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. The Geological Survey's account of the flood records eight people killed at Keystone and much of the town washed away. The marker the Survey later put up in the town says at least thirteen, and the local museum counts about fourteen, most of them visitors. The three figures have never been reconciled. The same night killed 238 people across the hills and destroyed 1,335 homes. Keystone had been through boom and collapse once already: placer gold in Battle Creek in 1876, tin and mica at the Etta mine from 1883, better than two thousand people at the height of the Holy Terror by the town's own reckoning, and then almost nothing after the mine closed in 1903. What refilled it was the carving of Mount Rushmore, which put local men to work from 1927 to 1941. The 2020 census counted 240 residents living off the traffic that carving still brings.