In July of 1874, General George Armstrong Custer led and expedition of a thousand men into the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory to seek sites for future military posts. The expedition included ten companies of cavalry, two of infantry, scouts, teamsters, guides, interpreters, mapmakers, botanists, five newspaper correspondents, and a military band on white horses, who serenaded the explorers with such hits as “The Blue Danube” and composed a new tune, “The Black Hills Polka.”
Rumors of Black Hills gold had been circulating for years, and the expedition also included two prospectors, Horatio Nelson Ross and William T. McKay. The company set up camp at French Creek, and McKay and Ross panned through the creek’s gravel. In early August 1874, scout “Lonesome Charley” Reynolds rode into Fort Laramie with news that the expedition had discovered gold.
Telegraphs quickly spread the word of the find. By December, the first prospecting company arrived at the abandoned French Creek camp. Building a stockade to protect themselves from the Lakota Sioux who lived in the area, the John Gordon Party found the gold they were looking for, but the U.S. Army soon removed them for trespassing on Sioux Nation Territory, the Hills given to them by the government at the Treaty of 1868. As more prospectors arrived to stake claims, the Army eventually gave up trying to keep the miners out.
Most of the early prospecting was done in the streams. Although this produced a steady but small supply of “Placer Gold,” few got rich panning. Thus began a search for the main source, the veins of gold ore that supplied the creeks. In the fall of 1875, a group of miners looking for this source, moved north into Deadwood Gulch, which soon became the center of the Black Hills gold rush.
Our timeline here begins in the Spring of 1876 when the rush was in full swing with folks from all walks of life pouring into the Hills to seek their fortunes, whether it be from mining or setting up businesses to support the miners, or those desperate individuals intending to kill, cheat, or steal their way to fortune…