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 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:

came to these hills in 1833, seven of us DeLacompt Ezra Kind G. W. Wood T Brown R Kent WM King Indian Crow All ded but me Ezra Kind Killed by Indians beyond the high hill got our gold june 1834

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 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 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 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 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), 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

Then he simply waited.

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 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 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 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 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.

And besides—there was Deadwood and the Homestake.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.