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The Wild West as it really was rather than how Hollywood has imagined it is revealed in this extraordinary collection of pictures.
And yet many of the pictures, taken by the pioneering photographer John C.H. Grabill, show how the reality was rather different to the traditions instilled by decades of Hollywood Westerns.
And yet many of the pictures, taken by the pioneering photographer John C.H. Grabill, show how the reality was rather different to the traditions instilled by decades of Hollywood Westerns.
The bushy-bearded old timers are pictured panning for gold, native American Indian chiefs are seen posing solemnly in full headdress. There is the ugly scar of a mining town on a hillside and the tepee encampments of ‘hostiles’ such as the Lakota Sioux.
The expressions of weather-beaten earnestness on the faces of frontiersmen and Native Americans alike are what we have come to expect, but there is barely a six-shooter to be seen hanging from anyone’s hip, the wagon trains are pulled by oxen, not horses, and everyone on the Deadwood Stage is wearing a jacket and tie, dressed more for a business meeting than a Sioux attack.

 

Season two represents life a year after the first season and marked the arrival of the telegraph and showed the town progressing in early 1877 with new conveniences including a bank.
The architecture of the town starts to take shape with inhabitants moving out of walled tents and into more permanent structures.
The final season concentrated on the establishment of law and commercialisation before Deadwood is brought into the Dakota territory.
When it was finished there was talk of TV movies being filmed but they are yet to come to fruition.

Between 1887 and 1892, Grabill sent 188 photographs — taken using an early technique that used albumen, or egg white, to bind together the chemicals — to the Library of Congress for copyright protection.
Deadwood in South Dakota was founded shortly after the discovery of gold in the neighbouring Black Hills in 1876.
As miners flocked to the town and its population quickly grew to 5,000, the wagon trains brought in not only supplies but gamblers, prostitutes and gunfighters.
Grabill (who also famously photographed the aftermath of the Wounded Knee massacre in which the U.S. Seventh Cavalry killed up to 300 Native American men, women and children) chronicled the settlement’s rapid expansion from a collection of tents to a fully-fledged town that celebrated the completion of a connecting railway with a parade down its main street in 1888.
Long before the arrival of the white man, the land was home to the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee, Crow and Sioux (or Lakota) Indians.
The settlement of Deadwood began in the 1870s, despite the town lying within the territory granted to Native Americans in the 1868 Treaty of Laramie, which guaranteed ownership of the Black Hills to the Lakota tribes.
However, in 1874, Colonel George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Hills and announced the discovery of gold on French Creek.
This triggered the Black Hills Gold Rush and gave rise to the town of Deadwood, which quickly reached a population of around 5,000.
In early 1876, frontiersman Charlie Utter and his brother Steve led a wagon train to Deadwood containing what were deemed to be needed commodities to bolster business.
The wagon train also brought gamblers and prostitutes, helping the town to boom - but with a bawdy reputation.
As the economy changed from gold rush to steady mining, Deadwood lost its rough and rowdy character and settled down into a prosperous town.
One of the subjects of Grabill's photographs is the last survivor from the battle of Little Bighorn - a horse called Comanche.
The battle took place between soldiers under the command for General Custer and the combined forces of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho people
Every soldier in the five companies under Custer was killed and Comanche, who belonged to Captain Keogh, was found wondering the battlefield.
It is thought, however, that the Indians may have captured some of the American army's animals.
Other images chronicle a time otherwise only imagined on film; from prospectors panning for gold to the early interactions between settlers from the East and the native Americans who inhabited the Midwest.
Little is known about Grabill’s life before or after his work in the Midwest.
There is speculation that he moved to Colorado - Denver Public Library is in possession of some of his work - or that he moved back to Chicago.buffalo bill above
What is surprising is that Myles Walter Keogh (March 25, 1840 – June 25, 1876) was an Irishman who fought in Italy during the 1860 Papal War before volunteering for the Union side in the American Civil War (1861 to 1865). During the war years, he was promoted from the rank of Captain to that of Major, finally being awarded the brevet rank of Lieutenant Colonel. After the Civil War ended, Keogh received a permanent commission as Captain of Company I, 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment commanded by George Armstrong Custer during the Indian Wars of the 1870s. Myles Keogh was killed with Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25th 1876.

 

As the economy changed from gold rush to steady mining, Deadwood lost its rough and rowdy character and settled down into a prosperous town.
One of the subjects of Grabill's photographs is the last survivor from the battle of Little Bighorn - a horse called Comanche.
The battle took place between soldiers under the command for General Custer and the combined forces of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho people
Every soldier in the five companies under Custer was killed and Comanche, who belonged to Captain Keogh, was found wondering the battlefield.
It is thought, however, that the Indians may have captured some of the American army's animals.
Other images chronicle a time otherwise only imagined on film; from prospectors panning for gold to the early interactions between settlers from the East and the native Americans who inhabited the Midwest.
Little is known about Grabill’s life before or after his work in the Midwest.
There is speculation that he moved to Colorado - Denver Public Library is in possession of some of his work - or that he moved back to Chicago.