A FRONTIER TOWN

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4803, 1 February 1936, Page 2

A FRONTIER TOWN

o FAMOUS DEADWOOD. STAGES AND HOLD-UPS. The n&me Deadwood seems to conjure up visions of all that was typical of the old American West —stage coaches and hold-ups and Indians and saloons peopled by the miners and gamblers that Bret Harte described so vividly. It must have been a great experience to live in this Dakota mining town in its dashing young days in the seventies —in the stage coach days before the unromanti'c railway came and spoilt everything, says an English exchange. As a girl, Miss Estelline Bennett, the daughter' of Deadwood’s first Federal Judge, saw the town in its heyday. The creaking, swaying, bump-

ing coach brought the Bennetts to their journey’s end. This coach symbolised all that was Deadwood. Its arrival was always an event; Dickens, one feels, would have liked this ; description given by Miss Bennett: — Its six white horses came up the gulch at a gallop. The driver on his high seat flourished his long whip in skilful, skyward sweeps, the dingy white canvas-covered coach lurched and rolled from side to side with its distinctive rumble, and our one brief daily tangency with the far world beyond the mountains and across the plains swaggered to an abrupt stop in front of the Merchants Hotel. The stage coach was the herald from the world that lay beyond the White Rocks and the tumbled mountains that rolled up around them. It brought a four-day-old Chicago paper, letters from strange places beyond the Missouri River, and passengers who as recently as last week had seen a locomotive and a train of cars.

-Held up at Night. The stage coach passengers never knew what might happen round the next corner. Road agents planned their first hold-up within a month of the opening of the route. The coach was lumbering along late at night, crippled by a slight accident, when five masked men appeared like shadows. The first shot killed the driver, who had the grand name of Johnny Slaughter. He tumbled from his high seat so easily that the messenger sitting beside him thought he had recklessly stepped down into the fray. The ensuing gun battle so terrified the horses that they broke into a wild run, tangled up the harness, and brought the coach and passengers dishevelled and frightened, but safe, into Deadwood about midnight. The new sheriff, Seth Bullock, took two men and went in search. They found the body of the driver lying in the road where he had fallen, with a circle

of thirteen buckshot over his heart. They never found the gang, but the doughty sheriff’s search was so thorough that he scared them from the neighbourhood. “It was the Bennetts and Bullocks,” someone said, “who brought law and order into the Black Hills.” The artistocracy of Deadwood lived their own calm lives, aloof from the riff-rafT of the saloons and gamblinghouses. They arranged dances and picnics and dinner parties; they set their tables conventionally “with fine linen, cut glass, silver, china, candles, and flowers”; they attended services in one of the four churches. They turned a blind eye to the saloons and the questionable goings-on in the Gem Theatre, with its painted ladies and curtained alcoves. Picturesque. Yet the saloons and their frequenters had a picturesqueness that the aristocracy, in spite of its colonels

and generals, lacked. The disreputable “Green Front” saloon made one con-

cession to conventionality; a sign on the wall read: “Gentlemen will not spit on the floor. Others must not.” And the names of those old-timers! What a fine ring there is about “Swill Barrel Jimmy,” “Dold Deck Johnny,” “Jimmy-behind-the-Deuce,” and “Calamity Jane.” But of “Deadwood Dick,” our boyhood hero, Miss Bennett makes no mention! Can there have been no such person? Hardly!

The gamblers were the most remarkable phenomenon of Deadwood. They were, says Miss Bennett, “the lily-fingered leisure class of Deadwood.”

No one ever saw them in the morning. They slept until noon and lived their lives at night. Of course, 1 never saw them at work —either the players or the dealers, but men who went about and gambled in casual, amateurish fashion said they always

were the same. Always they wore their poker masks and spoke with quiet voices. Winnings and losses alike left them apparently unmoved. The Last Coach Leaves. Then one Cold December morning Deadwood grew up. The previous Sunday afternoon the last stage coach rolled out of town, like a grand old actor taking his final curtain. Its escort of Knights of Pythias was in plain clothes, and carried canes instead of swords, and the band played a little plaintively, “Fare thee well, for I must leave thee.” But Frank Hunter, the last of the stage drivers, gathered his ribbons up over the six white horses and flourished his whip, and the horses curved their necks and pranced a little in starting as though the railroad still was two hundred miles away. Their game was closed, but they were good losers. And as the last coach had rolled out, so, with equal fuss and ceremony, the first train rolled in—“and the merry young mining camp bloomed into a surprised town with civic and moral obligations.” Now, no doubt, the good citizens chew gum and go to the cinema and play baseball —and never wear sweeping white hats or “bull-whack” down the streets or hear the coachdriver’s piercing cry of “Yip-yip-yip, yi-yi-yi-yi.” There is no question that the old Deadwood surpassed the new in romance!