David Milch's 'Life's Work' holds lessons about humanity and the power of art

There is a scene in the first season of Deadwood, David Milch's critically acclaimed HBO drama, that encapsulates the crux of the screenwriter and producer's life's work.

Deadwood was an illegal settlement on land stolen from the Lakota Sioux in the Black Hills of South Dakota during an 1870s gold rush; explores the settlement's history with a focus on, as Milch writes, "how people make a community whether they intend to or not." In the fifth episode, the settlers are grappling with the craven killing of Wild Bill Hickok, the frontier folk hero and gunslinger. Reverend H.W. Smith presides over Hickok's burial: "Mr. Hickok will lie beside two brothers...So much blood...[I] don't know the purpose now, but know now to testify that, not knowing, I believe. St. Paul tells us, 'By one Spirit we are all baptized into one body...For the body is not