Mr. Williams’ last chapter on the Badlands, a neighboring phenomenon, a place of amazing mystery and strange disorder, serves to depict what might be termed the undepictable in terms exactly calculated to excite the reader’s absorbed interest.
Will G. Robinson
South Dakota State Historical Society
Pierre, South Dakota
December 17, 1951
CHAPTER ONE
The Black Hills:
The Forbidden Land
The thing to remember is that the Black Hills are not hills at all. They are mountains, the highest mountains east of the Rockies, with Harney Peak rising to a height of 7,242 feet above sea level. Inasmuch as the prairie floor averages, at the four entrances to the Hills, only 3,200 feet in elevation, these are mountains of considerable stature.
The title “hills” was by no means given the area by early white settlers. Indeed, if that majestic domain had not already been named the Black Hills by the Indians, George Armstrong Custer, who in 1874 made the first full-scale exploration of the region, would no doubt have dignified it with a more appropriate and properly descriptive name—the Sioux or the Dakota Mountains, in all probability.
From time beyond remembrance, however, the region had been known to the Indians as Paha Sapa, exactly to be translated as “Black Hills,” and very properly that name was accepted by government geographers. The use of the word “black” possibly fulfilled several functions, for not only do these massive peaks appear decidedly black when seen against the horizon across distances as great as a hundred miles, but they were, to the superstitious braves of the Teton Sioux, the abode of the Thunders and studiously to be avoided.
This taboo fastness was one of the last regions in the great American West to be explored and settled. For one reason, it enjoyed an isolation from the centers of development that served to discourage any but the most hardy of explorers. Lying in the extreme western end of present-day South Dakota, the Black Hills were two hundred miles west of the settlements around Pierre, on the Missouri River, and two hundred miles north of the towns along the North Platte, the valley of the Oregon-California Trail. The most important reason, though, for its belated opening was that gold was not discovered in the Black Hills until 1874, and it was the discovery of gold in various sections which more than any other single set of circumstances dictated the pattern of the development of the trans-Mississippi West.