VOA标准英语2010年-There's Still Gold in Them Thar Black

（单词翻译）

Or at least plenty of money wagered¹ in Deadwood's gambling² halls

Ted³ Landphair | Washington, DC 03 June 2010
 In the 1980s, town commissioners⁴ decided⁵ to fix up Deadwood and make it a genuine historic attraction. About one million people visit each year.

Every year, about one million people visit the town of Deadwood in the Black Hills of South Dakota — once one of the wildest and most lawless towns of America's Old West. 

Wild Bill Hickok, for instance, was a celebrated⁶ Deadwood gambler and gunman who was shot dead while dealing⁷ cards in a poker⁸ game.

Deadwood Dick, a black man, was one of the most accurate shots in the West. He could shoot a wart⁹ off your nose.

And Calamity¹⁰ Jane Burke was a hard-drinking harlot with a heart of gold.

Wild Bill Hickok was holding the dead man's hand - two aces¹¹ and two eights - when Jack¹² McCall walked up and shot him dead to avenge¹³, he said, Hickok's murder of McCall's brother.

So Deadwood was quite the rip-roaring town. And it's no ghost town today. It's thriving, thanks to historic attractions, games of chance, and an unusual commitment to preservation¹⁴.

Many citizens of Deadwood — which got its name from a stand of trees burned in a forest fire — got rich in 1876 as the cry of gold!! filled Deadwood Gulch¹⁵ in the Black Hills.

For a while, Deadwood was a sumptuous¹⁶ Victorian showplace of 25,000 people, with fine hotels and restaurants and electricity.

But it deteriorated¹⁷ over the decades, and by the 1980s, tourists were demanding better than Wild West joints¹⁸ with neon signs and fake knotty-pine facades¹⁹.

This is Deadwood City Hall, pretty fancy digs for the frontier, in 1890, less than a year after South Dakota became a state.

It was then that the town commissioners decided to fix up Deadwood and make it a genuine historic attraction rather than a phony one.

A South Dakota architect came in and restored the historic Bodega Saloon and several other Deadwood buildings.

And the town commissioners proposed a neat way to pay for all these improvements.

Voters all across South Dakota approved a measure allowing low-stakes gambling in Deadwood.

All fixed²⁰ up, Deadwood looks nothing like most dusty, ramshackle frontier towns.

Low stakes, meaning inexpensive slot machines and maximum $25 bets on poker.

More than half of the gaming profits would go directly to the town for architectural restoration. That turned into millions of dollars a year, and the gaming parlors²¹ now employ more people than live in Deadwood. 

So gambling and historic preservation became, in the words of one preservationist, Deadwood's Siamese twins. You cannot separate them.