The Black Hills, Mid-Continent Resort

by Albert N. Williams

Meanwhile Reno did indeed encounter the Indians, and when he realized how tragically outnumbered he was, he immediately dismounted his men to fight a delaying action on foot, thereby saving both men and horses. He obviously adopted this tactic on the theory that he would be supported from the rear by Custer. When he saw that Custer had decided to make a diversionary attack on the right flank of the enemy, Reno and his men gave up the fight and concentrated on scrambling out of the trap and making their way to the hill which overlooked the village.

From that vantage point Custer and his force could be seen across the Little Big Horn at a distance of perhaps a thousand yards. Apparently thinking that Reno was still successfully engaging the Indians, Custer rode his men down into a ravine where he apparently encountered the full horde of savages and where he met his death. The details of that last action have never been made clear, but most experts think that he divided his pitifully weak force into two segments at the time of the final charge which took him full into the heart of the great enemy body. Thus it was that Custer was caught in the pliers of the attack, in which hopeless position his entire force was wiped out to the last man, officer, and guide. Custer’s Last Stand, as it has been poetically called, was in every respect the greatest defeat of white forces in the history of Indian warfare.

Custer’s death marked the end of the Black Hills controversy. Although the Indians had been completely victorious, they had spent so heavily of their warriors and their supplies that they were never again able to mount a major attack against the whites. Swiftly the troops hunted them down, village by village, and within a year the great Sioux War had ground to a stop.

A second treaty commission had been appointed late in 1876, and by February the transfer of the Black Hills from the Sioux Nation to the United States had been completed—not for a cash consideration, but only for the government’s promise to support the Indians until such time as they might learn, under agency supervision, to provide for themselves.

By that time the question of entry was no more than rhetorical. The Black Hills were as thickly populated as any region of equal size in the West. The stage routes in from Cheyenne, from Sidney, Nebraska, and from the Dakota railheads were well traveled. The last frontier had been broken.

And besides—there was Deadwood and the Homestake.

The original rush had centered in historic Custer, the scene of the first entrance into the country on French Creek, and the terminus of the Cheyenne-Black Hills stage line. By Christmas of 1875 the population of that wilderness settlement was in excess of ten thousand souls, each of them active and bustling about his business.

On the other hand, there was not a great deal of business to bustle after. French Creek was a good clue to gold, but that was about all. Before long most of the good citizens, having found the little brook something of a snare and a delusion, were casting about for some way to make their livings from each other. Storekeeping, laundering, ranching, hostlering, all were honorable occupations which soon found a plenitude of practitioners.

In that fashion the winter was passed. Ice capped the waters and the snow hung from the trees, and aside from hoping for spring there was little the thronging populace could do. Thus a fruitful field was in fallow for the gossip which started blossoming in March and April. The tales, whispered—as such stories always are—without definition or authority, had it that somewhere in the northern Hills there was another stream that had nuggets the size of ... it is unimportant how large the nuggets, for a glitter of dust the size of an eye-speck would have been a windfall in Custer. Day by day the rumor grew, and as is always the case with such gossip, the precise location of this “Deadtree Gulch” was never made entirely plain.

The reason for this obfuscation was simple: a rich strike had actually been made far in the north part of the Hills, and the claimants were doing their level best to keep it a secret. The fact that Custer held its population as long as it did was a testament to the sagacity and close-lippedness of John Pearson and Sam Blodgett, who had stumbled, late the previous winter, into one of the world’s richest gold basins.