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 always saved the gold from the badmen. Deadwood, it was said, was a place where "the coward never started and the weak died on the way."

There was another villain in the Deadwood legend: fire. Any flicker of flame in the bottom of the valley would feed upward to the houses above. And every Deadwood youngster knew that the gulch was a natural chimney when forest fires swept through the adjacent piny hills. A fire starting in a bakery charred Deadwood in 1879. The town was rebuilt with a water barrel on every roof, survived three big fires in 1951-52. Last week, for 24 hours, Deadwood (pop. 4,000) broiled under the windswept fingers of a forest fire that threatened to cook it once and for all.

Rifles & Cribs. The fire started early one gusty afternoon in a trash barrel behind an old folks' home outside of town. In an hour the flames had reached the first trees above, and the whole ridge to the north and west of town roared as the fire leaped through treetops, gobbling up great stands of ponderosa pine in one crackling rush. Townsmen quickly set to work spraying and shoveling under flames that licked down toward houses at the edge of town. National Guardsmen rolled in with bulldozers to make a firebreak. Fire fighters rushed in from Colorado, Montana and

Wyoming. By midafternoon the fire fighters numbered at least 1,000--state and federal Forest Service men, Air Force personnel from" nearby bases, Deadwood's own saloonkeepers and miners from the nearby Homestake gold mine.

As the flames spread. Larence County Sheriff Dick McGrath ordered all women and children to evacuate the town. Says Game Warden Kenny Scissons, who helped break up traffic jams: "There weren't many sportsmen in that crowd when it came to seeing who was going to get out first." Cars lurched out of town, decked with clothing, rifles, bicycles and skis; the girls from the cribs on Main Street hustled out, carrying their treasured negligees. The wind shifted, driving evacuees onto alternate highways, only to shift capriciously again, pushing the traffic stream back into other roads.

Smoldering Duff. As evacuees finally bedded down in nearby towns of Sturgis and Spearfish (S.D.) and Newcastle (Wyo.) and in hundreds of tourist cabins in the Black Hills, the fighters worked through the night. Twenty miles away, outside the town of Nemo, another fire raged. Said one fire boss grimly: "If them two sons of bitches come together and start crowning [i.e., spreading among the treetops], it won't stop till it gets to Custer, and we'll all look like Custer's men after the battle." At midmorning next day, the men were still fighting. Two Forest Service planes--a converted 6-24 and a Navy torpedo bomber--began bombing hot spots with 500-gal. loads of a slurry made of bentonite and water. Slowly the fire fighters won control, and by midafternoon Deadwood's residents were told to come back home.

At last all danger was past, though the fire itself smoldered softly through the duff on the forest floor. Remarkably, nobody was killed (a few fire fighters were injured), and the only severe damage for Deadwood came with the destruction of the two lumber plants, a lot of dry lawns, a trailer park, a few houses on the town's edge, and Deadwood Dick's famous cabin in the woods. It was a nightmarish ordeal all around, but in the telling of tales that makes old Deadwood a paradise for tourists, it was bound to get much worse until, ultimately, it might even rival the tales of Deadwood Dick himself, and of Wild Bill, Calamity Jane, Poker Alice, and that mean coward Jack McCall.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.