Engaging Deadwood's history through the lens of her great-great-uncle John S. McClintock's legendary 1939 memoir, Pioneer Days in the Black Hills, Laura J. Beard shines light on the power of mythology to shape historical interpretation. McClintock's memoir serves as a guidebook not just to the early days of Deadwood and the Black Hills but also to current modes of engagement with critical issues of truth, memory, storytelling, history, and sovereignty that remain vital in today's debates over preservation and Indigenous rights. Tourism campaigns continue to promote the "Wild West" town of Deadwood as just as wild today as it was when legends like Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Seth Bullock roamed the streets. Those myths and legends of the West are key to Deadwood's continued economic success, but that success rests on the unsteady foundation of mythological history and the violation of Lakota treaty rights. In her exploration of these issues Beard exposes the complex and nuanced web of myths that generate their own Wild West realities.
Laura J. Beard is a professor of literature and an associate dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Alberta. She is the coeditor of The Divided States: Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century and the author of Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the Americas.
"In this captivating insider's view of the ways Deadwood's history has been told, Laura Beard combs through the biography of her great-great-uncle, John McClintock, to demonstrate his centrality to that Wild West town and the Western myth itself. Carefully researched and deeply personal, this work reveals how Deadwood is a cultural palimpsest, rich with layers of meaning, traditions, and inventions that will continue to charm visitors and audiences for many years--and many stories--to come."--Kara L. McCormack, author of Imagining Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die "John S. McClintock and Deadwood smartly considers the transformation of a mining town's history into popular myths, while noting what those myths covered up. It is probably the best book on Western mythmaking that I've read in the last few years, partly because it is so good at taking big themes and then grounding them in a particular story and a particular place."--Brian Leech, author of The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana, and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit "Laura J. Beard's scrupulously researched engagement with John S. McClintock's firsthand account of the founding of Deadwood, South Dakota, invites us to reflect on the fraught legacy of U.S. westward expansion in the nineteenth century. Deftly unraveling the myth of Deadwood and the Wild West, Beard follows threads of fact and fabrication from McClintock's memoir through present-day representations of the iconic town in American popular culture to show how mythmaking centered on Deadwood has naturalized--while occasionally calling into question--the ongoing U.S. occupation of the Black Hills. At a moment when the injustices of the past are being written out of American history, Beard's reclamation of McClintock's life narrative offers a vital contribution to our understanding of a formative period of the settler state."--John David Zuern, coeditor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly "Using an ancestor's memoir as a springboard, author Laura Beard ably explores the history and legends of Deadwood. Anyone interested in the making of frontier myths will find this book of great use."--Peter Cozzens, author of Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West
