What Deadwood characters are real? Every historical figure in the show, from Hickok to Hearst

The real people, name by name

• Seth Bullock — the show's lawman was a real hardware merchant who arrived in Deadwood in August 1876 and became the camp's first sheriff in 1877. He later built the Bullock Hotel, still standing today, and died in 1919.
• Sol Star — Bullock's real business partner, who went on to serve as Deadwood's mayor for roughly a decade.
• Al Swearengen — very real, and by most accounts worse than Ian McShane's version. He ran the Gem Theater, a notorious saloon and brothel, and lured women west with fake job offers. He died broke in Denver in 1904, found dead near the train tracks.
• Wild Bill Hickok — shot in the back of the head by Jack McCall at Nuttall & Mann's No. 10 saloon on August 2, 1876, holding the aces-and-eights "dead man's hand."
• Jack McCall — acquitted by a hasty miners' court, then retried legally in Yankton (Deadwood sat on Indian territory, so the first verdict didn't count) and hanged on March 1, 1877.
• Calamity Jane — real, though her claimed closeness to Hickok was heavily embellished. She's buried beside him at Mount Moriah Cemetery.
• Charlie Utter — Hickok's loyal friend, who really did organize his funeral.
• E.B. Farnum — the weaselly hotelier was a genuine merchant and the camp's first mayor.
• A.W. Merrick — co-founder of the Black Hills Pioneer, Deadwood's first newspaper.
• Reverend Smith — Henry Weston Smith, the camp's first preacher, though the show changes his death. The real Smith was murdered on the road in August 1876.
• George Hearst — the season 3 villain was a real mining magnate who bought the Homestake claim in 1877. It became one of the richest gold mines in history, operating until 2002 — and his son was William Randolph Hearst.
• Jack Langrishe and Tom Nuttall — the theater impresario and the No. 10's owner, both real.

How close does the show stick to the facts?

Closer than you'd think. Bullock and Star really did roll into camp a day or so before Hickok was killed, exactly as season 1 stages it. The lawlessness was literal — Deadwood was an illegal settlement on land granted to the Lakota, which is why McCall's first trial meant nothing.

Bullock's later life outdid the show. He became lifelong friends with Theodore Roosevelt, who made him a US Marshal.

Roosevelt, in his 1913 autobiography, remembered Bullock as: "a true Westerner, the finest type of frontiersman"

Who was invented?

Alma Garret, Trixie, Doc Cochran, Joanie Stubbs, and Cy Tolliver are all Milch's creations — though Tolliver's Bella Union saloon was a real Deadwood establishment. They're the connective tissue between the historical figures.

For the record: when Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1905, Bullock rounded up a troop of cowboys and rode them down Pennsylvania Avenue in the parade. The finest type of frontiersman, indeed.