SOUTH DAKOTA: Tales of Deadwood Gulch

In its heyday, the gold-mining town of Deadwood, S.D., nestling in a steep-sided gulch in the Black Hills, was a brawling, ripsnorting oasis of 25,000 people, pungent with gunsmoke and ribaldry. There, in the late 1800s, Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane lived—until that mean coward Jack McCall plugged Hickok in the back of the head as he sat at a poker table in Saloon Number Ten. There Poker Alice, the gnarled old cigar-smoking card shark, fleeced many a dude; and there lived Deadwood Dick Clark, the legendary stagecoach driver who somehow...

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