
Deadwood
Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Pre-order for $23.40
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Mark Bramhall
-
By:
-
Peter Cozzens
About this listen
The true story of the Black Hills gold rush settlement once described as “the most diabolical town on earth” and of its most colorful cast of characters, from Wild Bill Hickok to Calamity Jane to Al Swearingen and Sheriff Seth Bullock
Sifting through layers and layers of myth and legend—from nineteenth-century dime novels like Deadwood Dick to HBO prestige dramas to the casino billboards outside of present-day Deadwood trumpeting the hand of “aces and eights” that Hickok purportedly held when he was shot—Peter Cozzens unveils the true face of Deadwood, South Dakota, the storied mining town that sprang up in early 1876, just as the young United States was celebrating its hundredth birthday, and came raining down in ashes only three years later, destined to become food for the imagination and a nostalgic landmark that now brings in more than two and a half million visitors each year.
That Western romance, we’re reminded by Cozzens—the prizewinning author of The Earth Is Weeping—retains its allure only as long as we willfully ignore the town’s foundational sins. Built on land brazenly stolen from the Lakotas, Deadwood was not merely a place where outlaws lurked, like Tombstone or Dodge City, but was itself an outlaw enterprise, not part of any U.S. territory or subject to U.S. laws or governance. This gave rise to the gunslinging, stagecoach robbing, whiskey guzzling, rampant prostitution, and gambling Deadwood is known for. But it also bred a self-reliance and a spirit of cooperation unique on the frontier, and made it an exceptionally welcoming place for Black Americans and Chinese immigrants at a time of deep-seated discrimination.
The first book to tell this complex story in full, Deadwood reveals how one frontier town came to embody the best and worst of the West—a relic of humanity’s eternal quest to create order from chaos, a greater good from individual greed, and security from violence.
Critic reviews
"What a perfect marriage—one of the most exquisite chroniclers of America's Wild West exploring the most notorious town of the era. Throughout Deadwood, Cozzens brings fresh drama and absorbing detail to paint a vivid portrait of the colorful characters who in just three short years etched this tiny if hellraising South Dakota mining community into the lore of our collective history. Exemplary in all respects, thanks to the author's storytelling skills, Deadwood lives again." —Tom Clavin and Bob Drury, bestselling authors of Blood and Treasure and Throne of Grace
"There is no western town more steeped in myth, legend, and fairy tale than Deadwood, South Dakota—not even Tombstone, Leadville, or Dodge City. It was the Wild West of dime-store novels, of breathless, not-quite-exactly-true accounts in the newspapers. What Peter Cozzens has done with this remarkable book is to show us that the truth about Deadwood is, in fact, even more interesting than the myth.” —S. C. Gwynne, author of NYT Bestseller Empire of the Summer Moon
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
The Earth Is Weeping
- The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
- By: Peter Cozzens
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 18 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With the end of the Civil War, the nation recommenced its expansion onto traditional Indian tribal lands, setting off a wide-ranging conflict that would last more than three decades. In an exploration of the wars and negotiations that destroyed tribal ways of life even as they made possible the emergence of the modern United States, Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail.
-
-
Excellent detailed history of US conflict with Native Americans
- By White Thai on 06-24-17
By: Peter Cozzens
-
Abraham
- The First Jew
- By: Anthony Julius
- Narrated by: Anthony Julius
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this new biography of Abraham, Judaism's foundational figure, Anthony Julius offers an account of the origins of a fundamental struggle within Judaism between skepticism and faith, critique and affirmation, thinking for oneself and thinking under the direction of another. Julius describes Abraham's life as two separate lives, and as a version of the collective life of the Jewish people.
By: Anthony Julius
-
The Girl in the Middle
- A Recovered History of the American West
- By: Martha A. Sandweiss
- Narrated by: Kate Handford
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government's treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern Plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. .
-
-
Fleshing Out a Photo
- By Michael Hennelly on 04-27-25
-
Advance Britannia
- The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945
- By: Alan Allport
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The author of Britain at Bay—which the Wall Street Journal called “[perhaps] the single best examination of British politics, society, and strategy [from 1938 to 1941] that has ever been written”—picks up his sweeping social history in 1942, when what was once a regional war has become an intricate, globe-spanning conflict, with profound consequences for the British Empire and for a British people already exhausted after more than two years of fighting
By: Alan Allport
-
The Romans
- A 2,000-Year History
- By: Edward J. Watts
- Length: 23 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When we think of “ancient Romans” today, many picture the toga-clad figures of Cicero and Caesar, presiding over a republic, and then an empire, before seeing their world collapse at the hands of barbarians in the fifth century AD. The Romans does away with this narrow vision by offering the first comprehensive account of ancient Rome over the course of two millennia. Prize-winning historian Edward J. Watts recounts the full sweep of Rome’s epic past: the Punic Wars, the fall of the republic, the coming of Christianity, and more.
By: Edward J. Watts
-
1861
- The Lost Peace
- By: Jay Winik
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
1861: The Lost Peace is the story of President Lincoln’s difficult and courageous decision at a time when the country wrestled with deep moral questions of epic proportions.
By: Jay Winik
-
The Earth Is Weeping
- The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
- By: Peter Cozzens
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 18 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With the end of the Civil War, the nation recommenced its expansion onto traditional Indian tribal lands, setting off a wide-ranging conflict that would last more than three decades. In an exploration of the wars and negotiations that destroyed tribal ways of life even as they made possible the emergence of the modern United States, Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail.
-
-
Excellent detailed history of US conflict with Native Americans
- By White Thai on 06-24-17
By: Peter Cozzens
-
Abraham
- The First Jew
- By: Anthony Julius
- Narrated by: Anthony Julius
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this new biography of Abraham, Judaism's foundational figure, Anthony Julius offers an account of the origins of a fundamental struggle within Judaism between skepticism and faith, critique and affirmation, thinking for oneself and thinking under the direction of another. Julius describes Abraham's life as two separate lives, and as a version of the collective life of the Jewish people.
By: Anthony Julius
-
The Girl in the Middle
- A Recovered History of the American West
- By: Martha A. Sandweiss
- Narrated by: Kate Handford
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government's treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern Plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. .
-
-
Fleshing Out a Photo
- By Michael Hennelly on 04-27-25
-
Advance Britannia
- The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945
- By: Alan Allport
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The author of Britain at Bay—which the Wall Street Journal called “[perhaps] the single best examination of British politics, society, and strategy [from 1938 to 1941] that has ever been written”—picks up his sweeping social history in 1942, when what was once a regional war has become an intricate, globe-spanning conflict, with profound consequences for the British Empire and for a British people already exhausted after more than two years of fighting
By: Alan Allport
-
The Romans
- A 2,000-Year History
- By: Edward J. Watts
- Length: 23 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When we think of “ancient Romans” today, many picture the toga-clad figures of Cicero and Caesar, presiding over a republic, and then an empire, before seeing their world collapse at the hands of barbarians in the fifth century AD. The Romans does away with this narrow vision by offering the first comprehensive account of ancient Rome over the course of two millennia. Prize-winning historian Edward J. Watts recounts the full sweep of Rome’s epic past: the Punic Wars, the fall of the republic, the coming of Christianity, and more.
By: Edward J. Watts
-
1861
- The Lost Peace
- By: Jay Winik
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
1861: The Lost Peace is the story of President Lincoln’s difficult and courageous decision at a time when the country wrestled with deep moral questions of epic proportions.
By: Jay Winik
-
The Great Contradiction
- The Tragic Side of the American Founding
- By: Joseph J. Ellis
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A major new history from the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award winner American Sphinx, on how America’s founders—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams—regarded the issue of slavery as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In this daring and important work, our most trusted voice on the founding era reckons with the realities and regrets of our founding and the tragedy of its two great failures: the failure to end slavery and the failure to avoid Indian removal
By: Joseph J. Ellis
-
The Wounded Generation
- Coming Home After World War II
- By: David Nasaw
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From award-winning and bestselling author David Nasaw, a revelatory reexamination of post-World War II America and the nation's unhealed traumas, exposing the fault lines that characterized the country then and now.
By: David Nasaw
-
1942
- When World War II Engulfed the Globe
- By: Peter Fritzsche
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1942, historian Peter Fritzsche offers a gripping, ground-level portrait of the decisive year when World War II escalated to global catastrophe. With the United States joining the fight following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, all the world’s great powers were at war. The debris of ships sunk by Nazi submarines littered US beaches, Germans marauded in North Africa, and the Japanese swept through the Pacific.
By: Peter Fritzsche
-
Black Lamb and Gray Falcon
- By: Rebecca West
- Length: 39 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West’s classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country’s history as well as its daily life.
By: Rebecca West
-
The Southern Fault Line
- How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History
- By: Bryan Jones
- Narrated by: Steve Marvel
- Length: 16 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Southern Fault Line explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarchical side in response to the Civil Rights movement. Bryan Jones draws from his own family's centuries-old history in the region to explore the rise and fall of the "two minds" of the South.
By: Bryan Jones
-
The Gunfighters
- How Texas Made the West Wild
- By: Bryan Burrough
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.
By: Bryan Burrough
-
Secrets of a Suitcase
- The Countess, the Nazis, and Middle Europe's Lost Nobility
- By: Pauline Terreehorst
- Narrated by: Rachel Perry
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Pauline Terreehorst bid for a vintage Gucci suitcase at Sotheby's Amsterdam, she had no idea what was inside. The case turned out to be full of fine dresses, furs, and lace, with boxes of postcard albums showing grand castles and churches in Austria, France, England, and Scotland. The curious correspondence revolved around Austrian philanthropist Countess Margarethe Szapary, and her daughter.
-
A Brutal Reckoning
- Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South
- By: Peter Cozzens
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Creek War is one of the most tragic episodes in American history, leading to the greatest loss of Native American life on what is now U.S. soil. A conflict involving not only white Americans and Native Americans, but also the British and the Spanish, the Creek War opened the Deep South to the Cotton Kingdom, setting the stage for the American Civil War yet to come. No other single Indian conflict had such significant impact on the fate of America—and A Brutal Reckoning is the definitive book on this forgotten chapter in our history.
-
-
Non-political history
- By Ryan S. on 02-09-25
By: Peter Cozzens
-
Tecumseh and the Prophet
- The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation
- By: Peter Cozzens
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 19 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first biography of the great Shawnee leader in more than 20 years, and the first to make clear that his misunderstood younger brother, Tenskwatawa, was an equal partner in the last great pan-Indian alliance against the United States. Tecumseh and the Prophet presents the untold story of the Shawnee brothers - the two most significant siblings in Native American history, who, Cozzens helps us understand, should be writ large in the annals of America.
-
-
Excellent. Good companion to other Tecumseh bios
- By Chris on 11-05-20
By: Peter Cozzens
-
The Last Great Dream
- How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties
- By: Dennis McNally
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fascinating, far-reaching, and definitive, THE LAST GREAT DREAM is the ultimate guide to a generation-defining countercultural movement, an Underground 101 course for newcomers and aficionados alike.
By: Dennis McNally
-
1929
- The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
- By: Andrew Ross Sorkin
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1929, the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation. But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded—one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin. With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin takes listeners inside the chaos of the crash.
-
The Invisible Spy
- Churchill's Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II
- By: Thomas Maier
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a tough but smart Italian American kid, Ernest Cuneo played Ivy League football at Columbia University and was in the old Brooklyn Dodgers NFL franchise before becoming a city hall lawyer and “Brain Trust'' aide to President Roosevelt. He was on the payroll of national radio columnist Walter Winchell and mingled with the famous and powerful. But his status as a spy remained a secret, hiding in plain sight. During this time, Cuneo began a close friendship with British spy Ian Fleming and helped inspire Fleming's James Bond novels.
-
-
N excellent isten. sorry to see it end
- By "Old" but Good Reader on 04-10-25
By: Thomas Maier