Dick’s success was instantaneous, for there was a sense of truth in these stories which had theretofore been missing. Dispatches in every post brought the news of Deadwood as it was happening, and thus the weekly appearance of another Deadwood story was able to hang itself firmly on the coattails of reality. In one episode Dick courts Calamity Jane, who actually existed at the time, and finally marries her. In another, Our Hero is a frontier detective, fighting bravely on the side of law and order. In still another he has turned to robbery, and at one point is actually strung by his neck from a cottonwood gallows. After exhausting the many plot possibilities of the Black Hills, Dick, who had become as real to his readers as George Washington, began to work both backward and forward in time and space. In one set of adventures he is shown to be an active Indian fighter; in another he turns up with Calamity Jane in the town of Leadville, Colorado, which came into its glory not long after the strike in Deadwood. At last the many loose ends of the story so entangled author Wheeler that he gave up Deadwood Dick as a lost cause and out of nowhere fetched him a son, Deadwood Dick, Jr., who marched on to the turn of the century and down into our own time. Indeed, his noble features can still occasionally be found staring gravely up from a pile of old and dusty magazines in attic corners. With such a heritage it is little wonder that as the town of Deadwood grew away from its infancy, and as its modern Chamber of Commerce turned to summer pageants as a source of tourist interest, Deadwood Dick should be revived and paraded. Deadwood’s summer festivals, the gay “Days of ’76,” are built around a town-wide re-creation of the gold rush, with the natives chin-whiskered, booted, and costumed within an inch of their lives. During this gusty week otherwise sober and retiring citizens turn themselves out as stage coach drivers, Indians, and pony express riders, and the nights are filled with such a bubbling halloo that the tourists, who come in ever larger droves, are able to go home and report that they have honestly spent time in a frontier town. To heighten the effect, the impresarios of this gay divertissement many years ago decided to raise Deadwood Dick from Beadle’s pages and put him on the street like all the other self-respecting Calamity Janes and Wild Bills. Locating an oldster who looked not unlike the artist’s original concept, they dressed him in an assortment of western oddities and gave him time off from his duties as a stable hand while the festival was in session. For several years this simple pretense was carried on, and no sleep whatsoever was lost over the fact that a mild fraud was being perpetrated on the visiting Iowans.