Career
He reputedly combined a reputation for brutality with an uncanny instinct for forging political alliances. Swearengen lured desperate young women from far away to Deadwood, then forced them into prostitution through a combination of bullying and physical brutality, committed by himself and his henchmen. The results were highly lucrative: the Gem earned an average of $5,000 a night, sometimes as much as $10,000 (worth between $140,000 and $280,000 when inflation-adjusted for 2009).
The Gem burned down on September 26, 1879, along with much of the town, but Swearengen rebuilt it larger and more opulent than ever, to great public acclaim. Swearengen's talent for making canny alliances and financial payoffs kept him insulated from the general drive to clean up the town, including the otherwise successful work of Seth Bullock, until the Gem burned down once again in 1899. Swearengen remarried the same year to Odelia Turgeon.
It appears that the Methodist church in Deadwood - which also took a moralist crusade to clean up the town - specifically targeted the Gem Theater. According to his rediscovered obituary, Swearengen was found dead in the middle of a suburban Denver street on November 15, 1904. He apparently died of a massive head wound and was not hopping a freight train as is often reported.
From 2004 to 2006, the HBO television series Deadwood depicted Swearengen as a powerful and influential figure in the early history of the town, ruthlessly murderous and abusive but ultimately guiding it towards its development and annexation to the Dakota Territory, once he comes to see this course as fitting his best interests. The series, however, altered Swearengen to be English-born, and his character was referred to as "the slimy Limey".