The Black Hills: a Project Gutenberg eBook

COPYRIGHT, 1952, BY
SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY AMERICAN BOOK—STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK

Acknowledgments

The research on early Black Hills and Badlands history was ably assisted by Miss June Carothers, whose services were provided the author through a generous grant-in-aid by the University of Denver’s Bureau of Humanities and Social Development.

Miss Ina T. Aulls, Mrs. Alys Freeze, Mrs. Opal Harber, Miss Margery Bedinger, Mrs. Margaret Simonds, Mrs. Elizabeth Kingston, and Mrs. Clara Cutright, all of the Denver Public Library, are particularly to be thanked for placing the resources of that institution at my disposal.

For assistance in preparing the manuscript, I wish to thank Miss Helen Kiamos, Miss Edith Goldfarb, and Miss Lillian Helling.

I am indebted to Bell Photo of Rapid City for the photograph of the Needles highway; to Ned Perrigoue of Rapid City for that of Sylvan Lake; to the Denver Public Library Western Collection for those of Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok, and Deadwood Gulch in 1881; and to Mr. A. H. Pankow of the South Dakota State Highway Commission for that of a Black Hills stream.

And finally, as always, thanks go to my wife, Ann, for her patient editorial help.

Books by Albert N. Williams

Illustrations

Introduction

I have had an opportunity to enjoy one of the most readable accounts of the Black Hills I have ever come across. It is written to acquaint traveling America with an area which was long off the beaten path of tourists, and which has only during the past quarter century been recognized as a place where people who wish to “Know America First” may profitably spend some time.

Mr. Williams has outlined the historical reason why this small wonderland was so long outside the consciousness of America, and he has devoted a chapter to telling about the methods of nature in producing the intricacies of this formation, older by far than the Alps or the Himalayas. He has made the subject live, and he includes enough expert terminology to satisfy the reader that he knows whereof he speaks.

In his chapter on “The Hills Today” Mr. Williams outlines what the tourist should see, and how to see it. For that chapter alone his book would be well worth the attention of xiv every prospective sight-seer. He has two chapters pertaining to the history of the region, the first speculating on how the whole economic growth of the West might well have been altered had a confirmed story of “gold in the Black Hills” been released fifty years before it was spread-eagled on the pages of the Chicago Inter-Ocean. It is an interesting speculation, and he gives it a pleasing reality.

Another chapter deals with the lives of some of the characters exploited and given semi-permanent fame by the old dime novels. Deadwood without these characters would be just another picturesque town set down in a mountain valley; with them it becomes one of America’s better-known hot spots, vying with the Klondike and Leadville.

Mr. Williams’ last chapter on the Badlands, a neighboring phenomenon, a place of amazing mystery and strange disorder, serves to depict what might be termed the undepictable in terms exactly calculated to excite the reader’s absorbed interest.

CHAPTER ONE
The Black Hills:
The Forbidden Land

The thing to remember is that the Black Hills are not hills at all. They are mountains, the highest mountains east of the Rockies, with Harney Peak rising to a height of 7,242 feet above sea level. Inasmuch as the prairie floor averages, at the four entrances to the Hills, only 3,200 feet in elevation, these are mountains of considerable stature.

The title “hills” was by no means given the area by early white settlers. Indeed, if that majestic domain had not already been named the Black Hills by the Indians, George Armstrong Custer, who in 1874 made the first full-scale exploration of the region, would no doubt have dignified it with a more appropriate and 2 properly descriptive name—the Sioux or the Dakota Mountains, in all probability.

From time beyond remembrance, however, the region had been known to the Indians as Paha Sapa, exactly to be translated as “Black Hills,” and very properly that name was accepted by government geographers. The use of the word “black” possibly fulfilled several functions, for not only do these massive peaks appear decidedly black when seen against the horizon across distances as great as a hundred miles, but they were, to the superstitious braves of the Teton Sioux, the abode of the Thunders and studiously to be avoided.

This taboo fastness was one of the last regions in the great American West to be explored and settled. For one reason, it enjoyed an isolation from the centers of development that served to discourage any but the most hardy of explorers. Lying in the extreme western end of present-day South Dakota, the Black Hills were two hundred miles west of the settlements around Pierre, on the Missouri River, and two hundred miles north of the towns along the North Platte, the valley of the Oregon-California Trail. The most important reason, though, for its belated opening was that gold was not discovered in the Black Hills 3 until 1874, and it was the discovery of gold in various sections which more than any other single set of circumstances dictated the pattern of the development of the trans-Mississippi West.

Even today this fascinating region remains nearly the most remote of all America’s resort and recreation areas. The Grand Canyon lies but an hour’s drive from a major east-west transcontinental highway. Estes Park,[1] in the Rockies, is only seventy miles from the city of Denver. Glacier Park is easily served by the Great Northern Railroad on its overland run, and Yellowstone enjoys direct service by three railroads. But the Black Hills lie beyond the privileges of railroad stopovers, and in order to visit them the tourist has no choice but to plan a vacation trip for the sake of the Hills themselves and not as a side venture from any of the traditional tours of the West. The Hills are worth the effort.

The Black Hills occupy a rectangular realm which is roughly one hundred miles long, north to south, and fifty miles across its east-west 4 axis. The White River Badlands, which are customarily visited on any Black Hills trip, form a depression in the high prairies some forty miles long and fifteen miles across the widest part. This stark and empty waste is to be found some seventy-five miles east of the Black Hills, or, more precisely, east of Rapid on U.S. Highway 14-16.

There are five major access routes to the land of Paha Sapa. From the west, which is to say from Yellowstone Park, five hundred miles distant, the Hills can be reached by U.S. Highways 14 and 16. These routes come in together across the high plains of northern Wyoming, and separate a few hours’ drive from the South Dakota border, 14 veering to the north and 16 continuing through the central section of the Hills.

From the south, U.S. 85 comes up from Denver, four hundred miles distant, crossing the Lincoln Highway at Cheyenne, and continuing along the route of the old Cheyenne-Deadwood stage.

From Omaha and points in the southeast, the Hills are best reached over U.S. 20 across the top side of Nebraska. Although this route is not a major east-west route for interstate tourists, it serves a busy agricultural section and is generally in fine repair.

From the east U.S. 14 and 16, again, bring the tourist through Pierre, on the Missouri River, past the Badlands, and into the Hills through Rapid City. From Minneapolis the distance is just over six hundred miles, while from Chicago it is very nearly a thousand.

For those entering the region from the north, U.S. 12 from Miles City, Montana, is in all probability the best route.

The gateways to the Black Hills are the towns of Hot Springs in the south, Rapid City on the eastern edge, Spearfish or Belle Fourche at the north, and Custer in the west. All these towns offer entirely acceptable accommodations for a touring family; in fact, no one need drive more than twenty or thirty miles from any point in the area to find suitable lodgings at a desired rate.

Hot Springs, on U.S. 18-85A and State 87, is situated at an altitude of 3,443 feet and has a population of approximately five thousand. It is the one sector of the Black Hills that does not owe its original development to the gold rush of the seventies, but was sought out from the earliest days for its natural thermal springs.

The town is located in a large bowl of the southern hills known as the Vale of Minnekahta, from the Sioux name for “warm waters.” Situated as it is on the rim of the Hills region, it was not included in the general taboo that cloaked the rest of Paha Sapa to the north; and for nearly a century before its discovery by the white man in 1875, it was a favored health resort of the Indians. As a matter of fact, Battle Mountain, which overlooks the town, takes its name from a legendary war between the Sioux and the Cheyenne for the exclusive privileges of the hot baths.

Not long after the discovery of the springs a syndicate of investors who had come into the Hills from Iowa bought the ranch claims that had been taken out in the Minnekahta Canyon, and sought to develop the region as a spa. This was in the late eighties when salubrious waters were in high fashion as a cure for arthritis and other joint and muscular disorders of various degrees of complexity. Colonel Fred T. Evans, who had made a fortune operating a bull-team freight line from Fort Pierre to Rapid City, built an elaborate resort, the Evans Hotel, which even today is imposing in its last-century splendor; and with the arrival in 1890 and 1891 of two railroads, the Chicago and Northwestern 8 and the Burlington, wealthy cure-seekers from all over the United States made it their habit to spend the summer months in this pleasant town.

Healing waters have long since gone out of vogue as a form of recreation, and although several clinics still treat a modest number of visitors for one indisposition or another, the town of Hot Springs has ceased to be a tourist center of any consequence. Also, the fact that the Springs are located a considerable distance south of U.S. 16, the main east-west route through the Hills, has contributed to the increasing isolation which this town enjoys, 9 drowsily seeing to the wants of the occasional visitor who strays into Paha Sapa from the south along U.S. 85. But do not mistake it, it is a pleasant town to stop in, with excellent motor courts and a good selection of restaurants.

The town of Custer, a scant fifteen miles from the Wyoming border on U.S. 16, is little more today than a tourist stopover. It is almost two thousand feet higher than Hot Springs, at an altitude of 5,301 feet, and contains, according to the latest estimates, nearly two thousand residents.

As the tourist enters the town he will immediately be amazed by the wide main street; but if he ponders for a moment the problems of turning a freight wagon behind sixteen oxen, the reason will become clear. Custer, the western gateway to the Hills, was, until the coming of the railroads, a major way station on the busy Cheyenne-Deadwood stage and freight route; and for fifteen years the great bull wagons teamed into this busy center where, in most cases, the goods were unloaded and trans-shipped by lighter wagons into the various mining centers throughout the northern and central Hills.

Custer, the oldest of the white man’s settlements 10 in Paha Sapa, was founded in 1875 by gold-seekers who flocked into the territory following the reports of yellow metal sent back by George Custer after his exploratory campaign of 1874. In the first spring and summer of its existence more than five thousand miners swarmed into the region to pan gold. This invasion was a violation of the government’s treaty with the Sioux, and the military forced the argonauts to leave.

By 1876 the Indian problem had come to a head with the defeat of General Custer on the Little Big Horn in eastern Montana; and as one phase of retaliation the federal government redrafted the Sioux treaty, allowing American citizens to enter the Black Hills, until this time reserved for the Indians. Although for some time the tribal leaders could not be persuaded to sign the revised agreement, the restrictions on settlers were removed, and back into the Hills rushed the prospectors—this time to the new strikes in Deadwood Gulch, in the north.

By the middle of 1877 Custer, where gold had originally been found, had a population of a mere three hundred souls, all of them concerned primarily with the operation of the stage stations and hostels. True, a few grizzled 11 placer miners still worked the streams near by, and do to this day; but hard rock mining in Deadwood was the new order of affairs.

The visitor to this section of the Hills today will find it pleasant to stay the night in any one of a wide choice of tourist courts and other reasonable billets, and he may see much of historical interest within a few miles’ drive of Custer. A settler’s stockade, reconstructed to the original model of 1874, is a remarkable site to visit, and the Jewel Cave is best reached from this point. For sheer color and pageantry the annual celebration of Gold Discovery Days, which is held at Custer late in July—near the date of the discovery of gold, July 27—is an affair not to be missed during a Black Hills vacation at that time of year.

The town of Spearfish is the point of entrance to the region on U.S. 14, or, coming in from the north, on U.S. 85. This tidy metropolis, called the Queen City of the Black Hills, never knew the heady history that marked the early days of Custer, of Deadwood, of Rapid City, or even of fashionable Hot Springs. Lying outside the magnificent natural bowl of mineral deposits, Spearfish was founded and exists today for the simple purpose of supplying the inner Hills with food and produce. It 12 has a population of between three and four thousand people, most of whose energies are devoted to agriculture and livestock.

Spearfish has, however, carved for itself a fame and renown even larger, in many quarters, than that enjoyed by the gold rush towns of gustier memories. It is the home of the Black Hills Passion Play.

This beautiful and stirring performance, which is given in a large amphitheater on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday evenings throughout the summers, is a resurrection in an American atmosphere of the centuries-old Passion of Luenen, in Germany. The man who plays the Christus, an inherited responsibility through many generations, is Josef Meier, who fled from Europe in 1932. For six years, with a reassembled cast, he toured the United States, performing a much trimmed-down version of the historic morality on college campuses, in civic auditoriums, and at summer encampments. It was at such a performance at the Black Hills Teachers College that the citizens of Spearfish were inspired to offer the touring company a permanent home. Meier and his group eagerly accepted the offer, and the town constructed an outdoor theater seating eight thousand people. Now, each winter 13 the Passion Play continues its tour of the United States, but all during July and August it remains in residence, acting its moving and majestic pageant to constantly packed houses.

The eastern gateway to the Hills is Rapid City, a metropolis of thirty thousand people which lies on the level prairie just to the east of the final ring of foothills. Founded, like Spearfish, not as a mining center but to serve the near-by gold regions, Rapid City has developed a maze of industrial and commercial enterprises. Shipping, of course, has been a basic form of commerce from the earliest days, with the two most heavily traveled trails into the Black Hills, that from Fort Pierre and that from Sidney, Nebraska, on the Union Pacific, entering the gold area at Rapid City. Lumbering, manufacture, banking, and livestock quickly became prominent as the gold fever subsided and the more permanent settlers began coming into the region to take up the rich cattle and farming lands in western South Dakota. A final guarantee that Rapid City will continue to flourish may be seen in the selection by the Air Force of the high, level prairie land just ten miles to the east of the city as the nation’s major mid-continent bomber base.

Rapid City is served by U.S. Highway 14-16, and South Dakota state highways 40 and 79. Two railroads and a major airline assist in handling the heavy summer tourist travel, and from Rapid City practically every point of interest in the Black Hills can be reached by car within three hours.

CHAPTER TWO
The Formation of the Black Hills

One of the most rewarding features of a visit to the Black Hills is the opportunity for the average individual, who has no technical training, to see with his own eyes a museum of the earth’s ages and a living sample of practically every one of the many aeons of the planet’s history.

The Hills, which is to say the rock substances of the region, are older by hundreds of millions of years than the stone out-juttings of the Rocky Mountains. Layer after layer of slates and schists from the very foundations of this globe lie visibly exposed as the end result of a doming of the region, a vast blistering, as it were, which raised the entire structure, layer 16 upon layer, several thousand feet in the air. Following this doming process, a vigorous program of erosion commenced. Stratum by stratum the winds and rains cut across this huge blister in a horizontal plane, eventually laying the core open at the height above sea level at which we find the Black Hills today. From that core, extending in every direction in the general form of a circle, the various strata which once lay so smoothly one upon another have been laid open as one might slice off the top of an orange.

In order to get an even clearer picture of how this amazing phenomenon came about 17 through the aeons, let us fold back the ages to the very birth of this planet.

For centuries men have attempted to determine the earth’s exact age, but except for the famed Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland, who gravely calculated that the earth was formed at precisely nine o’clock on the morning of the twelfth of October in the year 4004 B.C., no scientist has been able to come closer than a few million years in the figures. Through a number of trustworthy measurements, however—including, in recent years, the examination of the deterioration of radioactive elements in rocks—geologists have agreed that the oldest known ingredients of the earth’s crust have been in existence at least two billion years, and, according to some very recent calculations, possibly as long as three and a half billion.

In what is known as the Archean period, the most ancient of which we have any geological knowledge, a vast sea covered much of North America, bounded by certain masses of land, the extent of which has never been discovered. From this land mass remnants of mud and sand were broken away by waves and deposited on the floor of the sea. Eventually, under the pressure of its own weight, this material 18 formed shales and sandstones to an undetermined depth—many thousands of feet. Those particular sandstones and shales underlie the entire Black Hills area and extend in nearly every direction for a considerable distance, suggesting perhaps that the area of the Hills was at one time the bottom of this watery bowl.

The Archean period came to an end some five hundred million years ago. By then the seas had withdrawn, and the new land formations which had lain under the early ocean merged with the vestiges of the first land mass. But this metamorphosis, which can be described in such calm fashion, was by no means a gentle affair. It took place largely as the result of a shifting and rising of certain ocean bottom areas, among which was the region where we now find the Black Hills.

At the time of this uplift, and possibly contributing to it, there was a tremendous disturbance in the lower regions of the earth which sent great streams of molten matter up into the several-mile-thick layer of shale, through which it poured toward the surface, breaking through in monolithic forms and hardening into granite. The New Mexico writer, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, describing 19 a similar geologic phenomenon in the valley of the Rio Grande, has called it “like sticking a knife through a tambourine,” and indeed it was. Harney Peak, in Custer State Park, is just such a granite finger pointing up through the original shales toward the sky.

When this disturbance took place the granite juttings did not rise above the surrounding landscape as they now do. In many cases they did not even reach the surface of the shale beds, but ceased their flow and hardened short of the crust of the earth, as it was then to be found. When, however, the region was domed, many millions of years later, the subsequent weathering of the huge blister did not attack these granite formations with anywhere near the vigor with which the softer sandstones and limestones were eroded. What actually occurred, then, was a peeling away of the softer rocks, leaving the granite formations near their original sizes, but at last above the ground level in the form of peaks, needles, and spires.

But we have gotten ahead of our story. Following the Algonkian period, when the molten matter was injected into the layers of shale, there came what is known as the Cambrian period. The Cambrian occupied the first 80,000,000 years of the Paleozoic era, which in 20 itself covered the entire period from 510,000,000 to 180,000,000 years ago.

During the Cambrian period the land subsided again, perhaps because of the weight of the uplifted sedimentary formations. During this subsidence the waters once again covered vast portions of North America, and additional muds and slimes were deposited on the bottom. It was at this period that life first appeared on the earth, in the form of simple marine organisms which have left fossil remains. These deposits made in the Cambrian period can be seen in outcroppings all through the region, although they are most notably found in the area about Deadwood. Because of their structure they indicate to the geologist that the shoreline of the ancient Cambrian sea was near at hand, and also that this covering of water was by no means as extensive or as deep as the earlier Archean sea.

The deposits of sand and mud, which were eventually pressed into stone, occasionally reach a depth of as much as five hundred feet, although they were laid down extremely slowly, as eddying mud is laid at the bottom of a pond. In the locality of Deadwood they contained a rich infiltration of gold, and the entire conglomeration was thoroughly intermixed with a vast outcropping of much older rock—this effect undoubtedly having taken place later, during the great continental uplift, when the final doming occurred.

THE AGES OF EARTH

The next period of the earth’s age—the Ordovician period, which extended from 430,000,000 to 350,000,000 years ago—has left its mark just as visibly upon the Black Hills. It was during this period that the many species of invertebrate marine life reached a zenith of development, and that a bed of sediment was laid down and later compressed to a pinkish limestone. The fact that this Ordovician bed is less than forty feet thick indicates that the land mass from which the muds and sands were drawn was very low, and that the Cambrian sea was relatively shallow, entertaining only minor erosive currents along its shores.

MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO	(Pre-Cambrian Existence back to 3½ Billions of years)
PALEOZOIC ERA
510
	Cambrian Period—First fossils deposited. Marine life.
430>
	Ordovician Period—Invertebrates increase greatly.
350>
	Silurian Period—Coral reefs formed. First evidence of land life.
310>
	Devonian Period—First forests. First amphibians.
250>
	Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, and Permian Periods.—Reptiles and insects appear. Continental uplift at end of this period.
180
MESOZOIC ERA
	Triassic Period—Small Dinosaurs. First mammals.
150>
	Jurassic Period—Dinosaurs and marine reptiles dominant.
125>
	Cretaceous Period—Dinosaurs reach zenith of development then disappear. Small mammals. Flowering plants and development of hardwood forests.
60
CENOZOIC ERA & PERIOD
	Paleocene Epoch—Archaic mammals.
50>
	Eocene Epoch—Modern mammals appear.
35>
	Oligocene Epoch—Great apes appear.
25>
	Miocene Epoch—Grazing types of mammals appear.
10>
	Pliocene Epoch—Man appears.
0

The next two ages, the Silurian and the Devonian, which brought our earth down to a scant 250,000,000 years ago, did not see the deposit of any silting in the Black Hills region. No doubt the waters which covered the locality dried up gradually. The Mississippian period, however, was a time of great depositional activity. A layer of limestone between five and six hundred feet thick was set down over the entire section. In later periods this limestone 23 underwent much decay and water erosion, which formed the amazing caverns for which the Black Hills are known. Wind Cave, now the site of a National Park, Crystal Cave, and Jewel Cave are the best-known tourist attractions among the many, although there are a number of lesser ones, some even today only partially explored.

The chemical activity which accomplished this erosion was caused by the seeping of rain water down through later accumulations of sediment on top of the layer of limestone. As it seeped through rotting vegetation and timber the water collected carbonic acid gases which, when it reached the level of the Mississippian limestone, eroded the structure and ate out huge hollows in it.

The thickness of the Mississippian deposit indicated that at this time the earth had again sunk beneath the waters to a considerable depth. The shallow sea which had not offered sediment to a greater depth than a few feet was replaced by active currents which carried heavier sedimentary materials from great distances, laying them down on the floor of the sea in various strata to a depth of several hundred feet. Finally, after an unknown number of millions of years, but perhaps during the 24 Triassic period, the land again rose above the level of the waters. A red shale suggests a time of great aridity when the region must have been a near desert, and certain discernible patterns in the shales suggest periods of rapid evaporation and a consequent change in chemical activity.

Finally the land subsided again, for the last time to date. At times salt water covered the region, and at other times fresh water left its chemical mark. At some levels in this last layer of sedimentary rocks an abundance of fossils can be found, indicating deep water, and at others ripple-marked rock indicates very shallow water. It remains a period of great mystery. How long this final submersion continued we do not know; but in all probability it lasted nearly a hundred million years, and then was terminated by the vast upending of North America which created the Rocky Mountains. This upheaval did not take place suddenly, as a volcanic eruption or a series of earthquakes, but apparently commenced about sixty million years ago and lasted, as a continuous series of shiftings and slow upheavals, for about twenty million years.

At the beginning of this mighty uplifting the region of the Black Hills was covered by 25 the various layers of sedimentary deposits to a depth of nearly two miles. Slowly this rectangular area was lifted as a dome over the surrounding prairies. We do not know how high above the level lands this dome reached, but we do know that several thousand feet of later deposits overcapped the granite upthrusts which were planted in the fundamental shales. Those granite fingers, which have now been exposed to view, stand from five hundred to four thousand feet above the plains, and thus the original dome may be assumed to have extended from eight to ten thousand feet above our present-day sea level.

Almost as soon as this era of upheaval first started, as soon as the first land of the Black Hills was elevated above the great sea, the forces of erosion set to work. Wind and rain worked their terrifying magic on the slowly rising terrain, carving away the softer rocks and the loose dirt and leaving only the granite outcroppings. Down from the sides of the great dome poured the waters of melting snows, gushing springs, and torrential rainfalls, digging out rivers, canyons, and the deep and narrow cuts which characterize this beautiful region. Slowly the land continued to rise and the oceans to fall until at last an equilibrium 26 was reached, a static state of affairs which remained much the same until our own period, when the base of the dome was at last revealed, with the surrounding lands drifting away in every direction on a gentle incline.

From that day the structure of the Black Hills has changed but little. The high winds off the Dakota plains and the annual spring run-off and seasonal rains cut their minute etchings in the landscape; but Nature’s greatest effort in the Black Hills part of the world has, it seems, been made. It must be remembered, though, that Nature has had other responsibilities. At the time of the doming of the Black Hills the Alps had not yet been formed, nor the Pyrenees, nor the Caucasus. And on the site of the mountains we know today as the sky-piercing Himalayas, the swampy waters still moldered.

CHAPTER THREE
The Hills Today

It is this writer’s personal opinion that no other resort area in the United States possesses such a wealth of tourist attractions as the Black Hills. This profusion of happy endowments can be separated into three categories, each of which deserves individual study and enjoyment. Two of these, the region’s folklore and its memories of the gold rush, belong to the amazing history of the Hills. But of course the visible landscape and the natural wonders of the area are the primary objects of the tourist’s visits, and it is proper that they be considered immediately and in detail.

Wind Cave

The Wind Cave lies ten miles north of Hot Springs on U.S. 85A. The cavern is the focal 28 point of interest in its own National Park, which takes in forty square miles. Nearly half of this park is enclosed with a high fence, behind which one of the last great bison herds roams contentedly. Protected antelope, elk, and deer also enjoy this game preserve.

The cavern was discovered, according to legend, by a cowboy who heard a continued low whistling noise in the weeds and, investigating, found air rushing from a ten-inch hole near the present entrance to the cave. And indeed it is this very phenomenon that makes Wind Cave different from other notable caverns, such as the one at Carlsbad. Even on the stillest of days a steady current of air can be felt rushing in or out of the cave’s opening—into the earth if the barometer is rising, and out of the ground if the pressure is falling.

The National Park Service conducts tours of the cave, the complete excursion lasting some two hours. Fortunately, although the visitor descends to a great depth as he searches out the various chambers on the route, the tour ends at an elevator which whisks him swiftly to the surface near the starting point.

The entire cavern is a little more than ten miles long, although there are portions of it which have not even yet been explored so that 29 their size may be known with accuracy. It is not graced with the growths of stalactites and stalagmites normally to be found in limestone formations, but nature has compensated for that lack by fashioning a peculiar box-work which looks for all the world as if the cavern had been subjected to an interminable frosting process. These beautiful fretwork deposits, which are not to be found in any other cave, are the result of a strange chemical process that took place in the limestone stratum where Wind Cave is located. Surface water seeping into the stone became charged with carbon dioxide gas from the decaying organic matter through which it passed. This gentle acid then dissolved the limestone only to redeposit it in cracks and crevices around other limestone fragments. The precipitated limestone was of a different chemical composition and resisted later onslaughts by the eroding acids—which, however, did eat away the fragments around which the precipitate had formed, leaving the maze of hollow crystalline formations that can be seen in the various chambers of the cavern.

The National Park, being relatively small, is not equipped with overnight facilities; but this does not matter, for the town of Hot Springs is but twenty minutes’ drive from the 30 park, and the town of Custer is only twenty miles away. There are, however, camping grounds in the park, and the Park Service operates a lunchroom at the entrance to the cave.

Custer State Park

Custer State Park is located almost in the center of the Black Hills. Containing nearly one hundred and fifty thousand acres, it is one of the largest state parks in America. It was originally set aside as a state game refuge, and it was not until the advent of summer touring as a national pastime that the state of South Dakota purchased additional private lands which contained scenic wonders, incorporating all of them into the one large area.

Today the park is the center of all tourist activity in the region. A number of excellent lodges, camp grounds, and tourist courts along every road make it particularly easy for the tourist to stop at will for a day or more to enjoy the various recreational facilities as his fancy dictates. In every respect the park is effectively administered: food and lodging prices are held to a reasonable figure, the cleanliness of the buildings and grounds is regularly inspected, and the landscape is protected from commercial exploitation.

The center of the park’s activities is the Game Lodge, a monstrous Victorian hotel built in 1919 and operated under a private lease. Close by the Game Lodge are cabins, stores, eating establishments, the park zoo, a museum, and the offices of the state park officials. The Lodge, those with a flair for nostalgia will recall, achieved international renown in 1927 when President Coolidge made it the summer White House. It lies on US. 16, thirty-two miles from Rapid City and seventeen miles from the town of Custer.

It behooves the writer to mention at this point that the museum connected with the Game Lodge is by no means the drab and dusty sort of collection of impedimenta associated with the vicinity that is so often found in museums at scenic sites. Indeed, this fine attraction is an assemblage of geological, paleontological, and historical items which trace with rare discernment the whole history of the Hills through the ages, and up to our own day. The visitor who fails to pass an hour in this exciting spot will have missed the heart of the Hills entirely.

Harney Peak

Harney Peak stands like a sentinel in Custer Park. The highest point in the Black Hills, it rises to an altitude of 7,242 feet, 4,000 feet above the prairie floor outside the Hills. Higher by 900 feet than Mount Washington in New Hampshire, it is the highest mountain east of the Rockies.

High as it is, Harney Peak is by no means the typical mountain which tourists come to expect after a trip through Colorado, for example, or western Wyoming. It is older by ages than the precipitous and craggy Rockies, and the winds and waters have worked their slow erosion on it, cutting away what high shelves and escarpments might originally have existed and leaving it, except at the top, a gentle and easy mountain that may be climbed over a trail which will scarcely tax the laziest tourist.

On the top of the peak will be found the core of granite that originally broke through the Archean shales. This granite, subject to the mechanical ravages of wind, rain, and frost, is rugged and coarse, a steep dome covered with a thick lichen. From this eminence the entire Black Hills area can be seen, rolling away 33 in every direction—great waves of pinnacle and mountain, gradually subsiding and disappearing in the haze of distance which covers the prairies. Especially striking from this spot is the view of Cathedral Park, with its hundreds of needle-like spires and organ pipes, and, sheltered in a quiet recess, that amazing phenomenon, Sylvan Lake.

The Needles

The Needles Highway, a fourteen-mile stretch of road, branches off U.S. 16 about five miles west of the Game Lodge. At the time of its construction in 1920-21 it was regarded as an engineering marvel, although later exploits of American highway builders, such as the road to the top of fourteen-thousand-foot Mount Evans in Colorado, have since far overshadowed this accomplishment.

The road winds and curves in an interminable pattern, finding its way, by trial and error it seems, among the great granite spires that give the region its name. These “needles,” through the last of which the highway actually plunges in a tunnel, are the remains of a great granite plateau which once covered that entire portion of the Black Hills. Contrary to popular opinion, the rocks are not outthrusts, the 34 result of some ancient upheaval, but the last thin vestiges of this once-solid plateau. The age-old process of erosion has carved them into the shapes they now have; and the inquiring visitor can see the process still at work, for upon close inspection this granite is found to be not the impregnable stone it appears, but rock in a late stage of disintegration. Rot is the word which actually describes this formation, and in many spots whole chunks can be picked from the side of a spire by hand. It was, as a matter of fact, this situation which made the construction of the Needles Highway possible. Had the granite been solid, the task of cutting the Needles and Iron Creek tunnels would have been so expensive as to prohibit the entire undertaking.

Sylvan Lake

Not all of the scenery in the Black Hills was created by Nature. Sylvan Lake, in many respects the most beautiful corner of the region, was made entirely by hand.

It was near the turn of the century when two hunters, Dr. Jennings of Hot Springs and Joseph Spencer of Chicago, got the intriguing idea of having an additional tourist attraction in the vicinity of Harney Peak—a lake.

Some lakes are difficult to construct, while some are relatively easy. Sylvan belongs in the latter category. The two imaginative gentlemen merely bought a small tract of land between two great granite shields and built a dam seventy-five feet high between the boulders. The waters of Sunday Creek, which flowed to their dam, together with local springs, at last contrived to fill the area back of the dam. Today this loveliest of lakes basks peacefully high above the world at an elevation of 6,250 feet, actually on top of a ridge, at the north terminal of the Needles Highway.

It is easy for any lover of water scenes to become enthusiastic as he describes the colorations of his favorite lake, so I shall merely state that Sylvan never looks the same in two consecutive moments. Not having the symmetry of natural lakes or the tremendous depths of glacial pools, this body of water plays the role of mirror to the fabulous rock shapes which surround it; and indeed it is a source of never-ending delight to watch the cloud and sun patterns as they wrestle with the shadows of the rocks on its surface.

For many years Sylvan Lake and its environs 36 were operated privately. A hotel catered to the tourists who bounced over the privately built road in buggies and horse-drawn busses. In 1919 the property was purchased by the state of South Dakota, and since that time it has been operated as a public facility. When the original hotel burned, in the thirties, the state built with funds procured from the federal government a comfortable and modern hostelry, the most amazing feature of which is the expansive dining room with picture windows looking out over the lake to Harney Peak.

The hotel is small, as resort hotels go, containing only fifty rooms, and the tourist would do well to arrange for accommodations in advance of his visit. There are, however, a number of cabins operated in conjunction with the main building, and except at the height of the season rooms can probably be found in the annexes. Along the lake shore an excellent restaurant, independent of the hotel, serves the needs of the traveler who has only a few hours to spend at this stop.

Mount Rushmore

From Sylvan Lake around back of the north side of Harney Peak it is a drive of but a few 37 miles to the second man-made wonder of the Hills—the Mount Rushmore Memorial.

Perhaps no one thing has done so much to make the Black Hills known throughout the world as this incredible undertaking—the carving in the natural granite face of a mountain of the faces of our four most revered presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. “Teddy” is included for his lasting service to the people of the United States as the president who saw the Panama Canal project through Congress and into being. The military and economic values of that enterprise so deeply impressed the sculptor of this mammoth frieze that he insisted upon elevating TR into the august company of the other three great statesmen.

The whole story of the memorial would fill several volumes, and indeed has already done so. Briefly, the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, wished to perpetuate a patriotic motif in stone figures so large that they would attract visitors from every corner of the country and impress upon them the glories of the democracy which the four presidents had done so much to build and sustain. The sculptor’s own words were: “I want, somewhere in America, on or near the Rockies, the backbone of the continent, a 38 few feet of stone that carries the likenesses, the dates, and a word or two of the great things we accomplished as a Nation, placed so high that it won’t pay to pull it down for lesser purposes.”

The actual construction work started in 1926, and the formal dedication was made by President Coolidge in the summer of 1927. Between nine hundred thousand and a million dollars went into the gigantic task, including money for supplies, wages, and the sculptor’s own personal needs during the fifteen years he spent on the project. He died in 1941, and the work was completed a few months later by his son.

The immensity of the undertaking can be grasped when the dimensions are noted. The face of each of the figures, for example, measures sixty feet from chin to forehead.

The rough carving was done by dynamite. Borglum, working from a carefully constructed model, would mark on the sheer sides of the great mountain the lines where he wanted the stone peeled away. Then a blast would be set off in the hope that the rock displacement would approximate the lines marked out, and from that point the work had to be done by hand. At first, taking lessons 39 from the miners working for him who had many years of experience in blasting the hard granites of the region, Borglum was able to reach only within a foot of the final figure by dynamiting. As he became more proficient in the use of the explosives he got to the point where his original blasts would shed the stone to a matter of an inch or less from the final cut surface. The head of Washington was finished in 1930, that of Jefferson in 1936, that of Lincoln a year later, and that of Theodore Roosevelt, the final figure, in 1941.

There are no tourist facilities at the site of the Memorial. Like every other place in the Black Hills, however, Rushmore can be reached in a few minutes’ drive from any one of a number of near-by points where a tourist might be stopping. Borglum’s studio, situated on a prominence a few hundred yards from the carvings, gives the best view of the scene and is open to the public.

Crazy Horse

It is not entirely accurate to refer to the Mount Rushmore Memorial as the other man-made wonder in the Hills. At the moment it is the only such marvel outside of Sylvan Lake; but in twenty-five or thirty years it will have to 40 share that honor with the Crazy Horse Memorial, a statue carved on top of Thunderhead Mountain, between Harney Peak and the town of Custer. This gigantic carving, which will be an entire figure and not a mere bas-relief, will be an equestrian statue of the great Sioux chief, Crazy Horse, who led his nation during the desperate years between 1866 and 1877. The chief will be mounted on a prancing steed, his hair blowing, as if in the wind, behind him.

The Indians themselves can take the credit for this fabulous idea. Chief Henry Standing Bear, a resident of the Pine Ridge reservation, is said to have had his inspiration after a visit to Mount Rushmore. Why not, he wondered, erect some monument to an outstanding red man, so that when the last of his people have been assimilated into the white man’s society, visitors to what was once the heart of the Indian country can reflect for a moment upon the greatness of that lost race?

Standing Bear wrote his idea to Korczak Ziolkowski, an energetic and imaginative sculptor, and suggested that Chief Crazy Horse would make a fitting symbol of the Indians’ struggle for existence. This was in 1940.

The sculptor took to the idea, but because of the events of World War II he was unable 41 to commence work on the project until 1947. Since then he has been setting off two blasts of dynamite a day, carving away the rock at the top of Thunderhead. But even yet the first faint outlines of the eventual statue are only barely discernible. Ziolkowski estimates that the entire task will consume a quarter of a century, if not more, and will cost not less than five million dollars. If this figure sounds high compared with the less than a million spent on Rushmore, perhaps the measurements will provide an explanation: the horse upon which the chief will be seated will be four hundred feet from nose to tail, and the entire work, from pedestal to top, will be more than five hundred feet in height.

Mount Coolidge

In this same general region lies another prominent Black Hills landmark which every tourist should take time to visit—Mount Coolidge. With a height of 6,400 feet, this peak is by no means an outstanding mountain, being ranked by a good half dozen higher within the Hills. But from its summit, which can be reached by an auto road leading off U.S. 85A a few miles to the north of Wind Cave Park, an amazing vista can be seen. To the east, on a clear day, 42 the White River Badlands loom as a great valley sixty miles away. To the south one can see across the high rolling hills all the way into Nebraska, and to the west landmarks in Wyoming are clearly visible. On the summit a stone lookout tower has been built for the convenience of visitors.

Jewel Cave and Ice Cave

Since the Black Hills are underbedded so widely by limestone, it is not surprising to find in them not one but several memorable caverns. There are, as a matter of fact, a dozen or more well-known large caves; but outside of Wind Cave, only Jewel Cave has been opened and fully prepared for public visit. The expense of exploring, lighting, and carving trails in the others has kept them off the market, so to speak, for in a region so packed with scenic delights two great caverns are about as much as the traffic will bear.

Jewel Cave lies some fourteen miles west of Custer on U.S. 16, almost at the Wyoming-South Dakota border. It is a small cave, with only two tours marked out in it, one a mile long and the other two miles. It is noted for its wealth of colorful crystalline deposits, totally 43 unlike the delicate filigree work to be found in Wind Cave.

The cave was discovered by two prospectors, who proceeded to develop their property for commercial gain. In 1934 they sold the cave and such of its environs as they owned to the Newcastle, Wyoming, Lions Club and the Custer Chamber of Commerce. These two organizations sought to popularize it further as a lure to tourists who would have to travel through their towns to reach the scene. In 1938 the federal government took it over and made a national monument of it.

Not far from Jewel Cave is the famous Ice Cave. This cavern gets its name from the current of cold air which blows from its mouth, cold and clammy on even the hottest of summer days. The Ice Cave is not officially open to the public, and has not even been totally explored. Forest rangers and Park Service employees have charted some of it and have searched out certain channels in the strange formation, and from their meager reports it would seem that if Ice Cave is ever fully opened it will vie with New Mexico’s Carlsbad in beauty and grandeur.

For the curious tourist the only possibility at the moment is to take the lovely off-route 44 trip to the cave’s entrance, a natural arch twenty feet high and seventy-five feet wide.

In addition to Wind Cave, Jewel Cave, and Ice Cave, there are a number of other caverns of varying interest and underground beauty which have been opened and exploited by private individuals. In many cases these are but indifferently arranged for public inspection, but can be tracked down by the visitor by means of the garish signs which too often manage to clutter the otherwise unblemished scenery.

Just Scenery

The foregoing are only a very few of the scenic wonders of the Black Hills. Detailed information on the various other scenic features is easily to be had at any of the hotels and tourist courts in the Hills, and brochures covering practically every landmark are available gratis, thanks to the enthusiasm of the local chambers of commerce, the Black Hills and Badlands Association, and the state of South Dakota. The area is crisscrossed with good roads, and no matter which route one takes to his eventual destination, every mile will be marked by breath-taking views and natural wonders.

The region, except at the summits of the peaks, lies at an average altitude of some five thousand feet. Cool nights are thus guaranteed, regardless of the temperatures by day. The highest mean temperature ranges, during the six months between April and November, from 60 to 85 degrees. Light outing clothes are suggested for day wear, and light wraps are always in order after dark.

The rainfall during this same six-month period, averaged over fifty years, amounts to three inches per month; what small showers do occur take place most usually in an hour or so of the early afternoon, and refresh rather than hinder the tourist.

The hillsides are covered with a mass of shrub and tree growth, and an earnest searcher can find specimens of no less than fifty-two varieties. Yellow pine, spruce, cedar, ash, aspen, alder, dogwood, and cottonwood are most in evidence.

The bird lover will find the Black Hills nothing less than a vast aviary, more than two hundred species having been seen in the region. Animal life is almost as widely represented, although the casual visitor is not likely to come upon a native mountain lion or gray wolf. The assistance of forest rangers and Park Service 46 employees is available in locating the habitats of some of the rarer varieties of wildlife.

As might be expected, the fisherman will find plenty of opportunity to ply his pole in this region. There are nearly 150 miles of stream and lake frontage in the Black Hills, and the waters are liberally stocked by the state hatcheries. In addition to trout, the angler will encounter pike, pickerel, bluegills, black bass, and perch.

Finally, there are the annual celebrations and fairs, which are always of interest to the outsider, for they help dramatize the particular region where they are held and its historical background. July and August are the months for these celebrations, and notices of coming events will be found posted prominently’ along the tourist routes. Four such outstanding occasions are Black Hills Range Days at Rapid City, Gold Discovery Days at Custer, the Belle Fourche Round-Up, and the Days of ’76 at Deadwood. The Deadwood celebration, it might be added, celebrates not the Revolutionary War, but the discovery of gold in Deadwood Gulch in 1876.

CHAPTER FOUR
History I: Indians and Gold

Gold, they say, is where you find it. In California in 1848—in Montana in 1852—in Colorado in 1858—in Arizona, in Nevada: when they finally found it in the Black Hills in 1874, the Gold Rush West had nearly all been settled and the bonanza days were forever gone, for all the likely places had been searched.

The question posed is an obvious one. With sourdoughs plowing and digging up the bed of every stream and rivulet in the West from 1849 on, how did it come about that the Black Hills, lying a considerable distance closer to home than California and the other gold rush regions, had kept their glittering secret until so late?

The truth of the matter is that the mysterious 48 and brooding dark mountain-land was a good place to hide secrets. Gold had been discovered there, as a matter of fact, as early as 1834, which was just seven years after the country’s first gold strike—the 1827 Georgia rush. But unfortunately those first lucky gold-seekers—there were six of them—did not live to enjoy their taste of the Black Hills’ incredible wealth. Fifty-three years later, not far from the town of Spearfish, one Louis Thoen found a piece of limestone upon which was crudely but legibly engraved this melancholy message:

On the back of this somber relic were the blunt words: “Got all gold we could carry.”

Yes, there was gold in plenty, but Paha Sapa of the Hills was a jealous spirit who guarded the forbidden portals with a great vengeance. It is interesting, though, to speculate upon how the course of western history might have veered had Ezra Kind made his way out of the bleak region to report his discovery. Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and most of the Missouri Valley would have been skipped 49 over in a rush to the prairie West, left to be filled in and settled later. The upriver ports of the Missouri, rather than St. Louis, Kansas City, St. Joseph, and Omaha, would have been the outposts, and there would have been no Santa Fe Trail, no Platte River—Oregon Trail, but rather a heavily traveled National Road winding out from St. Paul and from Chicago. Rapid City would have been a metropolis the size of Denver, and when eventually the Union Pacific was built it would have been three hundred miles north of its present route. And the Indians? There would have been a far different story in that regard, perhaps a much bloodier and more tragic tale.

But Ezra Kind was killed and his secret slept, and thus we are as we are today. Actually it was the Indians who kept the Hills so long forbidden—Indians of the Teton Sioux, the same tribe who put Ezra’s party to the tomahawk.

Before the California gold rush life on the Great Plains had proceeded pretty much on an even keel. The mighty Teton Sioux, all seven tribes of them—the Oglalas, the Unkpapas, the San Arcs, the Brules, the Minniconjous, the Blackfeet, and the Two Kettle—roamed the prairies at will, from the Missouri 50 Valley to the Rocky Mountains. Of course they had their misadventures with the fur companies, but just as often their dealings with the Mountain Men were profitable, for the Indians, when in the mood, scouted, trapped, and hunted, all for the white man’s pay.

With the great exodus to California, though, the situation took on a different hue. Immigrants by the hundreds and the thousands poured up the rolling valley of the Platte, and it was not many months before the haphazard Indian attacks took on a new strength and design. Long burned the council fires in the dark nights, and all up and down the great plains the war raged. To protect the wagon trains the government sent its shrewdest and most experienced Indian agent, Thomas Fitzpatrick, a veteran fur trader since 1823, the famed “Broken Hand” of western legend. Summoning the tribes to Fort Laramie in 1851, Fitzpatrick managed to subdue them, but only by promising that he would confine the settlers to specific ranges and would keep them steadfastly out of the Dakotas and the Black Hills.

In the meanwhile the eastern tribes, the Santee Sioux, were beginning to feel the pressure of settlement in the rich Minnesota valleys. In 1862 they revolted, and the terrible battle of Wood Lake was fought, with the score of massacred settlers reaching into the high hundreds. The leaders of this outrage were, of course, apprehended and punished, but whole tribes fled into the western plains, into the land of the Black Hills, where they eventually joined forces with their Teton cousins.

By 1865 matters had come to a head again, because although the great Sioux, numbering between thirty and forty thousand, had kept to themselves, the white man had broken his side of the bargain and was cutting a new route into the forbidden country. This passage was the famed Bozeman Trail, which drove north from Fort Laramie, on the Oregon Trail, directly through the Sioux country to serve the new gold fields of Montana.

To protect the wagon trains on the Bozeman the army called upon General Grenville Dodge, who was later to build the Union Pacific. Dodge, Commandant of the Department of the Missouri, was an old hand at Indian warfare. He rushed into Wyoming a full force, four columns of men, who swiftly brought the angered tribes to heel.

The immediate result of this engagement was the signing of a halfhearted and inconclusive treaty at Fort Sully, near Pierre, in October 52 of 1865. The treaty attempted to settle some old differences of a fundamental nature, but inasmuch as neither the Oglala nor the Brule were represented it failed of its mission.

A year later a further powwow was staged at Fort Laramie to pursue the matter of keeping the Bozeman Trail open through the forbidden Sioux country. Perhaps matters might have proceeded equably had not General Carrington arrived in the midst of the delicate negotiations to announce that he had enough soldiers to protect the trail, treaty or no treaty.

Carrington’s blustery announcement, backed up by a show of seven hundred courageous but misguided cavalrymen, brought the talks to an abrupt end and sent the two most important Sioux Chieftains, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, scurrying for the council fire and the war paths. In all the great plains there were not to be found braver or more single-minded Indian strategists than these two. For the better part of two years roving bands of tribesmen under Red Cloud and his stalwart colleague amply proved that Carrington could not have kept the trail safely open if he had had seventy times his seven hundred men. It was, as a matter of fact, the only time in our long history that 53 Uncle Sam’s troops ever took a downright beating.

At last even Red Cloud could see that the white man, for all his braggadocio and poor planning, would eventually win the turn; and although his savage troops had tasted victory in almost every engagement, he consented in 1868 to negotiate once more. Presumably both sides were wiser by then, for a pact, sometimes called the Harney-Sanborne Treaty, was dutifully signed and accepted in April of that year. The United States agreed to close the Bozeman Trail and to abandon the forts. The Black Hills were utterly forbidden to the white man, and except for an agreement to let the Northern Pacific rails cross the upper prairies unmolested, the high plains from the Missouri to the Big Horn were returned by federal order to their historic isolation.

After that fiasco the situation remained comparatively quiet for a few years. Eastern Dakota was being settled bit by bit, and the rails were pushing forward, ever so slowly but ever so surely. The Missouri River was the frontier line, dividing the settled Dakotas from the Sioux lands; and Fort Lincoln, on the river (not far from the site of today’s Bismarck), 54 was the outpost that overlooked the troubled territory.

From month to month trappers, gold-seekers, and would-be homesteaders slipped inside the Sioux curtain from the Cheyenne-Laramie country on the south, from the rich Niobrara country in northwest Nebraska, or from eastern Dakota itself. There was not much that the army could do about these treaty violators except worry, for the borders to be patrolled were vast and the forbidden lands inviting.

But the army did worry, endlessly. There were increasingly frequent rumors of the existence of gold in the Hills, and year after year General Sheridan, commanding the Departments of Dakota, the Platte, and the Missouri, urged stronger fortification of the Sioux boundaries to prevent trouble. Trouble was particularly to be expected because several bands of Sioux, specifically those under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, had not agreed to government supervision in 1868 and seemed thirsting for a fight.

Thus it was to make a military survey that Sheridan sent an expedition through the heart of the Hills in 1874. His force of more than a thousand soldiers moved under the command of George Armstrong Custer; and, strange 55 impedimenta for an army, the luggage in the lorries included mining picks and pans, the belongings of H. N. Ross and William T. McKay, who were officially attached to the command. Presumably Custer was looking for something more than mere military sites.

The Indian fighters of an earlier day—Kit Carson, the Bents, or Sibley, for instance—would have stood gaping in the stockade as Custer’s force moved leisurely onto the empty Dakota prairies. This was no ragtag army in buckskin, but an orderly procession of one hundred and ten wagons, six ambulances, a dozen caissons, and two heavy field pieces. Each wagon and ambulance was drawn by a sprightly hand of six sleek mules.

In addition, three hundred head of beef cattle browsed slowly along the way in mooing testimony that this expedition would live off the very fattest of the land. The personnel included, in addition to Custer’s highly trained troops, a hundred Indian scouts, a platoon of expert white guides and trappers, and, mounted upon docile mares, a special contingent of botanists, geologists, geographers, and assorted expert college professors. Also, as has been reported, there were two miners.

To the north of the Hills, crossing the Belle 56 Fourche River first, the army made its gentle way, and then down the west slope of the forbidding mountains, seeking for an easy pass into the dark interior. Tall in the saddle rode golden-haired George Custer, for he was commanding the strongest army ever put into Indian country. It is little wonder that he slept quietly at night, or that he wrote in his diary: “It is a strange sight to look back at the advancing column of cavalry and behold the men with beautiful bouquets in their hands while their horses were decorated with wreathes of flowers fit to crown a Queen of the May.”

In that holiday mood the army moved down inside the great bowl of mountains on its sightseeing tour, and presently it camped about three miles west of the present town of Custer. All this while the miners had not been inactive, but had plied their pans here and there as the company passed across various streams. Until this bivouac, though, they had had no luck, and, as a matter of fact, had actually been expecting none. They had come along to quell the rumor of gold as much as to bear it out. Preferably to quell it, if General Sheridan were to have his way.

On August 2 of that year, 1874, McKay turned out to try his implements once again 57 on French Creek. An early account gives this dramatic version of the famed discovery: “When the earth [in the pan] was gone, he held up his pan in the evening sun and found the rim lined with nearly a hundred little particles of gold. These he carried to General Custer, whose head was almost turned at the sight.”

Through the magic of his discipline Custer managed to keep his army from beating their ration tins into placer pans and “claiming” on the spot. Getting under way almost immediately, the men continued their march eastward through the heart of the Hills, and on August 30 emerged from the great park and headed back to Fort Lincoln.

In the meanwhile a messenger had been sent ahead with the news of gold. Scout Charley Reynolds, who was to die with his commander just two years later, was detached from the base camp and sent scurrying down to Fort Laramie, to the nearest telegraph station. Within an hour of his arrival at the post, two hundred miles to the south and west of the Black Hills, the tremendous news was burning over the wires to General Sheridan in St. Louis.

It was also burning some operator’s ear 58 along the way, for the great secret, which was to be handed only to the high command in Washington, made its way on that very day into the editorial rooms of the old Chicago Inter-Ocean—where, naturally, it was treated with great respect and splashed across the headlines with all the vigor of an announcement of the Second Coming.

There was actually a genuine religious fervor in the proclamation, for the locust had been upon the land for many months in the eastern cities, and the bread lines had been growing. It had threatened to be a cold winter until ... until this last bonanza burst upon the nation.

Men had all but forgotten what a gold rush was like. It had been so long since the last great hegira to the Pikes Peak region that a new generation had come into manhood, a generation that knew California only as a state, Colorado as a prosperous territory, and the Union Pacific as the proper way to cross the empty West. There were none of the desperate winter marches up the Continental Divide this time, no lost wagon trains on the salt deserts, no Indian massacres. This rush left Chicago on the “cars,” as noisy and as highhearted as fans following a football club.

And there was another great difference between the foray to the Black Hills and the earlier gold rushes. In this case the argonauts did not get to the diggings. The troops saw to that. Deploring the untimely leak of official intelligence concerning the presence of the yellow metal in the Dakota outcropping, the War Department issued stern warnings to all settlers to keep away. The existence of the treaty with the Indians was proclaimed in every paper—and, though less resoundingly, the danger from the Indians was also mentioned.

Nonetheless, before the end of that crucial year a sizable group of foolhardy settlers broke through the blockade and made themselves at home. Erecting a strong stockade at the scene of the first strike, they soon carved themselves a town in the wilderness, gratefully naming it Custer, and even that early providing for the wide main street where ox teams could make a U-turn. Throughout the first winter these illegal townspeople managed somehow to survive the cold, the lack of rations, and the danger of Indian attack; but late in the spring General Crook’s cavalry arrived to “escort” them out of the Hills and back to the railroad at Cheyenne.

Many of the citizens of that first town took 60 their eviction with fair grace, turning to other means of employment than gold mining—and there were plenty—in Cheyenne, Denver, and the other near-by and rapidly growing settlements. One group, though, the Gordon Party, apparently enjoyed leadership of a tougher sort. They refused to be intimidated by the troops. Setting up camp on the very boundary line between the forbidden country and the permitted Platte Valley, they just waited. Actually, an increasingly large number of immigrants waited on the border only until nightfall, and then set out into the unknown. Some were apprehended by the cavalry and returned, some were killed by the sullen tribesmen, but hundreds of them managed to find their way to the vicinity of French Creek. More than that, they managed to stay.

It might be thought that gold mining, with all its necessary paraphernalia, supplies, and general confusion, could not very well be carried on in an atmosphere suggesting the more modern practice of moonshining; but the truth of the matter was that there were just too many settlers and too few soldiers. Time and again the troops would swoop down on some busy little gathering and hustle the miners out to the nearest courts, where they would hastily 61 be acquitted and released to go back to their workings. Under the very fist of forbiddance a score of towns had sprung up, among them the reborn Custer City.

Finally the government gave up all hope of keeping the eager immigrants out of this last frontier. By the fall of 1875 the border towns of Sidney, Nebraska, Yankton, South Dakota, and Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming, were bursting at the seams with gold-hunters who demanded “their rights as citizens.” Bowing to the inevitable, the government sent a treaty commission to wait upon the Sioux. This body of earnest men offered the Indians six million dollars for the right of entry into the Hills. Although the treaty Sioux agreed to sell, the price they asked wavered between twenty and one hundred million. Crazy Horse, who did not attend the council, refused to sell at any price and solemnly warned the white man to stay out.

Frustrated, the treaty commissioners returned to Washington in despair, while the embittered Sioux disappeared into the west river country to nurse their grievances. Upon this turn of affairs, the government washed its hands of the matter and opened the lands to settlement.

That was in June of 1875. Within a matter of weeks after the bars had been let down, the Hills were populated by uncounted thousands of men, women, and children. Many simply came out of the woods to claim honestly the diggings they had been working dishonestly; but many, many more came from the East by every train, now that the country was legitimately open.

It was a motley assembly that took part in this Black Hills rush. In earlier bonanzas the type had been pretty well formalized, for the difficulty of the overland journey to California, for example, or across to the Pikes Peak region, had kept all but the roughest—and toughest—at home. But on this occasion the West was by no means as wild as it had been in those earlier days. Distances had been conquered; transportation methods, even beyond the railroads, were much safer and more adequate; and the Black Hills, although cold in the middle of winter, offered none of the climatic ferocities of the Rocky Mountains. Thus, to partake of this feast of yellow dust hopeful clerks brushed shoulders with desperadoes, professional men of every accomplishment traded rumors with crease-faced sourdoughs from the dead land south of the 63 Mogollon, and oldsters who had thought they might never again hold a pan in their hands dug alongside mere boys from whom the apron strings had been relaxed.

In the meantime, even as the good citizens of Custer, Gayville, Central City, Golden Gate, Anchor City, and a host of other thriving towns, most of which have long been given over to the ghosts, were bustling about their exciting business, matters in the west were taking a slow but inexorable turn for the worse.

The army had let the situation ride for the summer and fall, keeping a careful watch over the enemy Sioux, but feeling fairly assured that they would attempt no large-scale raid of the Hills, populated now by at least fifty thousand people. Summer and fall were not normally times to worry over, in any case, for the buffalo were still on the range and forage was plentiful for the tribes. It was in the depths of winter that the tale would be told—either the Indians would come docilely to the reservations for their rations, or they would steer clear of the white man’s soldiers and supply their own necessities by raiding the isolated ranch and stage line outposts.

By mid-December the reservations were still empty, and General Terry sent out a call to 64 Sitting Bull, ordering him to bring his people in to the military posts. January 1, 1876, was given as the deadline. The haughty Sioux chief paid scant attention to Terry’s order, replying simply that the general knew where to find him if he wanted to come for him. Sitting Bull knew that the army would attempt no large maneuvers with the weather as it was—one of the bitterest winters in recorded history.

But General Terry was no man to take a short answer. Immediately he ordered three expeditions to prepare themselves for the field, to move as soon as weather should permit, and to take the Indians early in the spring when their ponies would still be thin and unrecovered from the winter’s rigors. General Crook was to march north from Fort Fetterman, on the North Platte River; General John Gibbon was to move south and east from Fort Ellis, in Montana; and General Custer was to come west from Fort Lincoln.

Unfortunately not only the Indians but the weather as well turned against General Terry, for with the thermometer standing most of the time at between twenty and forty below and the prairie covered with the glaze of incessant 65 blizzards, neither Custer nor Gibbon was able to move out of camp.

Crook, though, was able to best the winter when March rolled in and to locate one of the most dangerous of the rebel bands, Crazy Horse’s renegade Oglalas, deep in the Powder River Valley. This was on March 17, 1876. Had Crook’s men not made certain grave errors of tactics after a brilliant surprise, the battle might have solved the problem. As it turned out, the Indians galloped a few circles around the troops and made merrily off into the forest. Again the weather closed in.

Three months later, when the summer weather made campaigning possible, Crook’s troops were able to take to the saddle again, and again Crazy Horse was located, this time encamped on the Tongue River, between Powder River and Rosebud Creek. Again the battle was inconclusive, for the troops seemed unable to press the advantage of their surprise discovery of the Indians.

Eight days later, on June 17, the bewildered but indomitable Crook came a third time upon Crazy Horse, now on Rosebud Creek. On this occasion the troops were able to euchre the Indians into a pitched battle—and were thereupon so thoroughly trounced that Crook’s 66 command was essentially immobilized where the bleeding remnant lay at the battle’s close.

By the time the harassed cavalrymen had bound up their wounds and remounted, Crazy Horse had disappeared over the hills and down into the Big Horn Basin, where his cohorts joined a host of other bloodthirsty braves in a great Sioux encampment. Black Moon was there, Inkpaduta, Gall, and a major roster of other courageous Indian warriors. Counseling them and performing their good medicine was none other than Sitting Bull himself, who, it should be said, was not a warrior but a medicine man and tribal diplomat.

Historians have never been able to agree upon the number of braves assembled under this battle flag, but all concur in the belief that the camp could have contained no less than three thousand warriors—in all probability the greatest single Indian army ever to be put into the field against the troops.

By this time other help was coming for Crook, as he lay in the south nursing his ill fortune. General Custer, having scouted out Crazy Horse’s retreat, had been ordered to stop him from the north and to pinch the Indians between the prongs of his force and Crook’s.

But it was Custer rather than Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull who met the pincers. Coming upon the headquarters village of the enemy, Custer divided his force of 600 men into four groups: Benteen with 140 odd, Reno with about 125, McDougall with the ammunition and supplies and perhaps 140 men, and Custer himself retaining the balance.

While McDougall stayed to the rear, Benteen was sent off on a fruitless errand into a badly broken terrain to the southwest. Custer and Reno in the meantime proceeded side by side toward the village. Coming over the last remaining hill before the Indian camp, Custer dispatched Reno ahead to make a preliminary contact with the enemy, while he rode off in a somewhat parallel direction, apparently bent on encircling the savages.

Meanwhile Reno did indeed encounter the Indians, and when he realized how tragically outnumbered he was, he immediately dismounted his men to fight a delaying action on foot, thereby saving both men and horses. He obviously adopted this tactic on the theory that he would be supported from the rear by Custer. When he saw that Custer had decided to make a diversionary attack on the right flank of the enemy, Reno and his men gave up the 68 fight and concentrated on scrambling out of the trap and making their way to the hill which overlooked the village.

From that vantage point Custer and his force could be seen across the Little Big Horn at a distance of perhaps a thousand yards. Apparently thinking that Reno was still successfully engaging the Indians, Custer rode his men down into a ravine where he apparently encountered the full horde of savages and where he met his death. The details of that last action have never been made clear, but most experts think that he divided his pitifully weak force into two segments at the time of the final charge which took him full into the heart of the great enemy body. Thus it was that Custer was caught in the pliers of the attack, in which hopeless position his entire force was wiped out to the last man, officer, and guide. Custer’s Last Stand, as it has been poetically called, was in every respect the greatest defeat of white forces in the history of Indian warfare.

Custer’s death marked the end of the Black Hills controversy. Although the Indians had been completely victorious, they had spent so heavily of their warriors and their supplies that they were never again able to mount a 69 major attack against the whites. Swiftly the troops hunted them down, village by village, and within a year the great Sioux War had ground to a stop.

A second treaty commission had been appointed late in 1876, and by February the transfer of the Black Hills from the Sioux Nation to the United States had been completed—not for a cash consideration, but only for the government’s promise to support the Indians until such time as they might learn, under agency supervision, to provide for themselves.

By that time the question of entry was no more than rhetorical. The Black Hills were as thickly populated as any region of equal size in the West. The stage routes in from Cheyenne, from Sidney, Nebraska, and from the Dakota railheads were well traveled. The last frontier had been broken.

The original rush had centered in historic Custer, the scene of the first entrance into the country on French Creek, and the terminus of the Cheyenne-Black Hills stage line. By Christmas of 1875 the population of that wilderness settlement was in excess of ten thousand 70 souls, each of them active and bustling about his business.

On the other hand, there was not a great deal of business to bustle after. French Creek was a good clue to gold, but that was about all. Before long most of the good citizens, having found the little brook something of a snare and a delusion, were casting about for some way to make their livings from each other. Storekeeping, laundering, ranching, hostlering, all were honorable occupations which soon found a plenitude of practitioners.

In that fashion the winter was passed. Ice capped the waters and the snow hung from the trees, and aside from hoping for spring there was little the thronging populace could do. Thus a fruitful field was in fallow for the gossip which started blossoming in March and April. The tales, whispered—as such stories always are—without definition or authority, had it that somewhere in the northern Hills there was another stream that had nuggets the size of ... it is unimportant how large the nuggets, for a glitter of dust the size of an eye-speck would have been a windfall in Custer. Day by day the rumor grew, and as is always the case with such gossip, the precise location 71 of this “Deadtree Gulch” was never made entirely plain.

The reason for this obfuscation was simple: a rich strike had actually been made far in the north part of the Hills, and the claimants were doing their level best to keep it a secret. The fact that Custer held its population as long as it did was a testament to the sagacity and close-lippedness of John Pearson and Sam Blodgett, who had stumbled, late the previous winter, into one of the world’s richest gold basins.

The secret held for only a few months. Trappers, prospectors, and mere travelers were passing through the spruce trails of the Hills in such profusion that sooner or later the activity up Deadwood Gulch, as it came to be called, was bound to be observed. Pearson had found his dream cache in December of 1875, and he managed to contain the secret only until March of 1876. Like a forest fire the news of the strike to the north spread, and by May the southern Hills were deserted. Custer, for several years the metropolis of the entire region, lost all except thirty of its citizens in a matter of weeks, and other settlements in the south and west simply dried up and disappeared.

That Deadwood Gulch, so named for the 72 stand of burned-over timber which graced its declivitous sides, contained a major deposit was not to be denied. The rich sands which Pearson had spaded up testified to that, and later comers were by no means disappointed. But the names and locations of individual early discoveries have long been lost to all save the most assiduous researchers, for there was one claim which outshone all the rest. That digging was the mighty Homestake, which, from its first days, has produced gold and assorted other precious ores in such abundance and with such dependability that it has been accepted the world over as one of earth’s great mines, rivaled in munificence only by the Portland-Independence of Cripple Creek in Colorado and the fabulous workings of the Witwatersrand of South Africa.

As with all rich diggings, an appropriate legend attends the account of the original discovery of the Homestake. It seems there were two brothers, Fred and Moses Manuel, who had long been addicted to that most vicious of all unbreakable habits—gold prospecting. Moses had wound his weary way through the West for a full quarter of a century, plodding the dusty California gold gulches in ’50, up the steep heights of Virginia 73 City in ’60, into Old Mexico, and—although he was a full generation too early—into Alaska. But now, in 1875, he was through with it all and was going home.

Collecting his brother Fred, who was fruitlessly panning the sands of the Last Chance Gulch in the high border country of Montana, Moses started east, passing of course through the Black Hills, to scout down this one last ray of rumor—that a new strike was in the making. Setting out their camp in Bobtail Gulch, a mere pistol shot from certain placer claims in Deadwood Gulch, they went to work in midwinter, hoping to find, the legend has it, just enough blossom rock to give them a stake for their homeward journey.

They seem to have hit it with a vengeance, not mere placer gold in the stream bed but a genuine lode, for on April 9, 1876, they patented the claim known as the Homestake. Discarding for the moment all idea of going on home with whatever meager wealth this “last” try should bring them, the Manuel brothers immediately consolidated their position by going into partnership with another prospector and taking shares in the Golden Terra, an adjoining piece of real estate, the Old Abe, and the Golden Star. The immediate returns, by 74 the ton, are not today known, but they must have been substantial, for the lucky brothers built an arrastra—a crude millstone affair for grinding ore—and managed to pocket more than five thousand dollars in their first year of operation.

In the natural run of events the Homestake and the adjoining parcels which the Manuel brothers were operating would probably have worked well enough for a year or so, and would then have suffered the fate of thousands of other diggings throughout the gold-rush West—the surface ores would have played out, and because of the high cost of following the lodes deeper into the earth than a few dozen feet, the mines would have been abandoned. But in this case a San Francisco syndicate came into the picture, providing the necessary capital funds for the searching out of whatever ultimate wealth the Homestake might have.

This syndicate of Pacific Coast businessmen included James Ben Ali Haggin, a partner in the highly solvent Wells Fargo express company, and Senator George Hearst, the father of the publisher, William Randolph Hearst. These vigorous men sent a mining engineer into the Hills in 1877 to canvass the location for possible investments; and in the course of 75 a detailed examination of whatever properties seemed to be paying well, this emissary from Market Street came upon the brothers Manuel. A superficial examination of the Homestake and the Golden Terra sufficed this engineer, and he optioned them both, the first for seventy thousand dollars and the second for half that sum. Returning immediately to California, he delivered to his employers samples of this richest gold mine in North America, and without delay Senator Hearst went to South Dakota to see for himself.

What he saw impressed him most favorably, for upon his return to California he owned both the Terra and the Homestake, as well as several other claims on the same hill, a total of ten acres of mining property. That small figure is significant in the light of the fact that the Homestake Mining Company today owns more than six thousand acres of mining claims.

With the incorporation of the mining company in San Francisco, the aboriginal methods employed by the Manuel brothers were discarded, and the latest in mine machinery was laboriously shipped by train to Sidney, Nebraska, and then by ox team the two hundred miles to the town of Lead (pronounced “Leed”), the precise location of the Homestake, 76 two miles from Deadwood City. The first installation was an eighty-stamp mill, which began its work in July of 1878. Within five years six additional mills were in operation, holding a total of 580 giant stampers.

The mine now handles four thousand tons of ore per day and has, in its sighted reserve, twenty million tons yet to work. The two main shafts reach into the earth to a depth of more than a mile, with branching tunnels piercing the mountain at hundred-foot levels; and there are more than a hundred and fifty miles of secondary tunnels, served by more than eighty miles of mine railway.

The richness of the Homestake ore has averaged fourteen dollars per ton for many years now. This may not sound like any considerable amount of wealth—but the most active gold operation in Colorado, the Fairplay dredge, is working gravel which pays an average of nine cents per ton.

Finally, the records of the company show that it has mined 70,000,000 tons of ore, yielding a total of 18,000,000 ounces of gold, which has brought a gross price, at various standards, of $450,000,000.

With the opening of the Homestake, the conquest of the Black Hills was effectively 77 completed, and the region entered into a period of rapid development and expansion. Although the great mine at Lead was run solely as a business enterprise, devoid of glamour and excitement, the town of Deadwood, two miles away, enjoyed a decade of the lustiest history ever to be known by a bonanza town. During its years of activity and arrogance Deadwood contributed to our national folklore several great figures, among them Calamity Jane, Deadwood Dick, Wild Bill Hickok, and Preacher Smith.

CHAPTER FIVE
History II: Deadwood Days

Sam left where he was working

one pretty morn in May,

a-heading for the Black Hills

with his cattle and his pay.

Sold out in Custer City

and then got on a spree,

A harder set of cowboys

you seldom ever see.

—“Legend of Sam Bass”

It has become the literary custom to recall our bonanza frontier less as an economic phenomenon than as a backdrop for bloodshed, mayhem, and assorted turns of vigor and violence. Early California, for example, is today known less as the scene of the accomplishments of James Fair, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford than as the arena for the armed forays of Joaquin Murietta, Black Bart, Dick 79 Fellows, and various other gunmen. Since this is the accepted practice, it is entirely appropriate to introduce the gold-rush days of the Black Hills with a brief account of the banditry and thuggery which accompanied the early growth of that last frontier.

The quotation at the head of this chapter is one verse of an old folk ballad, “The Legend of Sam Bass,” the not particularly inspiring saga of the life and death of an Indiana-born horse thief and road agent. Actually, Bass had little to do with the history of the Hills, and as anybody knows who has ever whistled or sung his song, the bulk of the chronicle concerns his struggle against the Texas Rangers.

On the other hand, Sam Bass will long live in Black Hills history, for regardless of his other accomplishments he went to his glory bearing the credit for having originated the fine art of stage robbery in that Dakota wilderness. The Black Hills, like every other gold region, enjoyed but scant holiday from the pestiferous road agents. During 1875 and 1876, when the region was filling up, it seemed that there was plenty to occupy the imagination of every individual who was able to make the tortuous trip from the railroad. But by 1877 the area had calmed down to such an 80 extent that idle hands could occasionally be counted in the dram shops, and the time was ripe for the devil to get in his work.

From the point of view of geography the Hills presented ideal conditions for armed assault. The two major stage lines leading into the region were the Cheyenne-Black Hills Line, running through two hundred miles of desolate emptyland, and the Sidney Short Route, less long by some thirty miles, but passing through equally lonely country. In addition, one freight and stage line came in from the east, from Fort Pierre, and another from the north, following the general heading of Custer’s 1874 expedition. The gold, though, most often traveled the fastest route, out to the Union Pacific at Cheyenne or Sidney.

During the first twenty months or so of the Black Hills gold rush, armed guards were not normally counted among the personnel of the stage coaches. As a matter of fact, in most instances it was to be questioned whether or not any gold rode the stages, for the going was generally thin in the diggings, and the average operator accumulated his bullion for several months before amassing a shipment large enough to be worth the trouble and worry. For all the wealth of the Homestake, the Hills 81 by no means repeated California’s early history, when every stage worth tying a horse to carried at least some treasure. And yet, in the springtime most of the miners cleaned up their winter’s take, it was commonly understood, and ... well, Sam Bass must have thought, every good thing must have a beginning.

In March, 1877, Bass organized a gang of cutthroats in Deadwood, and the brief period when one could ride the coaches in comparative safety came to an end. It was not much of a gang that the legendary bandit gathered around him, the five other men being mostly cowardly and quite worthless, either as adventurers or as strategists. Bass himself was little more than a “punk,” as he would be called today, and, as a matter of fact, did not earn his immortality until much later, in Texas, where he was shot down in a barber chair by a Ranger.

The gang, if they might so be called, foregathered on the snowy night of March 25 in Deadwood and, after consuming sufficient whiskey to enable them to stand the cold, made their way down the south road to a point a few miles from town where they might intercept the incoming stage from Cheyenne. What genius of diabolical planning led them to attack 82 an inbound conveyance, which could be carrying little more than ordinary mail, rather than the “down” stage, which might possibly be loaded with bullion, has never been figured out, but at any rate they camped themselves in the snow and waited.

At last the stage hove into sight, and Bass, the trusty leader, cautioned his hoodlums not to shoot, but merely to stop the coach and demand the mail pouch. Presumably the sentiments of the period held that robbery without gunfire was quite condonable, and an entirely different affair from burglary accompanied by shooting. It is also quite possible that Bass was only minding his own safety, for the night had already been marked by one misfortune—one of his men had managed to shoot himself in the foot while putting on his deadly hardware.

As might be expected, however, Bass’s well-laid plans went very much agley. In the excitement of calling “Halt!” one of the bandits proved a bit too eager-fingered, and even as the stage driver was reining his team to a stop, a shotgun blared out, emptying its charge at close range into the driver’s chest.

With the shot the horses bolted, and shortly thereafter they pounded into Deadwood, guided by a hatless passenger who had managed to secure the ribbons as they dangled. Within a matter of minutes a posse had been formed and riders were making their way into the woods. Inasmuch as Bass and his companions had been acting suspiciously during the afternoon and evening, the finger of accusation pointed altogether correctly in their direction, and before the moon was down Sam Bass was well on his way to Texas, escaping Deadwood’s justice only to go to his lathered doom.

This tragic foray against law and order set the stage, so to speak, and before long the spruce trails of the Black Hills, once so still and harmless, could be passed over safely only in the company of “shotgun messengers,” as the armed attendants were called. It did not take the stage companies long to come to this way of operating, for Wells Fargo, which contracted for the express business, had had a quarter-century of rugged experience. Bringing their brave talents swiftly to bear on the situation, the Wells Fargo men steel-plated the coaches to be used for bullion shipments, and brought into the Hills the famed treasure chests which had figured so largely in the history of the coming of law and order to California—metal-bound cases too heavy to be transported quickly from the scene of crime, 84 and too sturdy to be opened except after arduous work with chisels and crowbars. The chests had been developed with the idea that a posse could be gathered at the spot where a stage had been held up before the gold could be removed from the chest or the chest itself taken far away.

A more important safety factor than the chests was the reputation of the shotgun messengers. The express companies went to great lengths to engage only the most fearless and law-abiding men they could find for this dangerous task, and time and time again thousands upon thousands of dollars in bullion rode across the lonely trails with no more than one man, his shotgun, and his reputation for bravery guarding it.

Wyatt Earp, perhaps the most noted of these messengers, entered his long tour of Wells Fargo duty through that firm’s Deadwood office. Earp, as any lover of western legend will tell, earned his vigorous reputation as marshal in the bloody Kansas cattle towns of Dodge City and Abilene. After the excitement of these Gomorrahs had worn off, he made his way to Deadwood in 1876—not as a gold-seeker, but apparently merely in search of honest and not too dangerous employment. 85 At any rate, his brief stay in the Hills was given to the profession of coal and wood dispensing rather than to law enforcement. Either the weather or the lethargy of the place suited him poorly, for within the year he was casting about for some means of making his way back to his own plains country.

Taking advantage of the public clamor against road agents after the Sam Bass affair, he offered his services to the express agent and was hired for the single trip out for fifty dollars cash and free passage. The agent was by no means doling out any charity in this exchange, for he knew the value of Earp’s reputation and looked upon the fifty dollars as a cheap form of insurance. He advertised in the local newspaper: “The Spring cleanup will leave for Cheyenne on the regular stage at 7 AM next Monday. Wyatt Earp of Dodge will ride shotgun.”

Bullion shippers were quick to take advantage of this extra protection, and it was recorded that no less than two hundred thousand dollars in bullion was weighed in for that special trip. It would be most dramatic to recount that Earp’s one trip was marked by attempted mass raids, burning coaches, and wounded drivers, but the truth of the matter is that the 86 journey was made on time and in good order. Only one shot was fired, and that by Marshal Earp, who took offense at the suspicious actions of a rider whose course seemed to parallel the stage route for an unaccountable distance. Without stopping the stage or otherwise alarming the passengers Earp dropped the offending horseman a few miles out of Deadwood, and the rest of the trip was made without incident.

Despite the vigor with which the treasure coaches were protected, armed robbery continued to take place sporadically all during the final decade before the rails pushed through from the East. By and large these forays, while bloody, were unsuccessful, and not a single desperado was able to rise to any sort of fame during that period. On the other hand, there was one robbery which must go down in history for the strange way in which the loot was recovered.

This particular villainy, remembered as the Canyon Springs robbery, took place on September 28, 1878. The locale of the outrage was not far out of Deadwood on the rough way through Beaver Creek and Jenney Stockade into Wyoming and thence to Cheyenne. The coach, on this fateful occasion, was rumored 87 to be carrying nearly one hundred thousand dollars in ingots from the Homestake, as well as from other works; and although shipments of such size were not altogether rare, they were sufficiently out of the ordinary to suggest the services of additional shotgun messengers. It may well have been the mere fact of the scheduling of additional guards that called the attention of the bandits to this particular manifest.

The holdup took place in midafternoon, as the driver was stopping the coach to water the horses. In the gunplay three men were killed, and the bandits escaped with the loot from the treasure chest, which they apparently managed to chisel open. Ten miles away one of the guards came upon a party of horsemen, who returned to the scene of the carnage; but upon their arrival they found the coach despoiled of its gold.

In many such cases the bandits would have been recognized as local or near-local citizens; but in this instance all of the desperadoes appeared to be strangers to the Hills, and consequently the law officers had very little except guesswork to guide them in their pursuit. Guesswork coupled with just plain snooping soon uncovered a trail, however, for one of the 88 stage agents turned up a ranch owner who gave the information that a small group of men had, on the very evening of the holdup, bought a light spring wagon from him. Such a transaction was unusual enough to indicate that the purchasers were by no means individuals of legitimate calling, and in all probability were the actual bandits. Setting out on this trail, the agent managed to trace them and their wagon all the way to Cheyenne, where the group had apparently turned to the east.

By that time persons who had seen them in passing had recognized them, and their names were broadcast to the marshals and sheriffs of all the eastern regions of the plains. Day after day the stage agent followed their trail east, across the Missouri, across the border of Nebraska, and on to the pleasant town of Atlantic, in Iowa. By that time the wagon had been discarded and the gang had broken up, and the agent was following only one spoor—the track of a young man who was always seen with a strange, heavy pack on his back.

In the town of Atlantic the trail came to an abrupt end, and indeed the mystery might never have been solved had it not been for a strange display in the street window of a local bank. Pausing to see what it might be that 89 was engaging the attention of a crowd at the window, the agent was astounded to behold part of the very loot he was pursuing—two bullion bricks stamped with serial numbers which identified them beyond a doubt as part of the Canyon Springs treasure.

Upon questioning, the banker proudly asserted that his son had only the day before returned from a successful adventure in the Black Hills, and had, as a matter of fact, found a gold mine, which he had sold for the very bricks making up the exhibit.

Gently the agent disabused the banker of this sad misapprehension, and, enlisting the aid of the local Sheriff, had the prodigal son arrested.

The unfortunate conclusion to this tale of detective expertness is that although the gold was eventually returned to the Homestake, the young bandit escaped from the train which was carrying him back to Cheyenne, and was never thereafter apprehended. As for the other four robbers and the rest of the treasure, no further trace of either was ever discovered.

Although banditry and skulduggery played a very great part in the tales of most of the other bonanza gold fields, the Black Hills story was for the most part happily without 90 extraordinary violence. Much more conspicuous in the history of the Hills than the desperate adventures of bandits are the exploits of the folk heroes who rode the Deadwood legend into immortality. Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Deadwood Dick, Preacher Smith, all of these amazing personalities achieved a lasting fame during the early days of this later frontier, not for any deeds of derring-do in the Sam Bass fashion, but for the old American custom of living and dying in a high and wide manner.

In all probability Deadwood Dick has carried the saga of the Hills farther and to a greater audience, both in this country and abroad, than any of the others, and for that reason, as well as for the strange circumstance that he never existed, it is perhaps well to tell his story first.

Dick, who never had a last name, was nothing more nor less than the happy creation of an overworked literary side-liner eking out a living in the late seventies. Having exhausted the possible plot complexities of such heroes as Seth Jones and Duke Darrall, Messrs. Beadle and Adams, proprietors of that stupendous literary zoo, The Pocket Library (published weekly at 98 William Street, New 91 York, price five cents), urged their hack, Edward L. Wheeler, to crank out a new character. This Shakespeare of the sensational, having recently heard of the brave doings in Deadwood, of the Black Hills, promptly created a latter-day Leatherstocking, Deadwood Dick.

Dick’s success was instantaneous, for there was a sense of truth in these stories which had theretofore been missing. Dispatches in every post brought the news of Deadwood as it was happening, and thus the weekly appearance of another Deadwood story was able to hang itself firmly on the coattails of reality. In one episode Dick courts Calamity Jane, who actually existed at the time, and finally marries her. In another, Our Hero is a frontier detective, fighting bravely on the side of law and order. In still another he has turned to robbery, and at one point is actually strung by his neck from a cottonwood gallows.

After exhausting the many plot possibilities of the Black Hills, Dick, who had become as real to his readers as George Washington, began to work both backward and forward in time and space. In one set of adventures he is shown to be an active Indian fighter; in another he turns up with Calamity Jane in the 92 town of Leadville, Colorado, which came into its glory not long after the strike in Deadwood.

At last the many loose ends of the story so entangled author Wheeler that he gave up Deadwood Dick as a lost cause and out of nowhere fetched him a son, Deadwood Dick, Jr., who marched on to the turn of the century and down into our own time. Indeed, his noble features can still occasionally be found staring gravely up from a pile of old and dusty magazines in attic corners.

With such a heritage it is little wonder that as the town of Deadwood grew away from its infancy, and as its modern Chamber of Commerce turned to summer pageants as a source of tourist interest, Deadwood Dick should be revived and paraded. Deadwood’s summer festivals, the gay “Days of ’76,” are built around a town-wide re-creation of the gold rush, with the natives chin-whiskered, booted, and costumed within an inch of their lives. During this gusty week otherwise sober and retiring citizens turn themselves out as stage coach drivers, Indians, and pony express riders, and the nights are filled with such a bubbling halloo that the tourists, who come in ever larger droves, are able to go home and report that 93 they have honestly spent time in a frontier town.

To heighten the effect, the impresarios of this gay divertissement many years ago decided to raise Deadwood Dick from Beadle’s pages and put him on the street like all the other self-respecting Calamity Janes and Wild Bills. Locating an oldster who looked not unlike the artist’s original concept, they dressed him in an assortment of western oddities and gave him time off from his duties as a stable hand while the festival was in session. For several years this simple pretense was carried on, and no sleep whatsoever was lost over the fact that a mild fraud was being perpetrated on the visiting Iowans.

In 1927, though, when South Dakota was negotiating with Calvin Coolidge to get him to spend his summer in the Hills, the stable hand, whose name happened to be Dick Clarke, was sent to Washington to extend a personal welcome to the President. Patently a publicity stunt, it fooled nobody but old Dick himself. The rigors of the trip and the succession of tongue-in-cheek honors heaped upon him somehow tilted the old man’s mind, and from that day until his death a decade later he fully believed that he was the original Deadwood Dick. 94 Frowning down any suggestions that he doff his beaded finery and return to the care of the oat bins, he betook himself far from the gentle safety of the Deadwood that he knew and that knew him, and took to touring the backwoods with fifth-rate medicine shows and Wild West pageants. Somewhere along the line he got up a small pamphlet which he sold to the gawking audiences who thought they were seeing a genuine frontiersman. In this amazing tract he spelled out such of the facts of Wheeler’s stories as were coherent and in logical time sequence. The rest, including a date and place of birth, he soberly filled in for himself.

And that was Deadwood Dick. When he finally died, back in Deadwood in the early forties, much of the town had come to believe as he did that there had been a Deadwood Dick, just as there had been a Calamity Jane, and that this gaffer had been the very person. His cortege was solemnly followed, and to this day flowers are sprinkled on his grave by confused but loyal residents of the Hills.

Wild Bill Hickok, on the other hand, actually lived, and actually died exactly as the legend goes, with aces and eights in his hand. It was this unfortunate occurrence, as a matter 95 of fact, that gave to that particular poker hand its gruesome name, Dead Man’s Hand.

Somewhat in the manner of Deadwood Dick, Wild Bill achieved a large part of his fame through the earnest efforts of Beadle & Adams. That is to say, much of his renown came after his untimely demise, and much of it was deliberately generated to satisfy the great western-yearnings of the avid book-buying public. In addition to the publishers’ efforts on Bill’s behalf, great impetus was given to his posthumous repute by Calamity Jane. Nevertheless, in all probability Hickok was actually the fearless and sterling character his legendeers have depicted, and had he not been brutally done to death by feckless Jack McCall he would doubtless have earned even greater fame through his own efforts in later years.

James Hickok was born into a farming family in Illinois in the year 1837, and passed a quiet and respectable boyhood in the ordinary pursuits of such an existence. In his nineteenth year he, like so many other young men of that day, felt the urgent call of the Far West. He hired himself out forthwith as a teamster in a wagon train to the Pacific Coast.

Returning at the end of this one visit to the golden shores, he managed to land in the Platte 96 Valley of the eastern Rockies in the very year when gold was being discovered in that region. The following two years he spent in odd jobs around Denver and on the high plains to the east of that new city. During all this time, however, it seemed as if his heart were hungering for the lower country. He let his drifting carry him slowly back into Kansas where, at the beginning of the Civil War, he managed a station for Hinckley’s Overland Express Company, which was then staging from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Denver and into Central City.

All these adventures gave ample opportunity for any young man of spleen to entangle himself a dozen times over in killings, brawls, and assorted rough businesses, but through this entire period James Hickok gave evidence of being nothing but a stalwart and well-intentioned individual.

The harmlessness of his pursuits, though, came to an explosive end after one year in this genial work, when he indulged in pistolry with a certain McCanles gang. One version of the Wild Bill legend states that the “gang” were cutthroats, and that Hickok was only defending his company’s property. Another version, equally trustworthy, has it that the McCanleses were Confederate sympathizers, attempting 97 to raise a cavalry unit in the region and thus offending Hickok with his Unionist leanings. Whatever the reason, the outcome was bloody. No one today knows for certain how many men were killed, for eyewitness accounts have included reports ranging all the way from one to six, all of them presumably slain by Hickok.

The doughty station manager, his helper, and another stage company employee were speedily brought to trial for the affair, and just as speedily acquitted of any crime. Shortly after that Hickok resigned his express company affiliation and joined the Union army, fighting the war out as a trusted though undistinguished scout.

After his discharge in 1865, he seems to have forsaken forever his once peaceful way of life, and thereafter blood was more than occasionally to be found upon his hands. His first postwar killing took place in Springfield, Missouri, in a duel with a gambler; and later that same year he was reported to have mortally wounded another card player in Julesburg, Colorado Territory. In the next year another report, unofficial like all the rest, had him killing three more men in Missouri, and in 1867—this was official—he went to the booming cow town of 98 Hays City, Kansas, where he was shortly offered the post of marshal.

That his reputation, whether truthful or legendary, was growing there can be no question. By 1867 he was accounted to be one of the best gunmen of his time and place, quite possibly for the simple reason that he had survived so many fights. For all the shadowy overtones of his story, he was also reputed to be a devotee of righteousness and order, although this facet of his character may or may not actually have existed. He was well known to be a gambler, and his victims were all (except the McCanleses) supposed to be cheaters at cards. Whether his vivacity with Mr. Colt’s revolver was intended to rid the earth of dishonest men or merely to avenge a lost hand is beside the point, for his acceptance of the position of marshal of Hays City indicates that for a time, at least, his inclinations lay in the direction of law and order.

From Hays City he went to a similar post in Abilene, where he bore the star until 1872. During all this time he was forced to kill but a bare minimum of unworthy citizens, his ever growing repute as a dangerous man with a gun apparently frightening would-be desperadoes out of his orbit. Three notches were all that he placed upon his weapon during his service in those two hell cities of the prairies—definitely a world’s record in reverse.

Apparently the inactivity came to bore him, for he soon gave up police work to return to the army for two years as a scout. This harsh calling also failed to satisfy whatever inner wants were making themselves felt, and in 1874 he resigned to join a traveling show with Buffalo Bill.

In 1875, however, he was to be found no longer behind the chemical lights, but idling his time away in Cheyenne. During this restless interlude he married a circus rider named Agnes Lake. Shortly after the ceremony, which took place in 1876, he followed the trail to Deadwood, arriving in April and setting up camp with another ex-army scout. The motives which drew him to that thriving boom town were, in all probability, those which drew the thousands of others—mere curiosity and the hope that something might turn up. Indeed, during the four months of his Deadwood hiatus he did very little but play poker in the famed saloon known as Number Ten. That he was as accomplished a gambler as he was a gunman was doubted by no one, and through his ability with the pasteboards he apparently kept himself 100 in such funds as he needed. He did not attempt to look for gold, nor did he seek any official post in the town. He merely played the long hours away at cards.

One might expect such a man as Wild Bill Hickok to meet his nemesis in open battle with a murderous cutthroat seeking to pay off an old score. Western legend is filled with such fitting come-uppances. But in this rare case our hero was killed in a peaceful moment by a total stranger and for reasons which nobody was ever thereafter able to discern.

On the fateful day of August 2, 1876, he entered Number Ten shortly after the lunch hour to take up his everlasting hand of cards. Normally, being a prudent man, he insisted on a seat with its back to a wall, from which vantage point he could keep his eye cocked for trouble; but on this day, for some reason, he arrived just too late to take his customary position and had to accept a chair with its back to the door. The game proceeded amiably enough for a while, and there was nothing in the afternoon air to suggest violence of any sort. At last a normally inoffensive deadbeat, one Jack McCall, turned from the bar where he had been enjoying a quiet drink and, passing the gaming table on his way to the door, 101 suddenly and without a word pulled his revolver from his vest and put a shot through Wild Bill’s skull.

The effect was instantaneous. When the news spread that Wild Bill had been killed, all work stopped in the city and men streamed in from every corner, expecting at the very least to find a major battle in progress. When finally the crowds were quieted down and it was learned that the killing was nothing more than a mere murder, the populace speedily hunted up the terrified McCall, whom they found huddled in a near-by stable, and arranged a formal trial. The facts that Deadwood was at that time still out of bounds to American citizens and therefore under no legitimate civil jurisdiction and that the judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney were elected on the spot by a show of hands, having therefore no official standing, did not dampen the ardor of the crowd. A trial was a trial, and its results would presumably be fair and honest.

As a matter of fact, Jack McCall must have been the most surprised individual of all at the ultimate fairness of the legal machinery which had been set up in his honor. With the acceptance of his fumbling plea that Hickok had, at a place unnamed and at a time unnamed, killed 102 his brother, McCall was acquitted and turned free, and Wild Bill was sorrowfully buried by the admiring populace.

As soon as he was freed, McCall hurried back to Cheyenne to escape the reach of any of Hickok’s friends. Unfortunately the story of the killing followed him there, and under the mistaken impression that he had undergone a legitimate trial and was therefore no longer subject to additional jeopardy, McCall took no pains to deny the murder. This was a most foolish tactic on his part, for he was speedily rearrested and shipped to Yankton, the capital of South Dakota Territory, where he was held for a session of the proper court. Inasmuch as he had admitted before witnesses not only that he had killed Wild Bill, but also that his earlier plea had been fabricated from whole cloth, he had a very slender defense indeed, and was quickly found guilty and banged.

To the very end no clue could be found to any sort of sound reason for his having fired the fatal shot. It was quite definitely proved that he had never had any dealings with his victim and had never been in any way offended by him, and that he no more than knew vaguely who he was. It was apparently a completely 103 aimless killing, the unhappy inspiration of the moment.

On the other hand, Justice seems forever determined to get to the bottom of the matter, for The Trial of Jack McCall has become an institution of the Black Hills, played, like Ten Nights in a Barroom, all the summers long in a popular tavern. Where audiences elsewhere hiss their Legrees and other purely fictional villains, the proud residents of Deadwood have their very own and very real scoundrel for the target of their malisons—the miserable McCall. Tourists are cordially invited to join in the fun and thereby to spread ever farther the legend of Wild Bill Hickok.

On June 21, 1951, the legend was further enhanced and improved upon by the presentation to the city of Deadwood of a brand new statue of Hickok carved out of a massive chunk of native granite by the ebullient sculptor, Ziolkowski. An all-day celebration attended the unveiling of this statue upon its pedestal at the foot of Mt. Moriah, and the zenith of the day’s gaudy reverence was the reading of an “epic” poem to the hushed populace of the town over a loud-speaker system from the top of the mount. The statue is plain to be seen about a block from the Adams Memorial 104 Museum, and copies of the epic can no doubt be had by soliciting the Deadwood Chamber of Commerce.

Of a somewhat different character from Wild Bill, but, it is good to report, no less revered in the Hills, was Preacher Smith.

Frontier towns have been notorious for their hallowing of persons, both male and female, who were either expertly good or expertly bad. This strange compounding of affections would suggest that the vice or godliness in itself was unimportant, but that the rough and crude citizens who populated our earlier settlements held a genuine admiration and regard for anyone of any calling who demonstrated authority and accomplishment.

And thus it was with the Reverend Henry W. Smith. A man of exceptionally little luck in life, he gave up his dwindling congregations in the States and journeyed into the frontier in 1875, partly because of a zeal in his heart to bring the Word into the lawless and godless gold camps, but also, it must be conjectured, to find some form of weekday employment which would enable him to care for his wife and two daughters. The wolf had been howling at many doors during those years, and parsonages 105 which carried even a bare subsistence stipend were few and far between.

Smith went first to Custer, where he stayed but a short while, finding little in the way of work and less in the way of souls to save, since the rush to Deadwood was then in full force. Hiring onto a merchandise train as a cook’s helper, he made his way to that newer city, arriving early in May of 1876. In a town of such activity it was not difficult to locate work, and shortly his hide began to fill out and his purse to thicken. That purse, it was discovered after his death, was to be used for the purpose of bringing his family out to join him.

Working diligently and, of course, soberly at his menial tasks from Monday through Saturday, and bravely setting up his pulpit on the main street on Sundays, Preacher Smith soon won the respect and even the genial admiration of the roisterous townspeople. At first his congregations contained more wandering dogs than people, but week after week, as he determinedly kept after his work, an increasingly large crowd gathered of a Sunday morning to listen to his sermons.

Thus the entire town was shocked when he was brutally killed by Indians while walking to a near-by settlement to preach a sermon. 106 Indians were bad enough at best, but killing a harmless and unarmed preacher was an act of violence which shook the consciences of the whole citizen body. It was on those consciences that the guilt began to press—the guilt of the knowledge that they had driven him to his death by their slowness to accept him in their own community and that he had gone to his rendezvous seeking a congregation, no matter how small, that would house him and the Master he served.

Belatedly gathering to his support, the citizens passed a sizable hat for the benefit of the unfortunate man’s widow and daughters. In addition to the gift of cash, the woman received an invitation to bring her grieving family to the Hills, where care would be arranged for them, including a teaching post for the eldest daughter. Unfortunately, neither the widow nor the daughters were in good enough health to be able to make the rigorous trip, and in consequence they could not avail themselves of the hospitality and generosity which were so late in coming.

Although they had failed to bring the parson’s family to Deadwood, the worthy citizens were undaunted in their efforts to memorialize this modest itinerant who had stumbled unwittingly 107 into glory. A great chunk of sandstone was quarried and a local artist of more verve than ability proceeded to hack out the parson’s likeness. The statue was eventually propped over his grave atop Mount Moriah, the cemetery-museum where he lies alongside Wild Bill and Calamity Jane. Unfortunately souvenir hunters carried on their unworthy custom over the years, until finally the battered monument, no longer even recognizable, collapsed. In the Adams Memorial Hall of Deadwood, however, there can be seen a certificate signed in Preacher Smith’s very writing, and thus his handiwork lives along with his legend.

All stories of Deadwood in the Black Hills come, eventually, to the great riddle of Martha Jane Cannary (sometimes spelled Canary), known as Calamity Jane.

This gusty female, who rolled around the West for nearly half a century, has been the subject of more controversy and speculation than almost any other early-day character. In her lifetime she circulated a brief autobiography which successfully managed to hide the truth about practically every aspect of her history. In addition, she manipulated her drab story in such a way that a whole generation of 108 legend-mongers accepted her as the “true love” of Wild Bill Hickok, and thus by no means to be thought of as the drunken harlot she most certainly was.

By dint of careful searching, however, some few definite facts of her early life and adventures have been isolated, and upon them at least the framework of her true story has been constructed. She appears to have been born in the neighborhood of 1850—add or subtract a year—in Missouri. Some accounts have it that her father was a Baptist minister, which is an unimportant sidelight, for young Martha Jane did not stay at home long enough for any such influence to gnaw its way into her personality.[2]

How she managed to get from Missouri to Wyoming while still in her early teens remains a mystery, but nonetheless her career as a camp follower started when, at the tender age of fourteen, she arrived in the roaring outpost of Rawlins. Some tales have it that she had gone west as the consort of a young army lieutenant, and that her mother, remarried to a pioneer, found her in that boisterous military town and took her to Utah. In any event she came back into circulation two years later, for in 1866 she was duly married to one George White in Cheyenne. Following this felicitous turn of affairs she and her husband journeyed to Denver, where he was able to support her in a fine, high style. Unfortunately, she did not take to this pleasant existence, but shortly began to yearn after the cavalry. Leaving her husband to his 110 Denver duties, she appeared all during 1867 and 1868 in various forts throughout Wyoming. It was at this particular time in her career that she was supposed to have earned the nickname of Calamity Jane. Undoubtedly the title was bestowed upon her by barroom companions who had learned the sad truth that Martha Jane’s appearance on the scene boded a long and arduous night of drinking; but in her maudlin and confused autobiography she tells of assisting in an Indian fight and for her splendid services being gratefully given the name by a Captain Pat Egan. In a later interview Egan denied this, claiming that the only time he had ever seen the woman was while escorting her out of a barracks so that the men could get some sleep.

From Wyoming she went to Hays City, Kansas, still following the Seventh Cavalry, her chosen military unit. Six years later she turned up again, this time disguised as a man and marching with General Crook’s police force, which was trying to keep settlers out of the Hills. Her autobiography claims that she also accompanied Custer’s command on its famous exploratory march, but this does not appear to be true.

After the discovery of gold in Deadwood, 111 she found the high life in that town so completely to her liking that she made it her home base. In time she fastened herself so securely among the legends of the metropolis that she was thereafter known solely as Calamity Jane of Deadwood.

Taking advantage of the high romance which surrounded Wild Bill’s name after his death, Calamity made haste to pass the story around that he had been her only true love; and although there was no evidence of any sort that he even knew who she was, her last words, when she died in 1903, were a plea to be buried next to him.

In the eighties she became restless again and forsook her beloved Deadwood for two decades, roving as far south as El Paso, and on one occasion being seen in California. Her activities at this time of her life are mostly lost from sight, but it may be presumed that as whatever charms she may earlier have had faded, her interest to and in the soldiers waned. During this period she married again, this time wedding a man named Burke, to whom she bore a daughter. She soon tired of Burke, however, and drifted slowly north again, passing considerable time in Colorado and then returning briefly to Deadwood in 1895. Even 112 at that late date the citizens of the gold town had not forgotten her, nor had the esteem in which she had earlier been held dwindled; when it was discovered that she lacked funds to care for her daughter, the townspeople passed the ever present hat and arranged for the care of the child. This act of generosity was purportedly to repay a great sacrifice which Calamity Jane had made in the earlier days, braving the dangers of the smallpox scourge of 1878 to nurse whoever was ill and without help. This particular legend has had wide currency in the West, its closest variant being the tale of Silver Heels, a dancing girl who visited the mining camps of Colorado’s South Park in the sixties. Silver Heels is popularly supposed to have ministered to the miners during a similar plague, for which bravery a near-by mountain was named for her.

After placing her child in a school, Calamity, who was destitute, betook herself to the vaudeville circuit. Inasmuch as through the dime novels she had already become a well-known national figure, she was able for a while to draw large crowds. Had it not been for her unfortunate habit of getting dead drunk before show time, she might well have amassed a 113 competence over the years. But her first contract was not renewed, and after a brief whirl at the Buffalo Exposition she returned to the West, spending the next several years in Montana.

At last she came home to Deadwood, a sick and broken old roustabout. By this time she was nothing more than a bar-fly, and she lived out her last days panhandling food and liquor money from strangers. At last, on August 2, 1903, she died of pneumonia.

Deadwood turned out in force for her funeral. As she had requested, she was buried near Wild Bill Hickok on Mount Moriah, overlooking the town. That she had never really known Wild Bill was quite beside the point, and anyway, there was none present who knew whether she had or not. The shoddy story of her “love” for Hickok was nothing that interested the old timers, but was saved for historians to untangle. That she was no more than an alcoholic old harlot was of no consequence, either, to the good citizens, for with her passing the last of the great names of the frontier was coming home to rest. That the townspeople were proud of her, and genuinely so, was not to be denied, although there was 114 most certainly nobody present at that melancholy service who could have told why. The truth of the matter was that they were burying not a broken old woman, but the last of the Black Hills legends.

CHAPTER SIX
The White River Badlands

Any visit to the Black Hills must also be the occasion of a tour, at least for a few hours, of the famous South Dakota Badlands. This fantastic National Monument is not a part of the Hills, either geographically or historically, but because the two regions lie so close together—a scant fifty miles apart—they are expediently linked as two great natural wonders in the same region.

The term “badlands” has a loose scientific acceptance, meaning any region where a specific type of heavy erosion has taken place. Such regions usually have subnormal rainfall and sparse vegetation. Those rains that do occur, then, find little on the earth’s surface to prevent almost complete runoff, which is so vigorous as to act as a powerful cutting agent. 116 The final ingredients of a badlands are rock formations known as unconsolidated—lacking any general unity of structure which might tend to withstand erosion. When all these conditions exist, the devastation of the rushing flood waters is without pattern, a great gash being carved in one spot while no damage is visible on a near-by outcropping. The end result is an almost frightening collection of gruesome stone monuments rising to the sky and marking the heights once reached by a general plateau.

Actually, much of the high western plain abutting on the Rocky Mountains is basic badland formation, and small pockets of distinct erosion can be seen all through eastern Colorado, western Nebraska, and eastern Wyoming, in addition to the vast depression in the valleys of the White and Cheyenne rivers in South Dakota. This one region, though, sixty-five miles long and five to fifteen miles wide, is the largest and from the geologist’s point of view the most important of all such regions in the world. Desolate, empty, seared by ages of sun and wind, it is now a great gash in the earth’s flesh which exposes to view rock and soil strata that measure a great span of earth’s history.

In addition to the splendid opportunity to see and study the various layers of the earth’s surface going back as far as sixty million years, the very composition of badlands formations makes any such region a veritable museum of fossils and petrified animal relics. The South Dakota Badlands have turned up absolute treasures of such paleontological finds, enabling scientists to trace the evolution of mammalian life all the way back to the appearance on earth of the first carnivorous animals—the vastly distant ancestors of the dog. And the Badlands are noted not only for the great span in geologic time of their fossil beds, but also for the number of different types which have been found in their ancient soil, more than 250 different prehistoric animals having been discovered in various stages of fossilized preservation in this general region.

The tourist, though, need not be even an amateur student of geology or paleontology to be thrilled and awed by a visit to this grotesque but beautiful area. The mere colors of the various rock strata, ever changing under the light patterns of sun and cloud, provide a never-to-be-forgotten experience. One of the most articulate tributes to the grandeur of the Badlands is that of Frank Lloyd Wright:

The word “badlands,” which now has a genuine scientific meaning, was taken into our vocabulary from the folk name for this very region. In the earliest days of North American exploration, far back before the Revolution, French trappers had braved this empty wasteland on their endless quest for new fur grounds, and had brought back tales of this lost world of silence and strange shapes. They were the ones who gave it the name Badlands, but they were only translating directly the Sioux name, Mako Sika, which meant, precisely, lands bad for traveling.

To the early explorers the badlands meant only that—high escarpments to be overcome; twisting, winding, endless canyons from which there were no outlets; crumbling rock underfoot 119 on the three-hundred-foot crawls from the canyon bottoms to the table-tops; and the hot, shimmering distances of this forbidding terrain as far as the eye could see.

It was, as a matter of fact, the existence of this area that helped keep the Black Hills nothing more than an empty question mark on maps until the rumors of gold began to circulate. The first American explorers, who might have discovered the natural wonders of the Hills in the 1820’s, found their paths diverted to the north and the south by this impassable valley, and consequently missed the Hills.

The first reliable record of the wonders of this lost world was dated 1847. That year, it will be remembered, was one of great moment in the history of the western movement—the year that Brigham Young braved the high prairies and pathless mountains with his great exodus, settling an empire on the shores of Great Salt Lake. Although the Pacific trails were fairly well established by then, his was the first of the true migrations, and the gold rush to California, the Oregon excursions, and the Pikes Peak mosaid were yet to come.

In this fateful year of 1847 a certain Professor Hiram A. Prout of St. Louis came somehow into contact with a representative of the 120 American Fur Company, which ran substantial trapping operations all up the wide Missouri and its tributaries. How this meeting came about is lost to record, but we do know that the fur trader gave Professor Prout a souvenir of his recent travels through the Badlands of Dakota—a fragment of the lower jaw of a Titanothere, the first fossil ever to be quarried out of the region and used for scientific purposes.

In that same year a second Badlands fossil turned up, this one a well-preserved head of an ancestral camel, given to or purchased by the great scholar, Dr. Joseph Leidy. With true academic ardor both of these gentlemen, Leidy and Prout, rushed their discoveries into scholarly print, describing in learned journals the nature of their trophies. Enjoying the slender circulation of academic publication, the essays which described these fossil wonders eventually found their way into the offices of the government’s geological survey, which acted quickly to dispatch an expedition to the overlooked region of their origin.

That first exploring party, the David Owen Survey, went into the field in 1849. A prominent scientist-artist, Dr. John Evans, was attached to the group, and from his pen we have 121 several sketches of this pioneer adventure into the empty wastelands. If these drawings look more like studies of Dante’s Inferno than like the breath-taking Badlands as they really are, it must be remembered that such geological formations had never before been visited by the members of that party, and, being completely alien to the America of their knowledge, impressed them every bit as a visit to the moon might have done.

The Owens party was merely the vanguard of the great army of brave men and women who have ever since made their dangerous ways into the remotest distances of the mountain and desert West, seeking neither riches of gold nor riches of land, but only more minute bits of the knowledge of the world of our past. Archeologists, geologists, and paleontologists from universities and learned societies the world over have spent liberally of their time, energies, and personal safety to scout out the secrets of mankind’s past in such remote corners of the earth as the Badlands. Year after year additional expeditions, both governmental and privately organized, made their way into this particular area, seeking out the fossil remains which turned up in great numbers.

V. F. Hayden of the United States Geological 122 Survey was one of the most diligent of the early explorers. He made trips into the Badlands in 1853, 1855, 1857, and 1866, carrying on detailed and exhaustive studies and eventually unraveling the story of the region’s major geologic features.

As Hayden’s reports became more and more widely circulated, various universities found projects of specific interest in one or another phase of the work of uncovering fossil beds; and from year to year Yale, Princeton, Amherst, the universities of South Dakota and Nebraska, and other institutions sent groups into the Badlands for summer work. Gradually, as these several groups exchanged information and reports of progress, it became possible for their scientists to trace back, through the skeletal remains of prehistoric animals, the very processes of the evolution of many entire families in the animal kingdom. Not only are the fossil beds of the Badlands as richly stocked with remains as any such bed in the world, but in a great many instances entire groups of three, four, and five whole skeletons have been found, making it possible for museum workers to re-create almost perfectly the animals as they existed and to set up models of the terrain at various intervals 123 throughout its entire sixty-million-year history.

Perhaps the most noteworthy as well as view-worthy section of the Badlands is Sheep Mountain, located at the far west end of the Monument. Down from the summit runs a great canyon, the School of Mines Canyon, named for the fact that the South Dakota State School of Mines at Rapid City long ago chose that location for the bulk of its paleontological research. Under the guidance of famed Dr. Cleophas O’Harra, for many years president of that institution, groups of Mines students went on extended annual encampments on Sheep Mountain, unearthing, among other rarities, full skeletons of the prehistoric midget horse, the saber-toothed tiger, and camels. It was this last discovery that lent considerable support to the concept, conjectural at the time of Dr. O’Harra’s discoveries, that a land bridge had once connected North America and Asia, allowing the migration of peoples and animals from the old world into the new. School of Mines Canyon, while some distance off the main highway leading from Pierre to the Black Hills, is by all means worth the time required to visit it. The canyon lies only thirteen miles from the town of Scenic.

The Badlands are reached by Highway 14-16 and by State Route 40. Coming from the west, from Rapid City, the visitor can take route 40 directly to the town of Scenic, forty-seven miles distant. From Scenic, in addition to connecting with the side trip to Sheep Mountain, 40 continues along the north wall of the Badlands all the way to Cedar Pass and out the east end of the region, merging at Kadoka with Highway 16, or, by means of a nine-mile connection, with 14.

Should the weather be bad and State 40 not recommended by local informers, the route is out of Rapid City on 14-16, east fifty-five miles to the town of Wall, thence by the access road through the Pinnacles, down into the Badlands halfway between Scenic and Cedar Pass, and joining State 40.

From the east, Highway 16 goes through Kadoka, from which town State 40 should be taken, leading in through Cedar Pass, and out either through Scenic and on to Rapid City, or at the Pinnacles, through Wall and back on 14-16. Coming from Pierre on 14, the tourist must leave that highway a few miles beyond the town of Philip and make the nine-mile detour on 16 to Kadoka, from there going on to Cedar Pass as described.

Several railroads serve the Badlands and its general region, notably the Chicago & Northwestern, the Burlington, and the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul. This last road, the “Milwaukee,” offers the traveler the best view of the region, winding up the White River Valley the entire sixty-five miles between Kadoka and Scenic, and providing the passenger with unparalleled if hasty views of some of the most rugged and isolated portions of all the area.

Bibliography

Allsman, Paul T. Reconnaissance of Gold Mining Districts in the Black Hills, South Dakota. U.S. Bureau of Mines, No. 427. Washington, D. C.: U.S. Dept. of Interior, 1940.

Baldwin, G. P., editor. The Black Hills Illustrated. Philadelphia: Baldwin Syndicate, 1904.

Carpenter, F. R. The Mineral Resources of the Black Hills. South Dakota School of Mines Preliminary Report, No. 1. Rapid City: South Dakota School of Mines, 1888.

Dick, Everett. Vanguards of the Frontier. New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1941.

Eloe, Frank. “Rushmore Cave,” Black Hills Engineer, XXIV (December, 1938), 274.

Fenton, C. L. “South Dakota’s Badlands,” Nature Magazine, XXIV (August, 1941), 370-74.

Hayden, F. V. and Meek, F. B. “Remarks on Geology of the Black Hills,” Academy of Natural Science Proceedings. Philadelphia: Academy of Natural Science, 1858, X, 41-59.

Hough, Emerson. The Passing of the Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921.

Kingsbury, G. W. History of Dakota Territory. Chicago: The S. J. Clarke Co., 1915.

Newton, Henry. Geology of the Black Hills. Washington, D. C.: United States Geographical and Geological Survey, 1880.

O’Harra, C. C. “The Gold Mining Industry of the Black Hills,” Black Hills Engineer, XIX (January, 1931), 3-9.

——. The White River Badlands. Department of Geology, No. 13. Rapid City: South Dakota School of Mines, 1920.

Rothrach, E. P. A Hydrologic Study of the White River Valley. South Dakota Geological Survey Report. Vermillion, South Dakota: University of South Dakota, February, 1942.

Todd, James Edward. A Preliminary Report on the Geology of South Dakota. South Dakota Geological Survey, No. 1. Vermillion: University of South Dakota, 1894.

Tullis, E. L. “The Geology of the Black Hills,” Black Hills Engineer, XXV (April, 1939), 26-38.

Footnotes

[1]For an account of the history and natural wonders of Estes Park, readers are referred to a previous book in this series, Estes Park: Resort in the Rockies, by Edwin J. Foscue and Louis O. Quam.

[2]A treasured manuscript journal kept by the author’s great-uncle, who was for many years curator of the Colorado State Historical Society’s museum in Denver, reports an interview with Calamity Jane some time before her death which convinced him that the facts were substantially as they are stated here.

On the other hand, Mr. Will G. Robinson, the eminent State Historian of South Dakota, reports: “On the authority of Dr. McGillicuddy, who was a medico at Ft. Laramie, and whose original letter I have, I would be entirely certain that she was born at Ft. Laramie, of a couple by the name of Dalton. Dalton was a soldier, was discharged and went out a short distance west to LaBonte. Here he was killed by Indians, although his wife got back into the fort with one eye gouged out, after which she shortly died. Her child got her name—Calamity—by reason of this disaster. She was not much over 40 when she died in 1903.”

The discrepancy between these two accounts, both studiously researched and documented by men whose professional careers have been given over to solving puzzles of this nature with which western history abounds, is typical of the disagreement among well-authenticated reports of the birth and early life of this female enigma.

In any event, it is a matter which is still subject to a maximum amount of conjecture, and for a much more complete account of the variant clues readers are enthusiastically referred to Nolie Mumey’s Calamity Jane (Denver: Privately printed, 1949).

Index

THE BLACK HILLS
MID-CONTINENT RESORT

From taboo Indian fastness to roaring gold camp to modern resort and recreation area—so runs the history of the Black Hills, Paha Sapa of the Indians, which are really not hills at all but mountains, the highest east of the Rockies. Back through geologic ages the story extends, to the thunderous time when Nature fashioned the intricate formations of the Hills and their companion geologic marvel, the Badlands.

Here, in racy and fluent prose, Albert N. Williams has brought the full sweep of this story to life, from its beginning in the mighty geologic upheaval that, before the Alps had been formed, thrust the giant spire of Harney Peak up through the ancient shale, to the present quiet rest of man-made Sylvan Lake, where it lies peacefully reflecting its great granite shields for the delight of the traveler.

On the way he tells of the discovery of gold in this “mysterious and brooding dark mountain-land” just when gold-hungry men had decided that the bonanza days were gone forever; of the Indian fighting that reached its tragic climax at the Little Big Horn; of the development of the Homestake, one of earth’s greatest mines; of the hazardous stage-coach journeys on which “shotgun messengers” guarded chests of bullion; and, most fascinating of all, of the amazing personalities—Sam Bass and Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane and Preacher Smith—who inhabited the Hills in their gaudiest days or, like Deadwood Dick, lived a no less vivid life in the pages of dime novels.

If this were all, The Black Hills would be a book for any lover of our country’s natural glories and thrilling history to pick up and be unable to lay down again until he had finished it. But other chapters directed particularly to the tourist make it also a book for the traveler to keep always with him and to consult at every point in his journey through the Black Hills. All he needs to know is here—the highways to take into the Hills, the towns with their historic plays and celebrations, the peaks and lakes and caves he will find, the sports he may enjoy, the places where he may stay. A trip so guided cannot fail to be filled with the excitement the author himself has found in the Black Hills, of which he says that in his opinion “no other resort area in the United States possesses such a wealth of tourist attractions.”

Albert N. Williams was for many years a writer for NBC in New York, and for two years Editor-in-Chief of the English features section of the Voice of America. He is the author of Listening, Rocky Mountain Country, The Water and the Power, and numerous short fiction pieces in national magazines. He is at present Director of Development of the University of Denver.

Transcriber’s Notes

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Black Hills, Mid-Continent Resort

The Black Hills
MID-CONTINENT RESORT

Acknowledgments

Books by Albert N. Williams

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE
The Black Hills:
The Forbidden Land

CHAPTER TWO
The Formation of the Black Hills

THE AGES OF EARTH

CHAPTER THREE
The Hills Today

Wind Cave

Custer State Park

Harney Peak

The Needles

Sylvan Lake

Mount Rushmore

Crazy Horse

Mount Coolidge

Jewel Cave and Ice Cave

Just Scenery

CHAPTER FOUR
History I: Indians and Gold

CHAPTER FIVE
History II: Deadwood Days

CHAPTER SIX
The White River Badlands

Bibliography

Footnotes

Index

THE BLACK HILLS
MID-CONTINENT RESORT

Transcriber’s Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Black Hills, Mid-Continent Resort

The Black Hills MID-CONTINENT RESORT

Acknowledgments

Books by Albert N. Williams

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE The Black Hills: The Forbidden Land

CHAPTER TWO The Formation of the Black Hills

THE AGES OF EARTH

CHAPTER THREE The Hills Today

Wind Cave

Custer State Park

Harney Peak

The Needles

Sylvan Lake

Mount Rushmore

Crazy Horse

Mount Coolidge

Jewel Cave and Ice Cave

Just Scenery

CHAPTER FOUR History I: Indians and Gold

CHAPTER FIVE History II: Deadwood Days

CHAPTER SIX The White River Badlands

Bibliography

Footnotes

Index

THE BLACK HILLS MID-CONTINENT RESORT

Transcriber’s Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Black Hills
MID-CONTINENT RESORT

CHAPTER ONE
The Black Hills:
The Forbidden Land

CHAPTER TWO
The Formation of the Black Hills

CHAPTER THREE
The Hills Today

CHAPTER FOUR
History I: Indians and Gold

CHAPTER FIVE
History II: Deadwood Days

CHAPTER SIX
The White River Badlands

THE BLACK HILLS
MID-CONTINENT RESORT