Gold built the Black Hills   “A Belt of Gold Territory Thirty Miles Wide.”
The early day placer miner could carry only basic necessities when he walked into Deawood Gulch. John Morgan, Iowa City, Iowa posed for this re-creation photo by Jim Hatzell, Rapid City.

The year most strongly associated with the gold rush to the Northern Hills, 1876 is commemorated in the annual Days of ’76 celebration. Deadwood City was laid out in April of ’76, but the first recorded Deadwood gold discoveries were actually made in the fall of 1875.

Miners and trappers may even have been in the Black Hills as early as the1830s. The tragic tale of an 1833-34 party of seven gold seekers is etched in sandstone on the Thoen Stone displayed in the Adams Museum.

Rumors of gold in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory had persisted for many years.           

            Pioneer John McClintock heard the story nearly 20 years before coming to Deadwood, as he was traveling west from Omaha in the early 1860s. A fellow traveler called his attention to a dark streak on the horizon to the north:  

    That dark streak that you now see is not a cloud as it appears to be.
It is the Black Hills of Dakota and is part of an Indian reservation. …
White men are not permitted to explore it. … It is generally believed that these mountains, like the Rockies, are rich in gold and other precious metals. 

The presence of gold in the Hills was officially confirmed the summer of 1874. George Armstrong Custer led a military expedition into the mysterious and previously unexplored Paha Sapa, accompanied by civilian geologists, newspaper correspondents and two experienced miners, H. N. Ross and William McKay.

On French Creek near Custer, Ross and McKay found “color” in their gold pans and set the scene for the ensuing rush to the Black Hills.

Newspapers from New York to North Dakota carried glowing reports of probable rich gold deposits in the remote area of Dakota Territory.

Chicago Inter-Ocean correspondent William E. Curtis reported in the August 27, 1874 edition,  “… all the camp is aglow with the gold fever.” 

     Shovels and spades, picks, axes, tent-pins, pot hooks, bowie knives, mess pans, kettles, plates, platters, tin cups, and everything within reach that could either lift dirt or hold it was put into service by the worshipers of that god, gold. … the expedition has solved the mystery of the Black Hills, and will carry back the news that there is gold here, in quantities as rich as were ever dreamed of. 

The rush was on. Military forces tried to hold back the tide of gold-fevered prospectors, escorting them out of the Sioux treaty lands, but it was like emptying a wash tub with a teaspoon.

By the fall of 1875 there were an estimated 500 miners in the Black Hills. Illegal trespassers on the Great Sioux Indian reservations established by the 1878 Fort Laramie treaty, they were always in danger of losing their scalps to raiding Indians.

            From earliest diggings near Custer, the gold seekers migrated north -- to Hill City (or Hilyo) and Palmer Gulch, Harney, Hayward and Keystone, Rockerville and on to Deadwood gulch.

In late August 1875, prospectors from Montana located deposits paying twenty to forty cents to the pan and built a small log cabin in Whitewood Gulch, near Deadwood’s present day rodeo grounds. Their “discovery claim” was staked out on November 8, 1875. The next day prospectors who came north from Custer staked a second discovery claim up the gulch on Deadwood Creek.

Because the gulch was completely choked with downed timber, the dead wood that later gave the town its name, neither party of prospectors was aware of the other. Those early miners, playing hide and seek with the soldiers, were anxious to avoid military eviction and took care not to advertise their presence.

In January 1876, the gulch was divided according to established mining laws.

Claims 300 feet in length along the creeks, from rimrock to rimrock across the gulch, were numbered consecutively above and below Discovery. Placer mining was producing an average take of $10 a day, a good income in that era, although McClintock said claims No. 17 and 18 cleaned up approximately $20,000 in less than three months. In April the Manuel brothers located the rich lode that became the world famous Homestake Gold Mine.

Deadwood’s main street, a hodge-podge of canvas tents, brush shelters and rough wooden shacks erected beside and above diggings, was described as resembling a “heap of lemon boxes propped up on broomsticks.” 

By the end of January claims had been recorded on every foot of ground in the gulch. Many claims changed hands even before mining operations got underway, as disappointed late comers vied to purchase claims from original locators.

More than 7,000 miners arrived and left the Black Hills during that exciting year of 1876 when total gold production amounted to about $1,500,000. News of arrivals, departures and gold production was recorded in the first newspaper established that summer, along with a hotel, theater and telegraph office.

Bullwhackers and incoming “pilgrims” walked beside slow moving wagon trains that rolled into the gulch from Cheyenne, Sidney and Bismarck. A miner on foot kept his gear pretty basic – rubber hip-boots and a rubber ground sheet, woolen blanket, rifle, pistol and ammunition, tin plates and eating utensils, towels and matches.

Pulled by oxen or mule teams, freight wagons brought the necessities of life to the isolated miners, one of those necessities being plenty of whiskey. Black Hills historian Watson Parker relates the story of the sidewalk loafer who watched a teamster unload 20 barrels of whiskey and a sack of flour in front of a Deadwood store and asked, “What in the hell d’ya suppose they want with all that flour?”

Calamity Jane and Wild Bill came to Deadwood Gulch in early July 1876 as outriders with a wagon train from Cheyenne, led by “Colorado Charley” and Steve Utter. The Utter brothers also brought in the first “gold miners without pick and shovel”  – Madam Mustachio’s wagonload of prostitutes.

From 1876 until 1890, when the railroad arrived in Deadwood, gold was shipped out of the Hills on stagecoaches -- attractive targets for road agents, despite well-armed drivers and guards. During the summer of 1876, $500,000 in gold was shipped out of the gulch, in massive iron safes in the treasure coaches. Preceded and trailed by mounted, armed guards, treasure coaches deliberately ran on irregular schedules to foil plans of would-be robbers.

 Armored coaches, the Monitor, Salamander and Old Ironsides, were put on the line in 1878, often transporting as much as $200,000 worth of gold in a single shipment. Heavy and cumbersome gold bricks were an additional discouragement to bandits whose escape would have been slowed by the wagon needed to cart off their loot. An 1877 shipment worth $350,000 weighed in at more than 1,000 pounds.

Few placer miners left the Black Hills with a fortune. Many spent their hard-earned gold dust on girls, gambling and whiskey or bad investments. The real money was made by enterprising businessmen who furnished miners with supplies and recreation.

Seth Bullock and his partner Sol Star arrived in Deadwood from Montana on August 1, 1876, with a wagonload of hardware -- frying pans, Dutch ovens, dynamite, axes, picks, shovels and ropes -- and a quantity of chamber pots. Anticipating a cold and snowy Black Hills winter, miners avidly bid on the chamber pots auctioned off by Bullock the first night he was in the gulch. His auctioneer patter as he elicited bids was said to have been a classic in ribald humor.

Gambling, whiskey and women, not necessarily in that order, provided entertainment for the mining camp prospectors. All three vices were readily available on the lower part of Main Street, known as the Badlands because of its unsavory reputation.

By the summer of 1877, 75 saloons supplied commodities designed to relieve the miner of his gold dust. Scales for weighing out gold dust were as necessary as whiskey and women in a saloon. Boasting of “the finest brands of wines, liquors and cigars,” the Senate Saloon advertised it was “headquarters for sporting men.” 

            Repeatedly wiped out by major fires and floods, Deadwood rebuilt three times before the turn of the century. Temporary structures were replaced by multi-storied native stone structures, the elegant Victorian buildings that still dominate the downtown skyline and now house gaming casinos.

            Deadwood was the industrial, financial and cultural center of the Black Hills. In 1879, just a year after the first telephone was installed in the White House, telephone lines were strung in Deadwood. Electric lights were installed in 1883; the first passenger train arrived in 1890.

            But despite the best efforts of responsible citizens to turn the rowdy mining camp into a respectable community, remnants of its raucous beginnings lingered on, like the powerful scent of a painted lady’s perfume.

Prostitution and gambling, both prohibited when South Dakota became a state in 1889, continued right into the 1980s.

Gambling went underground when slot machines and poker tables were confiscated in a 1947 raid, but there was always a poker game in progress somewhere – upstairs above saloons, or in basements and back rooms. Ranchers and businessmen coming to Deadwood had no trouble locating the scene of the action.

The very last illegal poker game was in progress in the basement of Dakota Territory Saloon at the stroke of midnight June 29, 1989, when gambling finally became legal in Deadwood.

            Prostitution was a major factor in the Deadwood economy until a 1980 raid by federal and state authorities permanently closed the last three brothels. A July 1980 auction of the contents of Pam’s Purple Door wrote the final chapter in the 104-year history of Deadwood prostitution.

            Low limits gambling tied to historic preservation began in 1989, kicking off a second gold rush and bringing new prosperity to a deteriorating town in danger of losing its Historic Landmark designation. Bets were limited to $5 for nearly a dozen years, but were raised to $100 last winter.       

            Deadwood still clings to the sides of a gulch like gold dust clutched in the callused hand of a grizzled miner. It was gold that brought enterprising businessmen to the remote area more than a century ago, to establish homes and civilize the raw mining camp.  But the history of the old west mining town is as close as the story boards on downtown street corners that tell visitors about those exciting gold rush years.

As Buffalo Bill Cody predicted many years ago, “Deadwood was young so long it will never quite forget its youth.”