The Dead wood Coach

Waikato Times, Volume 117, Issue 19597, 8 June 1935, Page 13 (Supplement)

The Dead wood Coach

A Frontier Town in the ’Seventies: The Road Agent.

(By Webster Evans in John o’ London,)

THE NAME DEADWOOD seems to conjure up visions of all that was typical ol' the old American West —stagecoaches and hold-ups and Indians and saloons peopled by the miners and gamblers that Bret Ilartc described so vividly. It must have been a great experience to'live in this Dakota mining town in the dashing young days, In the seventies m the stagecoach days before the unromantic railway came and spoilt everything. As a girl, Miss Eslellinc Bennett, the daughter of Deadwood’s first Federal Judge, saw the town in its heyday. The Croaking, Swaying, Bumping Coach brought the Bennetts lo 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 in “ Old Deadwood Days”: " Its six white horses came up the gulch at a gallop. The driver on his high scat nourished his long whip in skilful, skyward sweeps, the dingy white canvas-covered coacli lurched and rolled from side to side with its distinctive rumble, and our one brief daily tangenoy with the far world beyond the mountains and across the plains swaggered to an abrupt stop In front of the Merchants Hotel. The stagecoach was tho herald from the world that lay beyond the AVlille Rocks and the tumbled mountains that rolled up around them. It brought a four-day-old Chicago paper, letters trom strange places beyond the Missouri Rivei, and passengers who as recently as last week had seen a locomotive and a train of cars. The stagecoach 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 a night, crippled by a slight accident, when fl '°lVlaskod Men Appeared Like Shadows. The first shot killed the driver, who had the grand name of Johnny Slaughter, lie tumbled from his high seat so easily that the messenger sitting beside him thought he had recklessly stepped down into Ihe fny The ensuing gun batlle so ternhed I lie" horses that they broke into a wild run, tangled up their harness, and brought Hie coach and passengers, dishevelled and frightened, hut safe, into Deadwood about midnight- The new sheriff, Seth Bullock, look l wo in on and wont in search. 1 hey found I he body of Ihe driver lying in the road where lie* had fallen, with a criclc of thirteen buckshot over his heart. They never found the gang, but Hie houMiiy sheriff's search was so thorough Ihaf he scared them from the neighbourhood. ” It was Hie Bennetts and Bullocks,” someone said, " who brought law and order into tho Black Hills. The aristocracy of Deadwood lived their own calm lives, aloof from the riff-raff of

the saloons and gambling houses. They arranged dances and picnics and dinner parties; they set their tables conventionally " with fine linen, cut glass, stiver, 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. , , . 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 Ono Concession to Conventionality—a sign on the wall read: “Gentlemen will not spit on Hie floor. Others must not.” And the names of those old-timers 1 What a fine ring there is about “ Swill Barrel •Jimmv,” "Gold Deck Johnny,” "Jiinmy-bchind-thc-Duce,” and ” Calamity Jane.” But of “Deadwood Dick,” our boyhood hero, Miss Bennett makes no mention I Can there have been no such person? Hardly! The gamblers were the most Remarkable Phenomenon of Deadwood. They were, says Miss Bennett, * the lilylingered leisure class of Deadwood.” “No one ever saw them In the morning. They slept until noon and lived their lives at night. Of course, I never saw them at work—cither the players or the dealers, hut men who went about and gambled in casual, amateurish fashion said they always were tho same. Always they wore their poker masks and spoke with quiet voices. Winnings and losses alike left them apparently unmoved." Then one cold December morning Deadwood grew up. The previous Sunday afternoon the last stagecoach 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, ‘Pare 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, wi lll equal fuss and ceremony, the First Train' Rolled In—- “ and the merry young mining camp bloomed into a surprised town with, civio and moral obligations." Now, no doubt, the good citizens chew' gum and go to the cinema and play baseball—and never wear sweeping white Stetsons or “bull-whack” down the streets or hear the coach-driver’s piercing cry of “Yip-yip-yip, yi-yi-yi-yi.” There is no question that the old Deadwood surpassed .the pew in romance t