HBO’s Deadwood is many things: deeply complicated, brutal, and familiar all at once, it represents a wide variety through both narrative and metanarrative. David Milch, the virtuosic TV writer responsible for it all (as well as the revolutionary ABC series NYPD Blue) has a lot to say about America and its foundations. Carefully accounting for all the blood and sleaze that went into the country’s creation, Deadwood is dense with metaphor and meaning. Stuffed to the brim with rich characterization and detail, the infamous South Dakotan town is used as a direct analog for early America, and its denizens are played for the archetypal Americans that they are. From gold to cinnamon, Milch’s work on the show is, more than anything else, the story of how people build institutions by way of self-interest and collectively understood meaning.
That last part is by far the most abstract of my points, but it’s also genuinely the simplest and most foundational to the argument that Milch is intentionally making.
“I could set the show somewhere that gold had been discovered. The agreement to act as if gold had a particular value, and organize behavior around that behavior was really the same story. (referring to society organizing around the symbol of the cross in Rome) Gold is a lie agreed upon. There is no intrinsic value to gold. It’s only the energy that it liberates in people who believe in it.”
– From “Life’s Work” by David Milch, page 154
With this phenomenological adherence to gold as a symbol of value, we see an entire system of trade and organization of society that springs up around the places it’s being mined in the West. Places such as…Deadwood! A town built with the promise of no social responsibility, no law, no answering to anyone but yourself; a town that’s sole organizing principle is the mining of gold. It’s no wonder that this society is a violent and lawless one! A life of backbreaking labor at a zero-sum game and a dozen people trying to shake you down on the way. The gold creates other demands as well: saloon and hotel operators provided the miners and runners land, food, and libations. Deeper concerns develop as the interest in the gold grows, extending all the way out to a bank and government that exist not out of desire, but for the most prudent use and protection of that devotion to the gold.
Now, you may read that and think “all well and good, but what was the deal with the cinnamon?” The cinnamon is one of Deadwood’s particular quirks. The first significant challenge to the town arrives in the first season, as the murder of high-profile gunslinger Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) rocks the illegitimate and unincorporated territory of Deadwood. Not wanting to appear as an attempted competitor to the United States, nor wanting to leave the matter unaddressed and warranting intervention, the elders of the camp convene to decide what comes next. At this meeting, local saloonkeeper and master strategist Al Swearengen’s (Ian McShane) disabled maid Jewel (Geraldine Ann Jewell) leaves cinnamon and peaches on the table for the meeting, and thus every town meeting after, all the town elders come to expect to have peaches with cinnamon everytime something in camp needs serious discussing.
While a much lesser and smaller symbol than gold, they both speak to the formation of social institutions. Whereas gold motivates the forming of social relationships, the cinnamon and peaches is a symbol endowed with meaning along the way. It’s just one of those strange rituals that people create and assign sentimental value as they share their experiences with one another. The almost silly juxtaposition between a symbol as serious and recognizable as gold and one as innocuous as cinnamon is not lost on Deadwood; it’s the butt of several jokes, including Al and his cronies bickering about the cinnamon and whether it’s proper to set out, inexperienced stomachs being turned, and town elders who are made sick by it. It’s not until the cinnamon is gone and absent that people make a fuss about having it, showing that these smaller symbols are a comfort to share and engage with, as stressful situations threaten their relationship to that original principle: the accumulation of gold and the cultivation of the social relationships that it necessitates.
Finding the Foundation:
Milch’s interest in the American project and its context is rooted incredibly deep in the show. As Milch details in his memoir, his original idea for the show was to be set in Rome, amongst the Roman Cohort, a group of officials in the city who were left to understand and find meaning in the Roman law as the praetorian guard was stuck fighting Emperor Nero’s conflicts. So it goes that HBO already had a Rome show working, but loved the pitch and asked him to set it somewhere else.
Thus he found the American West, a similarly misunderstood and strange time in which the world needed understanding and authority in a lawless place. Long the focus of American myth-making, Milch found himself wanting to tear apart the fantasy and replace it with an honest account of the cruelty and brutality that went into this settlement process that was essential to the foundation of America as we understand it today. As he studied even closer, he found a microcosm of America in Deadwood.
An illegal settlement on lands granted to the Sioux, Deadwood existed outside of American law. Although not officially sanctioned, it amounted to a settler colony for gold miners and opportunists intent on living by their own code. This project, much like the settlement of America by similar people for similar reasons, necessitated the removal of the Sioux clan from their rightful lands. We see this showcased in the first few episodes as the phantom-threat of supposed Sioux marauders is used to hide road agents associated with Al Swearengen as he oversees and rents out camp lands in a period of rapid growth. He attaches a financial incentive to this removal, stoking people’s fears of the “savage heathens” and puts a bounty on their heads, drawing people’s eyes from a story that doesn’t quite add up and towards money, drink, and prostitutes. I should hope that this blood-thirsty calculus in the name of business and settlement is sounding familiar.
Deadwood’s expanding social and infrastructural complexity grew much along the same path as the nation it sprung from, just on a smaller scale. After land was secured and a full town with its own paper, economy, and pseudo-governance emerged, the illusion of a lawless life with no social responsibility began to recede. Not wanting to upset their eastern rulers, this time a growing American state as opposed to the British empire, the camp elders guide their institutions so as to not rock the boat or give the impression of a competitor, but a potential partner. After the high-profile murder of Bill Hickok, it becomes acknowledged that something must be done. In a moment of true history, the unofficial court of Deadwood chose to pardon the coward Jack McCall (Garret Dillahunt), even though it was undisputed by eyewitnesses that he did shoot Wild Bill. Condemning and executing someone would be the sign of a government, and there ain’t no law in Deadwood. This impulse for self-preservation over communal responsibility is one that was the promise of America to begin with; from religious freedom to the promise of riches and independence, the ability to be left alone and answer to no one has been foundational to the American myth since the very first settlers landed on American shores.
It isn’t until the obnoxious and greedy officials of the American-annexed county of Yankton, seeking to incorporate Deadwood and the black hills into their own territorial body, that the town finds secure existence. Through a series of closed-door deals and the protection and nurturing of Deadwood’s assets against officials who would see them looted for their own pockets rather than the settlers, the town is eventually relinquished from the lawless wilds and into the purview of the American state. Just as happened to the colonies, the promise of total self-reliance and irresponsibility was broken and the one true ritual of pursuing gold was once again made sacrosanct. It is the guiding vision of Deadwood’s begrudging communal project to see that that gold be reinvested into communal exploitation, from the rending of the earth to get the gold to the mass supply of Cornish immigrants who give their bodies and lives to mine it. If it’s not to be them and they allow the camp to have the concerns of larger interests foisted upon them, who will ensure that they are not the exploited ones?
When material exploitation is the organizing principle, all of the institutions built with that goal are built to ensure that the exploitation does not get them. So it is passed down onto outsiders, whether they be the racial outsiders of the Native Americans (with their land and lives expropriated), the recently enfranchised freedmen (still trapped in a struggle for basic dignity or social rights), or the much more accurate target and the true titans of the American pantheon, industrial capital.
Who is Deadwood?
Here, we arrive at an essential question: if greed and self-interest built our institutions, and institutions are guided by people – who the hell built them? Insight into the American character can be found in, predictably, the cast of strange characters within Deadwood. Either based on true people or composites of true people, the show borrows much from history to make its point. Famed western gun-slinging sheriffs like Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Wild Bill Hickok appeared in this town next to famous drunks like Jane Canary (Robin Weigert) and even megalomaniacal industrialists like George Hearst (Gerald McRaney). An unfathomable amount of historical personalities passed through that disgusting and wild settlement, and within them came the archetypical Americans, true icons of the character that this country both attracts and creates. While taking stock of each individual character would reveal the direct analogies Deadwood is making towards archetypal Americans, the cast is so large and dynamic that it is simpler to order them in categories. Broadly, there are winners and losers. The exploiters and the exploited. Those who get ahead, and those who are left behind. But even within those parameters, there are distinct Americans who existed then and are still visible today.
THE ONES JUST TRYING TO GET BY:
They are the wage-workers at the mines, the prostitutes under possession of their bosses, and the crumpled bodies left behind. Characters like Samuel Fields (Franklyn Ajaye) and Hostetler (Richard Edward Gant) give us a heartbreaking vision into the place of Freedmen in this society: from their earlier time in bondage to their respectful ends, all they can ever fight for is basic dignity, being regarded as little better than the virulently hated Natives whose blood and corpses made the whole thing possible anyhow. Even Cornish immigrants, sent to die in Hearst’s gold mines and treated hardly any better than the slaves they replaced, are killed, fired, and beaten at their employers whim with no recourse. Even attempting to broach this matter legally leads to retaliation and further abuse.
Although they’d not like to admit it, characters like Racist Steve (Michael Harney) and Jane Canary serve as their opposing peers; white people who were, for whatever reason, never able to get ahead and felt every degradation and bruise as they fell down the social ladder. Whether it be intense white supremacy or bitter alcoholic misery, the expression of that degradation is ugly and often violent. Leading by one way or another to the broken social bonds that come from not having any way to better ones conditions, and thus is resigned only to assign blame for them. Hell, even the scammers and artisans such as the soap salesman and theater leader Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox) fit in here. Just people trying to hone what skills they have enough to survive.
THE TYRANTS:
As society moves on, certain classes of people reveal themselves to be the ones who can throw their weight and money around the community and decide the manner in which local political questions may be handled. In America, this role is notably occupied by small-business owners. It’s the local restaurant owner showing up at a city-council meeting to protest a local tax and talk about how no one wants to work anymore, it’s the local developer rallying votes against district rezoning, and in Deadwood, it’s the saloon, retail, and hotel owners who eat cinnamon covered peaches as they debate what’s to come next for the town. It’s the class of people who have enough influence and control to make decisions without having to consult the people beneath them. Though he may value them, Al never asks his peons Johnny Burns (Sean Bridgers) or Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown) how he should handle anything, competing saloon-keep and brothel owner Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe) always lashes out and beats or kills a subordinate when his gambits don’t pay off, their power is shown in their freedom to make choices and be unaccountable to nobody.
It was the dream of the yeoman farmer when there was an illusion of total self-sufficiency, it’s the regional power-boss using their resources to tame the frontier, and now that is expressed as the small business lord who has influence over minor policy. What never changes is that ability to exploit the people beneath you to generate that power. Whether it’s a disabled servant like Richardson (Ralph Richeson) and Jewel or the underpaid fry-cook having their wages garnished by a restaurant owner trying to cut down on overhead.
Springing from this class of people are other forms of power. Characters like Al get their most base power not only from their business, but from control over the land. Al gains the revenue for his schemes by renting out large tracts of land to some, and victimizing others through his use of road agents, creating a sort of ad-hoc police power over the land, allowing him to enforce his will to an even greater extent by providing or withholding leases and the ability to dispense violence at any point. As society grows, certain forms of control become untoward, like Al’s road agents, and must be replaced. Enter Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), a hardware store owner who is unafraid to kill or beat those he feels deserve it and is elevated to the legal position of sheriff, thus taking his implicit power over violence and industry and rendering it true simply because he was the recognizable one in the room when that choice was made.
Just as this society is growing and dressing itself, it calls to even greater predators. It is season two when the emissary of American industrialist and later senator, George Hearst, arrives. Francis Wolcott (Garret Dillahunt) may not be an owner, but through his access to the immense wealth of Hearst and the mass tracts of land that he buys, he becomes an incredibly destabilizing influence as the interests of these local oligarchs come into conflict with that of the national oligarchs. Antisocial and ruthless, Wolcott represents a level of wealth at which you need not consider the needs of the community. A freedom from social responsibility so great that one can act on any impulse. However, his influence is not great enough to beat the united front of the Deadwood settlement, as Alma Garret (Molly Parker), owner of the largest gold claim in the town — and thus owner of the most localized political power — digs in and refuses to accede to Wolcott’s demands.
It takes Hearst, the most powerful of the business owners, to come to town and begin to apply his will with direct violence and financial intervention in legal institutions, so that the power of the local concerns can be subverted. Even as he is unable to secure the totality of Deadwood’s wealth, he is more than able to bend the entire town to his will solely from his will-to-power and vast financial empire.
THE WINNERS AND THE LOSERS:
Through all of these byzantine games of power and control, there are winners and there are losers. People who may occupy the same strata of society, but see wildly different results with how they put that status to use. Cy Tolliver, for example, may be of that exalted business class, the smarmy owner of a very successful saloon and brothel, but he seems to always come out the embarrassed loser of whatever political gambit he inserts himself into. Al on the other hand, does not just back the winning horse, but often IS the winning horse, guiding the camp to relative security under threat.
When power is distributed to those with means, their use of those means becomes paramount. The actions they then take become a process of figuring out what may be best for them as a political actor, and just as it is in real life, it is not always the person with the best judgment who winds up making it. Cy, for his part, is every bit as violent and ruthless in his aims, but continually winds up the loser as his ego and idiocy blind him to his true self-interest. He’s stuck pursuing what he may BELIEVE to best for him, but what are more truly misunderstood displays of dominance and emotionally rooted spite. He regularly tries to suck up to those who offer him a quick check and punches down at those who offer him security. Al more prudently can see the threat of someone trying to buy allegiance and shores up his bets in making local institutions more powerful so as to protect his long-term interests.
This contest of wills and intelligence is not simply the plot of an esoteric HBO show, but rather the theater of politics in America. How many government officials who battle wars of words and petty interest come from those backgrounds of power rooted in ownership and dominance? How many of them represent big business as opposed to working people?
Deadwood is a great many things all at once. Its creator wrote it to be illuminating and demystifying, a map of context for the reasons our country is the way it is. By finding these patterns in that early stage of American development and tracing them out to their more advanced stages today, the blood and gold that’s built into the foundation of the American project become ever more apparent as systems and institutions break down and people suffer. Maybe this isn’t a result of a few corrupt personalities entering politics and eroding the world we know. Maybe the problems are much deeper rooted than we thought and the cracks that have always been there are just starting to show as we run short of gold to pull from the earth and free land to run away to. From foundational principles to eccentric avatars of American life, the story of Deadwood is simply the story of America.
