The Black Hills, Mid-Continent Resort

by Albert N. Williams

On June 21, 1951, the legend was further enhanced and improved upon by the presentation to the city of Deadwood of a brand new statue of Hickok carved out of a massive chunk of native granite by the ebullient sculptor, Ziolkowski. An all-day celebration attended the unveiling of this statue upon its pedestal at the foot of Mt. Moriah, and the zenith of the day’s gaudy reverence was the reading of an “epic” poem to the hushed populace of the town over a loud-speaker system from the top of the mount. The statue is plain to be seen about a block from the Adams Memorial Museum, and copies of the epic can no doubt be had by soliciting the Deadwood Chamber of Commerce.

Of a somewhat different character from Wild Bill, but, it is good to report, no less revered in the Hills, was Preacher Smith.

Frontier towns have been notorious for their hallowing of persons, both male and female, who were either expertly good or expertly bad. This strange compounding of affections would suggest that the vice or godliness in itself was unimportant, but that the rough and crude citizens who populated our earlier settlements held a genuine admiration and regard for anyone of any calling who demonstrated authority and accomplishment.

And thus it was with the Reverend Henry W. Smith. A man of exceptionally little luck in life, he gave up his dwindling congregations in the States and journeyed into the frontier in 1875, partly because of a zeal in his heart to bring the Word into the lawless and godless gold camps, but also, it must be conjectured, to find some form of weekday employment which would enable him to care for his wife and two daughters. The wolf had been howling at many doors during those years, and parsonages which carried even a bare subsistence stipend were few and far between.

Smith went first to Custer, where he stayed but a short while, finding little in the way of work and less in the way of souls to save, since the rush to Deadwood was then in full force. Hiring onto a merchandise train as a cook’s helper, he made his way to that newer city, arriving early in May of 1876. In a town of such activity it was not difficult to locate work, and shortly his hide began to fill out and his purse to thicken. That purse, it was discovered after his death, was to be used for the purpose of bringing his family out to join him.

Working diligently and, of course, soberly at his menial tasks from Monday through Saturday, and bravely setting up his pulpit on the main street on Sundays, Preacher Smith soon won the respect and even the genial admiration of the roisterous townspeople. At first his congregations contained more wandering dogs than people, but week after week, as he determinedly kept after his work, an increasingly large crowd gathered of a Sunday morning to listen to his sermons.

Thus the entire town was shocked when he was brutally killed by Indians while walking to a near-by settlement to preach a sermon. Indians were bad enough at best, but killing a harmless and unarmed preacher was an act of violence which shook the consciences of the whole citizen body. It was on those consciences that the guilt began to press—the guilt of the knowledge that they had driven him to his death by their slowness to accept him in their own community and that he had gone to his rendezvous seeking a congregation, no matter how small, that would house him and the Master he served.

Belatedly gathering to his support, the citizens passed a sizable hat for the benefit of the unfortunate man’s widow and daughters. In addition to the gift of cash, the woman received an invitation to bring her grieving family to the Hills, where care would be arranged for them, including a teaching post for the eldest daughter. Unfortunately, neither the widow nor the daughters were in good enough health to be able to make the rigorous trip, and in consequence they could not avail themselves of the hospitality and generosity which were so late in coming.

Although they had failed to bring the parson’s family to Deadwood, the worthy citizens were undaunted in their efforts to memorialize this modest itinerant who had stumbled unwittingly into glory. A great chunk of sandstone was quarried and a local artist of more verve than ability proceeded to hack out the parson’s likeness. The statue was eventually propped over his grave atop Mount Moriah, the cemetery-museum where he lies alongside Wild Bill and Calamity Jane. Unfortunately souvenir hunters carried on their unworthy custom over the years, until finally the battered monument, no longer even recognizable, collapsed. In the Adams Memorial Hall of Deadwood, however, there can be seen a certificate signed in Preacher Smith’s very writing, and thus his handiwork lives along with his legend.

All stories of Deadwood in the Black Hills come, eventually, to the great riddle of Martha Jane Cannary (sometimes spelled Canary), known as Calamity Jane.