Festival Feature: Cozzens – Real Deadwood Stories
September 27, 2025
NOTE: A version of this story appears in our 2025 South Dakota Festival of Books guide, produced by South Dakota Magazine. Peter Cozzens, a retired Foreign Service Officer and the author of 19 books on the Civil War and the American West, will be in conversation with South Dakota historian David Wolff TODAY at 12:45 p.m. in the Aspen Room at the Spearfish Convention Center.
HBO’s Deadwood series entertained and intrigued audiences — including Peter Cozzens — for three seasons. But as a noted author and historian of the American West, he wondered about accuracy. Were colorful characters like Seth Bullock, Sol Star and Al Swearingen portrayed as they lived? What about the town itself, a lawless miner’s camp illegally established on land set aside for the Lakota and not subject to the jurisdiction of a state, territorial or even the federal government?
Cozzens shines a light on everyday Deadwood in his new book Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West. It’s the first book devoted to pioneer Deadwood in its entirety, beginning with the discovery of gold in Deadwood Gulch in 1876 to the devastating fire in September of 1879. The blaze destroyed more than 300 buildings and helped define a turning point in the young town’s history.
“Deadwood was already changing by the autumn of 1879,” Cozzens says. “It was already losing a good amount of frontier lawlessness. Placer mines were running out. Miners were moving to new diggings in Colorado. A few months after the fire the main newspaper in Deadwood ran a series of stories by ‘old timers.’ They were already looking at events from just three years earlier as the old times. There was a sense already that something had passed and times had changed.”
Cozzens says he wanted to tell the real stories of people who lived in Deadwood during its infancy. “I spend a lot of time on daily life for ordinary people,” he says. “How did they get by? What was sanitation and food like? What did they do for recreation? I tried very hard to impart a flavor of daily life in Deadwood apart from the historic events that we all associate with Deadwood.”
Still, Cozzens knows readers will always be enamored with the gunfights, showgirls and quick riches that have come to define the Wild West, and they will not be disappointed. “The image of reckless, easy and fast living is what draws people to it,” he says. “It’s so different from our lives today.”
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