The Streets of Deadwood: Waking and Sleeping
The Thoroughfare Sleeps at Night
This is the fifth in a series about the TV series Deadwood.
Image 1. John C. H. Grabill, “Deadwood’s Pride. The Elegant City Hall,” 1890. Source: Library of Congress.
Waking
Season three opens with a look at the main street as it is waking at dawn. A wagon pulled by a team of horses approaches from the distance. One man tends a fire. Two other persons enter the street with burdens. We can see a set of wagon tracks on the muddy surface. Swearengen walks onto the veranda of the Gem Saloon with his morning coffee to survey this scene. Below him Dority appears and they have a brief dialogue. The camera takes us to another part of the street, where three workmen are assembling a wooden rostrum. In the background are a man walking, a man seated on a tree stump, and a man standing next to a horse. After a few indoor scenes, there is a return to the main street, by now, it’s fully awake. We can see part of the sign for a dry goods merchant, we see the partly built rostrum from a different angle this time, and the Grand Central Hotel is mostly blocked from view. Visible are two carpenters working on the rostrum, several pedestrians, and one man mounted on a horse. The scene lasts for just a few seconds, but it is important because it establishes the time of day and a baseline for the day’s tempo. On the other side of town, Seth Bullock gently leads his wife by the elbow. He is dressed smartly in a double-breasted gray plaid vest and a black duster, accented with a wide tie, a silver watch chain, and his sheriff’s badge. Martha Bullock is wearing a mourning dress and a black bonnet, but with brown gloves. He is confiding his apprehensions about his upcoming speech for his election campaign for sheriff. Alma Garrett (Molly Parker), now married to Ellsworth (Jim Beaver), looks out her window, her view made hazy by the plenum of striations in the glass. Walking away from her house are Ellsworth and their adopted daughter, Sophia (Bree Seanna Wall). Ellsworth greets the Bullocks, and there is a seamless transfer of custody of the young child to Martha Bullock. In the foreground is a butcher’s stand, as evidenced by the proprietor’s stained shirt and two flayed carcasses. A building in the background houses a restaurant and a bathhouse. More retail stalls are supported by crude poles and a few one-person tents are pitched in the street. One man on a mount walks his horse, but there are more pedestrians. Ellsworth and Seth Bullock drop back a few steps and follow the school teacher and her pupil, who talks about her plans to bake some bread. Ellsworth talks to Seth Bullock about the election and George Hearst.
The scene shifts to the porch at the home of Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens). A corpulent man (Pruitt Taylor Vince) sits in the shade and drinks coffee as the bastion of the house appears in profile from the front door. She is dressed in an off-white dress covered by a dark top and dark gloves. She is wearing her signature grey hat with a clasp, and the hat is banded with a white sash that flows down the back of her head, neck, and back. Joanie and the man exchange morning greetings. Calamity Jane sits some twenty feet away and picks an argument. After she tires of insulting him, she crosses the street and ducks into an alley, where she retrieves a bottle of stashed whiskey.
The street scene rejoins the Bullocks, this time from the perspective of Swearengin’s second floor window at the Gem Saloon. We can see the rostrum, or “hustings,” from another perspective along with the chaos of retail activity and foot traffic. The camera perspective returns to street level with another view of the rostrum, with one man hammering a nail and Merrick preparing a bunting. With the camera swinging back to Bullock’s group, Ellsworth hands off a lunch pail to Sophia and says his farewell. Merrick greets Seth and Martha prompts her husband to reciprocate. Following a brief interlude inside the Grand Central Hotel, the scene returns to the Bullocks and Sophia at street level as they approach the Gem Saloon. Swearengen calls out to Seth from his perch. He wants to arrange a meeting. The group continues to walk where their paths converge with Joanie Stubbs on her way to the Bella Union. She nods in their direction, but this time, Seth is minding his manners. He responds by touching the brim of his hat. Martha returns a smile.
Next is a close up of an open left hand with crib notes inscribed in ink. It belongs to Charlie Udder, who is seated on the boardwalk at his storefront and practicing his speech. He sees the Bullocks and springs forth to greet them and Sophia. He gives Seth the news about the murder of the Cornish miner at the Gem. They stop in the street. Martha takes this opportunity to split off toward their destination, the whorehouse-turned-schoolhouse. She and Sophie are joined by woman with a parasol who is escorting a girl and a boy. The camera perspective switches to a close up of Joanie’s home, where the large watchman rises from his chair and walks with his cane, slightly hunched over. Returning to the sheriff and his deputy on the street, there is a brief close up of Charlie Udder, who spots Calamity Jane. Jane pinches her face and returns a visual salutation with her middle finger.
These sequences tell a story of Milch’s Deadwood and its main thoroughfare as it wakes in the morning. It also illustrates the humanity of walking in the public realm, even with its blemishes and scars. There is access to many social opportunities not possible within the confines of the automobile and its hypermobility. The characters use their morning walks for conversation with family and friends. They engage in a multitude of casual social interactions. Important news of the town passes through the streets.
Sleeping
In the opening scene of the episode, “Leviathan Smiles,” Deadwood’s main street is the lone star. Throughout the series the viewer is treated to large doses of the street, but rarely does the show reveal it stripped of human activity. We see the standing sign for the printing office surrounded by a collection of hanging garments and sundry machinery: a washboard, a small spinning wheel, and a Singer sewing machine. Merrick and Blazanov emerge from the printing office with stacks of newsprint draped over their arms. The wind is causing clanging as the camera changes to a low posterior view of their feet as Merrick takes a calculated step into the mud, and his left shoe meets the surface with thwap. Merrick circles around slightly to find the high ground, while Blazanov chooses a more direct route carefully stepping into the interstices between the puddled footprints. The camera shifts to wide view of the street from a second-story vantage point. The mud is everywhere, but its topography varies between saturated footprints, larger puddles, and one quagmire. The scene illustrates a proliferation of encroachments. A sign in front of the covered boardwalk to the left reads “Sewing and Repair.” This solves the mystery of the Singer sewing machine in the street. Perhaps the proprietor built the fire and lives in the tent pitched underneath the sign. Contrasting with the smartly milled wood construction of the Grand Central Hotel’s portico is another haphazard array of encroachments. The boardwalks to the right do not all align as a cluster of buildings beyond the hotel steal a few more feet from the public way. The porticos of those buildings are occluded by a twisted row of shabby retail stalls, where the roadbed pinches into a segment perhaps as narrow as twelve feet. As Merrick and Blazanov approach their destination, the Grand Central Hotel, we discover the source of the clanging: two suspended metal pots are swinging in the wind and sometimes colliding. I can imagine Martial complaining that Deadwood is nothing but a shop.