The visitor to this section of the Hills today will find it pleasant to stay the night in any one of a wide choice of tourist courts and other reasonable billets, and he may see much of historical interest within a few miles’ drive of Custer. A settler’s stockade, reconstructed to the original model of 1874, is a remarkable site to visit, and the Jewel Cave is best reached from this point. For sheer color and pageantry the annual celebration of Gold Discovery Days, which is held at Custer late in July—near the date of the discovery of gold, July 27—is an affair not to be missed during a Black Hills vacation at that time of year.
The town of Spearfish is the point of entrance to the region on U.S. 14, or, coming in from the north, on U.S. 85. This tidy metropolis, called the Queen City of the Black Hills, never knew the heady history that marked the early days of Custer, of Deadwood, of Rapid City, or even of fashionable Hot Springs. Lying outside the magnificent natural bowl of mineral deposits, Spearfish was founded and exists today for the simple purpose of supplying the inner Hills with food and produce. It has a population of between three and four thousand people, most of whose energies are devoted to agriculture and livestock.
Spearfish has, however, carved for itself a fame and renown even larger, in many quarters, than that enjoyed by the gold rush towns of gustier memories. It is the home of the Black Hills Passion Play.
This beautiful and stirring performance, which is given in a large amphitheater on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday evenings throughout the summers, is a resurrection in an American atmosphere of the centuries-old Passion of Luenen, in Germany. The man who plays the Christus, an inherited responsibility through many generations, is Josef Meier, who fled from Europe in 1932. For six years, with a reassembled cast, he toured the United States, performing a much trimmed-down version of the historic morality on college campuses, in civic auditoriums, and at summer encampments. It was at such a performance at the Black Hills Teachers College that the citizens of Spearfish were inspired to offer the touring company a permanent home. Meier and his group eagerly accepted the offer, and the town constructed an outdoor theater seating eight thousand people. Now, each winter the Passion Play continues its tour of the United States, but all during July and August it remains in residence, acting its moving and majestic pageant to constantly packed houses.
The eastern gateway to the Hills is Rapid City, a metropolis of thirty thousand people which lies on the level prairie just to the east of the final ring of foothills. Founded, like Spearfish, not as a mining center but to serve the near-by gold regions, Rapid City has developed a maze of industrial and commercial enterprises. Shipping, of course, has been a basic form of commerce from the earliest days, with the two most heavily traveled trails into the Black Hills, that from Fort Pierre and that from Sidney, Nebraska, on the Union Pacific, entering the gold area at Rapid City. Lumbering, manufacture, banking, and livestock quickly became prominent as the gold fever subsided and the more permanent settlers began coming into the region to take up the rich cattle and farming lands in western South Dakota. A final guarantee that Rapid City will continue to flourish may be seen in the selection by the Air Force of the high, level prairie land just ten miles to the east of the city as the nation’s major mid-continent bomber base.
Rapid City is served by U.S. Highway 14-16, and South Dakota state highways 40 and 79. Two railroads and a major airline assist in handling the heavy summer tourist travel, and from Rapid City practically every point of interest in the Black Hills can be reached by car within three hours.
CHAPTER TWO
The Formation of the Black Hills
One of the most rewarding features of a visit to the Black Hills is the opportunity for the average individual, who has no technical training, to see with his own eyes a museum of the earth’s ages and a living sample of practically every one of the many aeons of the planet’s history.
The Hills, which is to say the rock substances of the region, are older by hundreds of millions of years than the stone out-juttings of the Rocky Mountains. Layer after layer of slates and schists from the very foundations of this globe lie visibly exposed as the end result of a doming of the region, a vast blistering, as it were, which raised the entire structure, layer upon layer, several thousand feet in the air. Following this doming process, a vigorous program of erosion commenced. Stratum by stratum the winds and rains cut across this huge blister in a horizontal plane, eventually laying the core open at the height above sea level at which we find the Black Hills today. From that core, extending in every direction in the general form of a circle, the various strata which once lay so smoothly one upon another have been laid open as one might slice off the top of an orange.
