At least there is no coffin race.
On previous Halloweens, the annual Deadweird gathering in the historic South Dakota town of Deadwood has featured not only a costume contest but a race where quartets of pallbearers pushed wheeled caskets 350 feet down the main street.
But the sight of a crowd cheering competing coffins would be an unfortunate optic amidst a pandemic in which more than 220,000 Americans have died.
“No coffin race this year but we hope to bring it back next year,” Deadwood Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Lee Harstad told The Daily Beast in an email.
The rest of the two-day event is on, including live music and a costume contest with some 700 registered entrants. Thousands more partiers are expected, creating a possible COVID-19 superspreader event just 11 miles from the super-superspreader Sturgis Motorcycle Rally two months ago.
“We’ve seen a rise recently—a spike, if you will—in the entire western side of the state since the Sturgis rally,” Deadwood Mayor David Ruth told The Daily Beast on Monday.
A good-sized Deadweird crowd can be expected, as any deterrent COVID-19 presents will be offset by Halloween falling this year on a Saturday with a full moon—perfect timing if you do not mind endangering yourself and those you encounter.
The gathering of the costumed contestants is scheduled to be held outside in Outlaw Square. But the actual judging is to be conducted inside one of the town’s casinos. And a Monster Ball featuring live music “prizes, dancing and FUN” will be held the night before inside another casino.
Participants at the indoor events are not required to wear masks and attendance will entail gambling with your very life. We can only hope nobody draws the pandemic equivalent of the Dead Man’s Hand, the black aces-and-eights supposedly held by Wild Bill Hickok when he was shot to death during a card game in a Deadwood saloon in 1876.
Hickok is buried in Mount Moriah Cemetery overlooking town and right beside him is Martha Jane Cannary, better known as Calamity Jane. She could drink and carouse with more abandon than anybody likely to appear in modern-day Deadwood. But she showed an angelic other side during a virus outbreak reported in the local newspaper just 10 days after the murder of her of beloved Wild Bill and 144 years before the present pandemic.
“Small-pox has broken out in our town, several persons now having the disease, and cases being reported every day,” The Black Hills Weekly Pioneer warned. “This disease breaking out as it does at a time when we are unprepared to protect ourselves from it in the manner usually adopted in well regulated cities, makes it a serious matter indeed. The citizens should take this matter in hand at once, and if possible erect a suitable building in some out-of-the-way place, engage competent nurses, and have every patient removed to the quarters prepared.”
That long-ago curve was apparently flattened by the necessary precautions, but the virus spiked again two years later, in 1878. Eight gold miners were quarantined in tents outside of town without nursing, food or water.
The one lucky break Calamity Jane had received during her harrowing childhood was surviving smallpox. She thereby had immunity, but even without that she may well have taken it upon herself to assist the unfortunate eight.
“[Calamity Jane] dropped all her vices and spent day and night nursing,” attests one written account cited by the publication Working Nurse, which also quotes a witness describing her as “a perfect angel sent from heaven when any of the boys was sick.”
Calamity Jane is said to have secured provisions for her patients at gunpoint. She provided such untiring care that earned a reappraisal from the town doctor, who had previously viewed her as unacceptably unladylike.
“Oh, she’d swear to beat hell at ’em,” Dr L.E “Old Man” Babcock was quoted saying. “But it was a tender kind of cussin’.”
Five of the eight miners survived. Calamity Jane is said to have uttered the sole prayer she knew as she buried the three she could not save.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” she reportedly said.
The virus remained a threat, but the Old West equivalent of the Deadwood Chamber of Commerce emphasized the importance of remaining vigilant even in a lull.
“The impression has gone out that the disease was not pronounced smallpox in Deadwood, and people outside were beginning to think, in view of this, that the Deadwood authorities were exceedingly derelict in handling it,” the Commercial Club said in 1900. “We have let them know that we regard the matter seriously and are taking the proper steps for the protection of the health of not only the people of Deadwood, but of the surrounding country.”
By then, Calamity Jane had resumed her old ways and she died from hard living three years later. Noises heard coming from the town cemetery on a Halloween a half-century later caused some in town to joke that her ghost had risen, unhappy from her eternal rest beside Wild Bill. The supposed cause of her discontent was the premiere that week of the 1953 comedy movie Calamity Jane in which the ever perky, squeaky-clean Doris Day has the title role.
If that were so, then a big racket should be heard coming from Mount Moriah this Halloween. The barfly-turned-angel would no doubt be as mad as a murder hornet to see the Deadweird crowd gathering in a pandemic that continues to fill so many actual coffins.
The winners of the costume contest in past years have included Robert Leonard, who won first prize in 2011 for an elaborate “Swamp People” get-up. He won the prize for scariest costume another year by coming as an electric chair.
“Electric lights flashing and the sounds,” he recalled.
But his work as a physician’s assistant in a South Dakota emergency room gives him continual cause to take precautions against COVID-19.
“Unless you can incorporate a positive air pressure respirator, I won’t participate,” he said.
He and his fellow emergency room workers are the real life equivalent of Calamity Jane at her angelic best and he does not need extra frights.
“It’s scary at work some days,” he said.
He says of Calamity Jane’s legacy, “She was a big deal in Deadwood back then,” he said.
He is as bothered as she would no doubt be by people acting as of the virus were not a deadly threat.,
“We’re not doing it as well as we could be,” he said. “I think we’ve got a bad time coming this fall.”
Michael Dowding won the most creative costume last year with this getup. He won’t participate this year.
Courtesy Michael DowdingAmong those who will participate in the 2020 costume contest is college professor Michael Dowding, who won the Most Creative prize last year. His costume was called “I Need My Personal ‘Space’” and portrayed him as an alien under a clear palace bubble at the center of a flying saucer whose circumference was big enough to ensure 360 degrees of social distancing
“That would have been good for this year,” he said.
He has over the years won every possible prize save for the group one and that was because he always goes solo. He was not about to let COVID-19 keep him from a chance at another first place this year, though he does not intend to attend the indoor Monster Ball the night before. He wants to keep this year’s costume a surprise, but he did reveal one feature.
“A mask,” he said.
Let us hope that prevents him and everybody else at Deadweird from ending up in an all-too-real coffin.
