Deadwood is/was a real mining camp in the Black Hills. According to the publicity for the show the real Deadwood had a murder rate of one a day. It was a pretty rough place, but I rather doubt whether it was quite the never-ending orgy of drink, drugs, sex and violence we see in the show.
I trust Ford. I think his picture of Tombstone in My Darling Clementine- the rough and the refined living side by side, with someone like Doc Holliday having a foot in both the salons and the saloons- is probably as accurate as it gets.
Like you I suspect that the Victorians, even Victorians in mining camps, were less freely spoken than we are today. And I'm not at all sure about the sexual swearing. I think that's modern. My gut feeling is that people in the late Victorian era would have gone in a whole lot more for blasphemy.
But where would one look to find out about that kind of thing?
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Date: 2004-09-22 01:30 pm (UTC)I trust Ford. I think his picture of Tombstone in My Darling Clementine- the rough and the refined living side by side, with someone like Doc Holliday having a foot in both the salons and the saloons- is probably as accurate as it gets.
Like you I suspect that the Victorians, even Victorians in mining camps, were less freely spoken than we are today. And I'm not at all sure about the sexual swearing. I think that's modern. My gut feeling is that people in the late Victorian era would have gone in a whole lot more for blasphemy.
But where would one look to find out about that kind of thing?