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. The Forest Service, which keeps the old flume bed as a hiking trail, credits the works with letting miners take out more than twenty million dollars in gold, and says it ran until 1885. That figure is worth holding loosely: the whole Black Hills placer output to 1880 has been put at six to eight million dollars, half of it out of Deadwood Gulch, and Rockerville's own district was reckoned at a hundred and fifty thousand in 1877 and a quarter of a million the year after. The company did not last as well as the flume did. Ambrose Bierce, later famous for The Devil's Dictionary, became its general agent at Rockerville in June 1880, fought off road agents who tried to rob a money shipment on the Deadwood road, and travelled to New York that December only to learn the company was insolvent. He was back in San Francisco by March 1881, writing for The Wasp, where he began publishing the sardonic definitions that made his name. Accounts of the collapse mention embezzlement, though the detail is thin.
Getting there
43.9581, -103.3586
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