![Along The Muddy Thoroughfare Of Deadwood With Colorado Charlie Utter Along The Muddy Thoroughfare Of Deadwood With Colorado Charlie Utter](https://irishgop.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Along-The-Muddy-Thoroughfare-Of-Deadwood-With-Colorado-Charlie-Utter.jpg)
Along The Muddy Thoroughfare Of Deadwood With Colorado Charlie Utter
I am in the midst of one of my periodic perambulations along the muddy thoroughfare of Deadwood. I am finding the legendary HBO drama more resonant than ever, given the tenor of our own times. Plague’s been in camp. Rumor continually calls into the doubt the validity of our claims. Entertaining, appeasing and manipulating the hoople heads is the object of our culture — and the fundamental political question of our day is no different than that of 1876. Namely…
Of course, I love the language — and I’m not even talking about the famously florid onslaught of curses and obscenity, though I love that, too.
*
On this trip, I became especially interested in the character of Charlie Utter, played by Dayton Callie. Some of Deadwood’s characters are fundamentally bad people with an unexpected vein of compassion and decency in their character. Others are fundamentally decent people who have been mauled by the rough life of the frontier, forced or lured into moral compromises that can’t be walked back. Utter is among the most morally and ethically stable in that muddy world. Downright noble, even.
Like his historical counterpart, Utter is introduced as the boon companion of James Butler Hickock — Wild Bill. He endeavors to keep his fading friend from self-destruction, much to Wild Bill’s annoyance:
“Some goddamn time, a man’s due to stop arguing with hisself, feeling twice the goddamn fool he knows he is because he can’t be something he tries to be every goddamn day without once getting to dinnertime and not fucking it up. I don’t want to fight it no more. Understand me, Charlie? And I don’t want you pissing in my ear about it. Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?”
The historical Utter — known as Colorado Charlie — is today known only as Hickock’s devoted sidekick. Like the Deadwood character, there’s a lot more to him than that. Unlike the Deadwood character, Colorado Charlie was a flamboyant and fastidious dresser, just like Wild Bill. He was a trapper, a teamster, a prospector, and a scout, and he self-consciously projected the image, wearing fine buckskins and beaded moccasins. He was proud of his flowing locks and kept his beard well-trimmed. He also had a weird habit of bathing every day.
That’s Charlie on the right, with his brother Steve, at Wild Bill’s gravesite in Deadwood, South Dakota.
Utter operated a freight business between Deadwood and Cheyenne, Wyoming, as depicted in the show. He was good at the work, and made a success of himself. Somewhere in there, he married, but it’s not clear when he lived with his wife. And he really was a friend to Calamity Jane.
When Crooked-Nose Jack McCall capped Wild Bill in the No. 10 Saloon, Utter took custody of Hickock’s remains, and organized a big funeral for his friend. He left Deadwood and returned to his home base in Colorado for a while. He returned to Deadwood in the late 1870s and operated a dancehall that burned down in one of Deadwood’s catastrophic fires.
He drifted after that, operating saloons in Colorado and New Mexico. He was divorced by his wife, and carried on with a female faro dealer. Somehow, he drifted south to Panama, where he would work as a druggist (or “an American Indian doctor,” whatever that means} until his death in 1915. (The Deadwood movie diverges completely from history with regard to his later life).
Charlie Utter’s life and career conformed to a frontier pattern, following economic opportunity to boomtowns, seeing the good times roll and then seeing them crash out and having to start all over again. And again.
One of these days, Lady Marilyn and I will head out to South Dakota to visit the Black Hills and walk the considerably less muddy modern streets of Deadwood. And I’ll tip my hat to the shade of Charlie Utter, the historical and the fictional, a decent feller among a rough crowd.
*
Legends of the Old West did a wonderful interview with the actor who plays Dan Dority on Deadwood, prior to the release of the Deadwood movie in 2019. Some great stories here:
And some good history here:
*
On this rewatch, I have been highly cognizant of the influence Deadwood had on Black Sails. My beloved pirate drama was not a knock-off, but it certainly adopted the sensibility of a place — Nassau — being the primary character in the drama, with an ensemble cast of competing/collaborating characters swirling around and through it, pursuing a variety of agendas. I guess I’d have to say that this is my favorite form of drama.