Deadwood became famous as a gold-rush settlement founded in 1876 in South Dakota’s Black Hills.
The town grew after gold was found in the Black Hills, an area the United States had promised to the Lakota under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. The discovery drew miners and prospectors despite the treaty, and Deadwood quickly developed as an unplanned frontier settlement.
Its population included miners, merchants, gamblers, saloon owners, and law officers. Figures associated with Deadwood include Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Seth Bullock. Hickok was killed in Deadwood on August 2, 1876, while holding the famous “dead man’s hand,” traditionally described as aces and eights.
Deadwood later became a city and preserved many historic buildings. In 1961, the entire community was designated a National Historic Landmark. Its history combines the Black Hills gold rush with the broader story of law, commerce, migration, and conflict in the late nineteenth-century West.