On December 19, 1899, in Deadwood, South Dakota, the Gem Variety Theater burned for the third and final time. Flames climbed the front wall of the building that had ruled the town’s underworld for twenty-two years. When firefighters arrived, the hydrant wrenches were gone, stolen, and no one knew by whom. All anyone could do was stand in the frozen street and watch it burn.
The balcony where the band played every night to pull men inside was already collapsing. The back rooms where women worked under names that were not their own filled with smoke. Al Swearengen, the man who had built the Gem three times with money taken from desperate people, had nothing left to rebuild with. This time, the town let it die.
Ellis Albert Swearengen was born on July 8, 1845, in Oskaloosa, Iowa Territory, with a twin brother named Lemuel. They were the eldest of eight children. Their father was a Dutch-American farmer, and their mother raised the family on open land in Mahaska County. It was not a story of poverty or abandonment.
The family eventually moved west and established a walnut grove near Yankton, South Dakota. The 1870 census shows Swearengen gone from Iowa, but where he went and what he did during those missing years is almost entirely undocumented. What is documented is that by the time he reached Deadwood in the spring of 1876, he already knew exactly how to make money off other people’s appetites and other people’s bodies. He arrived in Deadwood Gulch by way of Cheyenne and Custer, South Dakota.
He had already been running a dance house in Custer, a canvas tent thirty by one hundred fifty feet, open day and night, packed so tight patrons had to shove their way through. Within a week of arriving in Deadwood, he had a temporary saloon up and running, a canvas and lumber operation called the Cricket, with gambling tables and bare-knuckle fights held in a five-by-five-foot space out back. His wife Nettie came with him from Iowa. She left by September of 1876 and later divorced him on grounds of spousal abuse.
He married twice more while in Deadwood. Both marriages ended the same way, with the same accusation. Then, on April 7, 1877, the Cricket closed and the Gem Variety Theater opened at the corner of Wall and Main. The Black Hills Daily Pioneer called it neat and tastefully arranged as any place of its kind in the West.
Deadwood Gulch made Al Swearengen possible. The Black Hills gold rush began after the 1874 Custer expedition confirmed gold in Lakota Sioux territory, land guaranteed to the Sioux by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The federal government failed to keep miners out. By 1876, thousands of men were flooding into an illegal settlement in a narrow canyon lined with dead trees.
There was no law, no charter, no territorial government, no institutional authority of any kind. Wild Bill Hickok was shot dead in a saloon on August 2, 1876, a measure of how openly violent the camp was. Seth Bullock, the closest thing Deadwood had to a lawman, arrived the day before Hickok was killed. Bullock was appointed sheriff of Lawrence County by the territorial governor in March of 1877.
But Deadwood’s lower Main Street was not his territory. By agreement, spoken or unspoken, Bullock controlled upper Main Street. Swearengen controlled the lower end. The line between them was not law.
It was the absence of law. The Gem’s real business was not entertainment. The front was a bar and a stage, with the Gem band playing from the balcony every night as advertising. Behind the curtain were the rooms.
The women inside them had not come to Deadwood voluntarily. Swearengen placed advertisements in Eastern newspapers, promising hotel work, stage careers, cleaning positions, waitressing jobs, respectable employment in a booming western town. He advanced the women one-way tickets. When they arrived, there were no hotel jobs and no stage careers.
There was only the Gem and the debt for the ticket. Those who refused were told to repay the fare. Those who could not pay were threatened. Those who still refused were beaten.
His general manager was a man named Dan Doherty. The man who directly handled the women was Johnny Burns, who kept a team of bouncers described by people who were there as every bit as brutal as Swearengen himself. Women who tried to escape found themselves penniless and stranded in a mining camp with no way home. Some grew sick and died from exposure and hunger.
Some took their own lives rather than stay. Customers inside the Gem assaulted and tortured the women routinely. Calamity Jane, among the Gem’s first dancers, once procured ten girls from Sidney, Nebraska, for Swearengen on a single trip. Dances cost ten cents.
Beer cost twenty cents. Wine cost a dollar a bottle. The back rooms cost more. Every dollar flowed upward to the man who had placed the advertisement and bought the ticket.
By 1887, the Omaha Daily Bee reported that Swearengen had forcibly detained two married female stage performers from Omaha at the Gem and refused to let them leave. Their husbands had to petition Deadwood’s mayor, Sol Star, directly, begging him to intervene. Star did intervene, and the women were released. But that was the exception.
The Gem’s operation was public knowledge, reported in out-of-state newspapers, and the only thing that freed those two women was not the law, not the sheriff, not a court order. It was two husbands in another state who knew the right name to write to. Nobody else was freed that day. Swearengen did not survive twenty-two years in Deadwood on brutality alone.
He survived on alliances. He forged financial relationships with the most prominent citizens in town, including Sol Star, who served as Deadwood’s mayor for fourteen years and later as a state senator. Seth Bullock was widely described as incorruptible, but he did not have the political reach to push his cleanup campaign south of the line on Main Street. The arrangement held.
The Gem’s money moved through the town’s economy like water. Swearengen also controlled parts of Deadwood’s opium trade. He was tolerated because he was useful to the system. The town needed the revenue.
The Gem needed the silence. Both sides kept their end of the deal for more than two decades. The promise Deadwood kept breaking was permanence. The first fire came on September 26, 1879, when the Gem burned along with most of the town.
Swearengen rebuilt, bigger and grander. The reopened Gem was described as the finest entertainment venue in the region. The second fire came on March 5, 1894, when another massive blaze swept through the lower Main Street business district. The Gem burned with it.
Swearengen rebuilt again. Bullock and Star lost their hardware store in the same fire and rebuilt too, their warehouse becoming the Bullock Hotel. Everybody rebuilt. That was the implicit bargain of a boom town.
But by the late 1890s, Deadwood was not what it had been. The placer mining had played out. The Homestake mine was now industrial scale, owned by George Hearst’s interests. The Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley Railroad had connected Deadwood to the outside world in 1890.
With the railroad came outside scrutiny. With scrutiny came pressure. The old arrangement was becoming harder to keep. December 19, 1899.
The Gem burned for the last time. The hydrant wrenches were missing. The firefighters stood in the street and watched. Whether Swearengen stole those wrenches himself or whether someone else did it to finish him, the record does not say.
What is clear is that nobody rebuilt the Gem, not the town, not Swearengen. He had no money left. He married a woman named Odilia Turgeon that same year. They divorced soon after.
Twenty-two years, three fires, and the man who had run the underworld of one of the most famous towns in American history walked away with nothing. He was fifty-four years old. The site where the Gem stood eventually became Deadwood’s first gas station in 1921. No posse pursued Al Swearengen.
No marshal tracked him across state lines. He drifted to Colorado. Denver newspapers later reported that he spent his last years working as a prospector and a farm hand. He went by Albert Ellis, his own name rearranged, an alias thin enough to suggest he was not hiding from the law but from someone specific.
He had a recent arrest for vagrancy at the time of his death. October 2, 1904. Oskaloosa, Iowa. Swearengen’s twin brother Lemuel was attacked after leaving his meat market.
He had two hundred dollars in his pocket. He was struck on the head, then shot five times. He was not robbed. Lemuel was found unconscious the next day and never woke up.
He died eight days later. Al left Iowa immediately and made his way to Denver. November 15, 1904. Denver, Colorado.
Near the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad crossing at Alameda Avenue, a passerby found a body in the middle of a suburban street. Ellis Albert Swearengen, age fifty-nine. His skull was fractured. His ribs on the right side were broken.
Both legs were crushed. He had nothing on him except a cheap watch, a knife, and a dynamite fuse and cap, the tools of a miner. That is what the coroner listed as his occupation. Denver City Police could not determine whether the death was an accident or a homicide.
The old story told for nearly a century was that he died trying to hop a freight train. But rediscovered obituary and mortuary records tell a different story. He was found in the street, not on the tracks. His injuries could be consistent with a fall from a moving train.
They could also be consistent with a severe beating. Twin brothers, both struck on the head, six weeks apart. One of them not robbed. Modern historians believe Lemuel was a case of mistaken identity.
If that is true, whoever came for Al Swearengen found the right twin the second time. Seth Bullock went on to become close friends with Theodore Roosevelt after they met in Deadwood in 1892. He served as the first forest supervisor of the Black Hills National Forest, and Roosevelt appointed him United States Marshal for South Dakota. He died in 1919 and was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, on a hill overlooking the town he had tried to civilize.
Sol Star served fourteen years as mayor, became postmaster, and served as a state senator. He never married and died alone on his ranch in 1917. Dan Doherty and Johnny Burns, the men who ran the daily brutality at the Gem, vanished from the historical record after the building burned. No later fate is documented.
The men who kept the women in line simply disappeared when the building that justified their existence no longer stood. Of the women of the Gem, there is no comprehensive count. No memorial. No registry.
The names that survive are nicknames. Trixie, who shot a man through the skull after he beat her bloody, is remembered now mostly as a character in a television show. The rest are unnamed in the record. They came on one-way tickets, and they were never counted on the way out.
Swearengen did not operate in spite of the system. He operated because the system had a gap in it exactly the size and shape of the Gem Theater. The federal government broke the Fort Laramie Treaty and let miners flood Lakota land with no plan to govern them. The territorial government failed to establish law in the camp for years.
When local authority finally came, it drew a line across Main Street and agreed not to cross it. Prominent citizens took the alliances and the money. Newspapers in Omaha reported the detentions and the abuse, and nothing changed. Every institution that touched Deadwood had an opportunity to stop what was happening inside the Gem.
None of them did. The Gem was profitable, and the women inside it had no one to petition on their behalf. The system did not fail. The system worked exactly the way it was built to work.
It just was not built for the women behind those doors. The corner of Wall and Main Street still exists. There is no historical marker for the Gem Theater. A casino parking lot sits on the site now.
Deadwood is a tourist town, with legalized gambling since 1989. The Adams Museum holds the primary source material. Across the way, the Bullock Hotel still stands, three stories of sandstone built from the ashes of the 1894 fire by a man who tried to bring order to a place that was not ready for it. One building survived.
The other burned three times and nobody rebuilt it.