The third season of Deadwood ended last night with George Hearst triumphant. If you haven’t seen the episode yet, this is a spoiler alert. If you don’t watch Deadwood you are missing the best thing ever put on a television screen. Watching this season I could never put it far from my mind that George Hearst represented a kind of frontier attitude that is best represented today in the person of our Vice-President, Dick Cheney.
George Heast was the father of William Randolph Hearst. He was a 19th-Century mining legend. He had already made a fortune when, in 1875, gold was discovered in the Black Hills. The show Deadwood is based on real characters that lived in Deadwood in the Dakota Territories (later South Dakota) during the 1870’s. But it is not strictly historical. To see some of the differences between the show and the real history you can go here.
According to the show, George Hearst first sent an advance agent to Deadwood. That agent, Francis Wolcott, caused a false panic by paying people to spread the rumor that people’s mining claims would not be respected. Because Deadwood was located on land “ceded” to the Sioux by treaty, none of the claims were strictly legal. This gave Wolcott’s rumor credibility and he was able to buy up all the mining claims, save one, at a pittance of their value. The lone holdout was a woman named Alma Garrett (later Alma Ellsworth).
This season George Hearst arrived in town to personally negotiate for Mrs. Ellsworth’s claim. He eventually succeeded in forcing Mrs. Ellsworth to sell through sheer intimidation. He hired 50 gunmen to come to town. He littered the camp with dead miners (both to break any unionization and to send a message). He had one of his men shoot at Mrs. Ellsworth, intentionally missing. Finally, he had her husband killed. Having secured the final claim and also rigging the first Dakota elections, he left for Montana.
The real George Hearst would go on to win the San Francisco Examiner as a gambling debt and bequeath it to his son, William Randolph.
Heir to a vast mining fortune, at the age of twenty-four Hearst acquired and developed a series of influential newspapers, starting with the San Francisco Examiner in 1887, forging them into a national brand. His New York City paper, the New York Morning Journal, became known for sensationalist writing and for its agitation in favor of the Spanish-American War, and the term yellow journalism (a pejorative reference to scandal-mongering, sensationalism, jingoism and similar practices) was derived from the Journal’s color comic strip, “The Yellow Kid.”
Deadwood paints a Hobbesian portrait of life on the frontier. The press is corrupted, elections are stolen, the sheriff has little power to enforce order, murders go uninvestigated and unpunished. The power brokers are saloon owning pimps. Christianity is hardly known and barely practiced. It mainly serves as a solace for those in mourning. To survive, each individual must find protection and do the bidding of their masters. Stepping out of line is a good way to get your throat slit and be fed to the pigs.
This is the kind of world where a Dick Cheney excels. This is the type of atmosphere where his morality can actually be a virtue.
In 1880, George acquired the small San Francisco Examiner as repayment for a gambling debt. Though he had little interest in the publishing business, he kept it because he felt the Democratic Party needed a friendly newspaper in San Francisco.
Nothing like a freindly newspaper for your political party. The GOP has the whole Murdoch Empire as well as the Moonie Times. Nothing much has changed on the resource extraction front, either. Much like Hearst, Dick Cheney launched a campaign of fear and intimidation in a bold move to take Iraq’s oil away from French, Russian, and Chinese concessions. And he relied on a bought and sold press, just as William McKinley relied on Hearst’s son to whip up support for the Spanish-American War after the USS Maine blew up.
There are no heroes on the show Deadwood. There are some characters that are somewhat sympathetic. Sol Star is a well-meaning Jewish hardware store owner. Charlie Utter is a man with some moral compass. The Russian telegraph operator is a nice man. But no one escapes corruption and no one can stand aloof. And in the big bad world, then as now, the people with real power have few morals and no compunction whatsover about killing anyone that stands between them and their designs on grand wealth.