Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

Emily
Women in Deadwood were few, and no better than they needed to be. Most of them lived in a house
called the Cricket, down at the end of the south bend, where they plied their trade under the cold
watchful eye of Mrs. Marshall, who smoked opium and owned the house. Others were independent,
like Calamity Jane, who in recent weeks had made a great show of mourning the death of Bill Hickok,
much to the disgust of Hickok’s friends. Calamity Jane was so masculine she often wore a soldier’s
uniform and traveled undetected with the boys in blue, giving them service in the field; she had gone
with Custer’s 7th Cavalry on more than one occasion. But she was so male that she often boasted that
“give me a dildo in the dark, and no woman can tell me from a true man.” As one observer noted, this
left Jane’s appeal somewhat obscure.
A few Deadwood miners had brought their wives and families, but they did not often show in town.
Colonel Ramsay had a fat squaw wife named Sen-a-lise; Mr. Samuels had a wife, too, but she was
consumptive and always stayed indoors. So for the most part, the feminine element was provided by
the Cricket women, and the girls who worked in the saloons. In the words of one Deadwood visitor,
they were “pleasant women of a certain age, but in appearance as hard and mean as the rest of the
landscape of that wretched mining town. The ones that ran tables in the saloons smoked and swore
with the best of the men, and were so full of tricks that seasoned gamblers avoided them, and
preferred men as dealers.”
Into this hard-bitten world, Miss Emily Charlotte Williams appeared as a floating vision of
loveliness.
She arrived one noon on a miner’s buckboard, dressed entirely in white, her blond hair tied back
fetchingly. She was young—though perhaps a few years older than Johnson; she was immaculate; she
was delicate and fresh and sweet, and possessed some notable curvatures. When she took a room at
the Grand Central Hotel, she became the most interesting new arrival since young Foggy had showed
up with a wagonload of mysterious crates and two dead men covered in snow.
News of Miss Emily, her lovely appearance and her tender story, raced around the town. Perkins’s
dining room, never before full, was packed that night as everyone came to get a look at the creature.
She was an orphan, the daughter of a preacher, the Reverend Williams, who had been killed in the
nearby town of Gayville while building a church. At first it was said that he had been shot by a
devilish desperado, but it later turned out he had fallen from the roof under construction and broken
his neck.
In her grief, it was also said, Miss Emily had collected her few belongings, and set out to find her
brother Tom Williams, whom she knew to be prospecting somewhere in the Black Hills. She had