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. It reached French Creek on 30 July and made a permanent camp in the valley for the first week of August. The miners were Horatio Nelson Ross and William McKay. McKay's diary records a cent and a half to two cents in his first pan, and on 2 August the two found flakes in quantities they judged worth working. A 1971 state marker credits Ross alone, while the park's own newer panel notes that both men found gold and that Ross is only often claimed to have been first. Custer sent the scout Charley Reynolds south alone to Fort Laramie with the army dispatches and the correspondents' copy, and the Bismarck Tribune printed the word GOLD on 12 August, predicting the hills would become the El Dorado of America. What followed was a rush the army was meant to prevent and did not. In 1980 the Supreme Court held that the Black Hills had been taken without just compensation, and awarded it.