Local Stories in South Dakota
22 places
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 candlelight with string paying out behind him, sometimes nine hours at a stretch, and over about three years explored and named eight to ten miles of passage by the Park Service's reckoning: Moss's Palace, Monte Cristo's Palace, Mound Builder's Rest.
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 fifteen years for the De Smet News and Leader before going to work for Edward Senn, a publisher who owned something like fifty South Dakota papers and was known as the proof king. She came to Keystone in 1911 to manage The Recorder there and the Hill City Star.
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: tourists soon get fed up on scenery unless it has something of special interest connected with it. The Needles Highway had opened these granite spires to cars in 1922, and by the end of 1923 Robinson was proposing that the spires themselves be carved with figures of the West.
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 subscribed ten thousand dollars towards the work. The first flight, Explorer I, lifted on the morning of 28 July 1934 with William Kepner, Orvil Anderson and Albert Stevens aboard.
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 turning a warm creek into a resort town. In the autumn of 1881 he was one of five men who formed the Hot Springs Town Site Company, aiming at the seventy five or so warm mineral springs in the valley.
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 Devils Tower the next year they saw the Needles, and in 1949 bought twenty acres four miles from Custer to be as near the spires as they could get.
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 he did in the legislature. Game, Fish and Parks records that he marked the entire course of the Needles Highway on foot and on horseback before it was built, and it opened in 1922.
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 education meant the pupils worked a farm and a dairy after class. More than eight in ten came from Pine Ridge and Cheyenne River. Enrolment passed three hundred through the 1920s.
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 rather than murder, and the American Indian Movement called a national Indian Civil Rights Day at the courthouse in Custer for 6 February.
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 dropped nearly fifteen inches of rain in about six hours, more than ten inches across sixty square miles. The water came down the creeks into a town built along the floor of a narrow canyon, because the canyon floor was where the gold had been.
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 1868 set the Black Hills aside for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Sioux. The expedition went in regardless, with ten companies of the Seventh Cavalry, a hundred and ten wagons, a sixteen piece band, a photographer, a geologist and two practical miners.
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 half past nine and ten, debris jammed the spillway at Canyon Lake, and the dam gave way at about a quarter to eleven.
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 twenty feet, giving the nine most important events in the history of the United States between 1776 and 1906. It failed twice over: the letters could not be read from the ground, and moving the Jefferson head took the space.
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 outcrop that became the Holy Terror, which produced the highest grade gold quartz taken anywhere in the Black Hills.
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 accounts give the year as 1891 and the question has never been settled. The state bought the property, the lake became part of Custer State Park when the park was established on 1 July 1919, and the hotel burned on the night of 30 June 1935. What went up in its place did not go back on the shore.
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 went in with a family friend, Charles Bush, into crawlways lined with calcite crystals, which is where the name came from.
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. Rather than let the corridor break up among the landowners it crossed, the state railbanked it, which is the legal device that keeps a right of way whole after the rails come up.
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 whole problem the flume was built to solve. The Black Hills Placer Mining Company ran a wooden flume about twenty miles from Spring Creek, west of what is now Sheridan Lake, east to the Rockerville diggings, carrying it through two tunnels and across a succession of gulches.
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 a bluff on Maurice Williams's ranch inside the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. The Institute dug for seventeen days, took out ten tons of bone, and wrote Williams a cheque for five thousand dollars, which he accepted and cashed.
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 keep him content. Six dams were built and stocked with rainbow trout hauled eighty miles from the hatchery at Spearfish, and a trail was cut along a stream so the President could fish without walking far. He kept his executive offices in the high school at Rapid City and drove in to them.
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 built in earnest from January 1876, on the ground where gold had been found. By March 1876 its population was being estimated at somewhere between six and ten thousand, a range wide enough to show that nobody actually counted. Then the gulch at Deadwood opened and the town went north almost at once.
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 veterans with tuberculosis and joint disease into thin dry air near mineral water. Thomas Rogers Kimball of Omaha designed it in the local pink sandstone, part Mission Revival and part Richardsonian Romanesque, laid out as a circular centre with wards radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel.