The secret held for only a few months. Trappers, prospectors, and mere travelers were passing through the spruce trails of the Hills in such profusion that sooner or later the activity up Deadwood Gulch, as it came to be called, was bound to be observed. Pearson had found his dream cache in December of 1875, and he managed to contain the secret only until March of 1876. Like a forest fire the news of the strike to the north spread, and by May the southern Hills were deserted. Custer, for several years the metropolis of the entire region, lost all except thirty of its citizens in a matter of weeks, and other settlements in the south and west simply dried up and disappeared.
That Deadwood Gulch, so named for the stand of burned-over timber which graced its declivitous sides, contained a major deposit was not to be denied. The rich sands which Pearson had spaded up testified to that, and later comers were by no means disappointed. But the names and locations of individual early discoveries have long been lost to all save the most assiduous researchers, for there was one claim which outshone all the rest. That digging was the mighty Homestake, which, from its first days, has produced gold and assorted other precious ores in such abundance and with such dependability that it has been accepted the world over as one of earth’s great mines, rivaled in munificence only by the Portland-Independence of Cripple Creek in Colorado and the fabulous workings of the Witwatersrand of South Africa.
As with all rich diggings, an appropriate legend attends the account of the original discovery of the Homestake. It seems there were two brothers, Fred and Moses Manuel, who had long been addicted to that most vicious of all unbreakable habits—gold prospecting. Moses had wound his weary way through the West for a full quarter of a century, plodding the dusty California gold gulches in ’50, up the steep heights of Virginia City in ’60, into Old Mexico, and—although he was a full generation too early—into Alaska. But now, in 1875, he was through with it all and was going home.
Collecting his brother Fred, who was fruitlessly panning the sands of the Last Chance Gulch in the high border country of Montana, Moses started east, passing of course through the Black Hills, to scout down this one last ray of rumor—that a new strike was in the making. Setting out their camp in Bobtail Gulch, a mere pistol shot from certain placer claims in Deadwood Gulch, they went to work in midwinter, hoping to find, the legend has it, just enough blossom rock to give them a stake for their homeward journey.
They seem to have hit it with a vengeance, not mere placer gold in the stream bed but a genuine lode, for on April 9, 1876, they patented the claim known as the Homestake. Discarding for the moment all idea of going on home with whatever meager wealth this “last” try should bring them, the Manuel brothers immediately consolidated their position by going into partnership with another prospector and taking shares in the Golden Terra, an adjoining piece of real estate, the Old Abe, and the Golden Star. The immediate returns, by the ton, are not today known, but they must have been substantial, for the lucky brothers built an arrastra—a crude millstone affair for grinding ore—and managed to pocket more than five thousand dollars in their first year of operation.
In the natural run of events the Homestake and the adjoining parcels which the Manuel brothers were operating would probably have worked well enough for a year or so, and would then have suffered the fate of thousands of other diggings throughout the gold-rush West—the surface ores would have played out, and because of the high cost of following the lodes deeper into the earth than a few dozen feet, the mines would have been abandoned. But in this case a San Francisco syndicate came into the picture, providing the necessary capital funds for the searching out of whatever ultimate wealth the Homestake might have.
This syndicate of Pacific Coast businessmen included James Ben Ali Haggin, a partner in the highly solvent Wells Fargo express company, and Senator George Hearst, the father of the publisher, William Randolph Hearst. These vigorous men sent a mining engineer into the Hills in 1877 to canvass the location for possible investments; and in the course of a detailed examination of whatever properties seemed to be paying well, this emissary from Market Street came upon the brothers Manuel. A superficial examination of the Homestake and the Golden Terra sufficed this engineer, and he optioned them both, the first for seventy thousand dollars and the second for half that sum. Returning immediately to California, he delivered to his employers samples of this richest gold mine in North America, and without delay Senator Hearst went to South Dakota to see for himself.
What he saw impressed him most favorably, for upon his return to California he owned both the Terra and the Homestake, as well as several other claims on the same hill, a total of ten acres of mining property. That small figure is significant in the light of the fact that the Homestake Mining Company today owns more than six thousand acres of mining claims.
With the incorporation of the mining company in San Francisco, the aboriginal methods employed by the Manuel brothers were discarded, and the latest in mine machinery was laboriously shipped by train to Sidney, Nebraska, and then by ox team the two hundred miles to the town of Lead (pronounced “Leed”), the precise location of the Homestake, two miles from Deadwood City. The first installation was an eighty-stamp mill, which began its work in July of 1878. Within five years six additional mills were in operation, holding a total of 580 giant stampers.
The mine now handles four thousand tons of ore per day and has, in its sighted reserve, twenty million tons yet to work. The two main shafts reach into the earth to a depth of more than a mile, with branching tunnels piercing the mountain at hundred-foot levels; and there are more than a hundred and fifty miles of secondary tunnels, served by more than eighty miles of mine railway.