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Rapid City, SD → Lead, SD → Pierre, SD → Rapid City, SD 406.0 mi (653.4 km) |
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I have decided to begin a chilling new adventure, everyone!
Few places are as ingrained in South Dakota history as the town of Deadwood, epicenter of the Black Hills Gold Rush, which put such names as Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, George Custer, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse into the lexicon of US folklore! To kick off my new year and new hat, I’ve journeyed here at the tail end of January, mere weeks after a gift shop owner reported temperatures had dipped to -50˚F! Would I be dead wood myself by the end of it? Only time would tell!
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The Black Hills Gold Rush kicked off in August of 1875 when a party of seven prospectors found their first deposits at Deadwood Gulch. From there, more folks caught the gold bug and rushed in to stake their claims on Sioux land, in open violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie! But neither the Sioux nor the US Army could stop the flood of miners, who dug, and dug, and dug here until they’d pulled out ten percent of the world’s gold supply!
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By April 27, 1876, these miners had laid out the town of Deadwood, which they named for the dead trees they found piled up in a nearby gulch. What they threw together at first was a mish-mash of shabby buildings to meet their most basic shelter needs, but as more money flowed out of the mines, entrepreneurs built boarding houses, saloons, and brothels to capitalize on human needs in the middle of the Rush!
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Many of the legends of Deadwood come from its overall lawlessness! With no civic structure or law enforcement, disputes often got settled by pistols! For that reason, this stretch of Deadwood’s Main Street, loaded with gambling halls and opium houses, came to be called the Badlands!
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The law couldn’t get a hold of the Badlands for nearly a hundred years, and nowhere is that clearer than Pam’s Purple Door! Today, this “boarding house” really is a boarding house, but from 1876 until 1980, it was also a brothel! Even though the Mann Act of 1910 got cities across the country to shut down their brothels, they persisted in Deadwood for another seventy years! Part of the reason was that madams like Pam Holliday (a.k.a. Betty J. Campbell) were also philanthropists, and the locals didn’t want the philanthropy to stop. So when the FBI did finally raid Pam’s Purple Door on May 21, 1980, they kept it top secret and ultimately sent her to jail for tax evasion!
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Plenty of the crimes committed here in the Badlands were less beneficial to the local community. Most famously, former lawman and gunfighter, James “Wild Bill” Hickok, met his end in Nuttal & Mann’s saloon, shot in the back of the head by Jack McCall, whom he’d beaten at poker the day before! His final hand, with two aces and two eights, has been known as the “dead man’s hand” ever since! Drunk and unable to ride a horse, he was captured a few blocks later, put on impromptu trial, acquitted, then re-tried and executed in Yankton! The judge in Yankton had ruled the Deadwood trial a sham, so the defendant wasn’t protected by the laws of double jeopardy!
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The murder of “Wild Bill” sent a shockwave through Deadwood, and caused Territorial Governor Pennington to appoint Lawrence County’s first sheriff: hardware store owner, Seth Bullock! In nine short months, Mr. Bullock tamed Deadwood’s most notorious characters, like crime boss, Al Swearengen, with pure intimidation and without firing a shot! Years later, after befriending Teddy Roosevelt and moving his family to a much safer Deadwood, Mr. Bullock built the town’s first hotel on the site of his hardware store, which had burned down in 1894. The 63-room Bullock Hotel is still standing today!
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But when President Roosevelt came to visit his friend in Deadwood, he didn’t stay at the Bullock Hotel. By 1903, a much fancier, Renaissance Revival hotel went up near the railroad depot, equipped with the most modern amenities: electric lighting, steam heat, a buffet, and private bathrooms (a rare luxury in hotels of the time)! This hotel took on the name of its chief financier, Harris Franklin, who ended its years of underfunding and a stint as a swimming pool, to become the place for famous visitors to be safely pampered in notorious Deadwood!
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As to what funded most of this luxury, just next door to Deadwood was the town of Lead, famous for its Homestake Mine, the big one, the “Richest 100 Square Miles” on Earth! The original vein was discovered in 1876 by Hank Harney, Alexander Engh, and Fred & Moses Manuel, who worked it for two years then sold it to George Hearst (dad of William Randolph), who named it Homestake! This mine would continue, uninterrupted, for 126 years, plucking out 41 million ounces of gold and 9 million ounces of silver!
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At first, all the mining was done on the surface using the slope of the hills to control the water that helped separate the gold. Devices like these spiral concentrators sped up the process. There were sixty concentrators at the Homestake Mine, and like regular panning, they worked by weight! After dumping watery slurry at the top, the forces of gravity going around the spiral separated the lighter materials to the outside while the heavy gold stayed in the middle to be collected! This is how 40% of the Homestake’s gold was recovered!
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As the surface ore ran out, the miners dug deeper, first with candlesticks and hammers, then with pneumatic and hydraulic equipment! They began digging tunnels into the ground and mining upward from those tunnels, which of course was a huge safety risk! 400 miners died here at Homestake, but that also led to new safety measures being implemented. By the time the Homestake Mine closed in 2002, it was one of the safest in the world! Of course, by then, there was the question of what to do about the colossal hole and 370 miles of tunnels that the operation had left in the Black Hills!
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In 1965, the answer to the underground conundrum came from the far reaches of space! Chemist, Dr. Ray Davis of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, was having a ton of trouble learning about neutrinos! They were the oldest known particles, and that’s about all anyone knew about them! Neutrinos don’t interact much with other particles, and they were getting lost among all the other cosmic radiation that could penetrate at least 2,300 feet underground. Luckily for Dr. Davis, the tunnels at Homestake were 4,850 feet underground! So this old gold mine transitioned into a laboratory for studying particle physics!
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To find these neutrinos, workers assembled a huge, 48-foot by 28-foot tank and filled it with perchloroethylene, which is usually used in dry cleaning. Inside it, scientists successfully detected neutrinos, and Dr. Davis won the Nobel Prize for Science for it! There was just one problem: they only found a third of the particles they’d predicted! This led to the discovery of a neutrino’s three “flavors,” which pop up at various stages of their flight through space! Who knows what motherlode of cosmic discoveries could still be made in this old mine?!
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Like a fast-flying neutrino, once I finished exploring the lab’s visitor center, I was also flying fast into the east! I planned to add another state capitol to my quest log, about three hours east of Deadwood was South Dakota’s capital city of Pierre, the second smallest in the USA! How it came to be the capital was one wild fight! Yankton was the original in 1862, led by Governor William Jayne, a fellow with no experience at all, who was appointed as a favor by President Lincoln! Like in Deadwood, South Dakota’s process of choosing a capital was almost lawless with food fights, literal buying of votes, and threats of defenestration!
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After South Dakota and North Dakota split, seven different cities threw in their bids, from Aberdeen to Huron to Sioux Falls, but Pierre won out on October 2, 1889…and again in 1890…and again in 1904. It was in the middle of the state, on the Missouri River, and served by the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad! With all the mess finally cleared, the capitol building went up under the supervision of architects, Charles Bell (of Montana’s capitol) and Menno Detweiler!
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Pierre’s a very French-sounding name, so I wondered how that came to be name of South Dakota’s HQ! Across the Missouri, I found my answer at Fort Pierre Chouteau! This was originally a trapper’s fort, founded by John Jacob Astor of the American Fur Company in 1832. Since Pierre Chouteau, Jr. ran the company’s western operations from St. Louis, his name got attached to this fort!
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Boy, was this a cold and desolate-looking place! So what the heck were folks doing up here at all? Well, it had to do with keeping warm in winter! After the Corps of Discovery came through here between 1803 and 1804, the jig was up for all fur-bearing critters around the upper Missouri River. So Fort Pierre Chouteau became a big distribution point for buffalo robes and other animal skins bound for Eastern markets!
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Though only a stone marker remains today, by 1855, Fort Pierre Chouteau had become a bustling military post—the region’s first—with more than 900 soldiers stationed there! The fort was meant to keep tabs on conflicts between settlers and the Sioux, and it was here that the Treaty of Fort Pierre, signed in October of 1855, gave tribes the right to police themselves while offering food and farming assistance. Sounds pretty good, right? Congress never ratified the treaty, so it never went into effect! This cracked open the door to warfare that the Black Hills Gold Rush would swing wide!
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Whew! With all this time on the road, I was pretty beat! Being short, though, I couldn’t help but notice the cool wind-blown snow drifts and intricate ice textures that were forming around footprints on the path. It’s important to pause in the middle of running around and appreciate the tiny, beautiful things like these!
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But once the sun finished setting, it got much colder, and I was back on the road to Rapid City, ready to settle into the GrandStay Residential Suites Hotel, which was really nice, and had a full kitchen and dishwasher! Oh, to have a dishwasher of my own some day…
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Now that I’m bundled up and cozy, I am ready for a day of national park adventuring! Both sites tomorrow will be sending me out of the chilly air and down underground. My entries are all timed, so I will have to schedule my day just right. I think I’ve got that figured out by now!
I’m going deep, into sleep!
More 2024 Adventures |
Total Ground Covered: 406.0 mi (653.4 km) |
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