A great Western novel
The best
novel about Wild Bill Hickock by far, and indeed one of the finest of all
Westerns, is Deadwood by Pete
Dexter (Random House, 1986).
Pete Dexter
Wild
Bill is shot on page 149 of 365, i.e. only 40% in, but he remains a presence for the
whole of the book. Although the story is recounted chiefly around Bill’s
friend Colorado Charley, it is really Wild Bill who is the central personage.
All the other characters, Charley, Bill’s wife Agnes Lake, the ‘bottle fiend’,
Calamity Jane, Pink Bruford's bulldog, and so on, revolve like minor planets around Hickok’s flaming
sun. And indeed Wild Bill seems to have been that kind of man: he dominated the
scene wherever he went, even in his declining years. Still in his thirties when
he was killed, Hickok was losing his eyesight, probably suffered from a venereal
disease, gambled poorly and drank too much. He hadn’t been a lawman since
Abilene five years before. He was living on his reputation.
James Butler Hickok (1837 - 1876)
But until August 2nd, 1876, his
reputation was more than enough.
Still,
Charley is an enormously sympathetic character. The real Colorado Charley, CH
Utter (c 1838 – after 1912) grew up, like Bill, in Illinois. He became a
prospector, trapper, hunter and guide in Colorado in the 1860s. In 1876 he and
his brother Steve took a large wagon train from Georgetown to Cheyenne, where
they joined up with Hickok, and moved on to the gold camp of Deadwood. The
train was filled with all sorts of prospectors and hopefuls and no fewer than
180 prostitutes.
Colorado Charley, CH Utter
Charley
started a pony express company and was a successful businessman. He was absent the day Bill was shot but
arranged and paid for his funeral. He seems to have looked out for Bill in life
as well, giving him money to gamble, for example. He also saw to it when the
graveyard had to be moved higher up the mountain. After Bill’s death he ran a
bordello in nearby Lead, went back to Colorado and was last heard of running a
drugstore in Panama, where we assume he died. He went blind at the end of his
life.
Dexter’s
Charley is tough, kind, astute, sensitive. The story opens as he and his young brother-in-law,
the (fictional) Malcolm Nash move up from Cheyenne to Deadwood with Bill, and
join, on the way, a ‘whore man’ bringing in prostitutes. This is Al Swearingen,
based on a real character.
The real
Ellis
Albert Swearengen (1845 – 1904) arrived in
Deadwood in May, 1876 with his wife, Nettie (the first of three wives who would
divorce him for violent abuse). In April 1877 he opened the opulent Gem Theater
which featured prizefights, stage shows and prostitution, as well as
controling the opium trade in the town. It brought in an average of $5000 a
night, an astonishing sum. When it burned down in the Deadwood fire of
September 1879 he rebuilt it in an even more extravagant style. With canny
political alliances and large pay-offs he avoided the drive to clean up the town
led by Seth Bullock and remained in business until the Gem burned down again in
1899. Swearengen was found dead with a massive head wound in a Denver street in
November 1904.
The man in the buggy in front of the Gem Theater, Deadwood, bottom left, is thought to be Al Swearengen
Dexter’s ‘Swearingen’
is an equally loathsome but very different character (and also very different
from the Ian McShane character in the TV series Deadwood). He physically and sexually assaults Malcolm Nash and the
young man goes crazy. Nursed by Calamity Jane, Nash recovers somewhat and
becomes a disciple of an equally crazed preacher, also loosely based on a real
person, the Reverend Weston Smith. Nash haunts Swearingen until the pimp is
driven close to madness and flees Deadwood, some time before the fire.
There is no
romance between Jane and Bill; indeed Bill can’t stand her and does everything
to avoid her. Dexter’s Jane is also not entirely sane (very few in Deadwood
are), and is ugly, filthy, alcoholic and violent but is a caring nurse. She
tends smallpox patients in Sidney, Nebraska, Deadwood and later Cheyenne, although the suggestion
is there that ironically it is she who has unwittingly carried the infection to
these towns in the first place.
Another sympathetic
character is the savant fool who runs the bath house and collects bottles,
which contain, he says, secrets. He is called ‘soft-brained’. Charley bonds
with him, especially after the death of Bill.
Seth Bullock, a noted Deadwood figure, was later a captain in his friend Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders and afterwards a US marshal
Dignified Agnes
Lake and the libidinous actress Mrs. Langrishe are, with Charley and Sheriff
Bullock, about the sanest residents of Deadwood. Agnes in particular is drawn
in almost heroic lines and she too has a great influence before and after her
appearance in the town.
Agnes Lake Thatcher, Mrs. JB Hickok
The sub-plot, almost, of Bullock's business partner Solomon Star falling in love with a Chinese beauty and the tragic outcome is beautifully handled. Solomon is yet another whose sanity wavers.
There is a host of minor characters who play a small part in the tale yet are strongly limned and remain firmly in the memory. The braggart Captain Jack Crawford, for example; Harry Sam Young, the barman in the No. 10; Lurline Monti Verdi the whore (another based on a real person); the thug Boone May with the huge head; Handsome Banjo Dick Brown the singer-gunfighter; others.
Although Dexter’s Deadwood is cited as a source for both the Walter Hill film Wild Bill and the HBO TV show Deadwood, in both cases the screen version is very different indeed from the book. The novel is powerful, funny, moving, exciting and sometimes poetically written. It certainly ranks for me up with Charles Portis’s True Grit, Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, Ron Hansen’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and a very few others as one of the greatest Western novels of all time.
There is a host of minor characters who play a small part in the tale yet are strongly limned and remain firmly in the memory. The braggart Captain Jack Crawford, for example; Harry Sam Young, the barman in the No. 10; Lurline Monti Verdi the whore (another based on a real person); the thug Boone May with the huge head; Handsome Banjo Dick Brown the singer-gunfighter; others.
Although Dexter’s Deadwood is cited as a source for both the Walter Hill film Wild Bill and the HBO TV show Deadwood, in both cases the screen version is very different indeed from the book. The novel is powerful, funny, moving, exciting and sometimes poetically written. It certainly ranks for me up with Charles Portis’s True Grit, Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, Ron Hansen’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and a very few others as one of the greatest Western novels of all time.
This is a great blog. Thank you so much for the research and the fascinating photos of the characters from Deadwood. And you're right, the HBO special had nothing to do with the book because they pretended they made it all up based on historical characters... and paid Dexter nothing and never asked him anything.
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