South Dakota, US: The real wild west city of Deadwood, travel guide

With its neat, paved streets, sturdy, handsome buildings and laid-back, civilised air, Deadwood today is a lot different to how I'd envisaged it. Then again, most places have changed a fair bit since the 1870s. That's the era in which Deadwood – the noughties HBO TV drama – was set, capturing viewers' attention over three slow-burn seasons with the shenanigans of this then-lawless "Wild West" frontier town, which sprang up illegally on native American lands after gold was discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The show had a colourful cast of characters, including Al Swearengen, a saloon and brothel kingpin played with spiky relish by British actor Ian McShane, and fittingly, on our visit to Deadwood – part of a seven-day Spotlight on South Dakota trip with Collette – we're shown around by another larger-than-life local personality.

Brimming with energy and anecdotes, Dave is the wise-cracking guide of Kevin Costner's Original Deadwood tour – one of various ventures the Hollywood star got involved in after shooting his 1990 magnum opus, Dances with Wolves, in South Dakota. Driving us around on a juddery converted yellow school bus, Dave transports us back to 1876, when a mining camp was established in Deadwood Gulch (a gulch is a steep-sided ravine marking the course of a stream).

The settlement was named Deadwood because of all the dead trees that littered the area when the first pioneers struck gold. Peeking up at the cliffs that surround the town, I see a healthy sprinkling of ponderosa pine and aspen trees, and as Dave unfurls tales about Deadwood's famous poker players and preachers, gunslingers and gold-diggers, I browse, on the bus walls, antique newspaper clippings and "wanted" posters of former residents including Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok.

Like many characters in the Deadwood TV show, including Al Swearengen, they actually existed, and we wind up a steep narrow road, past free-roaming mountain goats, to the Mount Moriah cemetery, where old pals Jane (real name: Martha Jane Burke) and Bill (James Butler Hickok) are buried next to each other.

Their graves, especially Bill's – which has a bronze head bust, replete with his trademark handlebar moustache – are a pilgrim site, with visitors leaving flowers and bullets, bottles of Jack Daniels and playing cards. "Bill came to Deadwood looking for gold," says Dave. "And he got shot while gambling."

Re-enactments of his killing – during a poker game in 1876 – and the trial of his murderer, Jack McCall, are regularly performed for tourists in Deadwood. Also laid to rest in this hilltop cemetery was Seth Bullock – the town's first sheriff, played by Timothy Olyphant on screen – and Dave reveals there's one remaining grave from Deadwood's first Chinese community, which, at one point, before the gold mines dwindled, formed America's biggest Chinatown outside San Francisco with around 400 people. Besides gold prospecting, Chinese merchants helped serve Deadwood's burgeoning population (including with opium dens) but most were posthumously returned home for traditional burials.