A Brief History of South Dakota/Chapter 25
CHAPTER XXV
ON TO THE DIGGINGS
The year 1874 was one of the most distressing which the American people ever suffered. The great reactionary crash in business affairs, following the great boom which came after the war, had fallen in September, 1873. Not only were thousands of great fortunes wiped out, but everywhere, from the poorest cottage to the grandest mansion, the pinch of hard times was felt. At no time have the people been more despairing and hopeless.
On the evening of August 2, 1874, William McKay, an expert miner with Custer's expedition in the Black Hills, went down to the bank of French Creek, a few yards from the camp, and washed out a pan of earth. When the earth 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 in at once to General Custer, whose head was almost turned at the sight. Custer, as we have seen, at once sent a dispatch about this discovery to the army headquarters in St. Paul. It was received there on the evening of August 11, and the next morning the papers throughout America announced to the discouraged people that rich gold mines had been discovered in the Black Hills.
There was magic in the announcement, and drooping spirits everywhere revived. Thousands of despondent men resolved at once to recover their fortunes in southern Dakota. The action of the military in preventing the entry of the miners into the Black Hills cooled the ardor of many of them, but that very obstacle made the people believe that the army was guarding a vast storehouse of wealth, and that fortunes were awaiting them. Some, hardy enough to pass the barrier, sent out reports of rich finds, and this increased the determination of very many to get into the Hills.
To the people of southern Dakota, after the long years of dreary struggle through Indian troubles, grasshoppers, and bad crops, the Black Hills gold excitement seemed a godsend. The settlements along the Missouri were thronged with determined strangers waiting for an opportunity to slip into the Hills. Transportation companies were organized, roadmakers were sent out, and all was activity and excitement. Almost daily some miner would creep back from the Hills with exaggerated stories of the wealth of the diggings. Every one was sure that the treaty for the opening of the Black Hills would be made at once, when there would be wealth for everybody.
The route to the Hills, in which the Dakota people were interested, was advertised everywhere as the Yankton route. It was by railroad to Yankton, thence by steamboat to Fort Pierre, where stages were taken for the remaining one hundred and seventy-five miles into the diggings. The advantages and pleasures of this route were represented most extravagantly in the advertisements.
Although more than a year passed before military opposition to entering the Hills was withdrawn, there was no abatement of popular interest in the gold diggings. Late in the fall of 1874, a party organized at Sioux City had slipped into the Hills by way of northern Nebraska, and had built a stockade on French Creek near the site of the present city of Custer. They were removed by the military in the early spring, and the reports they brought out served to increase the gold excitement throughout America.
During this period the prospecting for gold was in the placers along the streams in the vicinity of Custer; although gold was found generally distributed in that region, these diggings never proved to be particularly rich. Late in the fall of 1875 John B. Pearson, of Yankton, made his way over into the Deadwood gulch in the northern Hills, and discovered rich placer diggings. The following winter was severe, with very deep snow, but many thousand miners assembled at Custer and in that vicinity. Custer city is said to have had eleven thousand population on the 1st of March. As the snows began to disappear in the spring, word was received of Pearson's find in the Deadwood gulch, and there was a stampede for the northern Hills. In a day Custer was practically depopulated. It is said that less than a hundred people remained, where so many thousands, were making their homes but the day before.
During the next summer there were not less than twenty-five thousand people in the Deadwood gulch. They were trespassers upon the Indian land. The laws of Dakota territory could not reach them. The United States government could only regard them as being in contempt of law. The excitement had brought there not only thousands of honest men, who hoped to secure
Deadwood Gulch in the Seventies
fortunes in the search for gold, but also many hundreds of the most desperate gamblers and criminals in America. The community had to protect itself. The miners met, organized a government, elected officers, established courts, and succeeded in maintaining order to a creditable degree. Of course, in such a community as existed in Deadwood in 1876, many crimes were committed, but most of them were promptly punished. Many of those pioneer gold diggers are still living among the most successful and most respected men of South Dakota. It
Deadwood City in the Seventies
will always be to their great credit that in this period of excitement they possessed the good sense and the courage to uphold the dignity of organized society.
While the sturdy miners were thus protecting themselves from these great dangers from within, an even greater peril threatened them from without. The Sioux Indians, jealous of these trespassers upon their land, lay in wait behind every rock, and few white men who straggled away from the main camps without protection were spared. This condition, however, ended as soon as the treaty of 1876 was signed in the fall of that year. By 1877 the laws of South Dakota were executed throughout the mining country; federal courts were established, and the region of the Black Hills at once became the quiet, rich, safe, well-organized part of the country that it has continued to be.