux tribe in the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty. When gold was discovered in 1874, white settlers began flooding the area. Milch, who had reinvented the cop drama in the ‘80s and ‘90s with Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, based most of Deadwood’s main characters on historical figures from the period such as Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), Wild Bill Hickock (Keith Carradine), and Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie), fictionalizing them generously along the way.
The distinctive dialogue is dense and often florid but also peppered with extremely creative usages of the words “fuck” and “cocksucker”. In one scene, gold magnate George Hearst baits lawman Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) by saying, “When I say, ‘fuck yourself’, sheriff, will you put that down to drunkenness or a high estimate of your athleticism?” Much of the series was filmed on Melody Ranch, a 22-acre film set in California that has been used as a location for Westerns for decades. The costumes and sets are meticulously researched reconstructions of the original town of Deadwood.
Deadwood broke the mold of the Western by smashing some of its major tropes and injecting others with realism and literary complexity never before seen in the genre on television. Most notably, Deadwood discarded the Western’s expectation of heroic virtues and heroic men. Former sheriff and Western legend Wild Bill Hickock arrives in the town of Deadwood in the pilot, and he is dead by the third episode, shot in the back by Jack McCall (Garret Dillahunt), but not before revealing himself to be a gambler with a death wish. Deadwood’s reluctant sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) survives all three seasons but is revealed to be a self-righteous bully with anger management issues whose tenure as the town’s health commissioner may have been more beneficial to the camp than his time as sheriff. In season three, Wyatt and Morgan Earp show up briefly only to reveal themselves as dishonorable men.
There are no black or white hats to easily distinguish good guys from bad guys and no easy narrative about justice upheld or restored. Deadwood’s most despicable characters meet variable, random fates. The “Coward McCall” is acquitted of murdering Wild Bill but is later hanged. Francis Wolcott (also played by Dillahunt) – the geologist who murders prostitutes for sport – escapes justice for his crimes but then hangs himself. Vicious saloon owner Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe) is stabbed in the gut but survives. Sociopath gold mine operator George Hearst is harassed out of Deadwood but promises to return to burn the camp to the ground. The gangster Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) survives and thrives. There is no guarantee of justice for bad actors in Deadwood, but Keone Joseph Young’s character, Mister Wu, has hungry pigs that are always ready to make a body disappear for a fee.
The series overturned other tropes as well. Cinephile‘s R. Colin Taint observed that women in traditional Westerns were two-dimensional stock characters—the wife, the schoolmarm, the “hooker with a heart of gold”—but Deadwood fleshes out some of these stereotypes with rich, interesting lives. Far from being foils for male leads, the women in Deadwood are fully realized characters with narrative agency who drive much of the action.
There is goodness in the mining town of Deadwood, but it is depicted as a widely distributed civic virtue rather than the province of a single upright man or band of anomalous do-gooders. In Deadwood, the upright person bands together with others to do the necessary work of improving the community through cooperation and mutual aid.
Early in Deadwood‘s first season, smallpox ravages the camp. When Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif), the cantankerous physician, organizes a campaign to fight the disease, he finds many volunteers, including Reverend Smith (Ray McKinnon) and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert). Later, Andy Cramed (Zach Grenier) joins the team after he recovers from the disease. Swearengen and his rival Cy Tolliver send riders to secure the vaccine, and they join with other leaders in the camp to organize an effective response.
The town’s reaction to smallpox is similar to what we see in real life. As just one example, we’ve seen it in the many stories of mutual aid and spontaneous collective action that surfaced during the worst of the COVID crisis. Hundreds of local mutual aid groups arose in the US during the pandemic, sewing face masks, delivering groceries to the elderly, raising money for people who were behind in their rent, walking pets for those who couldn’t, making wellness calls, playing concerts outside of nursing homes, and cheering nurses and doctors as they left hospitals after their long, exhausting shifts.
This ethos of mutual aid is everywhere in Deadwood. When bandits murder a Scandinavian family in the first episode, hardware store owner and former sheriff Seth Bullock and Wild Bill organize a group to go to the site of the crime. They bring back the only survivor, a little girl, who is taken in as a ward by Alma Garret (Molly Parker) and cared for by Trixie (Paula Malcomson), Doc, and Jane. The entire camp essentially adopts the young survivor. The care of the girl is a recurring theme throughout the series.
There are many other examples of community kindness. After the murder of three prostitutes at the Chez Amis brothel, Joannie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) agrees to turn the building into a school, and a little family organizes itself around her, Jane, and Mose Manuel (Pruitt Taylor). In season three, a troupe of actors arrives in town, all caring for their dying leader. Every burial scene in Deadwood is an act of mutual aid, as coffins must be made and graves dug. In another scene, Wild Bill shows up to help Bullock build the hardware store. Even Swearengen fondly recalls the early days of the camp when the original settlers helped each other to erect the first buildings.
Looking beneath Deadwood‘s violent surface, we see a quieter but equally consequential undercurrent of people caring for and supporting each other without expecting a reward. There is commerce, capitalism, and economic predation in Deadwood, but there is also an underground cooperation economy, making the town a less-than-hellish place to live—not favors for favors, but more like a frontier version of paying it forward. This ethos is expressed beautifully in the homily given by Reverend Smith at the burial of Wild Bill in season one. Hickock is shot in the back of the head while playing poker, just as he is beginning to be seen as the catalyst figure in the camp. The preacher says:
“For the body is not one member. He tells us, “The eye cannot say unto the hand, ‘I have no need of thee.’ Nor again, the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of thee.’ They much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble. And those members of the body which we think of as less honorable, all are necessary.”
This speech is probably the closest thing to a mission statement that this chaotic frontier town will ever have. It also expresses a historical truth about the American frontier that runs contrary to prevailing societal myths: Individualism was not the dominant proletarian cultural force on the frontier. Collective action played an equal, if not greater, role.
This collective action ethos is one of Deadwood‘s many historically accurate aspects. Before Europeans arrived in North America, mutual aid had been a survival strategy for many centuries among indigenous people, who organized their societies around small groups through which members were intimately reliant upon one another. European settlers also brought cooperative and communitarian lifestyles with them or adopted them after they arrived in North America. In his 2012 book For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America, John Curl writes, “Close community survival cooperation permeated the entire way of life in Colonial America,” citing corn-husking bees, quilting bees, apple paring-bees, trant and bull rings, and ship launchings as examples.
Writing about early 19th-century American society in Democracy in America (1835), French philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America.” Euro-American settlers carried this social logic of association into the frontier. Writing in 1941, the same year more than 100 classic genre Western movies were released in the US, historian and folklorist Mody C. Boatright wrote this of frontier culture:
“If a widow had no men in her family, her cattle would be gathered and her calves branded with her own brand. If a neighbor were sick, his corn would be plowed for him. If his house burnt down, neighbors contributed food and labor and clothing. If a school or church was to be built, each contributed his share of materials and labor.”
Boatright used documentary evidence left by pioneers to support his argument, but more recently, other historians have also noted this basic principle of frontier life, including most notably Robert Hine in his 1980 essay, Community on the American Frontier: Separate But Not Alone (1980). In his 2001 book Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, Ray Allen Billington wrote, “Mutual aid among neighbors for defense, cabin raising, and road building were taken for granted in places where the division of labor was unknown, and manpower was scarce.” Frontier settlers banded together for labor-intensive and mutually beneficial activities such as logrolling, house-raising, cattle roundups, and fighting prairie fires. Settlers created ad hoc anti-horse thief associations and “claim clubs” to resolve land claim disputes and organized against cattle herders and railroad companies. Radical individualism was a luxury on the frontier, and when practiced by the poor, it was liable to get them robbed, killed, or steamrolled by moneyed interests with deep pockets.
Mutual aid and association continued into the 20th century. In her Jacobin essay, “The United States Has a Long History of Mutual Aid Organizing” (June 2020), Maya Adereth observes that one in three adult men belonged to a fraternal society by 1920. Many of these organizations ran orphanages and hospitals, providing medical care that would have otherwise been out of reach for most people. The labor movement also owes its success to the American instinct for association.
Milch’s Deadwood makes collective action a commonplace civic virtue rather than relying on heroic men to bring it out in other characters. Classic Westerns depict many acts of mutual aid—wagon trains, bucket brigades, posses riding out to chase an outlaw, etc.—but these scenes are often subordinated to storylines in which a wandering gunman, lawman, or outsider is the catalyst for action because the ordinary folk are depicted as too weak to organize themselves. In George Stevens’ 1953 Western Shane, the farmers in the valley are helpless against the Rykers until the title character arrives. In John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960), an all-star cast of frontier ronin teaches the town of Rose Creek to fight for itself. In Pale Rider (1985), Clint Eastwood’s “Preacher” is the catalyst for the independent prospectors in Carbon Canyon. But Deadwood’s impulse towards collective action and mutual aid is always there and ready to manifest in unexpected people and situations.
The narrative arc across three seasons of Deadwood is headed towards a gradual knitting together of the town into a community. To move it forward, Milch wrote complex characters who engage in community building, sometimes against their better judgment. Al Swearengen, for example, begins the series as a ruthless gangster who acts only to protect and advance his interests in the town, but he gradually shows his willingness to collaborate with others for the common good.
Swearengen is an example of Milch’s gift for creating damaged characters with the potential for selfless acts. Mos Manuel is a vile, abusive man who murders his brother, but after nearly dying from bullet wounds, he recovers as a kind of guardian angel character, looking out for the “little ones” in the camp’s new school. Steve “The Drunk” (Michael Harney) is a loudmouth racist, despicable in many ways, but when black livery owner Arnette Hostetle (Richard Gant) flees Deadwood in fear for his life, Steve steps in to care for the horses. Other characters like Charlie Utter, Wild Bill, Jane, and Preacher Smith are more naturally inclined towards helping others. The most villainous characters—Tolliver and Hearst—are sociopathic in their unwillingness to do anything for the common good.
I missed Deadwood’s softer side the first time I watched the series because the verbal displays, the literary quality of the characters, and the obvious attention to historical detail enthralled me. At first viewing, Deadwood spoke to my aesthetic sensibilities. But 20 years later in America, after the Great Recession, the “forever wars”, the Trump Presidency, the COVID crisis, and more, I crave such moral optimism in my entertainment. Milch wanted to make a series that reached for universal themes, and Deadwood delivers by making us believe that even the most wretched among us is necessary to make the town work. “For the body is not one member, but many.” These are words to live by.