We’ve seen
the gold rush story in Alaska and in California, but the gold rush in South
Dakota was a whopper.
There were rumors in the 1850’s that there was gold in the
South Dakota Black Hills. That land was owned
by the Sioux, by treaty with the United States Government. Settlers were not
permitted to live and/or work in Indian territory. General Custer was sent to South Dakota in 1974
to find a location for a fort and to investigate rumors of gold. He
traveled with a very large staff (he apparently was high maintenance),
including two news reporters.
When the
party verified the existence of gold in “them thar hills”, the news reporters
trotted into town and released the story to the newspapers, the word spread
like wildfire, and the gold rush was on.
In 1875 the population in Deadwood ‘city’ exploded from near 0 to over 5000 people, mostly men, living in a lawless Lakota Sioux Territory illegally.
There were gold claims about every 60 feet
along the river, and many more claims up in the hills.
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Many people moved to the town to start
businesses to ‘mine the miners’. It
became a very multicultural town, with many immigrants seeking their own
fortune either through mining or auxiliary businesses.
There were Norwegian gold miners, Chinese merchants
(picture of Wong Family – prosperous merchants) and German Jewish immigrants
who were grocers and bankers.
From
language, monies, tools, cuisines, and religions, Deadwood became an unlikely
international mixing bowl.
The streets were a stinky mess, overflowing rivers of mud, animal waste, emptied chamber pots, and garbage. People said you could smell the town from miles away.
The Chuck
Wagon was invented by Charles Goodnight, a Texas cattleman. It was a rolling kitchen, pantry and
storeroom capable of feeding a dozen cowboys three meals a day.
The bed of the wagon held enough provisions
for feeding twelve men for a month – bacon, salt, pork, beans, rice, coffee,
flour, dried fruit, sugar and lard. The
wagon also held horseshoes, branding irons and stacks of bedrolls.
We watched
the re-enactment of the bar room shooting of Wild Bill Hickok. That was fun (as viewers of the re-enactment).
The actor paying Wild Bill talked about his life history, and how he
came to be living in Deadwood. Hickok was a
former gunfighter and lawman who arrived in Deadwood by stagecoach having
travelled with Calamity Jane. He was
playing poker in Saloon Number 10 when disgruntled miner Jack McCall walked in
and shot Wild Bill in the back of his head, killing him instantly (origin of
Deadman’s hand). The shooting may have
been related to a prior gambling encounter. McCall was tried by a jury of fellow coal
miners and found not guilty. This
verdict was thrown out by a court in Yankton, the territory capital, because
Deadwood was an Indian territory not covered under the United States legal
system. It was Sioux territory. When McCall was properly re-tried, he was
found guilty and hanged, then buried with the noose still around his neck.
The Mount
Moriah Cemetery is the current official Cemetery of Deadwood. It is also named Boot Hill. The original cemetery was near main street in
town, but that turned out not to be a good location.
In 1878, the bodies were dug up and re-buried
in the new Mount Moriah Cemetery. Occasionally (as recently as 2012), construction crews unearth previously buried remains near the old original cemetery site. There are currently about 3400 people buried in Boot Hill.
Wild Bill
Hickok and Calamity Jane, as well as many other notables are buried here.
This
building is the ‘bones’ of the old “Slime Plant”, now repurposed into a
restaurant, casino, hotel and entertainment venue.
The Slime Plant operated for over 60 years
using a cyanide process to glean gold from the ore.
It was terrible toxic work.
To this day, there are homes in Deadwood with rooves constructed with the lids from the old used cyanide canisters.
Just a few
miles from Deadwood, is the town of Lead (pronounced Leed). It was here that in 1877, George Hearst
(Father to William Randolph Hearst, (great-grandfather to Patti Hearst),
purchased the Claim that became the Homestake Gold Mine.
The Homestake turned into one of the richest
gold mines in the world, reaching a depth of 8000 feet, and operating for 126
years. The mine was the largest and
deepest gold mine in North America. Stock shares in Homestake were traded on the
NYSE starting in 1879 and the Homestake became one of the longest listed stocks in the
history of the NYSE.
It was an
open pit hard rock mining operation where miners, ore and equipment rode to the
surface in cage like elevators. The ore
was crushed into a fine powder and processed with cyanide to extract the
gold. Over 1000 workers went underground
every day. There were 331 miles of
linked railways. 41 MILLION ounces of
gold were refined out of the facility from 167 million tons of removed ore. There is still gold in the mine, but the mine
has been retired and re-purposed. The
gold will not be extracted.
The mine
closed in 2001 due to low gold prices, poor ore quality, and high operating costs.
The old
Homestake mine was selected by the National Science Foundation to be repurposed
into what is now the Sanford Underground Research Facility for leading edge
physical science research. They are
building the world’s largest dark matter and neutrino experimental center. Dr. Ray Davis, a chemist who conducted basic
research on neutrinos at this research center, won the Nobel Prize in Physics
in 2002 for his work done at Sanford.
Today, Deadwood and Lead are fun tour towns, contemporized, filled with shops, other on-street shooting re-enactments, and made-to look old attractions, scattered among some of the original well preserved buildings and an occasional closed mine pit.
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