The Days of ’76 runs July 19 through 25. The reason it exists is stranger than the rodeo.

Every July, Deadwood does the thing it once swore it would never do. It throws open the doors, dusts off the gunfights, and invites the world to come look at its wild past. The Days of ’76 rolls back into town July 19 through the 25th this year, with a professional rodeo, two parades down Main Street, and enough Old West reenactment to make you check your holster.

It’s one of the oldest celebrations of its kind in the country. It also almost didn’t happen. Worse than that, a good chunk of Deadwood didn’t want it to.

A town on the ropes

Rewind to the early 1920s. The gold that built Deadwood was mostly gone. The boom had busted, the mines up the gulch were shutting down, and the town was shrinking. The population had fallen from around 3,600 in 1910 to about 2,400 by 1920. Prohibition had shut the saloons and gambling houses in 1917. And down the road, Rapid City was becoming the place tourists actually stopped on their way into the Hills.

So a couple of local businessmen, George Baldwin and Fred Gramlich, looked around in the spring of 1924 and asked a simple question. What does Deadwood have that nobody else has?

The answer was its reputation. Wild Bill Hickok. Calamity Jane. The saloons and the shootouts and the whole blood-and-thunder legend that dime novels had been selling for fifty years. The town had spent decades trying to live that reputation down. Baldwin and Gramlich decided to put it up in lights instead.

Not everybody was thrilled

The idea of celebrating Deadwood’s rowdiest chapter did not go over smooth. The loudest objection came from Edward Senn, editor of the Deadwood Telegram and a moral crusader known across the state for going after the saloons. He worried that reenacting the old gambling dens and dance halls would drag the town’s name right back into the mud it had worked so hard to climb out of.

The organizers talked him down with a few promises. The card games would run on play money. The bars would serve nothing stronger than soda pop. The dancing would stay respectable. In other words, all of the flavor, none of the sin. Senn backed off, and after he saw how it actually went, he became one of the celebration’s biggest champions.

Getting the rest of town on board took some creativity. To make the men look like 1876 gold miners, organizers started the More Whiskers Club. The rules were simple. Stop shaving, grow the beard, and pay a dollar to join. They dangled prizes, and they threatened to haul the clean-shaven in front of a mock court and fine them. Inside a few days, about 150 men had signed up. Merchants played along too, nailing locally cut pine slabs across their storefronts so the block looked like a row of old log buildings again.

Opening day

The first Days of ’76 kicked off at ten in the morning on August 15, 1924, and ran two days. The parade had everything the tourists came to see. Men got up as prospectors, picks and shovels on their shoulders. Cowboys firing off blanks. Ox-drawn covered wagons, stagecoaches, cavalry down from Fort Meade, and Lakota riders from the Pine Ridge Agency.

They staged the stories the town was famous for, too. A reenactment of Wild Bill’s assassination. A play called The Trial of Jack McCall. And in a bit of casting you couldn’t make up, they hired a retired railroad worker named Richard Clarke to play Deadwood Dick, the fictional dime-novel hero. Clarke let his hair grow out, pulled on a set of buckskins, and told frontier stories to tourists like he’d been there for every one of them. By most accounts, he eventually came to believe he really was the character. Nobody running the show was in a hurry to correct him.

They’d hoped for a decent turnout. They got roughly fourteen thousand people over two days. The question of whether they’d do it again answered itself.

From pageant to powerhouse

It grew fast. In 1925 they brought in western movie star Jack Hoxie. In 1926 it was Ken Maynard and his trick horse Tarzan. And in 1927, they landed the biggest name in the country when President Calvin Coolidge showed up and wore a Lakota headdress, an image that put Deadwood in newspapers around the world.

Organizers tried a pioneer stage pageant from 1925 through 1928, then scrapped it once they figured out what people actually wanted. They wanted the action. So the rodeo grew into the centerpiece, and it never looked back.

That instinct paid off in hardware. The cowboys themselves vote on these things, and Deadwood keeps winning. The Days of ’76 has earned PRCA Rodeo of the Year honors nineteen times across the size classes, and Badlands Circuit Rodeo of the Year sixteen times. In 2011, the whole committee was inducted into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. The parade down Main Street, billed as the longest continuously running parade in the nation, is still mostly horse-drawn. Real wagons, real stagecoaches, the genuine article.

Where the wagons live the rest of the year

All those wagons and coaches need a home when they’re not rolling down Main Street, and that’s the Days of ’76 Museum, right as you come into town on 76 Drive. It started as basically a pole barn, just a place to store the vehicles and memorabilia the celebration kept collecting. In 1990, Deadwood historian Don Clowser folded in his own haul of firearms and pioneer and Native American pieces, and the barn couldn’t hold it all.

In 2004 the board committed to a real building, backed by a three million dollar gift from the city. The finished building runs 32,000 square feet and opened its doors on May 25, 2013. Its centerpiece exhibit holds more than fifty wagons, carriages, and stagecoaches. More than half of them still work the parade every summer.

The idea that spread

Deadwood’s gamble worked so well that other towns copied the blueprint. By 1929, Tombstone, Arizona had its own version and called it Helldorado. That same year, Dodge City, Kansas built one and named it the Last Roundup. The playbook was the same one Deadwood wrote.

That’s the whole arc of it. A town that was nearly broke took the one thing it was almost embarrassed by, its wild and lawless past, and turned it into the reason people still show up more than a hundred years later. The rodeo starts at 7 each night. The parade fills Main Street on the 24th and 25th. And somewhere in the crowd, you can bet, there’s a fella who didn’t shave.

The Days of ’76 runs July 19 through 25 in Deadwood. Rodeo tickets range from $10 to $100 and are available through the official Days of ’76 website and at the gate.

Historical details in this article draw on Kevin Britz’s “Deadwood’s Days of ’76: The Wild West Show as Community Celebration,” published in South Dakota History (Vol. 40, No. 1, 2010) by the South Dakota State Historical Society; on Deadwood History, Inc. and reporting by HistoryNet on the Days of ’76 Museum; and on current event and award information from the Days of ’76 organization and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.