The Black Hills, Mid-Continent Resort

by Albert N. Williams

To the north of the Hills, crossing the Belle Fourche River first, the army made its gentle way, and then down the west slope of the forbidding mountains, seeking for an easy pass into the dark interior. Tall in the saddle rode golden-haired George Custer, for he was commanding the strongest army ever put into Indian country. It is little wonder that he slept quietly at night, or that he wrote in his diary: “It is a strange sight to look back at the advancing column of cavalry and behold the men with beautiful bouquets in their hands while their horses were decorated with wreathes of flowers fit to crown a Queen of the May.”

In that holiday mood the army moved down inside the great bowl of mountains on its sightseeing tour, and presently it camped about three miles west of the present town of Custer. All this while the miners had not been inactive, but had plied their pans here and there as the company passed across various streams. Until this bivouac, though, they had had no luck, and, as a matter of fact, had actually been expecting none. They had come along to quell the rumor of gold as much as to bear it out. Preferably to quell it, if General Sheridan were to have his way.

On August 2 of that year, 1874, McKay turned out to try his implements once again on French Creek. An early account gives this dramatic version of the famed discovery: “When the earth [in the pan] 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 to General Custer, whose head was almost turned at the sight.”

Through the magic of his discipline Custer managed to keep his army from beating their ration tins into placer pans and “claiming” on the spot. Getting under way almost immediately, the men continued their march eastward through the heart of the Hills, and on August 30 emerged from the great park and headed back to Fort Lincoln.

In the meanwhile a messenger had been sent ahead with the news of gold. Scout Charley Reynolds, who was to die with his commander just two years later, was detached from the base camp and sent scurrying down to Fort Laramie, to the nearest telegraph station. Within an hour of his arrival at the post, two hundred miles to the south and west of the Black Hills, the tremendous news was burning over the wires to General Sheridan in St. Louis.

It was also burning some operator’s ear along the way, for the great secret, which was to be handed only to the high command in Washington, made its way on that very day into the editorial rooms of the old Chicago Inter-Ocean—where, naturally, it was treated with great respect and splashed across the headlines with all the vigor of an announcement of the Second Coming.

There was actually a genuine religious fervor in the proclamation, for the locust had been upon the land for many months in the eastern cities, and the bread lines had been growing. It had threatened to be a cold winter until ... until this last bonanza burst upon the nation.

Men had all but forgotten what a gold rush was like. It had been so long since the last great hegira to the Pikes Peak region that a new generation had come into manhood, a generation that knew California only as a state, Colorado as a prosperous territory, and the Union Pacific as the proper way to cross the empty West. There were none of the desperate winter marches up the Continental Divide this time, no lost wagon trains on the salt deserts, no Indian massacres. This rush left Chicago on the “cars,” as noisy and as highhearted as fans following a football club.

And there was another great difference between the foray to the Black Hills and the earlier gold rushes. In this case the argonauts did not get to the diggings. The troops saw to that. Deploring the untimely leak of official intelligence concerning the presence of the yellow metal in the Dakota outcropping, the War Department issued stern warnings to all settlers to keep away. The existence of the treaty with the Indians was proclaimed in every paper—and, though less resoundingly, the danger from the Indians was also mentioned.

Nonetheless, before the end of that crucial year a sizable group of foolhardy settlers broke through the blockade and made themselves at home. Erecting a strong stockade at the scene of the first strike, they soon carved themselves a town in the wilderness, gratefully naming it Custer, and even that early providing for the wide main street where ox teams could make a U-turn. Throughout the first winter these illegal townspeople managed somehow to survive the cold, the lack of rations, and the danger of Indian attack; but late in the spring General Crook’s cavalry arrived to “escort” them out of the Hills and back to the railroad at Cheyenne.