Chinatown

Deadwood's Chinatown, on the lower end of Main Street, was once one of the largest Chinese settlements in the American West, with hundreds of residents working as miners, laundrymen, merchants, doctors and labourers. It thrived from the 1870s into the early 1900s, then dwindled as anti-Chinese laws and quotas drove residents out.

Almost nothing of the original neighbourhood survives at street level, but informational plaques mark the locations of the joss houses, herbalist shops and the Wing Tsue Bazaar, and an archaeological dig in the 2000s recovered thousands of objects now on display in the Adams Museum. It is a sobering reminder of the multi-ethnic reality behind the cowboy iconography.

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At its peak in the 1880s Deadwood's Chinatown was the largest west of San Francisco, with perhaps four hundred residents, two joss houses, an opium den district, and several merchant houses. Almost nothing of the original neighbourhood survives above ground — but archaeologists have recovered tens of thousands of artefacts from the basements and privies, many on display in the Adams Museum.

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