Overview

Gold was found. Land was stolen. A town was born. And for three years, no law on earth could touch it. In the spring of 1876, a narrow mountain gulch in the Black Hills of present-day South Dakota exploded into one of the most extraordinary communities in American history. Deadwood was not simply a lawless town - it was an outlaw enterprise, built on land brazenly taken from the Lakota Sioux under a treaty the United States government had no intention of honouring, existing outside the reach of any court, any sheriff, or any legal authority whatsoever. What grew in that vacuum was stranger and more complicated than the mythology has ever managed to capture. Wild Bill Hickok arrived already famous, already ageing, and already going blind. Calamity Jane nursed the smallpox sick in makeshift pest houses at the edge of town while the dime novel industry was busy inventing her legend. Al Swearengen built the most profitable - and most ruthless - vice operation on the frontier, and sat on the town council while he did it. Seth Bullock became a lawman without a badge before anyone gave him one. But Deadwood was never just about its famous names. It was about the thousands of ordinary people who flooded into the gulch from every direction and every background: freed Black Americans who found unusual room in a place with no laws to exclude them, Chinese workers who built a community in the margins of someone else's boom, women who ran businesses and nursed the sick and taught the first school, ministers who walked toward death on August roads. Was God Even Watching? strips away three layers of mythology - the dime novels, the Hollywood Westerns, the HBO prestige drama - and asks what Deadwood actually was. The answer is both worse and better than the legend. Worse, because the town was founded on a theft that has never been repaired, and because the exploitation it practised was real and documented and aimed at the most vulnerable. Better because the people in that gulch built courts and schools and libraries and a genuine community out of nothing, with no one telling them they had to. The fire of September 26, 1879, destroyed most of what they had built. What it could not destroy was the story. This is that story - told from the primary sources, stripped of romance, and given back the moral weight it has always deserved. Perfect for readers of Erik Larson, Hampton Sides, David Grann, and anyone who has ever wondered what the real West looked like beneath the legend.

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