Deadwood was created by gold seekers in 1876. It was made notorious by the gamblers and gunslingers that soon came to mine the miners.

The United States ceded the Black Hills in the Dakota Territory to the Lakota Sioux in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. It belonged to the Sioux; anyone else was an illegal alien. Six years later, General George Custer, on an expedition through the Black Hills, reported evidence of gold. When the news got out, the rush was on. It wasn't long before a miner found gold in a narrow canyon known as "Deadwood Gulch".

More than 10,000 fortune seekers had moved into the Black Hills by 1876.

Sitting Bull summoned ten tribes to his Montana camp to discuss the situation. On June 25, 1876, the Indians answered. Custer and more than 200 soldiers were killed in less than 20 minutes by 4,000 Indians in the Valley of the Little Bighorn. By 1877, the mining camp of tents and lean-to's was giving way to wood and brick buildings. Flooded with desperados and the desperate, Deadwood was dangerous. It was also the last great chapter in the American Wild West. The railroads were bringing "civilized society" to the frontier. The California Gold Rush and fabled Comstock Silver Strike were gone.

Deadwood was the last chance for a poor man to get rich.

In the late 1870s and 1880s, Deadwood was action alley. It attracted dreamers 'n schemers, gamblers 'n gunslingers, heroes 'n zeroes.

One of the earliest arrivals in the boomtown was Wild Bill Hickock in 1876.

He'd been dismissed as marshal of Abilene, Kansas for being "too enthusiastic" in his pursuit of justice. A dedicated poker player, Hickock was immersed in a hand at the No. 10 Saloon when a coward with a grudge, Jack McCall, shot him in the back of the head from two feet away. Hickock's hand, Aces 'n 8s, became known forever as the "dead man's hand". Eventually, McCall was lynched.

The day Seth Bullock arrived in town, he was shocked to see a man riding up and down Main Street waving the severed head of an Indian. The next day, Hickock was murdered. The only man bold enough to call for law and order; young Bullock soon became the de facto Sheriff of Deadwood.

In later years, Seth Bullock became good friends with Theodore Roosevelt. He was a commander in the Rough Riders during the Spanish- American War in 1898 and was appointed U.S. Marshal for South Dakota by President Roosevelt in 1905.

Al Swearengen opened the Gem Theater, a dance hall, gambling house and brothel in early 1877. He enlisted young women from the East Coast to work as dancers and singers. Once having made the arduous trip to distant, remote, and mostly male Deadwood, they were forced into prostitution. The women were commonly beaten and kept doped on morphine or laudanum. Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, and Wyatt Earp were among the legendary gamblers 'n gunmen who spent time in Deadwood. But men did not win the West alone. Among Deadwood's foremost citizens were several notorious women, including Calamity Jane.

One of the earliest professional gamblers to arrive in town was a young Texas woman, Kitty LeRoy. She opened a gambling den called "The Mint". A journalist at the time wrote that she "had five husbands, seven revolvers, a dozen Bowie knives".

It's said that Kitty once donned a man's clothes in order to challenge a fellow who refused to fight a woman. She gunned him down. Her career came to a violent end in Deadwood when her fifth husband shot her and himself to death because she told him to get out.

Alice Ivers, a young English girl educated in a fashionable female seminary, came West with her parents and married a Colorado mining engineer. When he was killed in an accident, Alice found it necessary to become a professional gambler to survive. She was already widely known as "Poker Alice" when she arrived in Deadwood.

Poker Alice, one biographer tells us, "was not a prostitute... but a professional". He added, "She met men on an equal basis, asking no quarter and granting none. She took her booze straight, smoked cigars, packed a .38, and could cuss like a mule skinner".

Another legendary lady gambler was Belle Siddons, alias Madam Vestal. Born into pre-Civil War Southern society of wealth and privilege, she graduated from a women's university in Lexington, KY.

During the Civil War, beautiful Belle was a spy for the Confederacy and used her feminine charms to gain information from Union officers. After the war, she headed West and was among the first to open a saloon and gambling hall in booming Deadwood.

Settlers continued to push into the Dakotas throughout the 1880s. By 1889, the population was large enough that the Dakota Territory became the states of North and South Dakota. Two years later the railroad connected Deadwood to the outside world.

The target of reformers and Prohibitionists, gambling continued to survive off-and-on in Deadwood well into the early 20th Century. It was officially abolished in 1947.

But a community in which gambling had been such an integral part of its history, culture and character, couldn't keep it in the closet. In 1988, the citizens embraced their heritage and voted to restore not only the town's historic sites but to reintroduce gambling to Deadwood