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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.