David Milch, creator of HBO's critically acclaimed Western series, "Deadwood," said, "The only reason the town of Deadwood exists is gold." Milch bluntly discards the Western genre's foundational ideology of self-determination, considering these principles a delusion that obscures the material realities of the late nineteenth century. Were it not for the curious oscillation of history and economy, of time and theft, toward a mining free-for-all zone in the Black Hills, it seems unlikely that the war cries of noninterference and isolationism would have sounded so consistently throughout the camp of prospectors. "Deadwood" contributes to recent revisions of the Western precisely by calling attention to the economic and historical conditions that incubated the illusory myth of self-reliant individualism in the frontier space.