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. The vein was worked twelve hundred feet along its strike and twelve hundred feet down, ranging from a few inches to six feet wide, and the two mines together are credited with about seventy six thousand ounces of gold. The workings closed in the summer of 1903 for two reasons that were not romantic at all: a run of miner deaths blamed on poor practice brought judgments against the company, and the shafts were taking more water than the pumps could lift. The mine was left to flood, and was worked again only briefly between 1938 and 1942. The name is the better known story and it has a crack in it. Keystone tells it that Franklin's wife would haul him home out of the saloons, and that he said, ain't she a holy terror. Black Hills Illustrated, printed in 1904 and the earliest account there is, says instead that he had promised to name the mine after his wife, who expected it to be called the Lucy, and that he did name it after her, though not in the way she had expected. The town's own records call her Jennie.
Getting there
43.8975, -103.4206
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
