LISTENING
ROCKY MOUNTAIN COUNTRY
THE WATER AND THE POWER
THE BOOK BY MY SIDE
Contents
[I The Black Hills: The Forbidden Land] 1 [II The Formation of the Black Hills] 15 [III The Hills Today] 27 [IV History I: Indians and Gold] 47 [V History II: Deadwood Days] 78 [VI The White River Badlands] 115 [ Bibliography] 126 [ Index] 127
Illustrations
[Along the Needles Highway] facing page 34 [Harney Peak—older by ages than the Rockies] 35 [The Four Great Faces: Mount Rushmore Memorial] 50 [Sylvan Lake mirrors great granite shields at an elevation of 6,250 feet] 51 [Calamity Jane, during her carnival days] 82 [Wild Bill Hickok, from an early portrait] 82 [Cheyenne—Black Hills Stage carrying bullion guarded by shotgun messengers] 82 [Deadwood Gulch in 1881] 83 [Modern Deadwood—seventy years later] 83 [One of the Black Hills’ many streams] 98 [The Badlands: Desolate, empty, and seared] 99
Introduction
I have had an opportunity to enjoy one of the most readable accounts of the Black Hills I have ever come across. It is written to acquaint traveling America with an area which was long off the beaten path of tourists, and which has only during the past quarter century been recognized as a place where people who wish to “Know America First” may profitably spend some time.
Mr. Williams has outlined the historical reason why this small wonderland was so long outside the consciousness of America, and he has devoted a chapter to telling about the methods of nature in producing the intricacies of this formation, older by far than the Alps or the Himalayas. He has made the subject live, and he includes enough expert terminology to satisfy the reader that he knows whereof he speaks.
In his chapter on “The Hills Today” Mr. Williams outlines what the tourist should see, and how to see it. For that chapter alone his book would be well worth the attention of every prospective sight-seer. He has two chapters pertaining to the history of the region, the first speculating on how the whole economic growth of the West might well have been altered had a confirmed story of “gold in the Black Hills” been released fifty years before it was spread-eagled on the pages of the Chicago Inter-Ocean. It is an interesting speculation, and he gives it a pleasing reality.
Another chapter deals with the lives of some of the characters exploited and given semi-permanent fame by the old dime novels. Deadwood without these characters would be just another picturesque town set down in a mountain valley; with them it becomes one of America’s better-known hot spots, vying with the Klondike and Leadville.