In August 1876 Seth Bullock and his partner Sol Star rolled into Deadwood, the lawless gold camp in the Black Hills, with wagons full of picks, pans, shovels, dynamite and cooking pots, and opened a hardware store in a tent. Bullock, born in Ontario in 1849, had already served in the Montana territorial senate, where he helped create Yellowstone National Park, and as a sheriff in Helena. Days earlier Wild Bill Hickok had been shot dead at a poker table, and in March 1877 the territorial governor made Bullock the first sheriff of the new Lawrence County. He deputized a band of residents and brought order to the camp without killing anyone; his grandson said he could outstare a mad cobra. He also told a visiting Wyatt Earp that his services were not needed.
In 1884, bringing in a horse thief called Crazy Steve, he met Theodore Roosevelt on the range near Belle Fourche, and the two shared coffee and beans over a chuckwagon tailgate and stayed friends for life. Roosevelt called him a true Westerner, the finest type of frontiersman, and later made him U.S. Marshal for South Dakota.
When the hardware store on the corner of Main and Wall burned in 1894, Bullock and Star built on the site instead of rebuilding: a three-storey, 63-room luxury hotel costing $40,000, Deadwood's first, with steam heat and a bath on every floor. It opened by 1896. Over the next century it passed through other hands and in 1976 even became a hardware store again, before new owners restored it in the early 1990s, re-creating its Victorian decor and cutting the rooms to 28, some of them oddly shaped. It now has a casino and a bar named Bully's, after Roosevelt.
Bullock died of cancer on 23 September 1919 and lies in Mount Moriah Cemetery near Hickok and Calamity Jane. Popular belief holds that he died in Room 211, but he did not die in the hotel at all, and that mistaken story may have helped start the sightings. Guests and staff say he still keeps an eye on the place. People report being touched or hearing their names called, apparitions and orbs, and a young girl as well as the old sheriff. Employees say Bullock still plays host and makes sure his staff keep working; those who stop for a break say they feel a presence until they get back to it. The assistant manager says visiting mediums count at least six named spirits and twenty or so more. Ghost tours run regularly, and in 2015 the hotel featured in a Halloween episode of Ghost Adventures.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
