- History
Alvin McDonald
The South Dakota Mining Company hired Jesse McDonald in 1890 to look after its mineral claim at Wind Cave, and his son Alvin, sixteen years old, went down into it and did not really stop. He worked by…
- History
Carrie Ingalls
The Ingalls girl who did not write the books spent most of her adult life in the Black Hills, in the newspaper trade. Caroline Celestia Ingalls, born in Kansas in 1870 and raised at De Smet, worked fi…
- History
Doane Robinson
The idea of carving a mountain in South Dakota belonged to a state historian who wanted a reason for motorists to stop. Doane Robinson, superintendent of the State Historical Society, put it bluntly: …
- History
Explorer II
A natural bowl in the hills south west of Rapid City was chosen in 1934 because a stratospheric balloon needs shelter from wind while it is being filled and a clear run east once it is up. Rapid City …
- Industry & Science
Fred Evans
Fred Evans made his money hauling freight into the Black Hills, running an outfit that at its height employed something like a thousand men and well over a thousand oxen and mules, and he spent it tur…
- History
Herb And Jan Conn
Herb and Jan Conn married in 1944, climbed the rocks at Carderock outside Washington on Sundays while Herb worked for the Navy Department, and in 1946 packed a panel truck and drove west. On a trip to…
- History
Norbeck's Tunnels
Peter Norbeck was governor of South Dakota from 1917 to 1921 and a United States senator from 1921 until his death in 1936, and the roads through Custer State Park are as much his monument as anything…
- History
Rapid City Indian School
Congress paid for a boarding school on the west edge of Rapid City in 1898, and the first students arrived that year. By 1907 the school held 1,391 acres, about two square miles, because industrial ed…
- History
The Courthouse Riot
Wesley Bad Heart Bull was stabbed to death outside a bar at Buffalo Gap in late January 1973 by a white man, Darld Schmitz. The state's attorney for Custer County charged Schmitz with manslaughter rat…
- History
The Flood At Keystone
Keystone incorporated as a town on 8 June 1972, which turned out to be one day before the worst night in its history. Thunderstorms stalled over the eastern Black Hills the following evening and dropp…
- History
The Gold On French Creek
George Armstrong Custer led about a thousand men out of Fort Abraham Lincoln on 2 July 1874 and into country the United States had guaranteed to the Sioux six years earlier. The Fort Laramie Treaty of…
- History
The Greenway
On the night of 9 June 1972 thunderstorms stalled over the eastern Black Hills and dropped close to fifteen inches of rain in about six hours near Nemo. Rapid Creek rose through Rapid City between hal…
- History
The Hall Of Records
Gutzon Borglum worried that four faces would say nothing to anyone who found them without a language to read them by. His first answer was an inscription cut into the mountain, eighty by a hundred and…
- History
The Holy Terror Mine
Keystone's gold was hardrock, not placer. William Franklin, Thomas Blair and Jacob Reed located the Keystone lode in 1891, and Blair named the claim for Pennsylvania. In 1894 Franklin found the outcro…
- Architecture
The Lodge That Moved
Theodore Reder dammed the creek at Sunday Gulch in 1881 and made Sylvan Lake, seventeen acres of water at six thousand one hundred and forty five feet, with a hotel built on the shore beside it. Some …
- History
The Michaud Brothers
Frank and Albert Michaud were prospecting in Hell Canyon in 1900 when they felt cold air coming hard out of a hole in the rock too small to crawl into. They widened it with hand tools and dynamite and…
- Transport
The Mickelson Trail
The railroad that opened the interior of the Black Hills ran from Deadwood down to Edgemont through Lead, Rochford, Hill City, Custer and Pringle, and it stopped carrying traffic in the middle 1980s. …
- History
The Rockerville Flume
Placer gold turned up at Rockerville in February 1877 and several hundred people were on the ground by the end of the year. The gravels were rich and there was no water to wash them, which is the whol…
- History
The Seizure Of Sue
On 12 August 1990 Susan Hendrickson, working with a crew from the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, found the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever recovered, weathering out of…
- History
The Summer White House
Calvin Coolidge came to the Black Hills in June 1927 for three weeks and stayed nearly three months, working out of the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park while the state went to some trouble to ke…
- History
The Town That Emptied
Custer is the oldest town in the Black Hills and it very nearly did not survive its second year. The site was organised in July 1875 under the name Stonewall, renamed Custer City that August, and buil…
- History
The VA That Stayed Open
Congress authorised a sanitarium at Hot Springs in 1902 as a branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, and an unusual branch: purely medical, with no domiciliary role, sited to put …