Al Swearengen: He Was WORSE Than HBO Made Him.

Al Swearengen: The Real Man Was Worse Than HBO's Deadwood Ian McShane's Al Swearengen was the villain you couldn't stop watching. The court records from Deadwood, Dakota Territory tell a colder story. In 1879 a Deadwood court fined Al Swearengen fifty dollars for beating his wife Nettie — in a building reportedly taking in five thousand dollars a night. Ten years later his second wife went to the law about being choked and threatened, then paid seven dollars and fifty cents out of her own pocket to make the case disappear. This video walks the documented record of the Gem Theater and the man who ran it: the newspaper advertisements that lured women west from Chicago with prepaid tickets and promises of hotel work, the September 1884 Black Hills Daily Times front page, the 1887 Omaha Daily Bee report, the divorce filings, and the unresolved death on a Denver railroad crossing in 1904. We also separate the history from the show. The Seth Bullock partnership, the George Hearst feud, the character Francis Wolcott — what HBO invented, what it compressed, and the parts viewers assume were fiction that turned out to be real. Every date here comes from period newspapers and court records. Where historians disagree, we say so. Where the record goes dark, we say that too. If you're descended from someone who was in Deadwood in these years, or from one of the women who came west on a ticket somebody else paid for, tell us in the comments. Subscribe for more Old West history built on documents, not legends. Saddle & Smoke — Real Stories. Rough Country. #Deadwood #AlSwearengen #WildWest #OldWest #GemTheater #WesternHistory #AmericanHistory #WildWest #OldWest #AmericanHistory #WesternHistory #Outlaws #Cowboys #FrontierHistory #SaddleAndSmoke