The bird lover will find the Black Hills nothing less than a vast aviary, more than two hundred species having been seen in the region. Animal life is almost as widely represented, although the casual visitor is not likely to come upon a native mountain lion or gray wolf. The assistance of forest rangers and Park Service employees is available in locating the habitats of some of the rarer varieties of wildlife.
As might be expected, the fisherman will find plenty of opportunity to ply his pole in this region. There are nearly 150 miles of stream and lake frontage in the Black Hills, and the waters are liberally stocked by the state hatcheries. In addition to trout, the angler will encounter pike, pickerel, bluegills, black bass, and perch.
Finally, there are the annual celebrations and fairs, which are always of interest to the outsider, for they help dramatize the particular region where they are held and its historical background. July and August are the months for these celebrations, and notices of coming events will be found posted prominently’ along the tourist routes. Four such outstanding occasions are Black Hills Range Days at Rapid City, Gold Discovery Days at Custer, the Belle Fourche Round-Up, and the Days of ’76 at Deadwood. The Deadwood celebration, it might be added, celebrates not the Revolutionary War, but the discovery of gold in Deadwood Gulch in 1876.
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.