American Savagery
Twenty years later, David Milch's Deadwood remains among the 21st Century's greatest works of American art.
Note to The Vestibule’s subscribers: Upon recently realizing that 20 years have passed since David Milch’s HBO masterpiece Deadwood premiered on 21 March 2004, I experienced one of those “where has the time gone?” moments that regularly afflicts 52-year-olds like myself (in other words, people who can’t quite believe that we’re not still striplings who, in our 20s and 30s, are just beginning to build our careers and to enjoy our lives in the ways that, we’re told, proper adults should).
Rather than writing a new essay about Deadwood’s brilliance, I instead revisited the (fifth) chapter of my 2010 scholarly monograph—“The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “Homicide,” and “NYPD Blue”: Violence Is Power—devoted to Milch’s series. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I hate this book’s title despite valuing its extended study not only of David Milch’s but also of David Simon’s career as a television auteur and social realist. Indeed, that appellation was forced upon the book (and upon me) by its publisher’s marketing department despite my manuscript bearing the title American Savagery (and despite the three phone “conversations” between myself, my editor, and said marketing department that nearly degenerated into verbal Pier-Six brawls).
Even so, upon re-reading this long, ll-oo-nn-gg, lll-ooo-nnn-ggg piece, I realized that my thoughts and opinions about Milch’s program haven’t changed over time. If anything, they’ve strengthened, especially considering how well Deadwood: The Movie, the follow-up telefilm that HBO premiered on 31 May 2019, completes Deadwood’s story. This lovely, 110-minute return to the the richly imagined world of Milch’s series reunites every living cast member 13 years after the program’s unintentional finale (in Season 3’s “Tell Him Something Pretty”), serving not merely as its final chapter but also as a valedictory salute to Milch’s four decades of television writing.
Suffice to say, Deadwood remains one of the greatest examples of American art produced during the 21st Century, so I now present you Chapter Five of Violence Is Power, titled “American Savagery” (we writers, among the greatest packrats known to humanity, never waste a good idea if we can get away with it) and aligned with The Vestibule’s house style. I’ve broken the original piece’s too-long paragraphs into more digestible chunks, included relevant images alongside useful links, and massaged the prose where necessary.
Here are two brief usage notes: 1) The first time you see a character’s name, you’ll also see the performer’s name in parentheses immediately afterward, and 2) The first time you see an episode’s title, you’ll see its place within Deadwood’s overall chronology in parentheses immediately afterword—for example (1.1) and (3.12)—with the first number designating the season and the second number designating the installment: 1.1 refers to Season 1’s first episode, while 3.12 indicates Season 3’s twelfth episode.
Please find the published chapter and many other relevant documents in the “Files” section. And be warned: substantial screen-scrolling awaits you. Deadwood’s brilliance, however, justifies this long excursion into David Milch’s wonderful, filthy, and indelible masterwork.
Plus, if this long essay moves even one reader to watch (or to re-watch) Deadwood and Deadwood: The Movie, then I’ll declare victory rather than regretting the many paragraphs that you, dear reader, must endure on the way to finishing this piece.
All the best—Jason
![This image shows the title card of David Milch's HBO series Deadwood (2004-2006). The word "Deadwood" lies in the center of a shot of the town's main saloon and thoroughfare as reflected in a rain puddle. This image shows the title card of David Milch's HBO series Deadwood (2004-2006). The word "Deadwood" lies in the center of a shot of the town's main saloon and thoroughfare as reflected in a rain puddle.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F94f602b4-3b1d-4b9e-9e80-9888c65f142a_417x239.jpeg)
Deadwood
Created by David Milch
Starring Ian McShane, Timothy Olyphant, Jim Beaver, Seth Bridgers, W. Earl Brown, Dayton Callie, Larry Cedar, Kim Dickens, Brad Dourif, Anna Gunn, John Hawkes, Peter Jason, Geri Jewell, Jeffrey Jones, Paula Malcomson, Gerald McRaney, Molly Parker, Leon Rippy, William Sanderson, Bree Seanna Wall, Robin Weigert, Titus Welliver, Keone Young, and Powers Boothe
Guest Starring Franklin Ajaye, Kristen Bell, Keith Carradine, Brian Cox, Garret Dillahunt, Josh Eriksson, Cynthia Ettinger, Richard Gant, Omar Gooding, Allan Graf, Zach Grenier, Ricky Jay, Cleo King, Pasha D. Lychnikoff, Ray McKinnon, Timothy Omundson, Sarah Paulson, Ralph Richeson, Brent Sexton, Stephen Tobolowsky, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Alice Krige
36 one-hour episodes & 1 two-hour telefilm
Original broadcast 21 March 2004 — 27 August 2006 & 31 May 2019 (on HBO)
1. Westward Ho?
Deadwood (2004–2006) is David Milch’s highest achievement as a fiction writer, social realist, and television dramatist. This three-season HBO series, first pitched to the network as “St. Paul gets collared,”1 explores, interrogates, and elaborates three significant themes: 1) How law emerges from lawlessness; 2) How order emerges from chaos; and 3) How America’s savage founding gives way to the idea, necessity, and reality of community.
Milch, in the words of Mark Singer’s 6 February 2005 New Yorker profile “The Misfit,” originally “wanted to write about the lives of city cops in ancient Rome during Nero’s reign, before a system of justice had been codified.”2 Since HBO was developing the series Rome (2005–2007) for broadcast when Milch proposed Deadwood in 2002, Carolyn Strauss and Chris Albrecht, the network’s top executives, asked Milch to locate the same themes elsewhere. Milch, who’d proposed a Western series to NBC in 2001 that never materialized,3 began researching life in the Old West, finally focusing on Deadwood, the notorious Black Hills mining camp that arose in 1876 after gold was discovered by an 1874 expedition commanded by George Armstrong Custer.
Deadwood was located on Dakota Territory land originally deeded to the Lakota Sioux Indians. Milch, by setting his series in Deadwood, chooses a locale famous for its brazen, flagrant, and unrepentant illegality. The gold rush that brought Caucasian prospectors to sacred Native American territory recapitulated the nation’s tradition of officially sanctioned thievery, making Deadwood a nexus of licentiousness, criminality, and vice.
Deadwood, therefore, falls in line with Milch’s other major contributions to television drama—Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) and NYPD Blue (1993-2005)—despite its different genre. Singer calls Deadwood “an unlike-any-Western-you’ve-ever-seen Western” in “The Misfit,”4 an assessment that seems fitting for a television series that, on the surface, features few identifiable cowboys-and-Indians motifs, many unconventional violent encounters, and meager trappings from traditional cinematic and television Westerns. Deadwood has provoked ample commentary about how the program demolishes the conventional Western that graced American television screens during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, setting Milch’s program apart from the simplistic, good-versus-evil portrait of the American West that Gunsmoke (1955–1975), Wagon Train (1957–1965), The Rifleman (1958–1963), Bonanza (1959–1973), and The Big Valley (1965–1969) epitomize.
Deadwood’s graphic violence, sex, and profanity, according to this argument, distinguish it from all previous television Westerns, even programs such as The Wild Wild West (1965–1969) and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993–1994) that ridicule, parody, or satirize the genre. Milch occasionally endorses this viewpoint in interviews, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and panel discussions about Deadwood, believing that the traditional Western originated in Hollywood’s desire to sanitize American history by offering the nation a mythical, noble, and purified past.
![This collage shows the title cards of 7 American television Westerns. Top Row (left to right): Gunsmoke (1955-1975), Wagon Train (1957-1965), & The Rifleman (1958-1963); Middle Row (left to right): Bonanza (1959-1973), The Big Valley (1965-1969), & The Wild Wild West (1965-1969); Bottom Row: The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993) This collage shows the title cards of 7 American television Westerns. Top Row (left to right): Gunsmoke (1955-1975), Wagon Train (1957-1965), & The Rifleman (1958-1963); Middle Row (left to right): Bonanza (1959-1973), The Big Valley (1965-1969), & The Wild Wild West (1965-1969); Bottom Row: The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1afd5912-70c9-47b4-ad82-8b8bb339e564_1411x1080.jpeg)
In “The New Language of the Old West” and “An Imaginative Reality,” two behind-the-scenes documentaries included in Deadwood’s Season One DVD and Blu-ray sets, Milch tells Keith Carradine, the actor who plays Wild Bill Hickok in the program’s first five episodes, that the traditional Western reflects Hollywood’s Hays Production Code as much as authentic American history.5
Milch’s 5 March 2005 interview with Salon.com’s Heather Havrilesky elaborates his notion that the experience of immigrant Jews largely generated the Hollywood Western as we know it today:
The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the ’20s and ’30s and it has really nothing to do with the West, and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was. The first term of the Hays Code is that obscenity in word or fact or action is an offense against God and man6 and will not be depicted. In the early ’20s there were starting to be films that were kind of racy and these guys didn’t want their hustle to be jeopardized.7 So they formed this production board which essentially announced that, let us run the show and we will give you an America disinfected and pure.8
Commerce, in Milch’s judgment, drove Hollywood’s major movie studios to produce Westerns that reassured their audiences about America’s glorious past. This decision, according to Milch, also counteracted the “real vein of anti-Semitism and misgiving”9 that developed during the 1920s and 1930s, fostered by Charles Lindbergh’s and Henry Ford’s warnings against the social, economic, and political power of “the money lenders,” a common euphemism for Jewish bankers, merchants, and entrepreneurs.
“The dream factory was operated exclusively by immigrant Jews,” Milch says, explaining to Havrilesky that studio moguls like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer wanted to “stay sort of behind the scenes. . . . So, what these guys did was come up with a four-square American kind of vision with an unwritten guarantee: Let us run the show, and you will get 150 features a year which glorify innocence and the absence of conflict and so on.”10
![This image shows the cover of David Milch's 2006 book Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills (published by Melcher Media). This image shows the cover of David Milch's 2006 book Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills (published by Melcher Media).](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b4af2b3-a0c1-4fe7-88f5-ef93654a83e1_1400x1601.jpeg)
Milch’s sense that Hollywood Westerns are, in effect, parables of assimilation—stories that symbolically chronicle how immigrants become Americans by courageously confronting a wild frontier—clues the critical viewer into one of Deadwood’s profoundest ironies: Assimilation, civilization, and law, in Milch’s series, are merely byproducts of the ceaseless quest for profit, not noble ideals inherent to the American character or nation.
Milch is even more forthright about his intentions in Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, the book that he published in 2006 during the program’s third (and final) season. Confessing that he didn’t wish to write a contemporary drama after the events of 11 September 2001, Milch states that he settled on a story about Deadwood because “the camp came together in the mid-1870s, deep into the Industrial Revolution, and yet it was a reenactment of the story of the founding of America, and a reenactment, too, of the story of Original Sin. I suppose I accept [Nathaniel] Hawthorne’s definition of Original Sin as the violation of the sanctity of another’s heart.”11
Conflating the sacred and the profane within historical fiction, per this analysis, allows Milch to dramatize the uncomfortable, unfortunate, and ugly realities of America’s birth as a political, economic, and civic entity. Deadwood and Deadwood enact America’s founding by indulging the basest forms of avarice, theft, brutality, and murder as necessary adjuncts to securing wealth, land, and political supremacy.
Violating the sanctity of another’s heart not only suggests trampling an individual’s rights but also evokes the historical crimes of land dispossession, human bondage, and cultural genocide that, despite politically conservative attempts to deny them, are significant aspects of American history. Deadwood, for Milch, emerges as a fictional attempt to come to terms with shameful historical truths that traditional Westerns don’t merely minimize, but fully overlook.
![This image shows HBO's one-sheet poster celebrating Deadwood's (2004-2006) premiere episode, which was broadcast on 21 March 2004. This image shows HBO's one-sheet poster celebrating Deadwood's (2004-2006) premiere episode, which was broadcast on 21 March 2004.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F208ce548-021c-4e1d-935e-9e2c9b0e1e2f_660x528.webp)
2. Genre & Genius
Not all critics, however, credit Milch’s appraisal of the Hollywood Western as accurate or Deadwood’s revisionist tendencies as groundbreaking. Lee Siegel, in his 29 March 2004 New Republic review of Deadwood (reprinted in Siegel’s 2007 book Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television), calls statements about how Deadwood shatters the conventions of the traditional Hollywood Western “hysterical proclamations of cultural revolution” that ignore the genre’s rich history.12
“The tired old genre of the Western,” Siegel writes, is a “hackneyed American invention, we are told, in which evil is purely evil and good purely good, the difference between them usually indicated by sneering, black-hatted villains and tight-lipped, white-hatted heroes.”13 Such characterizations, Siegel implies, simplify the Western’s underappreciated complexity: “Except, that is, for Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, made way back in 1992 and 1989, respectively, both of which, we are further told, also shattered the tired old genre of the Western.”14
Anthony Mann’s and Sam Peckinpah’s contributions to the genre, by motioning toward greater realism, seem revolutionary because, in Siegel’s estimation, the Western idealizes the American past (here Siegel agrees with Milch). Deadwood, for Siegel, only appears to redefine Western conventions rather than breaking the genre’s narrative strictures: “The seeming paradigm-bursting change introduced by Deadwood, however, is really no more than an extra-emphatic expression of a single element. Which in the case of Deadwood, and so many other so-called innovative shows, is the seamy, sordid side of life.”15
Siegel’s world-weary tone typifies his facile reviews, but he correctly notes that Deadwood participates in a revisionist tradition that deconstructs the Western’s mythic nobility. Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973), and Kevin Costner’s Open Range (2003) are just three additional films that expose the violence, racism, sexism, and immorality of life in the Old West. Deadwood, therefore, may not stand alone in repudiating the traditional Western’s reputation for simplistic morality, but it defies Siegel’s misguided declaration that “take away the show’s moderate (by current standards) sex and violence, and its immoderate cussing, and Deadwood is really a very enjoyable, good old-fashioned cowboy series whose characters are, in the end, no more discomfiting than characters in more conventional-seeming cowboy movies.”16
Siegel’s seen-it-all-before attitude reveals his critical myopia, for Deadwood’s approach to sex and violence is far from moderate, while Milch’s program exceeds the old-fashioned cowboy series that Siegel invokes but refuses to name. Critical viewers cannot mistake Deadwood for Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Bonanza, or The Big Valley—or seriously place it in the same category of television drama as these earlier shows— because Deadwood, as Jason Jacobs notes, is a “filthy joy” to behold.17
![This collage shows the covers of four Western novels that are important forerunners to David Milch's Deadwood television series: (left to right) Owen Wister's 1902 The Virginian, Zane Grey's 1912 Riders of the Purple Sage, Louis L'Amour's 1955 Guns of the Timberlands, & Larry McMurtry's 1985 Lonesome Dove. This collage shows the covers of four Western novels that are important forerunners to David Milch's Deadwood television series: (left to right) Owen Wister's 1902 The Virginian, Zane Grey's 1912 Riders of the Purple Sage, Louis L'Amour's 1955 Guns of the Timberlands, & Larry McMurtry's 1985 Lonesome Dove.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcaecefc2-5365-4fe5-bc22-1f09d177fdc8_1916x771.jpeg)
Even so, Siegel usefully suggests that Milch’s analysis of the Western’s generic development overlooks many contrary examples, to say nothing of the extensive literary tradition that the Western enjoyed before migrating to radio, cinema, and television. Dime novels that chronicled the exploits of real-life Western celebrities like Wild Bill Hickok and fictional characters like Deadwood Dick were popular in 19th-Century America, while novelists from Owen Wister and Zane Grey to Louis L’Amour and Larry McMurtry have enjoyed tremendous success writing Western fiction (with Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian, Grey’s 1912 novel Riders of the Purple Sage, L’Amour’s 1955 novel Guns of the Timberlands, and McMurtry’s 1985 novel Lonesome Dove being consummate contributions).
Milch admits to little initial familiarity with cinematic and television Westerns, telling Salon’s Heather Havrilesky, “It wasn’t that I didn’t like them; it’s just I didn’t watch them particularly. When I was growing up, it was not the heyday of the western.”18 We must, of course, doubt this final statement’s veracity, since Milch, born in 1945, came of age in an era when each year averaged between 40 and 60 Western films, with more than 600 Westerns produced between 1950 and 1959.19
Plus, so many Western series were part of network television during Milch’s teenage years that he could only avoid them by pointedly refusing to watch the “horse operas” that ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcast by the dozens. Milch, we may infer, omits references to Western novelists and short-story writers from his comments because he preferred other genres on the page and on the screen.
Milch, however, became an avid student of the genre during the two years he researched Old West history while preparing Deadwood. This extensive reading taught Milch that he needn’t react against the Western’s established conventions because
I was mystified when I began to do the research. It seemed so obvious to me that the West I was encountering . . . had nothing to do with the westerns, which I was experiencing secondhand, which weren’t even good on their own terms. But then going back and seeing the classical westerns, those, too, had nothing to do with the West I was studying.20
Milch thinks his early generic ignorance “turned out probably to be a good enough thing” because the traditional Western “had everything to do with what Hollywood was about at that time, and nothing to do with what the West was about.”21
No matter how distant Milch feels from classical film and television Westerns, observers like Lee Siegel and John Leonard note that his series nonetheless reproduces their broadest conventions. Leonard’s 11 March 2004 New York Magazine review of Deadwood, for instance, sees it as part of a long lineage: “From Homer and the Bible to John Ford, men are hanged, women raped, and children stolen by savages because of turf wars, sexual property rights, and different ideas on how to look good dying. Sometimes, too, a sheep is dipped. Not even Deadwood fiddles with this Western formula.”22 Milch’s protestations to the contrary cannot change Siegel’s and Leonard’s opinion that Deadwood is more traditional, more conventional, and more usual than its creator, producers, and audience recognize.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc6eaad4f-e0fe-47e7-a88e-0f05c241d223_644x1000.jpeg)
Horace Newcomb’s thoughts about Deadwood—chronicled in the 2008 academic anthology The Essential HBO Reader—complicate attempts to determine the program’s generic freshness even more than Siegel’s assurances that Milch’s series, despite its revisionist tendencies, evokes the traditional Western. “The structure of the conventional western,” Newcomb writes, “is the movement from savagery to civilization. . . . So-called revisionist westerns undercut this narrative by showing how truly difficult the process can be, how ‘the winners’ in this contest must often engage in corruption as deeply as those who lose.”23
Newcomb’s analysis implies that Deadwood “is not a western at all, neither conventional nor revisionist. The ease with which Milch transferred his thematic exploration from one setting [ancient Rome] to another [Deadwood] confirms this. It is the ‘people’ who interest him; it is improvisation in the absence of law.”24 Milch’s desire to examine how law develops from lawlessness, for Newcomb, “is an abstract concept if ever there was one. But the abstraction is made concrete by context, by the social impulse. And that impulse is defined. It is the attempt,” Newcomb says, quoting Milch’s words in Singer’s profile of him, “‘to minimize the collateral damage of the taking of revenge.’”25
Deadwood, however, remains a revisionist Western (according to Newcomb’s terms) no matter how much attention the series pays to its characters. Milch’s program repeatedly dramatizes how civilization and savagery aren’t dichotomies but instead interpenetrate one another during the mining camp’s evolution from illicit settlement to legal municipality. The impulse to restrain vengeance and vendettas, moreover, underscores other notable Western novels, films, and television series—including Lonesome Dove, Unforgiven, and Gunsmoke—that, like Deadwood, engage social, political, and moral questions.
Perhaps the single most important forerunner of Milch’s series is Pete Dexter’s masterful 1986 novel Deadwood, which combines obscene language, graphic sexuality, chilling violence, and mordant wit into a grim narrative leavened by gallows humor.26 Milch doesn’t credit (or even mention) Dexter’s novel in interviews, documentaries, DVD commentaries, or Stories of the Black Hills, but Dexter’s example unquestionably influences Milch’s effort. The novel slowly reveals Charlie Utter—Wild Bill Hickok’s loyal friend (and the character played by Dayton Callie in Milch’s series)—to be its protagonist, while the section devoted to the Chinese prostitute Ci-an (known colloquially as the China Doll) includes details that Milch’s Deadwood assigns to the character Mr. Wu (Keone Young) and to the area of town called Chink’s Alley (even if the Chinese prostitutes in Milch’s series are minor—even insignificant—characters who never speak on their own behalf).
![This image shows Deadwood Sheriff Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant) with the characters &#$%*@?$! over his mouth to indicate how much profanity this character--and most others on David Milch's Deadwood--indulge. This image shows Deadwood Sheriff Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant) with the characters &#$%*@?$! over his mouth to indicate how much profanity this character--and most others on David Milch's Deadwood--indulge.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5f851139-3804-4185-b547-06ec52369f4f_1400x700.avif)
3. Language & Frontier
Milch’s Deadwood, therefore, is neither wholly original nor utterly conventional. It casts a jaundiced eye on the myth of the American frontier, or the idea that sophisticated European society’s heroic confrontation with, struggle against, and triumph over the North American continent’s vast wilderness (and its Indigenous peoples) forges an exceptional, exemplary, and unitary American identity that transforms European refinement into an inveterate pragmatism while enshrining white society as America’s most authentic population.
The young nation, according to this legend, discards its primitive impulses (by marginalizing the African slaves and Native Americans who symbolize undiluted savagery to the white frontiersmen venturing across the continent) to embrace a social compact that regulates human desire by outlawing deleterious behaviors like vengeance while licensing immoral actions, particularly bondage and land dispossession, that support Manifest Destiny’s expansionist project.
Milch’s series, therefore, ambivalently regards the frontier mythology that Frederick Jackson Turner lionizes in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” his landmark address to the American Historical Association meeting held during Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition (an event that celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing on the American continent).
This piece, perhaps the most famous essay ever written about the American West, invokes metaphors of political germ theory and microbiological evolution to assert, “Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment” before making its signature declaration: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.”27
This statement endorses the notion of civilized Europeans subjugating nature to their economic and political will, but not before the frontier changes their cultured manners into more elemental behaviors. Turner recognizes the symbiotic relationship between Americans and their physical environment by noting, “The wilderness masters the colonist. . . . Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.”28
The United States’s historical development, in other words, depends on flexibility, adaptability, and fluidity rather than fixed, stilted, and rigid identities. This American capacity for change produces unique cultural traits that Turner avidly chronicles. “That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness,” he writes, “that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil”29 not only define but also embody the American character.
![This image shows, on the right, a photographic portrait of author Frederick Jackson Turner, and, on the left a quotation from his 1893 address to Chicago's Columbian Exposition (titled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"). This quotation reads: "American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. In the advance the frontier is the outer edge of the wave--the meeting point between savagery and civilization...." This image shows, on the right, a photographic portrait of author Frederick Jackson Turner, and, on the left a quotation from his 1893 address to Chicago's Columbian Exposition (titled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"). This quotation reads: "American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. In the advance the frontier is the outer edge of the wave--the meeting point between savagery and civilization...."](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F41110e53-bbed-4a8b-a4ca-95a84d930899_810x413.jpeg)
Deadwood is less sanguine about the frontier’s salutary effects on American identity, industry, and enterprise than Turner’s triumphal celebration of rugged individualism. The series exposes the camp’s energetic pursuit of gold, liquor, and sex as a barbaric façade that can’t fully sever America’s connection to its European ancestors. A scene from the pilot episode, simply titled “Deadwood” (1.1) and written by Milch, illustrates the camp’s complicated revision of those qualities that Turner defines as quintessentially American.30
Prospector Whitney Ellsworth (Jim Beaver) delivers gold to Al Swearengen, proprietor of the Gem Saloon, Deadwood’s largest and most profitable bordello. Swearengen, who in real life was born in Iowa, is played by English actor Ian McShane, and Ellsworth, after Swearengen calculates the gold’s value as $170, launches into a profanity-laden monologue that incorporates many terms from Turner’s essay:
ELLSWORTH: Now, with that Limey damn accent of yours, are these rumors true that you’re descended from the British nobility?
SWEARENGEN: I’m descended from all them cocksuckers.
ELLSWORTH: Well, here’s to ya, Your Majesty. I’ll tell you what: I may of fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker. And working a paying fucking gold claim. And not the U.S. government saying I’m trespassing or the savage fucking Red Man himself or any of these limber-dick cocksuckers passing themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me.
SWEARENGEN: They better not try it in here.
ELLSWORTH: Goddamit Swearengen, I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you, but I enjoy the way you lie.
Ellsworth’s sarcasm dismisses Swearengen’s tenuous connection to British royalty before announcing his (Ellsworth’s) independence from all civic and moral authority. Only gold and the commodities it can purchase matter to him (Ellsworth tells Swearengen to inform the Gem’s card dealers and whores of his $170 credit before asking about Swearengen’s accent), while no restraints can contain Ellsworth’s declaration of total freedom from human, governmental, and historical obligation.
His speech’s casual contempt for federal authorities and implicit racism against Native Americans recall Turner’s statement that the frontier is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization”31 where nature must give way to culture, but not before the wilderness diminishes the civilizing tendencies of European settlers (and their descendants) to generate the dominant individualism that Turner and Ellsworth (who functions in this scene as the fictional avatar of Turner’s thesis) identify as exceptionally American.
Ellsworth, however, knows not to expect fair treatment from anyone, even the man who purchases his gold, in an illegal camp where no law exists. Milch’s script for “Deadwood” includes a detail that the scene as edited obscures. After Swearengen tells Ellsworth that his gold weighs 8.5 ounces, the script reads, “The camera’s CLOSER SCRUTINY reveals Swearengen’s thumb adjusting the scale’s balance in his favor,”32 but the episode’s viewer doesn’t see Swearengen cheating Ellsworth because the scene begins after Swearengen weighs the gold.
Director Walter Hill, while collaborating with Milch, may have found such visual confirmation unnecessary since Ellsworth’s final line, jauntily delivered by Beaver, alerts the viewer to Swearengen’s dishonesty. Beaver and McShane skillfully convey how both men recognize thievery as a fact of life in Deadwood, with Ellsworth implicitly preferring Swearengen’s brand of larceny to the depredations of prospectors who might rob his claim to offset their own losses.
![This image shows one of Deadwood's best characters, gold prospector Whitney Ellsworth (played by Jim Beaver) sitting in his prospecting camp near Deadwood. A dog, with its back to camera, sits at Ellsworth's feet. This image shows one of Deadwood's best characters, gold prospector Whitney Ellsworth (played by Jim Beaver) sitting in his prospecting camp near Deadwood. A dog, with its back to camera, sits at Ellsworth's feet.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F71d89897-c195-402a-bffa-21da9a19c16a_1000x555.jpeg)
The sexual violence of Ellsworth’s conversation with Swearengen, moreover, implies that Deadwood’s prospectors and entrepreneurs needn’t sublimate the virility that Turner’s “coarseness,” “strength,” and “restless, nervous energy” suggest is necessary to tame the frontier. The term cocksucker, first mentioned by Swearengen to repudiate his British ancestry, becomes, for Ellsworth, a way to distinguish his economic potency from the powerless, “limber-dick” prospectors who might steal his gold rather than pursuing their own busted claims.
Swearengen, by stating that no one should try to cheat Ellsworth while he patronizes the Gem Saloon, feminizes these hypothetical thieves even more by insinuating that they occupy a place beneath the Gem’s prostitutes who, rather than stealing from the camp’s male residents, offer sexual services in exchange for money. This arrangement’s suppression and exploitation of women’s freedom mirrors the suppression and exploitation of Indian rights that permit Ellsworth to mine gold in the first place, with Deadwood’s pilot episode occurring roughly two weeks after George Armstrong Custer’s 26 June 1876 defeat at the Little Bighorn.
Eroticizing the American confrontation with the frontier as a rape of the land, its Indigenous inhabitants, and their cultural heritage makes Ellsworth into the primary representative of this desire to master the natural, political, and historical forces in play. Ellsworth, indeed, utters language whose crudity, obscenity, and vulgarity shocks even audiences that, by Deadwood’s 21 March 2004 premiere, had become accustomed to the profanity that typifies HBO dramas like Tom Fontana’s Oz (1997-2003), David Chase’s The Sopranos (1999-2006), and David Simon’s The Wire (2002-2008).
Mark Singer, in his “Misfit” New Yorker profile of Milch, aptly recognizes that “the language on Deadwood ranges from Elizabethan-like ornateness to profanity of a relentlessness that makes The Sopranos seem demure. Both extremes often coexist in a single speech.”33 The inverted rhythms of Ellsworth’s monologue, particularly their tendency to place predicates before subjects, suggest an opulent quality that the speech’s unyielding profanity counteracts.
This vulgar discourse is the episode’s (and, therefore, Deadwood’s) first extended excursion into the spoken obscenity that not only characterizes the series but also provoked passionate controversy after the pilot episode’s initial broadcast. Milch has claimed many times that Deadwood’s profanity has firm historical roots, telling Keith Carradine in “The New Language of the Old West” behind-the-scenes special that “it’s very well documented that the obscenity of the West was striking, but the obscenity of mining camps was unbelievable.”
Ellsworth’s comments embody this judgment, particularly their absurd imagery and unlikely metaphors. How, for instance, does a person make such a mess of his life that it becomes “flatter than hammered shit”? The comparison here, like the notion of hammering manure, makes no logical sense but calls to mind, as Scott Eric Kaufman observes in his incisive Acephalous essay “Deadwood and To Whom Its Dialogue Is Beholden,” blacksmith iconography: Pounding an anvil becomes a metaphor for a hard life ruined “through long effort, through the labor evoked by the mention and soundscape of hammering.”34
Ellsworth, despite the gold he sells to Swearengen, confesses to wasting his life so badly that material wealth can’t undo the damage. Ellsworth’s plan to spend his money drinking, gambling, and whoring also indicates his desire to embrace the romance of the frontier rather than accumulating material wealth.
![This image shows Currier & Ives's 1866 lithograph of Frances Flora Bond Palmer's painting "The Rocky Mountains: Emigrants Crossing the Plains." This image shows Currier & Ives's 1866 lithograph of Frances Flora Bond Palmer's painting "The Rocky Mountains: Emigrants Crossing the Plains."](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea1353a8-36df-4ebc-aca7-3df3b13072ba_555x410.jpeg)
The freedom from legal authority that the frontier offers, however, can’t compensate for the failure that Ellsworth feels he’s become, leading the prospector to indict the federal government, the Indians, and the camp’s other prospectors for their imagined crimes against the unfettered life that he tries to carve from Deadwood’s unscrupulous environment. Ellsworth’s anger, hidden under his cheerful demeanor, unleashes a torrent of profanity that hammers this point home while eliminating the possibility of fellowship with the surrounding community. Ellsworth trusts no one, not even Swearengen, to understand, sympathize with, or care about his predicament.
Milch, in Stories of the Black Hills, states that the people who traveled to gold-strike camps sought linguistic and political liberation because “there has to be a cleaning away—the purgation of meaning that profanity permits,”35 meaning that obscene language paradoxically cleanses its speakers of their linguistic and political fetters.
Ellsworth’s monologue temporarily purges his disappointment, with its obscene language informing the viewer that this prospector—whose importance to Deadwood’s narrative increases until his third-season murder by agents of mining mogul George Hearst (Gerald McRaney) in “The Catbird Seat” (3.11) provokes shock, sorrow, and rage in the camp’s inhabitants—can’t reconcile his economic ambitions with the stark realities of surviving the frontier. Gold promises wealth, comfort, and serenity, but the unlikely possibility that Ellsworth will “strike it rich” forces him to realize just how hopeless his future is.
Ellsworth’s profanity, then, reveals a theatrical personality continually staging its own identity. This impulse to re-create oneself when encountering unfamiliar places is a prototypical American trait that Deadwood’s florid dialogue expertly captures. Such dialogue, moreover, is literary language as much as authentic 19th-Century speech, a point that Horace Newcomb lucidly acknowledges:
As presented by an outstanding cast, the language is most often described as Shakespearian [sic], and it is indeed important to note that the language is performed, not merely spoken. Subtle distinctions of diction and voice, vocabulary, and inflection serve to distinguish characters. Soliloquies and muttered musings offer insight into the psychology, the motivations and speculations, of individuals, but also into the relationships among them.36
Ellsworth and Swearengen, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg comments, wouldn’t have talked in real life as Deadwood makes them speak because the profanity used by 19th-Century frontiersmen would have “had religious overtones rather than sexual or scatological ones,”37 but these characters’ conversation permits Jim Beaver and Ian McShane to refashion the stock Western characters of weary prospector and sly saloonkeeper into specific personalities that the viewer can’t mistake for any other individual in Deadwood’s massive cast.
Milch’s achievement in this regard won’t surprise anyone who recalls the memorable speech patterns of Hill Street Blues’s and NYPD Blue’s characters or who knows that Robert Penn Warren once favorably compared Milch’s dialogue to Ernest Hemingway’s,38 a faith justified by the linguistic richness that Ellsworth’s outwardly crude yet deceptively poetic words manifest. Milch’s shrewd casting also deserves praise, for only talented actors can bring alive Deadwood’s elaborate dialogue without indulging arch or campy performances that call attention to themselves.
The unexpected resonance of Ellsworth’s speech—no viewer who hears it, despite Lee Siegel’s opinion, can look on Deadwood as a conventional Western—illustrates Milch’s persuasive claim, made in Stories of the Black Hills, that “what follows [profanity] is a regeneration of meaning, so that words come to have a different meaning in a world that has been made new.”39
![This image shows Wild Bill Hickok (played by Keith Carridine, left) and Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant, right) with their hands on their pistols while standing in Deadwood's main thoroughfare. Both men stare at something or someone off-camera. This image shows Wild Bill Hickok (played by Keith Carridine, left) and Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant, right) with their hands on their pistols while standing in Deadwood's main thoroughfare. Both men stare at something or someone off-camera.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F071d147c-fc9c-4f1c-b9aa-11e611a775c1_1280x720.jpeg)
4. Law & Order?
Deadwood’s eccentric language, sex, and violence, as such, make its narrative world seem unexplored. The series includes no clichéd street standoffs or barroom brawls, thereby managing to refresh even hackneyed Western plot points. The pilot episode’s first scene, for instance, finds Montana marshal Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) protecting Clell Watson (James Parks), a man sentenced to hang at dawn, from a mob that wishes to kill Watson before sunrise. Bullock is infuriated by the repeated threats of Byron Sampson (the mob’s leader, played by Christopher Darga) to storm the jail, injuring or even killing Bullock and his business partner, Sol Star (John Hawkes), in an effort to reach Watson.
Bullock intends to resign his position as marshal the next morning, after the hanging, so that he may travel to Deadwood and open a hardware business with Star, but Sampson’s intransigence makes Bullock’s plan impossible. This storyline, of an Old West peace officer defending a condemned man’s life before a town mob, is so familiar to regular viewers of Westerns that Deadwood initially strikes its audience as a run-of-the-mill entry in the genre.
This situation abruptly changes, however, when Bullock, seething with anger, carries out Watson’s sentence rather than fighting Sampson’s gang. Bullock fashions a noose to the jail’s front porch, telling Sampson that the execution will be carried out “under color of law.” Bullock asks Watson what message the man wishes to give his sister (who intends to attend the execution), writes these words onto a piece of paper, and then hangs Watson. The distance between the noose and the porch floor, however, is so short that Bullock tugs on Watson’s struggling body until the man’s neck breaks. Bullock then gives the paper to an onlooker who promises to deliver it to Watson’s sister, boards the fully packed wagon that Star drives, brandishes his weapon at Sampson, and rides out of town.
This unexpected development transforms an apparently trite scene into a disquisition about law, order, violence, and responsibility. Bullock’s determination to carry out Watson’s execution by legal means bespeaks his belief that order is necessary to maintaining civil society by quelling the violence that Bullock himself perpetrates when angered. After arriving in Deadwood, for instance, Star and Bullock unload their wagon in the middle of the street, to the chagrin of a loudmouth driver who can’t pass until they finish. The fellow yells, “This the first wagon you ever fucking unloaded? Hold onto my horse. I’ll show you how to do it,” causing Bullock to tell the man to stay where he is. When the man asks, “And what if I don’t?,” a belligerent Bullock moves toward him, saying, “Stand there mouthing off and you’ll find out.”
Bullock clearly intends to strike the man, but Star intervenes, offering the fellow a free chamber pot as an apology. Wild Bill Hickok and Charlie Utter pass by this confrontation, with Hickok noting Bullock’s ferocity. Later, while Star and Bullock hawk their wares outside the tent that serves as their temporary storefront, another man (Gill Gayle) attempts to steal business by claiming that he just bought a 50-cent soap bar with a five-dollar prize inside its wrapping. Bullock walks toward this shill, telling him, “Front your game away from our tent.” Bullock’s combative attitude intimidates the man, who moves down the street.
These incidents, beyond demonstrating Bullock’s temper, alert the viewer to his fundamental hatred of bullying, confidence games, and bad faith. Although Bullock settles in Deadwood to work as a merchant, not a lawman, he behaves so much like a peace officer that Hickok (a former Kansas marshal) instantly recognizes their similarity. A major storyline in the pilot episode concerns Hickok and Bullock leading a search party for the Metzes, a family that has been massacred while returning in their wagon to Minnesota along the Spearfish Road.
Ned Mason (Jamie McShane)—a road agent who works for Swearengen—reports that Indians slaughtered the family, but Hickok and Bullock suspect that the nervous and twitching Mason perpetrated the crime with unknown accomplices (who then double-crossed Mason, forcing him to return to Deadwood). Hickok, Bullock, Mason, Star, Utter, and the owner/editor of the Deadwood Pioneer newspaper, A.W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones), ride to the site, finding that five-year-old Sofia Metz (Bree Seanna Wall), the only survivor, is barely alive.
They take the girl to Dr. “Doc” Amos Cochran (Brad Dourif ) in Deadwood, with Bullock and Hickok telling Mason to remain in town because Sofia, when she recovers, may implicate him in the murders. A truculent Mason pulls his weapon, but both Hickock and Bullock fire their guns first, shooting Mason in the eye. One of the pilot episode’s best moments occurs when, as Mason lies dead on the ground, Hickok asks, “Was that you or me, Montana?” and Bullock replies, “My money’d be on you.”
![This diptych shows Seth Bullock as played by Timothy Olyphant in the television series Deadwood (left) and the real Seth Bullock as photographed during his time as Deadwood's sheriff (right). This diptych shows Seth Bullock as played by Timothy Olyphant in the television series Deadwood (left) and the real Seth Bullock as photographed during his time as Deadwood's sheriff (right).](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F05c11b31-c688-42d8-aa49-b131c9079f91_1080x472.webp)
Although Deadwood (a camp that abrogates federal statute by sitting on land awarded to the Sioux Indians by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty) has no formal laws, Hickok and Bullock preserve order by trying, convicting, and executing Mason in the street. Their violence satisfies Bullock’s need to secure justice by avenging the greater crime of killing an innocent family, then blaming it on Native Americans. Bullock, unable to outrun his past, restores order even though he left Montana to escape a marshal’s life.
Bullock becomes an unusual Western character in these scenes. He acts outside legal authority but behaves like a conventional lawman, with Milch, in Stories of the Black Hills, noting that the actual Seth Bullock was regularly beaten by his father, provoking a rage that made him despise the act of one human being bullying another. Bullock comes to believe that “the law is going to protect him [by] disinfect[ing] his own murderous rage,”40 but Deadwood’s lawless environment challenges Bullock’s assumptions. He discovers, in Milch’s words, that “law and order are not the same. . . . Our desire for order comes first, and law comes afterward.”41
Bullock must adapt to his new circumstances, discharging the sheriff’s duties although no such office yet exists in Deadwood. Bullock’s need to master his own anger drives him to pursue order, in private and public, just as Deadwood’s first season dramatizes how the camp begins ordering its civic affairs to become a functioning municipality so that residents may continue mining gold, selling goods, and accruing profit. Milch’s program illustrates how law arises from order, creating new obligations and responsibilities for its characters. Violence, Bullock’s pilot-episode trajectory illustrates, is as crucial to establishing the camp’s legitimacy as regulating violence is to sustaining its community.
This approach to screen mayhem converts the stock Western sheriff into a more thoughtful and brooding character whose taciturn nature belies his underlying passion. The resulting paradox creates fascinating drama as Deadwood unfolds. “Bullock’s capacity for violence and his impulse to order are conjoined in the same personality,” Milch writes in Stories of the Black Hills. “That’s the making of the new American hero.”42 Noting that the real Bullock became one of Theodore Roosevelt’s best friends, Milch argues that the future president helped develop the rhetoric of the West “in his book The Winning of the West. He (Roosevelt) based that rhetoric in some large part on Bullock’s character, including his anger as well as his habitual silence.”43
Bullock’s contradictory impulses, with order and disorder inhabiting the same body, therefore reflect the historical conflicts (freedom and bondage, democracy and authoritarianism, compassion and vengeance, generosity and greed) that inhabited Deadwood, making the camp, for Milch’s purposes, the perfect replica of America’s civic genesis and social development.
Language, as always in Deadwood, becomes central to depicting a town that develops a civilized veneer to cover the camp’s personal, political, and historical savageries. The program’s approach to frontier life is less a progression (or evolution) from barbarism to refinement than an admission that such progress shrouds in noble rhetoric the violence that helps create Deadwood’s municipal enterprise.
Bullock and Swearengen, for instance, appear diametrically opposed in their linguistic talents. Bullock, in Milch’s words, thinks that “language is a way that he bound up his rage” because Bullock is a “primitive” creature, not a lawman, who has “just emerged out of the primordial ooze, and he’s slouching around, barely able to control his impulses to wreak savage violence on whoever crosses the street the wrong way.”44
Swearengen, by contrast, indulges long soliloquies and monologues whose verbal dexterity often bemuses his listeners—especially henchmen like Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown), Johnny Burns (Sean Bridgers), and the educated Silas Adams (Titus Welliver)—as they hatch plans to rob, assault, or murder the people who thwart Swearengen’s attempts to consolidate power in Deadwood. Bullock and Swearengen, however, both utter words that meld violence, politics, sexual aggression, and profanity into examples of wounded masculinity that, as David Scott Diffrient observes, exude “vigor, rage, intensity, and authority” despite their expressive inadequacies.45
The scene preceding Bullock and Swearengen’s brutal fight in the second-season premiere, “A Lie Agreed Upon, Part I” (2.1), written by Milch, exemplifies this tendency.46 Bullock, although married to his brother’s widow, Martha (Anna Gunn), has pursued an affair with Alma Garret (Molly Parker), a New York–born woman who inherits a massive gold claim after Swearengen dispatches Dority to murder her husband, Brom Garret (Timothy Omundson), during the first-season episode “Reconnoitering the Rim” (1.3).
![This image shows Alma Garret (played by Molly Parker) wearing a beautiful blue outfit as she stands in Deadwood's main thoroughfare and stares in shock at something or someone off-camera. This image shows Alma Garret (played by Molly Parker) wearing a beautiful blue outfit as she stands in Deadwood's main thoroughfare and stares in shock at something or someone off-camera.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffa624db7-4529-4491-ba9f-54618f3dfa6f_800x440.webp)
Alma, who’s also overcome a laudanum addiction with the assistance of Swearengen’s chief prostitute (and occasional mistress) Trixie (Paula Malcomson), has agreed to become Sofia Metz’s guardian. Swearengen, in “A Lie Agreed Upon, Part I,” insults Bullock—who accepted appointment as Deadwood’s sheriff in the previous episode, the first-season finale “Sold Under Sin” (1.12)—after Bullock emerges from Alma’s hotel following a tryst. Bullock glares at Swearengen, telling the saloonkeeper to remain at the Gem so that they can have words later in the day. Bullock, upon arriving in Swearengen’s office, learns that Deadwood’s political fortunes will change:
SWEARENGEN: We’re getting ass-fucked, carved into counties, but not one fucking commissioner coming from the [Black] Hills.
BULLOCK: How do you have this information?
SWEARENGEN: From the governor himself in a pricey little personal note. They want to make us a trough for Yankton’s snouts, and them hoopleheads out there [Deadwood’s miners], they need buttressing against going over to those cocksuckers. Now, I can handle my areas, but there’s dimensions and fucking angles I’m not expert at. You would be if you’d sheathe your prick long enough.
BULLOCK: Shut up.
SWEARENGEN: And resume being the upright pain in the balls that graced us all last summer.
BULLOCK: Shut up, you son of a bitch.
SWEARENGEN: Jesus Christ! Bullock, the world abounds in cunt of every kind, including hers. (Bullock glowers at Swearengen, then removes his badge and gun belt.) Of course, if it’d steer you from something stupid, I, uh, could always profess another position.
BULLOCK: Will I find you’ve got a knife?
SWEARENGEN: I won’t need no fucking knife.
Bullock and Swearengen then strike one another, beginning an altercation that sees them stumble onto Swearengen’s second-story balcony, tip over the balcony’s railing, and land in the main thoroughfare’s mud. Both men are injured, but the duplicitous Swearengen pulls a knife to stab Bullock, stopping only when he sees Bullock’s wife, Martha, and stepson, William (Josh Eriksson), staring at him through the window of a newly arrived stagecoach that has transported them from Michigan. “Welcome to fucking Deadwood!” Swearengen yells at mother and son before stumbling into the Gem Saloon. Bullock, who, despite a nasty cut to his head, seems less hurt than Swearengen, goes to his family rather than retrieving his badge and gun.
This confrontation has many ramifications: It sets the stage for Bullock and Swearengen’s eventual rapprochement, it forecasts the uneasy and tempestuous partnership they will form as Deadwood becomes a legally recognized part of the Dakota Territory, and, most important, it threatens Swearengen’s health. Swearengen, dismissing Dority and Adams after insulting Bullock early in the episode, grimaces when he feels pain in his side or groin. He stands over his chamber pot, futilely trying to urinate, when Bullock arrives to confront him for the insult. “Age impedes my stream, not fucking fear of you,” Swearengen says by way of greeting, informing the viewer that his body has betrayed him.
This detail is doubly important since it anticipates not only Swearengen’s messy and nasty fight with Bullock but also his subsequent debilitation by septic shock and kidney stones, resolved only when Cochran, in “Requiem for a Gleet” (2.4), inserts a metal probe known as a Van Buren’s sound into Swearengen’s urethra to allow him to pass the stones. This painful procedure requires Dority, Trixie, and Burns to hold Swearengen down while he screams and writhes in pain, much as he does while fighting Bullock. The parallelism between physical violence, bodily ailment, and moral sickness is a deliberate Milchian equation that, Erin Hill recognizes, stresses how “the representation of ailments on Deadwood . . . tends to saddle its afflicted with bodily troubles that match or force to the surface the troubles of their souls.”47
Swearengen and Bullock perpetrate physical violence against one another presaged by their verbal sparring during the first season (Swearengen, in the second episode, “Deep Water” [1.2], is upset that Bullock tries to negotiate a better deal for the lot—owned by Swearengen—on which Bullock and Star wish to build their hardware store, telling Bullock, in one of the series’s best moments, “Here’s my counteroffer to your counteroffer: Go fuck yourself!”48). Swearengen and Bullock, in other words, vent their turbulent inner lives in a spectacle of public aggression that their language forecasts and regulates.
Their conversation before the fight, for instance, fuses political corruption, rampant profanity, sexual crudity, open misogyny, and personal hostility into a scene of remarkable expressive power. This densely packed short dialogue, especially its references to numerous ongoing plotlines, exposes Milch’s talent for economical prose even while respecting the characters’ well-established personalities: Swearengen talks while Bullock glowers, seethes, and simmers.
Swearengen’s contempt for women drives this discussion forward, extending the man’s discomfort with bodily fluids into the realm of sexuality. Bullock’s coitus with Alma disturbs Swearengen not because it offends him (a hypocritical position for any brothel owner to hold), but because, to Swearengen’s mind, such copulation distracts Bullock from his sworn duty to protect the camp, which includes defending the economic interests on which Swearengen parasitically preys. Swearengen’s dialogue includes no fewer than seven allusions to genitalia, intercourse, fellatio, and anal sex, all within the political context of the Black Hills being divided into counties by a distant government that awards no representation to the camp’s residents.
This linguistic formulation juxtaposes anxieties about urological, excremental, and sexual impotence with fears of governmental, administrative, and bureaucratic marginalization. Swearengen’s hatred of women (“cunt of every kind” is perhaps the most misogynistic declaration in Deadwood’s 36 episodes) reveals his fury that Yankton feminizes the camp by making it a passive spectator to its own fate.
![This diptych shows Deadwood's primary antagonist & antihero Al Swearengen (played by Ian McShane) on the left and a black-and-white photograph of the actual Al Swearengen (full name: Ellis Alfred Swearengen) on the right. This diptych shows Deadwood's primary antagonist & antihero Al Swearengen (played by Ian McShane) on the left and a black-and-white photograph of the actual Al Swearengen (full name: Ellis Alfred Swearengen) on the right.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c33b5a0-1bce-439e-88a8-fa0c75ab99f8_2110x1230.webp)
Swearengen, the pimp and whoremaster accustomed to enforcing his will over defenseless women, becomes one of their number in the Dakota Territory’s ruthless political economy (a connection extended by Swearengen’s first words to Dority upon recovering from the kidney-stone procedure: “Did you fuck me while I was out”49) . The unfamiliar and distasteful sensation of being controlled, ignored, and degraded provokes rage in Swearengen, who targets Bullock’s active sexuality as an improper response to the bureaucratic rape—the ass-fucking—that Deadwood, in Swearengen’s opinion, has experienced.
Swearengen routinely invokes anal sex to describe unwelcome events that disempower their victims. When Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe), freshly arrived in camp, prepares to open the competing Bella Union casino and brothel in “Reconnoitering the Rim,” Swearengen combines latent homophobia with anti-Indian racism to describe Deadwood’s viability as an ongoing commercial enterprise:50
TOLLIVER: How long you been in camp, Al?
SWEARENGEN: Well, this year, Cy, since March. I was here last year, too, but the fucking cavalry drove us out.
TOLLIVER: Put all the whites out, didn’t they?
SWEARENGEN: Oh, deep fucking thinkers in Washington put forward that policy. This year, though, so many soldiers deserting to prospect, give up the ghost and let us all back in. And, of course, Custer sorted out the fucking Sioux for us, so now we’re all as safe as at our mothers’ tits.
TOLLIVER: Did a job for our side, didn’t he, Al?
SWEARENGEN: How about that longhaired fucking blowhard, huh? I’ll tell you this, son, you can mark my words: Crazy Horse went into Little Bighorn, bought his people one good long-term ass-fucking. (Swearengen pumps his fist back and forth.) You do not want to be a dirt-worshipping heathen from this fucking point forward.
Swearengen, rather than seeing Custer’s famous defeat as a debacle, thinks it may benefit Deadwood because the federal government will pursue a revenge campaign against the Sioux, a perception proved true in “Sold Under Sin” when General George Crook (Peter Coyote) leads a detachment of soldiers into town for rest and provisions before seeking reprisals against all Native Americans living in the Dakota and Montana territories (even if they didn’t participate in the Battle of the Little Bighorn). Swearengen represents Native Americans as sexual inferiors who must endure a violation they can’t prevent, resist, or stop, thereby equating them with two other minority populations that Swearengen loathes: women and homosexuals.
Swearengen applauds the passivity that “ass-fucking” implies for the Sioux (McShane relishes the word by enthusiastically enunciating it) but derides the subservience that he (along with Deadwood’s residents) must endure after Yankton decides to partition the Black Hills into counties without consulting the local populace. Swearengen’s comments in both “Sold Under Sin” and “A Lie Agreed Upon, Part I” suggest that Deadwood’s political destiny is a form of sexual trauma that not only plays out on a municipal scale but also demonstrates how the camp’s (and region’s) body politic can be abused and dismembered by the Dakota Territory’s paternalistic government.
Milch and his writers draw Deadwood’s master themes together in these sequences to meld sex, violence, profanity, and history into a dizzying fictional reproduction of the American frontier. Singer accurately writes in “The Misfit” that, during the 1980s and 1990s, Milch “had enormous success, critical and otherwise, writing for television, . . . and Deadwood demonstrates that his narrative gifts have deepened,”51 a judgment that the program’s intelligent, ambivalent, and elliptical approach to the Western substantiates. Deadwood, despite its self-consciously literary dialogue, strikes the viewer as an authentic portrait of 19th-Century American frontier society by depicting a fractured, incomplete, and quarrelsome community that constructs itself from base, vulgar, and unpleasant elements that defy the sunny rhetoric that Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, and other Western apologists promulgate.
This unvarnished presentation is plausible precisely because it evokes a complex, lived-in West rather than the disinfected environment of the traditional Westerns to which Milch objects. Deadwood, indeed, challenges simplistic symbolic readings by including vivid details that reward multiple viewings. “The symbolic, the allegorical, is always generated out of the particular,” Milch writes in Stories of the Black Hills to argue that surface meanings are incomplete: “I never thought of the name Swearengen as connected to his profane language, any more than I thought of Bullock as bull-headed . . . or anything of the sort. It is the life of this fiction, of the world of Deadwood, that generates these similarities. Symbols generate their meaning out of the closed system of a fiction.”52
The violence, profanity, sexuality, and historical backdrop that typify Deadwood, in other words, create realistic effects by inventing a fiction that resonates with lived experience. Viewers may not experience Deadwood as they do consensual or quotidian reality, but the program’s autumnal tone not only counteracts Bullock’s and Swearengen’s objectionable behavior but also reflects the mature style that Milch, his writers, his cast, and his production staff achieve.
![This image from 2019's Deadwood: The Movie sees three men standing in a Deadwood alleyway. From left to right: Unnamed Chinese immigrant, Marshal Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant), and hotelier Sol Star (played by John Hawkes). This image from 2019's Deadwood: The Movie sees three men standing in a Deadwood alleyway. From left to right: Unnamed Chinese immigrant, Marshal Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant), and hotelier Sol Star (played by John Hawkes).](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea64fc98-272c-472d-bb91-f533ebb68f32_618x412.webp)
5. Democracy & Desire
Deadwood’s attempt to chronicle the camp’s day-to-day existence leads Milch to compare his series to literature of an earlier era. “The number of characters in Deadwood does not frighten me,” he writes in Stories of the Black Hills. “The serial form of the nineteenth-century novel is close to what I’m doing. The writers who are alive to me, whom I consider my contemporaries, are writers who lived in another time—Dickens and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Twain.”53
This claim may seem pretentious for a man working in television, but it indicates Milch’s narrative ambitions and accomplishments as he makes Deadwood a long, interconnected, and dense story. This novelistic approach, while not new (Deadwood’s 2004 premiere was preceded by daytime soap operas; Murder One, a series for which Milch served as creative consultant in its first season; Oz; The Sopranos; 24; and The Wire, among other examples), forces viewers to pay attention to detail, to accept a different (and more languid) narrative pace, to track numerous intersecting storylines, and to negotiate the program’s literary effects.
Joseph Millichap finds Robert Penn Warren’s literary influence upon Milch decisive in this final regard, stating that “like the best of Warren’s works, Milch’s finest creations, especially Deadwood, employ a distinctive, diverse, and mannered style to delineate a harshly naturalistic vision of the dark and divided depths within the American national character, an identity simultaneously and paradoxically both innocent and corrupted.”54
The literary lineages that Millichap traces in “Robert Penn Warren, David Milch, and the Literary Contexts of Deadwood,” the finest essay yet written about this theme, prove that Milch’s demand for historical accuracy in settings, costumes, and music supplements his political, psychological, and moral vision for a program in which Deadwood represents America’s genesis, development, and expansion. Milch, by pursuing this narrative project, resembles Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Twain because all four novelists create wildly imaginative worlds that employ realism and naturalism to legitimize their fictional enterprise. Deadwood succeeds because Milch and his writers honor the literary legacy that these authors (along with Penn Warren) impart to produce a disturbing, resonant, and evocative television series.
Deadwood, as Singer notes, is a more mature work than even NYPD Blue. Despite their similar concerns (racism, sexism, law enforcement), both programs occupy distinct positions in Milch’s development as a television dramatist. Their perspective on legality distinguishes them from one another, with NYPD Blue presenting law enforcement as a frequently disturbing, always difficult, yet finally noble effort to regulate human desire that, for Richard Clark Sterne and other observers, adopts an nearly authoritarian sociopolitical stance.
![This image shows four men standing at the Gem Saloon's bar in a scene from David Milch's television series Deadwood. From left to right: Al Swearengen (played by Ian McShane, pouring whiskey into a shot glass), Sheriff Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant), Dan Dority (played by W. Earl Brown), and Johnny Burns (played by Seth Bridgers). This image shows four men standing at the Gem Saloon's bar in a scene from David Milch's television series Deadwood. From left to right: Al Swearengen (played by Ian McShane, pouring whiskey into a shot glass), Sheriff Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant), Dan Dority (played by W. Earl Brown), and Johnny Burns (played by Seth Bridgers).](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F50375e95-ab9b-40ca-b699-c2323af85325_1401x876.webp)
Deadwood, however, portrays law as a corollary to economic, civil, and political order that shares the same vulgar basis as the criminality it ostensibly polices. Continuities exist (Bullock’s rigid outlook in Deadwood’s opening episodes, for instance, matches Detective Andy Sipowicz’s worldview in NYPD Blue’s early seasons), but Milch, in creating a lawless mining camp that predates NYPD Blue’s urban metropolis by one century, offers a more cynical appraisal of American commerce, politics, and jurisprudence. This paradoxical position—one would expect the police drama to be gloomier than the frontier Western—makes sense insofar as returning to the earlier era frees Milch from the 20th-Century historical events, developments, and influences that NYPD Blue inherits, while working for HBO frees Milch from network television’s censors.
This dramatic liberation gives weight to Newcomb’s contention that “Deadwood is not a western because it tells its tale by digging out the root elements of the western. It neither revises those elements nor replays them. It exposes the western, the genre itself, as an attempt to provide ‘endings’ that can never be true.”55 Deadwood, for Newcomb, becomes an anti-Western in the same manner that Leslie Fiedler, in his 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel, sees Robert Penn Warren’s fiction about the American South’s antebellum and postbellum societies as attempting “the risky game of presenting to our largest audience the anti-Western in the guise of the Western, the anti-historical romance in the guise of the form itself.”56
This generic indeterminacy—Deadwood, after all, revises numerous Western conventions, embracing them even as it hollows them out—generates the complications that the series unveils to audiences that may find the program’s elliptical dialogue, unconventional pace, and odd characters mystifying. Viewers must return to individual Deadwood episodes to catch their nuances, details, and subtexts, a practice that HBO enabled during the program’s broadcast life by airing a single episode many times during a given week and, later, by releasing entire-season DVD box sets (Deadwood’s complete-series collection even resembles a thick novel to extend Milch’s invocation of 19th-Century authors as his literary forefathers).
Milch follows a reverse progression, moving from crime drama to Western drama, despite American television tracing the opposite path. The urban crime thriller, as David Simon notes in his introduction to Rafael Alvarez’s 2004 production history “The Wire”: Truth Be Told, “long ago became a central American archetype, and the labyrinth of the inner city has largely replaced the spare, unforgiving landscape of the American West as the central stage for our morality plays.”57
The career of Elmore Leonard, to take one well-known example, emblematizes Simon’s analysis. Leonard, one of America’s most prolific authors, began writing Westerns during the 1950s but became an eminent crime novelist during the 1960s (and continued writing crime dramas—sometimes heavily influenced by Western motifs—until his death on 20 August 2013). Milch’s career, however, goes against this trend to examine the origins of America’s political, legal, and economic structures. Deadwood, in Ned Martel’s memorable phrase, gets down in “the muck from which [law enforcement’s] basic concepts and rituals began to evolve. The town’s attempt to govern itself is corrupt, sporadic and bloody, as the main characters attempt—and often fail—to impose some stability on the society they are building.”58
![This image shows the town council assembled by Al Swearengen in "Plague," Deadwood's sixth episode. From left to right: Tom Nuttall (played by Leon Rippy), Doc Amos Cochran (played by Brad Dourif), Cy Tolliver (played by Powers Boothe), Reverend H.W. Smith (played by Ray McKinnon), hardware merchant Sol Star (played by John Hawkes), publisher A.W. Merrick (played by Jeffrey Jones), Swearengen (played by Ian McShane, with his back to camera), and hotelier E.B. Farnum (played by William Sanderson, also with his back to camera). This image shows the town council assembled by Al Swearengen in "Plague," Deadwood's sixth episode. From left to right: Tom Nuttall (played by Leon Rippy), Doc Amos Cochran (played by Brad Dourif), Cy Tolliver (played by Powers Boothe), Reverend H.W. Smith (played by Ray McKinnon), hardware merchant Sol Star (played by John Hawkes), publisher A.W. Merrick (played by Jeffrey Jones), Swearengen (played by Ian McShane, with his back to camera), and hotelier E.B. Farnum (played by William Sanderson, also with his back to camera).](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd8916921-311f-478e-bc05-0f6dc33780a2_1024x576.jpeg)
Deadwood, by making Swearengen and Bullock its protagonists, continues Milch’s fascination with antiheroes. NYPD Blue’s Andy Sipowicz is the spiritual father of these characters, who frequently find themselves (despite their baser natures) demonstrating compassion, a trend that allows the camp to establish itself as a legitimate community rather than a lawless frontier town. The first motion toward Deadwood’s eventual municipal identity occurs during “Plague” (1.6), when a smallpox outbreak forces the camp’s “elite”— Swearengen, Star, Tolliver, Cochran, Merrick, bar owner Tom Nuttall (Leon Rippy), hotel owner E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson), and Reverend H.W. Smith (Ray McKinnon)—to convene a meeting to decide how to protect Deadwood’s healthy residents while treating the disease’s victims.
Their decision to set up a “pest tent” at the camp’s outskirts is far more charitable than Tolliver’s choice in the previous episode, “The Trial of Jack McCall” (1.5), to leave his associate Andy Cramed (Zach Grenier), a gambler and con man infected with smallpox, to die in the woods outside Deadwood’s perimeter. The meeting’s participants also volunteer money to pay riders to purchase vaccine shots in Fort Kearny, Nebraska; Bismarck, Dakota; and Cheyenne, Wyoming, which, in the episode “Suffer the Little Children” (1.8), they distribute free of charge to all residents.
Swearengen organizes and runs this meeting, held in the Gem Saloon, but doesn’t hold court in his usual fashion. He instead solicits opinions, makes suggestions for Merrick’s article about the outbreak (advocating benign misinformation that downplays the crisis’s severity), and accepts Reverend Smith’s advice not to stigmatize the disease’s victims.
This embryonic government, in Erin Hill’s words, “contains an answer to what is perhaps the central question of Deadwood, which is whether or not residents can be trusted to handle their business themselves without being regulated by a larger power, or, put more simply, whether order is possible without law.”59 This admirable civic-mindedness, however, is undemocratic. The camp’s inhabitants don’t elect this town council, but rather Swearengen, in the absence of election codes, appoints them by asking (in truth, commanding) the members to participate.
When, in “No Other Sons or Daughters” (1.9), word comes from Yankton that the federal government will sign a treaty with the Sioux Indians to annex the Black Hills to the Dakota Territory, Swearengen again assembles the town fathers—this time including Bullock and Tolliver’s right-hand man, Eddie Sawyer (Ricky Jay), but not the ailing Reverend Smith—to formalize their council.60
Only rudimentary democracy ensues. Swearengen, when telling Star about the meeting, says that the council must create an informal municipal organization (rather than an official government, which would suggest that the camp rebels against federal authority) with “structure enough to persuade those territorial cocksuckers in Yankton that we’re worthy enough to pay them their fucking bribes.” He then tells the assembled group that their organization will help miners, prospectors, and business owners keep title to their lands by becoming a legally recognized government whose “proper order of fucking business is to make titles and departments before the territorial cocksuckers send in their cousins to rob and steal from us.”
![This diptych shows two different stills of Deadwood mayor E.B. Farnum (played by William Sanderson). On the left, Farnum stands at the front desk of his hotel. On the right, a nattily dressed Farnum stands inside the Gem Saloon and gazes at something (or someone) off-camera. This diptych shows two different stills of Deadwood mayor E.B. Farnum (played by William Sanderson). On the left, Farnum stands at the front desk of his hotel. On the right, a nattily dressed Farnum stands inside the Gem Saloon and gazes at something (or someone) off-camera.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa130e872-d2ca-4d30-84fe-6b6b1fa9b36d_1710x900.avif)
When Farnum, perfectly described by Mark Singer as “an oleaginous toady [who] lives suspended between mortal fear of Swearengen and mercenary eagerness to do his bidding,”61 asks to be mayor, Swearengen calls for objections and then, before Merrick can speak, pounds his hand on the table like a gavel to appoint—not elect—Farnum to this largely ceremonial position (no one doubts that Swearengen, who already acts as the meeting’s de facto chief executive, will continue in this role).
Farnum quickly proposes taxing the camp’s residents to pay the Dakota Legislature’s bribes, but Merrick nervously asks when elections will be held to replace the temporary council with permanent officials. After Farnum affirms that the council is ad hoc, the irritated Swearengen says, “Ad fucking hoc. . . . Can we just get on with the fucking meeting?”
Swearengen’s and Merrick’s opposing views illuminate Deadwood’s complex, ambivalent, and cynical rendering of America’s democratic origins. Swearengen, the pure pragmatist, finds government to be a necessary illusion that enables the camp’s residents to lay legal claim to the land they already occupy and the profits they already earn. Merrick, the romantic journalist, desires representative democracy that upholds the virtues of freedom and liberty he holds dear.
This conflict encapsulates the problems that the camp faces throughout the second season, when Francis Wolcott (Garret Dillahunt), a geologist employed by George Hearst, arrives to buy gold claims that prospectors such as Ellsworth work. Wolcott immediately enlists Tolliver to begin spreading rumors that all such claims will be declared invalid by the territorial government (since they violate the Fort Laramie Treaty), but that their owners may sell their land to Hearst for a fair price. This ruse is a confidence scheme that allows Hearst to acquire valuable land at little cost and that will result in hefty profits after Deadwood becomes a legitimate municipality.
This storyline also becomes Deadwood’s innovative spin on the conventional Western land-grab plot, being much more complex than the typical tale of a cattle baron running off innocent homesteaders. Hearst, the millionaire prospector who arrives in camp during the second-season finale, “Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To” (2.12), uses his wealth, influence, and power to rig the official elections that, much to Merrick’s delight, Yankton demands Deadwood hold to establish a permanent legal government and full rights under the territory’s auspices.62
The third season sees all major characters, particularly Bullock and Swearengen, align themselves (at first quietly and then more openly) against Hearst’s machinations. Deadwood’s experiment with democracy, therefore, melds Swearengen’s practical and Merrick’s ethical viewpoints into an alternately hopeful and disappointing movement toward self-rule that can’t escape the depredations of Hearst’s economic desire. His greed ensures that Deadwood, rather than ridding itself of the impure motivations that feed the camp’s development, expands the social, political, economic, and moral compromises that give it life.
![This image shows George Hearst (played by Gerald McRaney) dressed in his finest clothes while standing on Deadwood's main thoroughfare. This image shows George Hearst (played by Gerald McRaney) dressed in his finest clothes while standing on Deadwood's main thoroughfare.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffa56a517-52b5-49ae-8405-91adce5eabc7_646x335.webp)
6. Power & Pretension
The Hearst storyline most fully synthesizes Deadwood’s major themes, particularly the connection between money, violence, profanity, and community. The third season dramatizes Milch’s belief, stated in Stories of the Black Hills, that “before violence was anything else, it was simply a way of doing business.”63 The confrontation between Swearengen, Hearst, and Hearst’s chief enforcer, Captain Turner (Allan Graf), in “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For” (3.2) embodies Deadwood’s sophisticated, if cynical, treatment of the relationship between wealth, power, and desire.64
Hearst, through Wolcott, has purchased nearly every gold claim in the camp but has failed to acquire the rights to Alma Garret Ellsworth’s massive strike (Alma, in “Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To,” marries Whitney Ellsworth—who manages her claim so well that she becomes rich enough to underwrite the camp’s first bank—to prevent the shame that news of her pregnancy by Bullock would entail). Hearst summons Swearengen to a meeting to discuss how to force Alma to sell, but Swearengen, knowing that such a decision could place the camp under Hearst’s perpetual control, refuses:
HEARST: I’ll not name how you would benefit from the action I wish you to take, saying only instead it’s my will, to which I will have you bend. (Hearst indicates a shot glass of whiskey on the table.) I suggest you drink that.
SWEARENGEN: No. (Behind Swearengen, Captain Turner produces a pistol.)
HEARST: I would incorporate into my holdings the claim now owned by Mrs. Ellsworth. I am told that you can help me bring this about. (Turner pistol-whips Swearengen in the back of the head, knocking Swearengen to the floor. Turner then grabs Swearengen from behind and pins Swearengen’s left hand on top of the table.) Tell me how you will help. (Hearst hefts a rock pick.) This is a grip I’m used to.
SWEARENGEN (fighting to stay conscious): Well, far as making your way into her, act averse to nasty language and partial to fruity tea. (Hearst, angered by Swearengen’s refusal, brings the rock pick down on Swearengen’s left hand. Swearengen gasps and collapses.)
Swearengen’s vulnerability is notable, with Hearst speaking to him much as Swearengen speaks to his own underlings, employees, and prostitutes. Bending Swearengen to his will underscores not only Hearst’s arrogance but also his symbolic sexual mastery of the camp’s ruling elite, here represented by Swearengen, who becomes a victim of the physical violence that he (Swearengen) customarily perpetrates against others.
Hearst’s talk of incorporation indicates his unappeased (and perhaps unquenchable) appetite for “the color,” or the gold that makes him wealthy enough to control Deadwood’s municipal, economic, and political affairs. Hearst, in a further display of his influence, simply buys enough votes from residents of the Black Hills (including Deadwood) to ensure that people sympathetic to his interests gain positions of power.
Hearst’s interference upsets the tenuous civic equilibrium that the camp achieves during Deadwood’s second season. Bullock, thanks to Hearst’s rigging, loses the election as sheriff to Harry Manning (Brent Sexton)—a bartender at Tom Nuttall’s saloon who wishes to found the camp’s first fire department—in the series finale, “Tell Him Something Pretty” (3.12). The camp’s nascent democracy, therefore, begins as a corrupt enterprise that circumvents the will of the people, Swearengen’s pragmatism, and Merrick’s romanticism by preferring greed over community.
![This image shows Trixie (played by Paula Malcomson, with her back to camera) aiming a small pistol at George Hearst (played by Gerald McRaney) after Hearst's agents murder Trixie's friend, prospector Whitney Ellsworth. This image shows Trixie (played by Paula Malcomson, with her back to camera) aiming a small pistol at George Hearst (played by Gerald McRaney) after Hearst's agents murder Trixie's friend, prospector Whitney Ellsworth.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F95376c1b-194c-4fd7-b8fd-89a985241949_506x316.jpeg)
The final episode, moreover, illustrates how Hearst’s power is comprehensive when he purchases the services of Pinkerton Detective Agency workers to menace the local population by forming a private militia that enforces Hearst’s will on the camp’s populace. Two agents murder Whitney Ellsworth in the series’s penultimate episode, “The Catbird Seat,” which prompts a distraught Trixie to shoot Hearst in the shoulder before this episode ends.65 Farnum’s comment about this event, with gallows humor marvelously delivered by William Sanderson, reflects the camp’s (and, likely, the viewer’s) perspective: “Hearst. Shot. The wound, alas, not mortal.”
Hearst, despite his injuries, completes his quest to dominate the camp’s affairs by purchasing Alma’s gold strike after a Pinkerton agent, in “A Constant Throb” (3.10), shoots at her while she walks to the camp’s bank. This threat convinces Alma to sell her claim because remaining in Deadwood and protecting Sofia Metz are more important to her than frustrating Hearst’s plans.
In “Tell Him Something Pretty,” Bullock, as sheriff, and Star, as chief officer of Deadwood’s bank, along with a Pinkerton agent named Newman, attend the meeting that sees Alma transfer her title to Hearst.66 The scene’s dialogue emphasizes Hearst’s need to manipulate the transaction’s every aspect, as well as Alma’s and Bullock’s refusal to capitulate to his petty demands:
HEARST: Mr. Newman, I ask you to ready payment to the officers of Mrs. Ellsworth’s bank.
BULLOCK: We’ll receive it where we can put it in her safe.
HEARST: May I hope, Madam, you do not subscribe to this insulting and juvenile precaution?
ALMA: I do not find the precaution juvenile, so many having been murdered with whom you’ve had dealings in this camp.
HEARST: At least you acknowledge the insult.
ALMA: I acknowledge the pretense to civility in a man so brutally vicious as vapid and grotesque. (Alma rises, followed by Hearst.)
HEARST: Have the gold seen to her bank, Newman. Have its purity assayed. Let her or her seconds choose the man. When that tedium is completed, have the documents witnessed as though we were all of us Jews and bring the business back to me. Excuse my absence, Mr. Star, as I hope you’ll forgive my thoughtless aspersion on your race. You stand for local office, but some contests being countywide, I await wires from the other camps. (Hearst goes to the door. Alma passes him.) You’ve changed your scent.
BULLOCK (to Star): Can’t shut up. Every bully I ever met can’t shut his fuckin’ mouth. Except when he’s afraid.
HEARST: You mistake for fear, Mr. Bullock, what is, in fact, preoccupation. I’m havin’ a conversation you cannot hear.
Hearst’s final line refers to his Indian name, Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To, a designation that explains his uncanny talent (for discovering gold, silver, and other precious metals) as the ability to hear (and to translate) the earth’s voice. Alma, however, highlights Hearst’s venality, while Bullock accurately describes the man as a bully whose menacing demeanor covers insecurity, anxiety, and apprehension.
As such, Hearst gets what he wants materially, but not morally, when Alma castigates his stunted character. Alma and Bullock rebuke Hearst’s irritation by insisting on following sensible procedures to secure her payment, thereby resisting Hearst’s control of the deal’s linguistic and emotional elements. Hearst’s perfume comment, in this context, becomes the scene’s most juvenile moment, proving that the mining mogul’s wealth doesn’t ensure wisdom, decency, or integrity.
![This image shows saloonkeeper Al Swearengen (played by Ian McShane) wiping blood from the floor of his office. A whiskey bottle sits on the floor next to Swearengen, while the episode's title, "Tell Him Something Pretty," appears in yellow cursive lettering that spans the shot's left third. This image shows saloonkeeper Al Swearengen (played by Ian McShane) wiping blood from the floor of his office. A whiskey bottle sits on the floor next to Swearengen, while the episode's title, "Tell Him Something Pretty," appears in yellow cursive lettering that spans the shot's left third.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe81a9289-c816-42db-be46-aa50ba7b1a40_1280x720.jpeg)
A more potent example involves Hearst’s demand that his assailant be killed in “Tell Him Something Pretty,” forcing Swearengen to murder Jen (Jennifer Lutheran)—the Gem prostitute whom Johnny Burns fancies—in Trixie’s place when Burns proves unable to do so (Swearengen stabs Jen in his office, off-camera). Hearst accepts Jen’s corpse as Trixie’s, not realizing (or not caring about) the ruse that Swearengen perpetrates, then leaves town to see to business and political interests in other camps.
“Tell Him Something Pretty” and Deadwood end with Swearengen scrubbing Jen’s bloodstains from his office floor when Burns arrives to ask if she suffered. “I was gentle as I was able,” Swearengen says, “and that’s the last we’ll fucking speak of it, Johnny.” Burns departs, leaving Swearengen, still scrubbing the floor, to mutter, “Wants me to tell him something pretty” as the screen fades to black.
This scene is a fitting conclusion for Deadwood (despite Milch’s intention to produce one or two more seasons) because it so thoroughly muddies Swearengen’s ethical, personal, and political choices that the viewer cannot fully condemn or excuse his actions. Swearengen resolves earlier in the episode to kill Hearst should the ruse fail, but he ensures that Jen resembles Trixie by dressing her cadaver in Trixie’s clothes.
He murders Jen to protect the camp from Hearst’s wrath yet sacrifices an innocent woman to save Trixie’s life. He regrets this decision, personally cleaning the blood he has spilled, yet offers only a mild apology to Burns for killing the woman that Burns loves. Swearengen’s actions recapitulate the camp’s morally ambivalent responses to external power, authority, and money to offer a skillful metaphor for Deadwood’s appeal—Jason Jacobs’s “filthy joy”—as a Western that depicts a complicated, compromised, and corrupt nation whose entrepreneurial energy, political pragmatism, coarse strength, and material mastery reveal the frontier as far less romantic, admirable, and simplistic than Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt believe it to be.
![This image shows Odell Marchbanks (played by Omar Gooding) on the left and his mother, "Aunt" Lou Marchbanks (played by Cleo King) on the right. Mother and son stare directly into one another's eyes, with Lou appearing upset at something Odell has just told her. This image shows Odell Marchbanks (played by Omar Gooding) on the left and his mother, "Aunt" Lou Marchbanks (played by Cleo King) on the right. Mother and son stare directly into one another's eyes, with Lou appearing upset at something Odell has just told her.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb957cc55-fd94-4afb-965c-d653812e229c_873x582.jpeg)
7. Race to the Bottom
Deadwood’s final scene also replays the gender and racial marginalization that the series interrogates. The camp’s political and physical survival depends on white men viewing the body of a woman murdered to satisfy a wealthy bigot’s vengeful masculinity. Hearst’s sexism has been evident since his arrival in camp, with his disregard for every woman except his absent wife, Phoebe, and his personal cook, “Aunt” Lou Marchbanks (Cleo King), enhanced by a courtliness that, Alma notes, departs when he’s challenged by any woman who opposes him.
Hearst’s racism is more complicated because his protestations about respecting and following the African-American Aunt Lou’s commands prove hollow when her son, Odell Marchbanks (Omar Gooding), arrives in Deadwood in “A Rich Find” (3.6) with news that a massive gold strike has been discovered in Liberia, the country founded by freed American slaves.
Odell has traveled from there to seek Hearst’s counsel, intending to dupe Hearst but approaching the matter subtly when sitting at dinner with the man in “Unauthorized Cinnamon” (3.7).67 Hearst insults Odell’s slovenly approach to fleecing him, causing Odell to threaten to leave after saying that he expected Hearst to send a man to Liberia to confirm the find’s legitimacy. Hearst relents, apologizing to Odell before lecturing him about gold’s power:
HEARST: Before the color, no white man—no man of any hue—moved to civilize or improve a place like this had reason to make the effort. The color brought commerce here and such order as has been attained.
ODELL: Yes, sir.
HEARST: Do you want to help Liberia, Odell?
ODELL: I want to help myself. (Hearst chuckles.) If Liberia’s where my chance is, that’s all right with me.
HEARST (offers a cigar to Odell): Gold is your chance, Odell.
ODELL (takes cigar): Thank you, sir.
HEARST: Gold is every man’s opportunity. Why do I make that argument? Because every defect in a man, and in others’ way of taking him, our agreement that gold has value gives us power to rise above.
ODELL: Fond as you are of my mother, without that gold I showed you, I don’t expect we’d be out here talking.
HEARST: That is correct. And for your effrontery at our meal a moment ago, I’d’ve seen you shot or hanged without a second thought. The value I gave the gold restrained me, you see, your utility in connection to it. And because of my gold, those at the other tables deferred to my restraint. Gold confers power. Power comes to any man who has the color.
ODELL: Even if he’s Black?
HEARST: That is our species’ hope: that uniformly agreeing on its value, we organize to seek the color.
Hearst expresses more racial tolerance than he feels by giving the word color different connotations than Deadwood’s viewers (or Odell, in an earlier scene) expect. Rather than referring to “colored people,” Hearst uses the term to connote gold, as well as gold’s symbolic and material power because, for Hearst, gold creates commerce, civilization, and the hope of racial solidarity.
![This image shows George Hearst (played by Gerald McRaney) on the left and Odell Marchbanks (played by Omar Gooding) on the right. Both men walk down Deadwood's main thoroughfare. This image shows George Hearst (played by Gerald McRaney) on the left and Odell Marchbanks (played by Omar Gooding) on the right. Both men walk down Deadwood's main thoroughfare.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e4b0abf-fc59-486e-815a-69a55025fef3_873x582.jpeg)
Hearst, however, can’t hide his contempt for Odell sitting at his table or rising from it in anger. Mentioning Odell’s effrontery becomes a metaphorical reference to the anger felt by Southern white Americans at the freeing of enslaved people at the Civil War’s conclusion. Hearst’s entire speech, occurring in 1877 or 1878 (at the end of the period known as Reconstruction), laments the lost civilization that he suggests America has become. Hearst, we see, retains his core belief that Odell, a Black man, isn’t good enough to sit at his table (only Odell’s connection to gold makes him worthy). Hearst, the careful viewer notes, never allows Aunt Lou to dine with him, either. She, indeed, is little more to Hearst than his “nigger maid,”68 whom Hearst quietly complains about, berates, and intimidates on more than one occasion.
Hearst, according to Milch, “was a Southern sympathizer and maintained a form of genial, condescending racism”69 that Gerald McRaney’s performance of Hearst’s gold speech expertly captures. Hearst’s gentility, however, can’t lessen the hatred that lies behind his words or his anger at being challenged by Odell. Aunt Lou, who has begged Odell to leave Hearst alone, worries for her son’s safety, a well-founded concern when the viewer considers Odell’s later, suspicious death while returning to New York City.
Hearst, in “Amateur Night” (3.9), tells Aunt Lou that Odell was robbed and killed near Rapid City, but Hearst’s menacing behavior in the previous episode, “Leviathan Smiles” (3.8), reveals both his racism and his rage.70 Aunt Lou asks Hearst to send a rider to deliver a garnet brooch that Odell accidentally leaves behind:
HEARST: My imagination resists the approach in that however quickly he might catch Odell, until he did, the man would know he rode in the service of a colored person. I’d suggest, having packed the brooch carefully and securely, we ship it to New York, where my man Fitzpatrick can give it to your son when he arrives.
AUNT LOU: All right.
HEARST: Are you afraid that by his not receiving today the token of your love something untoward might befall Odell? Are you superstitious that way, Aunt Lou?
Hearst’s concern that a white rider would object to serving a Black man expresses his own intolerance, while Hearst’s final two questions, delivered by McRaney with faint anger and subdued bitterness, imply that Odell is unprotected. Hearst seems genuinely pained when telling Aunt Lou about Odell’s death in “Amateur Night,” but she won’t let him hug her in support, fleeing from Hearst and confirming that she believes he ordered Odell’s murder.
![This image shows livery owner Hostetler (played by Richard Gant) on the left and his friend Samuel Fields (played by Franklin Ajaye) on the right. Both men stand in the entrance to Hostetler's stable. This image shows livery owner Hostetler (played by Richard Gant) on the left and his friend Samuel Fields (played by Franklin Ajaye) on the right. Both men stand in the entrance to Hostetler's stable.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62c63ee2-1a7a-4c19-abbc-d8a31110dc08_1355x763.jpeg)
Deadwood, therefore, doesn’t employ the documented racism of its setting merely to indulge racial epithets under the guise of historical accuracy, but rather illustrates how nonwhite characters face exclusion despite their intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit. Aunt Lou, for instance, is not the camp’s only African-American resident. Hostetler (Richard Gant), the owner of Deadwood’s livery, makes a reasonable living until one of his horses escapes while being castrated in “Amalgamation and Capital” (2.9), running wildly through the streets before trampling William Bullock, who later dies of his injuries.
Neither Seth nor Martha Bullock blames Hostetler for this tragedy, but Steve (Michael Harney), a white racist also injured by the horse, begins openly hating Hostetler during drunken ramblings at Tom Nuttall’s saloon. Hostetler leaves camp to capture the horse, accompanied by Samuel Fields (Franklin Ajaye), a Black man who calls himself “the Nigger General.” When Hostetler returns in “Full Faith and Credit” (3.4), he finds that, in his absence, Steve has taken over the livery, caring for its horses and incompetently running its business. Bullock, in “A Two-Headed Beast” (3.5), then mediates the sale of Hostetler’s livery to Steve, who balks at working for a Black man.
Steve, despite Bullock’s warnings, continues to provoke Hostetler, calling him a baboon and a liar until Hostetler, saying, “I will not be called a fucking liar. I didn’t live my life for that,”71 walks into the next room. A shot rings out, then Bullock discovers the suicidal Hostetler dead in a chair.
Milch’s approach to race and racism here is more mature than NYPD Blue’s sometimes reactionary stance. Hostetler endures Steve’s explicitly racist comments (the viewer imagines that Hostetler, born before the Civil War, has experienced vicious verbal attacks all his life) but can’t tolerate having his honesty, integrity, and reputation questioned. Hostetler equates these qualities with his full humanity, so his death shakes Bullock in its passionate rejection of Steve’s toxic racism.
Hostetler’s complex motivations for his suicide, however, illustrate Milch’s commitment to creating authentic human beings who react in unexpected, ambiguous, and complicated ways, to say nothing of Richard Gant’s superb acting. Deadwood is no mere cesspool of unrepentant racism, but a place where nonwhite residents strive to better their lives only to find that the restrictions of American society are, in the end, inescapable.
![This image shows Mr. Wu (played by Keone Young), the leader of Deadwood's Chinese community, entering through the Gem Saloon's front doors. A sign bearing the word "Supplies" and a white Deadwood resident can be seen in the street behind Wu. This image shows Mr. Wu (played by Keone Young), the leader of Deadwood's Chinese community, entering through the Gem Saloon's front doors. A sign bearing the word "Supplies" and a white Deadwood resident can be seen in the street behind Wu.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c358edc-cd26-46d4-9e62-79e0d2eb7f04_1200x630.webp)
8. America & Assimilation
Deadwood, in a departure from conventional Westerns, dramatizes no extensive contact with Native Americans. Apart from Bullock’s fight to the death with an unnamed Lakota Indian at the beginning of “Plague” (a contest provoked by Bullock’s trespass onto a sacred Lakota burial site) and the delivery, in “Here Was a Man” (1.4), of a Native American’s severed head by a Mexican rider wishing to claim the bounty on Indian scalps that Swearengen offers in the pilot episode, no Native Americans are ever seen in the program’s 36 episodes.
Talk of encounters, battles, and treaties with Indians is frequent, with several characters (particularly Swearengen) referring to Native Americans by such epithets as “savages” and “dirt-worshipping heathens.” The pilot episode illustrates how Native Americans become all-purpose bogeymen for Deadwood’s residents when they are easily blamed for the Metz family massacre, while General Crook’s arrival in “Sold Under Sin” demonstrates the federal government’s determination not only to punish the Sioux for defeating Custer’s troops at the Battle of the Little Bighorn but also to take their land by whatever means necessary.
Swearengen keeps the Indian head, which he address as “Chief ” during occasional soliloquies in which he compares Deadwood’s unstable political position to the Native American history of land dispossession. These moments may strike the viewer as odd, but they express Swearengen’s sense that, despite his racism, he’s more connected to Native Americans than he initially admits.
Deadwood’s lengthiest examination of race, racism, and assimilation comes in the form of Mr. Wu. This character, marvelously played by Keone Young throughout the program’s three seasons, runs Chinatown (known colloquially by the racist moniker “Chink’s Alley”), the area of Deadwood where Chinese immigrants work as launderers, meat packers, drug runners, and prostitutes.
Wu refuses to learn English, but provides Swearengen with meat, opium, and information about the camp’s legitimate and criminal dealings. Wu’s English vocabulary, at least in the first season, consists of four words: Swedgin (Wu’s mangled version of Swearengen’s name), San Francisco, and, most prevalently, cocksucker (normally yelled as “cocksucka!”). The relationship between these two men is one of Deadwood’s most complicated and most enjoyable, for Swearengen’s frequently irritated and always racist treatment of Wu (Swearengen, as an example, forces Wu to enter the Gem Saloon through its back door) can’t obscure Swearengen’s affection and respect for Wu’s business acumen.
“In fact,” Paul Wright and Hailin Zhou write in “Divining the ‘Celestials’: The Chinese Subculture of Deadwood,” their shrewd assessment of Wu’s significance, “it is precisely Al and Wu’s intertwined interests and often-murderous exchange of professional courtesies that fuel many of the show’s central conflicts, as well as its brutal and blunt depiction of racial politics.”72 Wright and Zhou note that Deadwood offers an unvarnished portrayal of racism that’s important to the program’s narrative progression. Although nonwhite people remain minor characters in Deadwood, they exceed the stereotypes that their white counterparts assign them. Swearengen and Hearst are just as savage in their professional dealings as they accuse Wu of being, while Wu’s willingness to feed human corpses to his pigs is an apt metaphor for how the camp consumes its residents’ ambitions, hopes, and lives.
![This image shows Mr. Wu (played by Keone Young) yelling at Al Swearengen (played by Ian McShane, whose back is to camera) while sitting at Al's desk inside Al's Gem Saloon office. This image shows Mr. Wu (played by Keone Young) yelling at Al Swearengen (played by Ian McShane, whose back is to camera) while sitting at Al's desk inside Al's Gem Saloon office.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32f337b7-6ee3-4db1-b2fd-aaab8483c04a_1280x720.jpeg)
Wu, as such, clings to pragmatism as much as Swearengen, Hearst, Bullock, and Ellsworth. Wu is American, Milch writes in Stories of the Black Hills, because “he makes do with what’s in front of him. He takes things the way they are and doesn’t pretend they’re something else.”73 True as this statement may be, it underplays Wu’s—and, by extension, Deadwood’s—complicated relationship with Americanism. Wu adapts to, but does not fully accommodate, an American-as-European-descendant model of assimilation, but, instead, preserves those aspects of his native culture that allow him to serve as leader of the camp’s Chinese community while defying the racism that defines his life.
In the episode “Mister Wu” (1.10), for instance, Wu causes a minor uproar by entering the Gem’s front door to complain to Swearengen that two white men have robbed and killed his (Wu’s) opium courier, leading Swearengen to agree to kill one of these thieves in recompense.74 Swearengen refuses Wu’s demand that both robbers be murdered because killing two white men to avenge a single Chinese man’s death is unacceptable to Swearengen. Later in the episode, Cy Tolliver tells Swearengen, “I don’t deliver white men to chinks” when Swearengen consults him about which thief should be sacrificed.
Tolliver’s statement expresses Deadwood’s pervasive nativism. The program’s racial economy is stark but not simplistic. Characters like Tolliver and Steve may hold uncomplicated beliefs about white supremacy, but Bullock, Swearengen, and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) (who befriends Samuel Fields, loudly declaring that she’ll drink with anyone, no matter who he is, in “Complications” [2.5]) are more tolerant in their outlook even if they don’t crusade for civil rights.
Bullock’s treatment of Hostetler, Fields, Wu, and the camp’s unnamed Chinese residents, indeed, is eminently fair, while Steve’s visible racism toward Hostetler upsets the sheriff, as do all slights against Star’s Jewish background. Deadwood portrays a continuum of racial attitudes rather than blind, unthinking bigotry from all white characters, dramatizing Milch’s belief that it’s “a mistake to think that white people have a corner on prejudice or parochialism.”75 Deadwood’s many racial aspersions against nonwhite characters (particularly references to Native-American, African-American, and Chinese savagery), however, demonstrate that the camp’s white residents are responsible for more racial animus than any other single group.
The program also illustrates how racism becomes a commercial strategy. Francis Wolcott, on Hearst’s behalf, hires a polished, English-speaking Chinese man named Mr. Lee (Philip Moon) to become the camp’s primary opium runner and Chinese-prostitute dealer in the second season’s “Requiem for a Gleet.” Lee treats his women so abominably (they live in squalid quarters with no health checkups, eventually expiring from overwork) that both Doc Cochran and Wu confront Lee, but to no avail.76 The tension between Wu and Lee culminates in the second-season finale, “Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To,” when Swearengen assigns Dan Dority, Johnny Burns, and Silas Adams to dispatch Lee’s henchmen while Wu murders Lee.
They do so by hiding their identities behind Chinese masks and clothing provided by Wu, who celebrates his rival’s death by standing in the main thoroughfare and cutting off his queue, the distinctive hair braid that Wu wears as a sign of his Chinese identity. Looking up at Swearengen, Wu yells, “Wu! America!” to which Swearengen replies, “That’ll hold you tight to her tit.”
![This image shows Mr. Wu (played by Keone Young) holding a knife in his right hand and his Chinese queue (hair braid) in his left hand as he yells up at the off-camera Al Swearengen. This image shows Mr. Wu (played by Keone Young) holding a knife in his right hand and his Chinese queue (hair braid) in his left hand as he yells up at the off-camera Al Swearengen.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F277a4f09-1a0e-4008-8048-700056e90431_506x316.jpeg)
This scene’s staging, with Swearengen looking down on Wu as the latter man declares his allegiance to America, dramatizes the difficulties of assimilating into American culture: Nonwhite characters must voluntarily suppress their native identities (or elements of those identities that mark them as foreign to the white populace) if they wish to participate fully in America’s economy, government, and society. Wu’s enthusiasm contrasts Swearengen’s ironic recognition that Wu has sacrificed part of himself to join Deadwood’s community, a theme that continues in the third-season episode “True Colors” (3.3) when Wu arrives on a stagecoach from San Francisco wearing a fancy Western suit rather than the traditional Chinese clothing he’s previously displayed.
Wu, by transforming himself, becomes for Milch “the absolute pragmatist, and, simultaneously, the absolute outsider, which makes him of the essence of Deadwood.”77 Wu is one of Deadwood’s primary representatives of America’s complex, contested, and controversial emergence as an economic powerhouse, a status that depends on civilization, savagery, entrepreneurialism, thievery, hard work, dishonesty, order, chaos, racism, tolerance, law, and crime to organize the nation’s pursuit of its political interests. This paradoxical formulation of the American experience means that Deadwood refuses to tell its audience pretty lies about the nation’s glorious past.
Milch rewrites the traditional Western into a more intricate, challenging, and disturbing narrative than the genre’s fans may expect, but his series makes the point, articulated by Milch in Stories of the Black Hills, that “none of us want [sic] to realize that we live in Deadwood, but all of us do. That is the point of the exercise. After first recoiling in horror, we come to love the place where we live, in all of its contradictions. To love not just America, but the world of which America is simply the most recent form of organization.”78
Milch concludes Stories of the Black Hills with the hilarious statement, “I’d guess I’d paraphrase Jefferson, that with all its horrors, Deadwood is the last, best chance of all human cocksuckers.”79 This sentence’s profanity, both literal and metaphorical, invokes one of the nation’s Founding Fathers to emphasize the ambiguities that lie at the heart of American democracy.
Deadwood’s dramatic sophistication, therefore, discomfits its audience to create a fascinating, memorable, and depressing vision of America whose authenticity develops from the program’s unflinching acknowledgment that the nation’s genesis wasn’t easy, pure, or noble. This message resonates with 21st-Century viewers by matching their sense that America, no matter how inspiring its rhetoric, rarely lives up to its reputation.
Milch, by exposing the dark impulses central to the American dream, finds in the 19th Century what David Simon’s The Wire discovers in the 21st: hope, fear, promise, and peril in roughly equal measure. Deadwood, as a result, represents the summit of Milch’s career as a fiction writer, social realist, and television dramatist. It’s his undeniable masterpiece.
FILES
NOTES
Mark Singer, “The Misfit,” New Yorker, 6 February 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact_singer.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
“The New Language of the Old West” and “An Imaginative Reality” are both available on Disc 6 of Season One of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections released by HBO Video. They are also available on Disc 6 of the Deadwood: Season One DVD and Blu-ray collections released by HBO Video.
In “The New Language of the Old West,” Milch says that the Hays Code’s first principle states that obscenity is an offense against God and natural law. The actual Hays Code, still available in print and electronic form, begins with three general principles:
No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin.
Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.
Milch conflates the first and third principle in his “New Language of the Old West” chat with Keith Carradine and in his interview with Salon.com’s Heather Havrilesky, although his summary is essentially accurate. The Hays Code’s three principles don’t directly mention God, but the reader, like Milch, can easily infer God’s centrality to the code from its moralizing diction.
For full-text versions of the Hays Code, see “The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930” (at www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/theory/1930code.pdf) and “The Production Code of the Motion Picture Industry (1930–1967)” (at http://productioncode.dhwritings.com/multipleframes_productioncode.php).
In “The New Language of the Old West,” Milch says, in typically colorful fashion, that the studio chiefs didn’t want to “queer their hustle” by permitting the release of too many objectionable films. They assented to the Hays Code’s control to increase their own profits and to prevent government censorship of their films’ content.
Heather Havrilesky, “The Man behind Deadwood,” Salon.com, 5 March 2005, https://www.salon.com/2005/03/05/milch/.
Ibid.
Ibid.
David Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, Melcher Media, 2006, pg. 12.
Milch refers to Hawthorne’s 1850 short story “Ethan Brand,” in which the titular protagonist searches for the unpardonable sin, only to discover that violating the sanctity of another person’s heart is unforgivable.
Lee Siegel, Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television, Basic Books, 2007, pg. 131.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., pg. 132.
Ibid., pg. 135.
Jason Jacobs, “Al Swearengen, Philosopher King,” in Reading “Deadwood”: A Western to Swear By, edited by David Lavery, Reading Contemporary Television Series, I.B. Tauris, 2006, pg. 11.
Havrilesky, “The Man behind Deadwood,” 5 March 2005.
Several websites and books archive the Western films produced since Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 The Great Train Robbery inaugurated the genre.
Wikipedia’s entries exhaustively chronicle the Western movies produced in America since 1903 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Western_films for thorough lists of Western films produced during the 20th and 21st centuries).
For further information and scholarship about the Western genre, consult the following sources: Angela Aleiss’s Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies, John G. Cawelti’s The Six-Gun Mystique and The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, David Lusted’s The Western, Patrick McGee’s From “Shane” to “Kill Bill”: Rethinking the Western (2006), Jim Kitses’s & Gregg Rickman’s The Western Reader, Scott Simmon’s The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century, Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, and Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns.
Havrilesky, “The Man behind Deadwood,” 5 March 2005.
Ibid.
John Leonard, “True West,” New York Magazine, 11 March 2004, http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/tv/reviews/n_10058/.
Horace Newcomb, “Deadwood,” in The Essential HBO Reader, edited by Gary R. Edgerton & Jeffrey P. Jones, Essential Readers in Contemporary Media and Culture Series, University Press of Kentucky, 2008, pg. 98.
Ibid., pg. 99.
Ibid.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History, first published in 1920, Dover Books, 1996, pp. 3–4.
Ibid. pg. 4.
Ibid., pg. 37
“Deadwood,” Deadwood, Season 1 Episode 1, written by David Milch, directed by Walter Hill, original broadcast 21 March 2004, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 62 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 1 of Season One of Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 1 of the Deadwood: Season One DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
To watch “Deadwood” after clicking the above PrimeWire link, please: 1) Click the “Play” button on the first screen that appears, 2) Click the “Filemoon” server after the next screen (a grid pattern with still images from the episode) appears, and 3) Click the “Play” button on the next/third screen that appears. You may need to exit additional screens that pop up with each click, but you’ll eventually be able to watch the entire episode. Please follow this same procedure to watch every Deadwood episode available on PrimeWire.
Turner, “Significance of the Frontier in American History,” pg. 3.
David Milch, “Deadwood,” Deadwood, Season 1 Episode 1, teleplay dated 20 August 2002, http://www.weeklyscript.com/Deadwood-Pilot.txt.
Singer, “The Misfit,” 6 February 2005.
Scott Eric Kaufman, “Deadwood and To Whom Its Dialogue Is Beholden,” Acephalous, 22 August 2006, http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/08/deadwood_and_to.html.
Milch, Stories of the Black Hills, pg. 19.
Geoffrey Nunberg, “Obscenity Rap,” Fresh Air, 20 June 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20111222155418/http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/deadwood.html.
Singer, “The Misfit,” 6 February 2005.
Milch, Stories of the Black Hills, pg. 19.
Ibid., pg. 121.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., pg. 121 & pg. 126.
Ibid., pg. 126.
David Scott Diffrient, “Deadwood Dick: The Western (Phallus) Reinvented,” in Reading “Deadwood”: A Western to Swear By, edited by David Lavery, Reading Contemporary Television Series, I.B. Tauris, 2006, pg. 191.
“A Lie Agreed Upon, Part I,” Deadwood, Season 2 Episode 1, written by David Milch, directed by Ed Bianchi, original broadcast 6 March 2005, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 50 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 1 of Season Two of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 1 of the Deadwood: Season Two DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
Erin Hill, “‘What’s Afflictin’ You?’: Corporeality, Body Crises, and the Body Politic in Deadwood,” in Reading “Deadwood”: A Western to Swear By, edited by David Lavery, Reading Contemporary Television Series, I.B. Tauris, 2006, pg. 173.
“Deep Water,” Deadwood, Season 1 Episode 2, written by Malcolm MacRury, directed by Davis Guggenheim, original broadcast 24 March 2004, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 56 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 1 of Season One of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 1 of the Deadwood: Season One DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
“Complications,” Deadwood, Season 2 Episode 5, written by Victoria Morrow, directed by Gregg Fienberg, original broadcast 3 April 2005, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 57 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 3 of Season Two of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 3 of the Deadwood: Season Two DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
“Reconnoitering the Rim,” Deadwood, Season 1 Episode 3, written by Jody Worth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, original broadcast 4 April 2004, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 52 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 2 of Season One of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 2 of the Deadwood: Season One DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
Singer, “The Misfit,” 6 February 2005.
Milch, Stories of the Black Hills, pg. 35.
Ibid., pg. 12.
Sean O’Sullivan’s excellent essay “Old, New, Borrowed, Blue: Deadwood and Serial Fiction,” found on Pages 115–129 of David Lavery’s Reading “Deadwood,” precisely analyzes Milch’s debt to Charles Dickens. O’Sullivan argues that serial narratives create tension between the old and the new, which, in a signature insight, explains how tradition influences serial narrative: “Such a dynamic speaks not only to the way that some embryonic communities create identities for themselves by favoring tradition (however new that tradition might be) over innovation, but the way Milch uses labyrinthine plots and dialogue as hazing rituals for viewers, forcing us to become locals very quickly or get the hell out of town” (122).
Joseph Millichap, “Robert Penn Warren, David Milch, and the Literary Contexts of Deadwood,” in Reading “Deadwood”: A Western to Swear By, edited by David Lavery, Reading Contemporary Television Series, I.B. Tauris, 2006, pg. 105.
Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, first published in 1960, Stein and Day (revised edition), 1973, pg. 409.
David Simon, introduction to “The Wire”: Truth Be Told by Rafael Alvarez, Pocket Books, 2004, pg. 2.
Ned Martel, “Resurrecting the Western to Save the Crime Drama,” New York Times, 21 March 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/arts/television-resurrecting-the-western-to-save-the-crime-drama.html?pagewanted=1.
“No Other Sons or Daughters,” Deadwood, Season 1 Episode 9, written by George Putnam, directed by Ed Bianchi, original broadcast 16 May 2004, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 58 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 4 of Season One of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 4 of the Deadwood: Season One DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
Singer, “The Misfit,” 6 February 2005.
“Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To,” Deadwood, Season 2 Episode 12, written by Ted Mann, directed by Ed Bianchi, original broadcast 22 May 2005, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 55 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 5 of Season Two of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 5 of the Deadwood: Season Two DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
Milch, Stories of the Black Hills, pg. 153.
“I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For,” Deadwood, Season 3 Episode 2, written by David Milch and Regina Corrado, directed by Dan Attias, original broadcast 18 June 2006, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 53 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 1 of Season Three of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 1 of the Deadwood: Season Three DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
“The Catbird Seat,” Deadwood, Season 3 Episode 11, written by Bernadette McNamara, directed by Gregg Fienberg, original broadcast 20 August 2006, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 50 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 5 of Season Three of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 5 of the Deadwood: Season Three DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
“Tell Him Something Pretty,” Deadwood, Season 3 Episode 12, written by Ted Mann, directed by Mark Tinker, original broadcast 27 August 2006, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 50 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 5 of Season Three of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 5 of the Deadwood: Season Three DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
“Unauthorized Cinnamon,” Deadwood, Season 3 Episode 7, written by Regina Corrado, directed by Mark Tinker, original broadcast 23 July 2006, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 50 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 3 of Season Three of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 3 of the Deadwood: Season Three DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
“True Colors,” Deadwood, Season 3 Episode 3, written by Regina Corrado and Ted Mann, directed by Gregg Fienberg, original broadcast 25 June 2006, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 52 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 2 of Season Three of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 2 of the Deadwood: Season Three DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
Milch, Stories of the Black Hills, pg. 55.
“Leviathan Smiles,” Deadwood, Season 3 Episode 8, written by Kem Nunn, directed by Ed Bianchi, original broadcast 30 July 2006, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 54 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 4 of Season Three of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 4 of the Deadwood: Season Three DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
“A Two-Headed Beast,” Deadwood, Season 3 Episode 5, written by David Milch, directed by Daniel Minahan, original broadcast 9 July 2006, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 54 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 3 of Season Three of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 3 of the Deadwood: Season Three DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
Paul Wright and Hailin Zhou, “Divining the ‘Celestials’: The Chinese Subculture of Deadwood,” in Reading “Deadwood”: A Western to Swear By, edited by David Lavery, Reading Contemporary Television Series, I.B. Tauris, 2006, pg. 160.
Milch, Stories of the Black Hills, pg. 213.
“Mister Wu,” Deadwood, Season 1 Episode 10, written by Bryan McDonald, directed by Daniel Minahan, original broadcast 23 May 2004, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 53 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 4 of Season One of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 4 of the Deadwood: Season One DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
Milch, Stories of the Black Hills, pg. 213.
“Requiem for a Gleet,” Deadwood, Season 2 Episode 4, written by Ted Mann, directed by Alan Taylor, original broadcast 27 March 2005, HBO Television and Red Board Productions, 53 minutes.
This episode is available on Disc 2 of Season Two of the Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray collections and on Disc 2 of the Deadwood: Season Two DVD and Blu-ray collections, all released by HBO Video.
Milch, Stories of the Black Hills, pg. 207.
Ibid., pg. 213.
Ibid., pg. 213.