The Black Hills, Mid-Continent Resort

by Albert N. Williams

The town is located in a large bowl of the southern hills known as the Vale of Minnekahta, from the Sioux name for “warm waters.” Situated as it is on the rim of the Hills region, it was not included in the general taboo that cloaked the rest of Paha Sapa to the north; and for nearly a century before its discovery by the white man in 1875, it was a favored health resort of the Indians. As a matter of fact, Battle Mountain, which overlooks the town, takes its name from a legendary war between the Sioux and the Cheyenne for the exclusive privileges of the hot baths.

Not long after the discovery of the springs a syndicate of investors who had come into the Hills from Iowa bought the ranch claims that had been taken out in the Minnekahta Canyon, and sought to develop the region as a spa. This was in the late eighties when salubrious waters were in high fashion as a cure for arthritis and other joint and muscular disorders of various degrees of complexity. Colonel Fred T. Evans, who had made a fortune operating a bull-team freight line from Fort Pierre to Rapid City, built an elaborate resort, the Evans Hotel, which even today is imposing in its last-century splendor; and with the arrival in 1890 and 1891 of two railroads, the Chicago and Northwestern and the Burlington, wealthy cure-seekers from all over the United States made it their habit to spend the summer months in this pleasant town.

Highways leading into the Black Hills.

Healing waters have long since gone out of vogue as a form of recreation, and although several clinics still treat a modest number of visitors for one indisposition or another, the town of Hot Springs has ceased to be a tourist center of any consequence. Also, the fact that the Springs are located a considerable distance south of U.S. 16, the main east-west route through the Hills, has contributed to the increasing isolation which this town enjoys, drowsily seeing to the wants of the occasional visitor who strays into Paha Sapa from the south along U.S. 85. But do not mistake it, it is a pleasant town to stop in, with excellent motor courts and a good selection of restaurants.

The town of Custer, a scant fifteen miles from the Wyoming border on U.S. 16, is little more today than a tourist stopover. It is almost two thousand feet higher than Hot Springs, at an altitude of 5,301 feet, and contains, according to the latest estimates, nearly two thousand residents.

As the tourist enters the town he will immediately be amazed by the wide main street; but if he ponders for a moment the problems of turning a freight wagon behind sixteen oxen, the reason will become clear. Custer, the western gateway to the Hills, was, until the coming of the railroads, a major way station on the busy Cheyenne-Deadwood stage and freight route; and for fifteen years the great bull wagons teamed into this busy center where, in most cases, the goods were unloaded and trans-shipped by lighter wagons into the various mining centers throughout the northern and central Hills.

Custer, the oldest of the white man’s settlements in Paha Sapa, was founded in 1875 by gold-seekers who flocked into the territory following the reports of yellow metal sent back by George Custer after his exploratory campaign of 1874. In the first spring and summer of its existence more than five thousand miners swarmed into the region to pan gold. This invasion was a violation of the government’s treaty with the Sioux, and the military forced the argonauts to leave.

By 1876 the Indian problem had come to a head with the defeat of General Custer on the Little Big Horn in eastern Montana; and as one phase of retaliation the federal government redrafted the Sioux treaty, allowing American citizens to enter the Black Hills, until this time reserved for the Indians. Although for some time the tribal leaders could not be persuaded to sign the revised agreement, the restrictions on settlers were removed, and back into the Hills rushed the prospectors—this time to the new strikes in Deadwood Gulch, in the north.

By the middle of 1877 Custer, where gold had originally been found, had a population of a mere three hundred souls, all of them concerned primarily with the operation of the stage stations and hostels. True, a few grizzled placer miners still worked the streams near by, and do to this day; but hard rock mining in Deadwood was the new order of affairs.