Bullock Hotel

The oldest hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota, on the Wall Street corner of Main, and the only haunted address in this catalogue whose ghost has a monument and a documented place of death that is not the building. Seth Bullock arrived in 1876 with his partner Sol Star to sell hardware, was appointed interim sheriff of Lawrence County in February 1877, later commanded Troop A of Grigsby's Cowboys — a different regiment from Roosevelt's Rough Riders, with which it is routinely confused — and was made Black Hills forest supervisor and then US marshal by his friend Theodore Roosevelt. When the fire of 5 March 1894 took the hardware store, the partners built a sandstone hotel on the site instead, opened in 1896. The legend says Bullock never checked out of room 211. He died of colon cancer on 23 September 1919 at his home, 28 Van Buren Street — not in the hotel, and not in that room.

The Bullock Hotel stands on the corner of Wall and Main in Deadwood, South Dakota, and it is the only building in this catalogue whose ghost is a man with a monument, a federal appointment and a documented address of death that is not the hotel. Seth Bullock arrived in Deadwood in 1876, the year of the Black Hills gold rush, with his friend and partner Sol Star. They set up as Star and Bullock, Auctioneers and Commission Merchants, first under canvas and then in a building, and sold hardware to a camp that had none. In February 1877 the territorial governor, John L. Pennington, appointed Bullock interim sheriff of Lawrence County — not of Deadwood, which is how the story is usually told — until the first election that November. The job lasted about nine months, and he never killed anyone doing it. That is the smaller half of his life. In 1884, escorting a horse thief into Deadwood, he met a young rancher named Theodore Roosevelt, and the friendship shaped the rest of his career. In 1898 Bullock took Troop A of the Third United States Volunteer Cavalry — Grigsby's Cowboys, raised by South Dakota's attorney general Melvin Grigsby and mustered in that May — and recruited eighty-four men to fill it, mostly miners and cowboys. The regiment is often collapsed into Roosevelt's Rough Riders; it was a different unit, and it never reached Cuba. Roosevelt later made him the first supervisor of the Black Hills Forest Reserve and then United States Marshal for South Dakota, which he was for nine years. The hotel comes out of a fire. Deadwood burned on 5 March 1894 — the lower Main Street business district, the stretch the town called the Badlands — and the blaze took the two-storey wood-frame building that housed the hardware store. Bullock and Star did not rebuild the store. On the same corner they put up a three-storey hotel faced in sandstone — steam heat, indoor bathrooms on every floor, a dining room, a sample room where travelling salesmen could lay out their cases — for about $40,000. It went up across 1894 and 1895 and opened in 1896, the grandest thing in town. The City of Deadwood's own timeline counts sixty-four rooms; the standard encyclopaedia entry says sixty-three, and nobody has published the plan that would settle it. Roosevelt died in January 1919. Bullock and the Society of Black Hills Pioneers raised a stone tower to him on the mountain above Deadwood and dedicated it on 4 July 1919, the first monument to Roosevelt anywhere in the country. Bullock died eleven weeks later, on 23 September 1919, of colon cancer. He did not die in the hotel. He died at his home at 28 Van Buren Street. The ghost story says otherwise, and says it precisely: that Seth Bullock never checked out of room 211. Staff and guests describe being touched, hearing their names called, seeing a figure in the halls, and finding that whoever it is keeps an eye on how the work is going — the owner still playing host, still running a tight ship. The hotel now holds a casino as well as twenty-eight of its original rooms, cut down in a restoration between 1991 and 1997. In 2015 the Travel Channel brought Ghost Adventures here for a two-hour Halloween special on Deadwood, broadcast on 31 October.

The Bullock Hotel is at 633 Main Street, on the Wall Street corner, in Deadwood, South Dakota. It is a working hotel and casino, open to the public, and the way to see the inside is to book a room, eat, or walk into the gaming floor — there is no admission charge and no separate tour of the building. Room 211 is a normal room and can be booked like any other; expect it to be asked for, and priced, accordingly. Twenty-eight of the original sixty-three rooms survive, so the hotel is smaller inside than its façade suggests. The whole of Deadwood has been a National Historic Landmark district since 1961, which is rare for an entire town, and the walk from the Bullock takes in most of the addresses the ghost tours use. Two things nearby are worth the detour for anyone here because of Seth Bullock rather than because of the hotel: Mount Roosevelt, above the town, where the stone tower he raised to Theodore Roosevelt in July 1919 still stands, and Mount Moriah Cemetery, where he is buried — his grave placed, at his own request, facing that mountain.