The drive: Just a shade under 6 hours from Boulder, essentially following I25 north until it bends west to intercept Casper, WY. Then, WY18 due east, across rolling high-elevation prairie with a rocky ridge to the south. Then, US 85 northeast toward the Black Hills (which geographically start in Wyoming), rising up to 6800' at O'Neill Pass, then down to Lead (pronounced 'leed') and Deadwood, which is only 35 miles or so inside South Dakota. Pretty drive for the most part - immense valleys, deep forest, lots of antelope, the occasional vestige of a frontier town - although as a matter of driving, SE Wyoming can get a bit tedious.
The town: Living near two Victorian-era mining towns-turned-gambling/tourist towns, we pretty much knew the drill. Pockets of historic buildings in various stages of restoration, filled but not packed with tourists, fast food and tourist-trade vendors lining the perimeter, and, of course, casinos everywhere. Mostly slots, some tables in the bigger joints. Platoons of tour buses, the usually chain-smoking blue-haired ladies emptying their Social Security into quarter slot machines, some nice neighborhoods just outside the casino district, a few restored old 1890's architecture houses, some rundown properties. The locals we met were uniformly warm, friendly, talkative (especially on the subject of ghosts and hauntings in Deadwood) - very little of that tourist-town fatigue or cynicism we have found elsewhere, although I imagine it exists. The rude, ignorant, pushy, aggressively intoxicated, and needlessly vulgar personalities we encountered were all tourists.
Somewhat larger than Colorado's three gaming towns, Deadwood struck me as a little more kitsch than their Colorado counterparts, especially with the ubiquitous visage of "Wild Bill" Hickok, legendary gunslinger-gambler-turned-lawman-gambler, murdered (shot from behind, in the head) in 1876, just as the town was establishing. Hickok's renown in Deadwood bears only familiar passing to the truth, much of which (save his sharpshooting skill) is shrouded in dispute and mired in that uncomfortable place beside and somewhat beneath legend. The guy was either a semi-repentant murderer, a cool customer, a redemptive figure of Western justice, an icon of American no-bullshit frontiersmanship, or somewhere in between.
Anyway - you can't swing a dead cat in Deadwood without hitting some likeness of Wild Bill, nor escape the relentless romanticism of the gold rush years of the 1870's and 1880's. Deadwood is quite proud to remind you that in 1876, there were up to six murders a day in and around the nascent little settlement. (The place was tiny back then - a little math suggests some difficulty with that claim, but the truth is probably unknowable at this point, and the legend sounds good.) I think one needn't ponder too obliquely that gold fever, lots of whiskey, fast money and hordes of armed, frequently embittered and impoverished ex-Civil War vets all combined to make for a pretty dangerous and violent place. The imagery is period Americana, of course, and we're all suckers for it, but the reality of that kind of life at that time was probably grimier, more violent and more thuggish than tourist-trap displays and gunfight re-enactments can portray.
Anyway, Hickok's gravesite at Mt Moriah, attended here by the throngs from one of the tour buses:
The cemeteries. Mt Moriah, being the final resting place of the aforementioned Wild Bill, is a Deadwood tourist attraction and a regular stop for the near-daily tours. It sits quite high above the town, and is actually a pretty nice little plot. The town's original cemetery grew too small fairly quickly (familiar story in the West) and was moved up here and renamed to Mt Moriah in 1881. The original cemetery used to sit further down the hillside, and some property owners even today who do work around their homes in the area occasionally dig up bones. We had permission to visit Friday night (like most cemeteries, it officially closes at sundown), and a walkthru at night was a little creepy. I did feel during one stretch that I was being followed by someone about 20' behind me, stopping when I stopped, walking cautiously when I resumed. Lasted a few minutes. But short of reviewing all the audio, that's all I can report on nighttime at Mt Moriah.
None of my nighttime shots turned out, but here's one taken the next day, when Sharon and I headed back up for daylight pictures:
We also visited St Ambrose, the Catholic Cemetery down the valley about 6 miles or so and just off a hillside neighborhood. (Everything around Deadwood is on a hill, and some VERY steep.) Much smaller and not restored at all, we both enjoyed this peaceful place very much. Some terrific old ironwork gating, some collapsing graves, and not another person there with us. Most recent burial we saw was 2007 - Mt Moriah appears to be closed for new interments, except perhaps for grandfathered family plots.
Will post some on the investigation a bit later.
No comments:
Post a Comment