‘Accurate History and Facts’ or Memoir?: Unravelling the Weave of History and Life Narrative in the Black Hills

ABSTRACT

This essay explores how John S. McClintock’s Pioneer Days in the Black Hills: Accurate History and Facts Related by One of the Early Day Pioneers, originally published in 1939 and republished by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2000, is employed as a historical source by historians and in popular cultural contexts (including by scriptwriters for the HBO series ‘Deadwood’). The essay underscores palpable tensions in a text in which McClintock presents himself as an eyewitness to key moments in Black Hills history, yet claims not to want to speak of himself. Tracing these tensions in the text reveals interesting insights into how we read and classify forms of life narratives and how those life narratives may serve historical understanding and writing. In writing of a life narrative written by an ancestor, I discuss my own relation to the man and the memoir as well the challenges that arise in working on life narratives by kin.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Hills
• American West
• personal testimony
• Deadwood, South Dakota

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Laura J. Beard is Professor and Associate Vice President of Research at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Her research interests include life narratives, women writers of the Americas, Indigenous literatures, stories and storyworlds. A two-time Fulbright Scholar, she is a founding member of, and serves on the Steering Committee for, the International Autobiography Association Chapter of the Americas. She is currently working on a book project on the memoir of her ancestor John S. McClintock, Pioneer Days in the Black Hills: Accurate History and Facts Related by One of the Early Day Pioneers, which involves fun research in Deadwood, South Dakota.

ORCID

Laura J. Beard http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6771-0822

Notes

1 See example at https://www.cityofdeadwood.com/index.asp?SEC=269A8C80-9F36-4D72-A17D-DF18E23E10FF&Type=B_BASIC.

2 My thanks go to all the wonderful staff at the Homestake Adams Research and Cultural Center, the Deadwood Public Library and the City of Deadwood Archives for their assistance with my research. I also acknowledge funding from the Killam Research Fund at the University of Alberta that allowed me to undertake a trip to Deadwood in 2018.

3 See JD McLaird (2008), L Jucovy (2012), P Stasi and J Greiman (2012), MJ Dworkin (2015), RW Etulain (2014), DA Wolff (2009), and P Zinder (2013) for examples.

4 The Black Hills and the characters were the stuff of legends long before McClintock published his memoir. To cite just a few examples, see S. Goodale Price’s Black Hills: The Land of Legend (1935), Edward L. Wheeler’s Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road: Or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills (1899) or Wheeler’s The Black Hills Jezebel: Or, Deadwood Dick's Ward (1881).

5 The Society continues today, but membership now extends to living descendants of the original members.