_South Dakota State Historical Society
Pierre, South Dakota
December 17, 1951_
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.
[Illustration: The Black Hills; The Badlands]
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.
[Illustration: Highways leading into the Black Hills.]
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.
CHAPTER TWO
The Formation of the Black Hills
One of the most rewarding features of a visit to the Black Hills is the
opportunity for the average individual, who has no technical training,
to see with his own eyes a museum of the earth’s ages and a living
sample of practically every one of the many aeons of the planet’s
history.
The Hills, which is to say the rock substances of the region, are older
by hundreds of millions of years than the stone out-juttings of the
Rocky Mountains. Layer after layer of slates and schists from the very
foundations of this globe lie visibly exposed as the end result of a
doming of the region, a vast blistering, as it were, which raised the
entire structure, layer upon layer, several thousand feet in the air.
Following this doming process, a vigorous program of erosion commenced.
Stratum by stratum the winds and rains cut across this huge blister in a
horizontal plane, eventually laying the core open at the height above
sea level at which we find the Black Hills today. From that core,
extending in every direction in the general form of a circle, the
various strata which once lay so smoothly one upon another have been
laid open as one might slice off the top of an orange.
[Illustration: The Doming of the Black Hills
Rock Strata being shifted into a dome at the time of the great
continental uplift.
The forces of erosion—wind and water—have levelled the dome and
opened the seams to view.]
In order to get an even clearer picture of how this amazing phenomenon
came about through the aeons, let us fold back the ages to the very
birth of this planet.
For centuries men have attempted to determine the earth’s exact age, but
except for the famed Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland, who gravely
calculated that the earth was formed at precisely nine o’clock on the
morning of the twelfth of October in the year 4004 B.C., no scientist
has been able to come closer than a few million years in the figures.
Through a number of trustworthy measurements, however—including, in
recent years, the examination of the deterioration of radioactive
elements in rocks—geologists have agreed that the oldest known
ingredients of the earth’s crust have been in existence at least two
billion years, and, according to some very recent calculations, possibly
as long as three and a half billion.
In what is known as the Archean period, the most ancient of which we
have any geological knowledge, a vast sea covered much of North America,
bounded by certain masses of land, the extent of which has never been
discovered. From this land mass remnants of mud and sand were broken
away by waves and deposited on the floor of the sea. Eventually, under
the pressure of its own weight, this material formed shales and
sandstones to an undetermined depth—many thousands of feet. Those
particular sandstones and shales underlie the entire Black Hills area
and extend in nearly every direction for a considerable distance,
suggesting perhaps that the area of the Hills was at one time the bottom
of this watery bowl.
The Archean period came to an end some five hundred million years ago.
By then the seas had withdrawn, and the new land formations which had
lain under the early ocean merged with the vestiges of the first land
mass. But this metamorphosis, which can be described in such calm
fashion, was by no means a gentle affair. It took place largely as the
result of a shifting and rising of certain ocean bottom areas, among
which was the region where we now find the Black Hills.
At the time of this uplift, and possibly contributing to it, there was a
tremendous disturbance in the lower regions of the earth which sent
great streams of molten matter up into the several-mile-thick layer of
shale, through which it poured toward the surface, breaking through in
monolithic forms and hardening into granite. The New Mexico writer,
Eugene Manlove Rhodes, describing a similar geologic phenomenon in the
valley of the Rio Grande, has called it “like sticking a knife through a
tambourine,” and indeed it was. Harney Peak, in Custer State Park, is
just such a granite finger pointing up through the original shales
toward the sky.
When this disturbance took place the granite juttings did not rise above
the surrounding landscape as they now do. In many cases they did not
even reach the surface of the shale beds, but ceased their flow and
hardened short of the crust of the earth, as it was then to be found.
When, however, the region was domed, many millions of years later, the
subsequent weathering of the huge blister did not attack these granite
formations with anywhere near the vigor with which the softer sandstones
and limestones were eroded. What actually occurred, then, was a peeling
away of the softer rocks, leaving the granite formations near their
original sizes, but at last above the ground level in the form of peaks,
needles, and spires.
But we have gotten ahead of our story. Following the Algonkian period,
when the molten matter was injected into the layers of shale, there came
what is known as the Cambrian period. The Cambrian occupied the first
80,000,000 years of the Paleozoic era, which in itself covered the
entire period from 510,000,000 to 180,000,000 years ago.
During the Cambrian period the land subsided again, perhaps because of
the weight of the uplifted sedimentary formations. During this
subsidence the waters once again covered vast portions of North America,
and additional muds and slimes were deposited on the bottom. It was at
this period that life first appeared on the earth, in the form of simple
marine organisms which have left fossil remains. These deposits made in
the Cambrian period can be seen in outcroppings all through the region,
although they are most notably found in the area about Deadwood. Because
of their structure they indicate to the geologist that the shoreline of
the ancient Cambrian sea was near at hand, and also that this covering
of water was by no means as extensive or as deep as the earlier Archean
sea.
The deposits of sand and mud, which were eventually pressed into stone,
occasionally reach a depth of as much as five hundred feet, although
they were laid down extremely slowly, as eddying mud is laid at the
bottom of a pond. In the locality of Deadwood they contained a rich
infiltration of gold, and the entire conglomeration was thoroughly
intermixed with a vast outcropping of much older rock—this effect
undoubtedly having taken place later, during the great continental
uplift, when the final doming occurred.