Deadwood E-Book

Peter Cozzens

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 757

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'What Peter Cozzens has done with this remarkable book is to show us that the truth about Deadwood is, in fact, even more interesting than the myth.' S. C. Gwynne, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of the Summer Moon Infamous for its stage-coach robbing, whiskey-guzzling and rampant prostitution, the gold rush settlement of Deadwood, South Dakota, was once described as 'the most diabolical town on Earth'. Built in 1876 on land brazenly stolen from the Lakota people, it was an outlaw enterprise not subject to US laws or governance. In Deadwood, award-winning historian Peter Cozzens sifts through myth and legend to recount the town's meteoric rise - a place where the currency was gold dust - and its stunning fall. He reveals how Deadwood's foundation bred a self-reliance and a spirit of cooperation unique on the frontier, making it an exceptionally welcoming place at a time of deep-seated discrimination. Along the way, Cozzens pulls back the curtain on legendary figures Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, and introduces us to colourful Deadwoodites: from Jack Langrishe to Judge Kuykendall, and Seth Bullock to Sol Star. This is the first book to tell Deadwood's extraordinary story in full, revealing the true tale of how one frontier town, in only three years, imprinted itself on our imaginations as the best and worst of the West.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY PETER COZZENS

A Brutal Reckoning: The Creek Indians and the Epic War for the American South

The Warrior and the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Brothers Who Led the Native American Resistance

The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

First published in the United States in 2025 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Peter Cozzens, 2025

The moral right of Peter Cozzens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

The picture acknowledgements on pp. 405–6 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Maps by Mapping Specialists Ltd.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 068 8

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Product safety EU representative: Authorised Rep Compliance Ltd., Ground Floor, 71 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, D02 P593, Ireland. www.arccompliance.com

For Eric, Brittany, and Brian

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there is no better illustration of this than is to be found in the dealings of the American government and people with the Indians. The Black Hills will send forth their treasures in gold, and the Sioux will scarcely be missed in the march of progress and wealth. But the Anglo-Saxon were a wiser and a better man if he cared a little more for [other] races, and a little less for himself.

— EDWIN CURLEY, Curley’s Guide to the Black Hills

Indians might inhabit the [Black Hills] for centuries and there would be only the change that Nature wrought. But in three short years, the white men have so destroyed its natural attractions that neither Indians nor game would now choose it as an abiding place. The hills are denuded . . . the gulches dug and washed out, and all for the sake of gold that is said to be only lucre, and filthy at that.

— SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, Green Bay Advocate, May 1, 1879

I have fallen in love with American names,

The sharp names that never get fat,

The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,

The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,

Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

—STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT, “American Names”

Contents

List of Maps

Prologue

PART IVisions of Deadwood(ca. 1770–April 1876)

1. Pahá Sápa

2. The New El Dorado

3. No Sale

4. Gold in the Gulch

PART IIA Town Built on Gold(May 1876–February 1877)

5. Centennial Town

6. Lies and Legends

7. “Take That, Damn You”

8. Lakota Autumn

9. The Montana Touch

10. The Day of Jubilee

11. A Hard Winter

PART IIIA Tumultuous Adolescence(March–December 1877)

12. Autocrats and Tenderfeet

13. Deadwood’s Chinatown

14. The Brigands of the Black Hills

15. The Most Diabolical Town on Earth

16. San Francisco Capitalists and Soiled Doves

17. Reckonings

PART IVFrom Adolescence to Ashes(January 1878–September 1879)

18. Coming of Age

19. The Treasure Coach

20. A Solid Country

21. The Great Water Fight

22. Black Friday

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Maps

1. The Black Hills and Surrounding Settlements, 1876

2. The Black Hills, 1876–1879

3. Deadwood, 1876–1879

4. Deadwood and Vicinity, 1876–1879

5. Stage Routes to Deadwood

Prologue

It was high noon, August 2, 1876. James Butler Hickok struggled through the fly-infested slop that passed for Main Street, Deadwood. The name suited the place, an illegal mining settlement perched in the Black Hills, land sacred to the Lakota nation.

Hard eyes stared at Hickok. From cabins and shacks, false-front stores and clapboard saloons, the people watched and wondered. There was no mistaking the slim-waisted, broad-shouldered, and sharply dressed six-footer with the flowing auburn hair and large sandy mustache, or the twin Colt Navy revolvers that he wore, handles forward. His likeness had graced the cover of the nation’s most popular magazine. Dime novels trumpeted his character as the epitome of frontier manhood, and his exploits with knife and gun as unrivaled.

Miners and merchants, gamblers and prostitutes pondered alike. What was “Wild Bill,” the legendary gunslinger reputed to have slain a hundred or more men, doing here? Did the former marshal intend to upset the lawless comfort of their mining camps? Did he intend to pacify the three-month-old town the way he had pacified Abilene, Kansas, in blood?

Hardly. All Wild Bill Hickok wanted to slay was a bottle of whiskey. Drinking, gambling, and a bit of half-hearted prospecting had become Hickok’s routine in the three weeks since he had ridden into Deadwood. He camped in deep brush on the edge of town. Sleeping in shirt, trousers, and boots, that morning he had awoken late from a makeshift bed in a wagon box. Hickok had tossed back a stiff drink or two before a campfire breakfast with his “pard” “Colorado Charlie” Utter and three or four other friends. He’d shaken out his Prince Albert frock coat, emptied his twin Colt Navy revolvers into a cottonwood tree, reloaded and holstered them, finished dressing, donned his trademark black sombrero, and then headed into town.

Hickok bore arms only for self-defense. His days of fast draws and provoking gunfights were over, and he knew it. Although he was just thirty-nine, Hickok’s keen eyesight—an indispensable asset to a gunfighter—was failing him. He wore a dull and listless aspect that his morning brace of whiskey did little to alleviate. Perhaps he might strike gold and grow rich enough to build a home for himself and his wealthy wife. Or the cards might turn in his favor for a change. In any event, pride prevented him from living off his wife’s charity. This was the American West, after all. Deadwood was journey’s end: Hickok would make it there, or not at all.

After traipsing a few hundred viscous yards, Hickok turned left off Main Street and entered the narrow, sixty-foot-deep, hewed pine-log No. 10 Saloon. Inside, he traded the choking stench of offal, animal urine, and manure for the tolerable odor of tobacco and sweat mingled with the sweet scent of pine. The burning gaslight from the saloon’s four chandeliers likely pained his eyes. Squinting at the gamblers, Hickok spotted an empty stool at one of the tables, and he joined the game in progress. Wild Bill wanted the seat against the wall, his preferred spot in any enclosed place, but the young claimant declined to surrender it. The two other players assured him he was among friends. Wild Bill relented. He sat with his back exposed to the rear door. For three hours, the men played intently for gold dust, the chief medium of exchange in Deadwood.

Hickok might have noticed a small and shabby man with a sombrero pulled over his eyes enter the saloon at 3:00 p.m. and sidle toward him along the twenty-foot bar. Wild Bill had beaten him at poker the night before, only to learn that the man’s buckskin bag of gold was too light to cover the bet he had lost. After warning him never again to wager more than he had, Hickok offered the man some loose change with which to buy himself a meal. The man, who went by the alias Bill Sutherland, scorned the money and left.

Now he was back, a .36-caliber cap-and-ball Colt Navy revolver tucked in his pants. It was an old and unreliable firearm, prone to misfiring, but the model was plentiful on the plains and cheap, about all that the twenty-four-year-old drifter, whose real name was Jack McCall, could afford.

McCall ambled toward the gold-dust scale atop the end of the bar. He hesitated a moment, then moved into Wild Bill’s blind spot a few feet from the back door. Hickok tossed his cards onto the table in dismay. “The old duffer,” he said of the player who had just bested him, “he broke me on that hand.” With that, McCall turned, stepped to within two or three feet of Hickok, drew his defective revolver, aimed it at the back of Wild Bill’s head, yelled, “Take that, damn you,” and squeezed the trigger.1

WHY DEADWOOD? What lured people like Wild Bill Hickok to the infant mining town? Hope, greed, and the chance for a fresh start. Three years earlier, the Panic of 1873 had triggered a crippling economic crisis. Industries shuttered. Unemployment skyrocketed. Railroads stood idle. Farm prices tumbled. Midwestern skies blackened with locust swarms of biblical proportion that denuded the land. A decade had passed without a new gold strike, and the nation ached for a bonanza that would offer the chance for renewed prosperity.

In the autumn of 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer tantalized the public with a glimmer of hope. He had discovered gold in the Black Hills of today’s South Dakota and Wyoming, on land that belonged to the Lakotas by treaty. Lakota rights, however, meant little to the common white man. Quipped one jobless fortune hunter, “A man can’t sit comfortably by the fire when there’s gold in the hills only five hundred miles from his door.”

As hopeful “tenderfeet” flocked into the Black Hills, they gradually coalesced around Deadwood Gulch, which promised the easiest and richest diggings, and its neighboring valleys and creeks. It was a place in which a man could live a decade in a year. Working at a feverish pace, miners extracted hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold from creek beds and gravel deposits. Merchants, gamblers, saloonkeepers, harlots, outlaws, and adventure seekers swarmed to the site. Within five months of the first gold strike, more than two hundred frame and false-front buildings went up, and Deadwood, the raucous center of the Black Hills mining districts, was born.

The country watched the proceedings with fascination both elevated and prurient. The New York Times, Harper’s Weekly, and other leading national organs wrote regularly about Deadwood, and the most popular dime novelist of his day created the enduring fictional character Deadwood Dick to thrill eastern readers with the supposed goings-on in the distant and dangerous Black Hills.

The setting was ideal for adventures. Unique among frontier towns, Deadwood was not merely a place in which outlaws lurked, like Tombstone and Dodge City, but itself an outlaw enterprise, not part of any U.S. territory, nor subject to U.S. laws or governance. Gunfights and vendettas defined the public perception of Dodge City and Tombstone; Deadwood came to represent not only danger but also the dream of amassing great wealth quickly, an allure that neither Dodge City nor Tombstone could replicate. In its early days, Deadwood and its inhabitants were criminal trespassers on land that the federal government had decreed to belong only and forever to American Indians. No other western community grew on such a wobbly foundation.

Deadwood was a blasphemous affront to the Lakotas, as was the entire white presence in the Black Hills. Something had to give. And so, in early 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant schemed to reward the white intruders and wrench the Black Hills from their rightful Indian owners. He and a like-minded government cabal secretly provoked the Great Sioux War, the bloodiest and biggest Indian War in the history of the American West. Deadwood became an island in a sea of hostile Lakotas.

Not surprisingly, Deadwood’s isolation fueled greater lawlessness. But there was a flip side. Seclusion bred self-reliance. It nurtured the better instincts of most Deadwood residents, creating a spirit of cooperation and racial amity unique on the frontier that survived beyond the immediate Indian crisis and came to characterize early Deadwood as profoundly as the fits of violent lawlessness that made it infamous. Decency battled expediency; morality wrestled with the basest vices; whites (including former Civil War combatants from both sides), blacks, and Chinese mingled with an ease uncharacteristic of the day, and roving Indian raiders and prowling stagecoach robbers rendered daily life precarious.

Early Deadwood thus came to embody the best and the worst of the West, and of the American spirit. The three years between its founding and the conflagration that devastated pioneer Deadwood encapsulate the American experience. From its story emerge enduring truths about man’s quest for creating order from chaos, a greater good from individual greed, and security from violence. The fire that destroyed pioneer Deadwood reflected the limits of community and the failure to take action to mitigate future calamities.

The dime-novel version of Deadwood unfortunately overshadowed an ugly reality of which the reader must not lose sight: that both the real Deadwood and the Deadwood of myth were built on land stolen from the Indians, as so much of our romanticism of the West is, retaining its romance and allure only as long as we willfully ignore its foundational sins.

Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West is the first book dedicated to the story of early Deadwood. It also probes timeless subjects such as race and sex, crime and punishment, religion and recreation, and everyday life in a manner that I hope will immerse readers in the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of the frontier West. You, the reader, will stand in the shoes of the diverse characters who peopled gold rush Deadwood. You will learn, I trust, how a renegade frontier society stripped to its basics, with no law save self-preservation and no protection but what the community itself could marshal, persevered and prospered.

Tempering that exhilaration is the tragic demise of Lakota Indian society that the white occupation of the Black Hills wrought. A grim undercurrent of a war forced upon them, of bullying treaties that stripped away their land and eroded their way of life, will offer readers a sobering reminder of the high human cost of America’s westward expansion that even the best-intentioned Deadwoodites, (as a local newspaper editor called the townspeople) rarely, if ever, contemplated.

Many of the more noteworthy of Deadwood’s characters, such as the iconic pair Wild Bill Hickok and Martha Jane “Calamity Jane” Canary, will be familiar to viewers of the great and gritty HBO series of the same name or to those with at least a passing knowledge of the American West. In reading these pages, however, they may discover a Wild Bill and Calamity Jane they had not imagined. Other characters will be new to many readers, but no less gripping than their better-known counterparts. The true nature of several of those historic luminaries who made the HBO Deadwood such a resounding commercial and critical success will surprise and captivate readers, as it did me. Their actions helped shape the lore that grew up around the town, and they were in turn shaped by it.

Deadwood, as city-protagonist, is the principal character in this book. It had a life, a spirit, and a soul of its own. Deadwood’s saga is divided into four parts that correspond to the conception, birth, volatile adolescence, and flaming early death of the town as a frontier experiment. Dime novelists and eastern newspapers offered readers a Deadwood of perverse life, evil spirit, and corrupted soul, a nineteenth-century Mammon that fed on the avarice of its inhabitants. That was not surprising; sensational press then as now made good copy. The real Deadwood was a much more complex place.

Though the tumultuous life of the rough-and-tumble Deadwood—the Deadwood of western lore—lasted just three years, from 1876 to 1879, a more event-filled three years in a town’s history would be hard to imagine. Even Deadwoodites of the day remarked that life itself seemed accelerated. In that short span Deadwood bore witness to the most storied assassination in western annals, that of Wild Bill Hickok; the discovery and rise of the largest gold mine in American history; two elections; a parade of colorful prostitutes, gamblers, gunmen, cattle rustlers, and road agents culminating in the most audacious stage robbery in western history; and a fistful of brutal murders. Just as important were the efforts of the lawmen Seth Bullock and Johnny Manning, the businessmen Sol Star and James K. P. Miller, the thespian John Langrishe, and countless others who strove earnestly to bring order and peace to the town.

The Deadwood of today both lives off its legends and seeks to sift the truth from the myths. The many casinos that propel the town’s economy have Wild Bill as their spiritual beacon, just as the town’s brothels, which flourished until federal agents shut them down in 1980, found themselves heir to Calamity Jane and her fellow soiled doves. The tax revenue from the casinos enables projects such as the archaeological excavation of Deadwood’s Chinatown and programs aimed at preserving the true history of the town. Deadwood is fortunate to have in Deadwood History Inc.—with its motto of “Engage. Inspire. Preserve.”—the Centennial Collection at the Deadwood Public Library, and Deadwood’s Historic Preservation Office instruments to preserve and celebrate the town’s past.

There is a wonderful bit of dialogue at the end of John Ford’s towering western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in which a credo is spoken that too often has steered the story of the old West. The film’s heroic protagonist, Ransom Stoddard, has just unburdened himself of the unflattering truth behind the legend that propelled him to fame and the front rank of American politics. The newspaperman tears up the exposé that Stoddard has handed him. “So you’re not going to use the story?” asks a perplexed Stoddard. “No, sir,” the journalist replies. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West prints the facts. I hope you will find, as I did, that the truth about this unique Wild West town makes for more riveting reading than any legend.

Part I

VISIONS OF DEADWOOD

(ca. 1770—April 1876)

1

Pahá Sápa

THE EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Oglala Lakota Indian boy Kahnigapi was no ordinary child. Slender and introspective, he teetered between two worlds. Spectral voices spoke to him. They hinted at numinous secrets, but always stopped short of revealing them. That Kahnigapi should have mystic encounters was expected. He heralded from a long line of healers and intermediaries with the divine (medicine men). His name meant “Chosen.” His cousin Crazy Horse had counseled him to submit to the will of Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, whenever it should be made known to him. The vision that struck Kahnigapi in the summer of 1872, however, surpassed in power and breadth what even the most gifted medicine man could ever hope to attain.

First came excruciating pain. Kahnigapi and his family were traveling with their Oglala band alongside the familiar waters of the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn) River in southeastern Montana, some two hundred miles northwest of the future site of Deadwood, when the boy’s legs buckled. Friends carried him to his parents’ tipi. Kahnigapi’s legs, arms, and face swelled. A high fever gripped him. His head pounded. He felt as if he were burning alive. Then came delirium. As he lay near death, Kahnigapi beheld two celestial warriors. Sweeping down from the clouds, they beckoned the boy to accompany them to the abode of the Six Grandfathers, the heavenly beings who represented the six cardinal directions of Lakota cosmology. Together they embodied Wakan Tanka himself. Riding on a soft white cloud, Kahnigapi penetrated the heart of the Lakota medicine wheel. There he passed through a dizzying array of sacred horses before meeting a bay stallion that carried him to the Grandfathers’ cloud tipi.

The tipi sat behind a rainbow gate atop the highest peak in the Pahá Sápa, or Hills That Are Black—the center of the Lakota world. On the granite crown, the Grandfathers bestowed upon Kahnigapi prophecies of future tribulations—a “fearful road of troubles and of war”—and the gifts that would enable him to save his people from annihilation and return them to the life-sustaining confines of the sacred hoop of harmony.

The vision continued. From Technicolor splendor it swirled toward dreadful anguish. Four times Kahnigapi and his people climbed the peak. Each ascent represented a generation, the Grandfathers told him, the third of which was his. The first ascent was easy. The world was green, and all were happy. The second was steeper, and the Lakotas grew frightened. The third ascent was excruciating, and the people began to scatter. The fourth ascent was unbearable. The buffalo—the lifeblood of his people—vanished, the Lakotas began dying, and a “new strength” emerged. As the vision dissolved, the spiritual messengers returned him to his family’s tipi. His purpose was clear: The Grandfathers had selected Kahnigapi to lead the Lakotas to cultural renewal. As an adult, the chosen boy would be renamed Black Elk. For the remaining seventy-eight years of his life, Black Elk would try to obey the dictates of his vision. In death, he would become revered worldwide as one of the spiritual giants of his day.1

But what was this “new strength” that would penetrate the Pahá Sápa and upend the Lakota world? Young though he was, Kahnigapi sensed the source of the danger. After recovering from his illness, he questioned his grandfather about the coming of the dreaded wasichu, or white men, which Kahnigapi divined was the real subject of his dream. Why, he asked, did the word “wasichu” once refer only to the vast herds of buffalo, but now denoted the whites, who drew ever closer to the Lakota domain?

“Because they are many,” his grandfather replied, too many to count, too many to comprehend.2

THE LAKOTAS AND their Northern Cheyenne Indian allies knew what the wasichu coveted. It was mázaska, the yellow mineral that the white men “worship and that makes them crazy.” Already gold-and silver-seeking wasichu, suffering from “manias,” “fevers,” and “hysterias,” had wreaked havoc on Native lands from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast. The madness and mayhem began with the California gold rush in 1848. Not only did tens of thousands of gold seekers eradicate the small Indian tribes of California itself, but their caravans also cut long scars across the Lakota country, denuding the landscape and slaughtering game. After California, mineral strikes hopscotched around the West. Each strike brought not only the young male miners themselves but also a bevy of bartenders, gamblers, merchants, prostitutes, and assorted rogues to serve and scam them. Between 1858 and 1861, waves of fortune seekers streamed across the Plains Indian country to new gold diggings in the Colorado Territory, giving rise to the city of Denver and displacing the Cheyennes and Arapahos, many of whom sought succor from the Lakotas. In 1859, an enormous silver and gold strike called the Comstock Lode gave rise to mining camps in what would become western Nevada.

From Arizona to Idaho to inland Washington, large pockets of prospectors mushroomed into new white colonies. Some places prospered and became permanent; others existed only fleetingly. A few miners struck it rich. Thousands more returned home empty-handed or became perpetual wanderers, always hopeful, ever seeking, yet never quite attaining the gold of which they dreamed. A patchwork of settlements blurred the distinction between the “Indian country” west of the Missouri River and the “civilized region” east of it.3

While the wasichu worshippers of mázaska plundered the Rocky Mountain West, the Lakotas expanded their Northern Plains domain. Between 1861 and 1862, they fought a final war with the Crow Indians for control of the Powder River country of present-day northern Wyoming. By the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, to which the United States and all the Plains tribes were parties, the land belonged to the Crows. The 150-mile-wide tract between the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills, however, was choice buffalo-hunting ground, and the Lakotas meant to have it. They won it thanks in large measure to the leadership of the forty-year-old Oglala Lakota war leader Red Cloud and the strange and silent young Oglala warrior Crazy Horse, cousin to the boy Kahnigapi, the future Black Elk.

With the defeat of the Crows, the Lakotas thought they had found a home far from grasping whites. In 1862, however, gold was discovered in southwestern Montana Territory. A year later, the frontier entrepreneur John Bozeman blazed an eponymous trail into the Montana diggings along the eastern base of the Bighorn Mountains, straight through the heart of the newly won hunting grounds. White travelers so depleted buffalo and antelope herds that the Lakotas nearly starved during the winter of 1865–66. To prevent their retaliating against Bozeman traffic, the army built two forts on the trail.

The move backfired. Rather than overawe the Indians, the presence of military posts in the Bozeman country infuriated them. Once again led by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, the Lakotas and their Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho allies bested the army in a two-year-long conflict that came to be called Red Cloud’s War. When rapid progress on the Union Pacific Railroad opened a safe route to the Montana goldfields and adjacent towns, the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant capitulated to Red Cloud’s demand that the army vacate the Powder River country.

In April 1868, federal peace commissioners invited Red Cloud to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to sign a treaty. Breathtaking in its scope, the accord constituted the government’s blueprint for the Lakota future. Not only did the government close the Bozeman Trail, but it also accorded the Lakotas an immense expanse. Present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River became the Great Sioux Reservation, for the “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the Lakotas. There the government would build schools and provide rations and annuities for thirty years (later sliced to four years by the Senate); in exchange, the Indians were expected to become tillers of the soil—in other words, “civilized.”

The proposed treaty also granted the Lakotas hunting rights above the North Platte River (roughly the northern half of Nebraska) and in northwestern Kansas so long as there remained enough buffalo there to “justify the chase.” Finally, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 contained a vaguely worded clause designating the land north of the North Platte River from the western limit of the reservation to the Bighorn Mountains as unceded Indian territory. Although undefined, the northern boundary of the tract came to be understood, by the government at least, as the Yellowstone River. In its totality, the unceded Indian territory embraced present-day northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana. No whites would be permitted to settle there without Lakota permission. Whether Lakotas who wished to live off the hunt rather than the government dole might also reside in the unceded land was left unclear. In any case, the Lakota domain was to be inviolate; the peace permanent. Red Cloud and his fellow chiefs made their marks, and nearly 90 percent of an estimated Lakota population of forty thousand settled on the newly opened Red Cloud or Spotted Tail Agency, together with most of the far smaller Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. The remaining few thousand Lakotas under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse scorned the treaty, made their home in unceded territory, and sporadically raided white settlements and Indian enemies living on the periphery.

Although not mentioned by name in the treaty, two-thirds of the Black Hills—including the forested gulch and creek that would give Deadwood its name—fell inside the boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation; the western third rested within unceded Indian territory. The government had effectively acknowledged Lakota possession of the Pahá Sápa in perpetuity.4

That sat poorly with the Crows, who were American allies, and with other Plains Indians whom the Lakotas had muscled out of the Black Hills. Their displeasure was understandable. The Lakotas were relative newcomers to the West. Members of the Sioux nation, they were formerly a woodlands people of the upper Midwest. As it shifted westward in the eighteenth century, the Sioux nation separated into three divisions: the Dakotas, who clung to the Minnesota River; the Nakotas, who settled east of the Missouri River; and the Lakotas, who wrestled their way onto the Northern Plains. The Lakotas were the true horse-and-buffalo Sioux of popular imagination, and they constituted nearly half of the Sioux nation. The Lakotas in turn divided into seven tribes, or “council fires”: the Oglalas, Brulés, Miniconjous, Two Kettles, Hunkpapas, Blackfeet, and Sans Arcs, of which the Oglalas and the Brulés were the largest. In fact, these two tribes outnumbered all the non-Lakota Indians on the Northern Plains.5

In their march across present-day Nebraska and the Dakotas, the Lakotas allied themselves with the Cheyennes and Arapahos, who had been pushed onto the Northern Plains ahead of the Lakotas and had forged an enduring bond. Not until the 1770s did the Lakotas penetrate the Black Hills, and at least fifty years would pass before they dominated the lush, mountainous island, surrounded by a dry sea of prairie, that they would call “the heart of everything that is.” The Northern Cheyennes and Arapahos came to depend on Lakota generosity and intermarriage to enjoy access to the Pahá Sápa, portions of which had once also been theirs.6

What made the Pahá Sápa so dear to the Lakotas, and so central to the young Black Elk’s vision? To begin with, the sheer physical magnificence of the place inspired awe. With an average elevation of more than a mile above sea level, the Black Hills tower four thousand feet above the harsh and dreary alkaline prairie. Embracing 5,000 square miles—125 miles from north to south and 60 miles in width—the Hills suggest secrecy, riches, and adventure. Ponderosa pines blanket the hills. Viewed from afar, they appear unnaturally dark, thus the Lakota name, the “Hills That Are Black.” The twin branches of the Cheyenne River—the fast-flowing Belle Fourche on the north, and the sluggish and muddy South Fork to the south—cradle the Black Hills.

The rugged oasis embraced a breathtaking assortment of granite and sandstone pinnacles and peaks, ridges and buttes, green meadows, dark gulches, dense forests, and mineral-laden streams. Deer and elk abounded. So too did animals of prey, among them the panther, timber wolf, and grizzly bear. Large patches of wild fruit dotted the landscape. Towering above the high plains, the Black Hills drew rain and lightning from the sky, creating a lush and uniquely fertile island. Violent storms frequently gathered above the Black Hills and remained there while the surrounding prairie and Badlands begged for water. Such a phenomenon, the Lakotas reasoned, surely must be the work of Wakan Tanka and the Six Grandfathers.

Absent Lakota written records, for the most part we are left to contemplate the Black Hills as wasichu interlopers perceived them. “On entering them,” wrote a white sojourner, “the mind is filled with wonder and amazement as it contemplates these mighty upheavals. But what is more pleasing to the eye than all else pertaining to the Hills, especially after having spent several days upon the open plains, are the beautiful pine forests that greet you on all sides.” A prominent Deadwood settler called the Black Hills “a natural playground and sanitarium. It is the land of balm to the sleepless; of strength to the feeble, of rest to the weary, and of joy to all.” A welltraveled army officer agreed, marveling at “air so pure and bracing that perhaps no more salubrious locality can be found in the United States.”7

For the Lakotas, the Pahá Sápa offered more than natural wonder and restorative potential. It was both a shrine and a source of supply; a place of unsurpassed spiritual power and material wealth. Because the Lakotas believed all places were infused with varying degrees of divinity, it was easy for them to transfer their mystic “center of the world” from the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers to the Pahá Sápa. Old myths found a new locale, and new legends were created to reflect the unique character of the conquered country. During the first decades that they occupied the Black Hills, the Lakotas, as well as the occasional whites who passed near, allegedly heard eerie explosions resembling the report of artillery emanating from the mountain recesses. These strange, unexplained phenomena, which ceased after 1830, the Lakotas attributed to the moaning of a great white giant entombed beneath the Pahá Sápa’s darkest defiles.8

The most important sacred site that the Lakotas associated with the Pahá Sápa is a small aperture in a ravine on its southeastern fringe. From it blows a cool, sharp, and steady breeze. When or how the Lakotas discovered this entry into the caverns beneath the Black Hills is unknown. Wind Cave, or Maka Oniye, the place of the “breathing earth,” nevertheless became the source of the Lakota emergence story. It was both a portal to the spirit world and the place from which the Lakotas believed that they and the four-legged beasts, foremost of which was the bison, first set foot aboveground.

When man and beast emerged, they held a race to decide which species would have the right to feed on the other. The ancestral Lakotas triumphed. The contestants beat a two-mile-wide path between the lower reaches of the Pahá Sápa and a steep, elliptical hogback. The Lakotas named the trodden soil the Race Track, or Kin Inyanka Ochanku. The valley still bears that name.

To the east of Wind Cave lies the third great landmark of the Lakotas, a place known later to whites as Buffalo Gap. Through it half a century after the Lakotas claimed the place would pour thousands destined for Deadwood. As with Wind Cave and the Race Track, the Lakota fashioned a legend to explain this entrance into the Pahá Sápa. In primordial times, no such spot existed. But when fabled herds of hungry and thirsty bison emerged from Wind Cave, they thundered toward the cool waters and rich grasses of the Pahá Sápa, their hooves pounding out the gorge.9

The Pahá Sápa also became central to the Lakota cosmology as a place where young Lakota warriors sought and received the powerful visions that would guide their lives, among the most profound of which was Black Elk’s dream.10

In the 1870s, white trespassers would contend that the Lakotas had never lived in the Black Hills. Violent thunderstorms discouraged the Lakotas from staying long, so the argument went. “These Hills were never the abode of Indians, but have always been regarded by them with superstitious reverence,” averred a surveyor. “Occasional trips were made to the mountains in search of lodge poles, but the storms which rage over the Hills in springtime, accompanied by vivid flashes of lightning and continuous crashing of thunder, made it evident to the Indians that this was the haunt of the evil one, and they have kept out of his reach.”

Storms in the Hills were indeed frequent, and flash flooding could convert dry gulches into roiling rivers that drowned the unwary. Recalling the “most terrific thunderstorm” he ever experienced, an early Deadwoodite wrote that “for a quarter of an hour the atmosphere appeared to be in one continuous blaze with electric charges, fierce bolts of lightning descended on all sides, while the concussions which followed in rapid succession fairly shook the mountains to their foundations. No wonder the Indians have a superstitious dread of the electrical phenomena of the Black Hills.”11

The Lakotas indeed dreaded the storms, which they believed reflected the anger of the malevolent Thunder Beings of the West. Fear made them cautious, but it did not keep them from long stays in the Pahá Sápa. Oglala bands regularly wintered along the Race Track or in Buffalo Gap. They and other Lakotas ventured deeper into the Pahá Sápa in both the fall and the winter to gather the abundant wild fruits, tubers, seeds, and pods that added variety and necessary carbohydrates to their diets, and to hunt deer and elk. They also camped in the higher elevations in the spring and summer. When the bison herds drifted away from the Race Track in the 1860s, fewer Lakotas frequented the Hills, but they cherished the Pahá Sápa no less. “[When] I was about fifteen years old I heard Sitting Bull say that the Black Hills was just like a food pack and therefore the Indians should stick to it,” recollected a Lakota chief. “I knew what he meant because I knew that the Black Hills were full of fish, animals, and lots of water, and I just felt that we Indians should stick to it. Indians would rove all around, but when they were in need of something, they could just go there and get it.” Self-serving twaddle to the contrary might ease the consciences of acquisitive whites but had scant basis in fact. Bishop William Hare, a fast friend of the Lakotas’, offered an apt analogy. The Lakotas’ attachment to the Black Hills “is a passion,” he wrote. “And well it may be, for this district is the kernel of their nut, the yolk of their egg.”12

But the yolk contained a contaminant: mázaska. The Lakotas picked up nuggets in streams. “Our people knew there was yellow metal in little chunks up there,” said Black Elk, “but they did not bother with it because it was not good for anything.” Late in life, Red Cloud confessed that his people had known of gold in the Black Hills as early as 1800. Two decades afterward, injudicious warriors traded nuggets for merchandise at Fort Laramie until Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Jesuit missionary whom the Lakotas revered, admonished the Lakotas to keep knowledge of Black Hills gold to themselves; otherwise, he said, the whites were sure to take both the gold and their country. Lakota chiefs heeded his warning. In 1857, at a grand council, they decreed that any Indian who gave gold from the Pahá Sápa to the wasichu, or told them where to find it, should be put to death. The Lakotas and their allies largely adhered to the law, but the damage had been done.13

Rumors of Black Hills gold swirled through the Dakota Territory, which extended only as far west as the Missouri River in the 1860s—tales fueled not only by earlier Indian indiscretions but also by the speculations of army explorers and geologists who skirted the Black Hills before the Civil War. Then too there were stories of white prospecting parties that had entered the Hills, never to return.14

One who did live to tell his tale was the famed mountain man Jim Bridger, who wandered into the Black Hills while with a military survey and saw gold shimmering in the mountain streams. French-Canadian trappers on friendly terms with the Lakotas also whispered tales of gold in the Black Hills. A greedy Lakota chief nearly lost his life when he offered to lead a party of prospectors from a Dakota Territory fort to a Black Hills gold deposit. Forced to abandon the scheme by Lakotas who threatened to kill him, the chief nonetheless sneaked back to the site and returned with a cupful of gold dust—a mix of fine particles, pellets, and flakes—that assayers pronounced to be “as fine quality and as clean as any dust ever discovered.” An Indian agent boasted that warriors would frequently bring him gold dust from the Hills, with a seemingly incongruous warning that any white man who dared to set foot in the Pahá Sápa would forfeit his scalp.15

Some of these stories might have been apocryphal. No one, however, doubted Father De Smet when he occasionally let slip to friends, army officers, or other apparently well-intentioned inquirers that the Black Hills contained gold deposits richer than those found in California. In an interview he granted when his steamboat docked at Sioux City, Iowa, in September 1871, the elderly De Smet misread the character of his questioner. The Catholic missionary spoke freely, and his indiscretion almost started the very sort of stampede to the Pahá Sápa he had hoped to prevent.

Father De Smet’s devious interlocutor was the thirty-two-year-old promoter, Irish revolutionary nationalist (Fenian), and editor of the Sioux City Daily Times, Charles Collins, as colorful a rogue as would ever cast a shadow in the Black Hills. Those who came to know him in Deadwood would describe Collins variously as “visionary,” “vigorous,” “irrepressible,” “waggish,” “caustic,” and “crazy.” A charitable chronicler called him “an Irishman of most undaunted courage and energy, not always practically applied, but possessed with an enthusiasm which never recognized defeat.”16

Armed with Father De Smet’s supposed confession that the Black Hills contained enough gold “to buy half the world,” Collins labored to open the treasure chest. Others had tried but failed to launch expeditions into the Hills. In the winter of 1869–70, Judge William L. Kuykendall organized the most notable effort. From his office in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, he advertised for gold seekers. Of the 2,000 who pledged to join him, only 130 showed up in Cheyenne in the spring of 1870 to march under the banner of his Black Hills and Big Horn Association. The fortune hunters had barely started before the Grant administration ordered the army to disperse Kuykendall’s legion. For the moment, the judge set aside his visions of mineral wealth and returned to the bench.17

Collins laid the groundwork for his enterprise more thoroughly. First, he published his interview with Father De Smet. Then Collins and several associates created the Black Hills Exploring and Mining Association. On March 1, 1872, they issued a circular bogusly claiming that gold “has positively been discovered in paying quantities in the Black Hills of Dakota,” which they intended to extract. Collins also sprinkled the columns of the Daily Times with similarly sensational fables of wonders and wealth that were reprinted nationwide. He persuaded an Iowa congressman to sponsor a bill to open the Black Hills, then testified before Congress on the measure, which would die on the House floor. He also badgered the secretary of the interior into writing a letter casting doubt on the “necessity” of the Black Hills to Lakota “happiness and prosperity.” Returning from Washington, D.C., Collins enrolled hundreds of recruits from Missouri River settlements for his expedition, which was set to start from Sioux City on September 1, 1872. The balloon burst, however, when the army department commander ordered that “any expedition organized for the purpose of penetrating the Black Hills be dispersed, the leaders arrested and placed in the nearest military prison.”18

For a time army roadblocks, the continued productivity of Montana and Colorado gold mines, and the general prosperity of the nation held Black Hills gold fever in check. A year after Black Elk’s Great Vision, however, an international economic crisis would upend the calculus.

2

The New El Dorado

AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, the United States enjoyed a seven-year economic boom. Coal, iron, and steel production surged to levels that stunned European industrialists. Agriculture also prospered, and surplus American wheat fed foreign markets. The term “unemployment” had yet to enter the national lexicon.

In 1872, the horizon darkened. The Union Pacific Railroad—the juggernaut of western expansion—was caught selling stock in the Crédit Mobilier, a construction and finance company used to funnel profits to insiders and below-market shares to politicians. Monopolists flinched, and the railroad magnates trembled. The Grange, a farmers’ cooperative movement dedicated to combating monopolists, gained nearly a million members. Perhaps most significantly for the future of the Black Hills, in January 1873 Congress voted to demonetize silver. Bimetallism was over; the gold standard looked to triumph over greenbacks (the paper currency first issued in the Civil War). Unearthing new gold strikes gained urgency.

Storms also brewed on far shores. In May 1873 the stock exchange in Vienna, Austria, crashed. Unaware how closely American prosperity was tied to European economies, most Americans took little notice. Gold, however, was a yellow artery linking Vienna to London and ultimately to New York, Chicago, and the prairie beyond. European investors, once enamored of western railroads, began to curb their outlays.

On September 18, 1873, the credit bubble burst. Jay Cooke & Company, one of the nation’s leading banking firms, failed because the bond values of its principal client, the mismanaged Northern Pacific Railroad, had tumbled. Depositors rushed to withdraw savings. Two days later, the New York Stock Exchange closed for the first time in its history. The so-called Panic of 1873 ushered in a full-blown depression.

The effect was catastrophic. Railroads defaulted like falling dominoes. Farm prices plummeted. Industries closed down or slashed their workforces. In Philadelphia, twenty-five thousand factory workers were laid off in a single month. New York City had fifty-eight thousand destitute by December 1, 1873. A singular dullness enveloped cities and towns. Sellers lacked buyers, business confidence sank, and credit dried up. Houses and stores stood tenantless. It was as if the pulse of society had stopped beating. Americans coined a new meaning for an old word: “tramp.” It had meant a hike or, during the Civil War, a hard march. Now it meant someone with no visible means of support. Of this legion of drifters, a government bureaucrat wrote a few months into the depression, “Probably never in the history of the country has there been a time when so many of the working classes, skilled and unskilled, have been moving from place to place seeking employment that was not to be had.” These were the sorts of men, he might have added, who would welcome a western gold strike, and who in three years would come to populate Deadwood.1

The twelve thousand inhabitants of the Dakota Territory, most of whom congregated in the southeastern corner along the Missouri River between the capital city, Yankton, and Sioux City, Iowa, knew where that strike should be: in the Black Hills. They suffered not only from the economic shock of the Panic of 1873 but also from a cruel nature. Low produce prices made it hard for Dakota farmers to obtain credit to begin or expand farms. Repeated droughts withered crops. Locusts swarmed over the prairie like coal smoke from a steamer to ravage what the droughts missed. A lack of trees on the open prairie hindered building. Unreliable transportation—there were no railroads into the territory, and the sandbar- and snag-littered Missouri River was hard to navigate—also hindered settlement.

The Black Hills presumably offered not only gold but also a huge reservoir of timber. In 1873, the Dakota Territory legislative assembly demanded that Congress open the Hills because it was a safe haven for depredating bands of non-treaty Lakotas. The accusation was no mere hyperbole. Not having been a party to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the non-treaty bands of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had no compunction about raiding the Crows, Pawnees, and Shoshones—tribes friendly to the United States—as well as white settlers who ventured too near Lakota land.2

The army leadership sympathized with the Dakota assembly. Commanding General of the Army William T. Sherman’s patience with the roaming Lakotas had worn thin. “Sooner or later,” he told Philip H. Sheridan, the commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, “these Sioux will have to be wiped out or made to stay just where they are put.” Neither general would have objected to an immediate showdown, but the Lakotas had yet to furnish sufficient provocation to convince the Grant administration that the time for war had come. Indeed, as General Sheridan confessed in his annual report for 1874, conditions in the Lakota country were “remarkably quiet.”

If he could not kill Lakotas, Sheridan could at least try to make them stay put, as Sherman had suggested. To check the reservation Indians, he established military posts near both the Red Cloud and the Spotted Tail Agencies. Protecting whites from non-treaty bands was more problematic. For that he would need to build a fort somewhere near the unceded Indian territory. The spot that Sheridan recommended, and that the War and Interior Departments approved, was the Black Hills.3

Sheridan turned to his fair-haired subordinate Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer to outfit a Black Hills expedition from Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory. The impetuous thirty-four-year-old welcomed the assignment. Fortune had favored him with uncanny consistency. The so-called boy general of the Civil War reveled in duty that would place him in the public eye, and an exploration of the mysterious Black Hills certainly offered an opportunity to enhance his celebrity.

Although Custer did not expect the Lakotas to “strew flowers on our pathway,” he was not overly concerned; with his Seventh Cavalry, he boasted to a newspaperman, he could “whip all the Indians in the Northwest.” Nonetheless, Custer ordered his men not to provoke them. A discerning private soldier in the Seventh Cavalry interpreted that as subterfuge to disguise the great wrong they were committing. “The United States government,” lamented the trooper, “forgot its honor, forgot the sacred treaty, forgot its integrity, and ordered an expedition for the invasion of the Black Hills.”4

If the Lakotas chose to fight, the expedition appeared large enough to take care of itself. By the time the engineering detachments and civilian scientists arrived, Custer had assembled a command of 951 soldiers and teamsters, augmented by 61 Arikara scouts—blood enemies of the Lakotas; two veteran miners purportedly fitted out at Custer’s own expense; and three newspapermen.

Was the expedition a violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty provision that prohibited whites from entering the Great Sioux Reservation without Lakota permission? Had the expedition been staged solely to reconnoiter possible sites for a fort, it would have been legitimate under a clause that permitted military personnel discharging their duties to enter the reservation. But its unspoken ancillary purpose—to search for gold, which the presence of miners betrayed—clearly violated treaty terms.

On July 2, 1874, Custer’s expedition departed Fort Abraham Lincoln for the Dakota Badlands. Billows of white alkaline powder blinded the men, and blood from the cactus-torn fetlocks of cavalry mounts stained the trail. Occasional clusters of reservation warriors watched the plodding white caravan from a respectful distance; none, however, tried to impede Custer’s advance. Neither did the non-treaty Lakotas, who ranged well beyond his line of march on the far side of the Black Hills, hunting buffalo or battling the Crows.

As the dusty and begrimed bluecoats pierced the Black Hills, the weather cooled, the air cleared, and the expedition took on the aspect of an armed picnic. The march led through achingly beautiful green meadows—“parks” in western parlance—festooned with wildflowers. Custer, who had never seen such a profuse display of flowers, found it strange to “glance back at the advancing columns of cavalry and behold men with beautiful bouquets in their hand, while the head gear of their horses was decorated with wreaths of flowers fit to crown a queen of May.”

In late July, Custer’s two miners went to work along a narrow, rippling stream later named French Creek in a broad park eleven miles south of the fey peak of Black Elk’s vision and fifty miles south of the spot Deadwood would occupy. On August 2, the miners struck pay dirt. It wasn’t much, they told Custer, enough perhaps to yield $50 to $70 a day in gold to organized miners—scarcely worth the efforts of individual prospectors. The gold fever gripped the camp nevertheless. A perplexed Arikara scout—evidently unfamiliar with the effects mázaska had on whites—watched soldiers laugh, weep, toss hats in the air, and run about in circles. Perhaps, he told a soldier, the mountain spirits had made them all crazy. No, the trooper answered, nothing sacred had struck the soldiers, only visions of earthly wealth. For two days, the troopers panned for gold before Custer put a stop to it. A few glittering grains, no more than 2 or 3 cents’ worth of gold, were the richest take.5

The American people waited hopefully for news from the Black Hills. Mired in the depression, the country longed for a gold bonanza—the more so as production in the Montana and Colorado mines had waned. They didn’t get word of one from Custer, at least not at first. On August 7, 1874, one of his white scouts carried a field report to General Sheridan in which Custer lauded the logging and stock-raising potential of the Black Hills. Regarding gold, Custer was circumspect. The scout, however, delivered more than just Custer’s guarded assessment of the Black Hills’ gold wealth because newspapermen had prevailed upon him to file their dispatches for them. Most were measured in their reporting. But the fanciful scribbling of the Chicago Inter Ocean correspondent William E. Curtis, trumpeting “ten dollar diggins’” and “pay dirt from the grass roots down” along a belt thirty miles wide, created a frenzy. Drawing on the past, Curtis thought a mining rush both inevitable and beneficial to the nation. After quoting an old miner who observed, “Money is scarce, and the country needs gold,” Curtis wrote, “The sequence is obvious. There was a crisis in 1848–9; California was opened and helped us out. There was a crisis in 1857; in 1858 Colorado was opened and helped us out. There was a crisis in 1873, from the effects of which we have not yet recovered; the Black Hills will be opened and pull us through.”

Curtis’s prognosis thrilled those after a new start and quick wealth. Prospecting expeditions soon fitted out all along the frontier. Enterprising writers with more imagination than experience churned out guidebooks to the “new Eldorado,” and opportunistic merchants from Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, to Sioux City, Iowa, and nearly every intermediate spot on the Union Pacific Railroad, stocked up on prospecting gear and provisions.

Before leaving the Black Hills, Custer did the Lakotas a spiritual indignity, likely without realizing it. He named the towering summit of Black Elk’s vision Harney Peak, in honor of General William Harney, who had slaughtered a village of Lakotas in the 1850s.

Custer returned to Fort Abraham Lincoln on August 31, having marched 1,025 miles. Before leaving the Black Hills, he conducted a perfunctory search for a place to build Sheridan’s fort but came up empty. No one outside the army cared.

The Lakotas had a name for the trail Custer had blazed through the Black Hills. They called it the Thieves’ Road.

Once back at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Custer came down with the gold fever. He declared not only that accounts of a bonanza in the Black Hills were true but that the prospects were even better than reported. While Custer’s proclamations enticed jobless men in the States and the itinerant miners wandering the West, General Sheridan tried to calm the hysteria. “The color of gold can be found almost anywhere in any of the now existing western territories,” he reminded a heedless nation, “but often its quantity is confined to a few particles which make the color.” Sheridan remained fixated on building a fort in or near the Black Hills, and—given the tenor of the times—the sooner the better.6

CHARLIE COLLINS SPRANG into action. Four days before the Seventh Cavalry dismounted at Fort Abraham Lincoln, he hustled to Chicago to lay plans for an expedition even grander than that which the army had compelled him to abort two years earlier. William E. Curtis interviewed Collins for the Chicago Inter Ocean. He recorded the Irishman’s “frank, manly, and intelligent”—he should have added self-serving—appraisal of the riches of the Black Hills. Collins reiterated his conviction that the region represented the best gold country in the world. Already he had enrolled 227 men at Sioux City for an autumn expedition to the Hills, and he welcomed more recruits. For $110 a man, Collins promised to furnish interested parties with all the gear and arms they needed, together with an allowance of three hundred pounds of provisions or baggage, and see them safely from Chicago to Sioux City by train and then overland to Harney Peak. To a similar party then organizing in Yankton, local newspapers advertised an added essential: life insurance.7

General Sheridan offered his own brand of insurance to those contemplating a journey to the Black Hills: guaranteed failure. “Should the companies now organized at Sioux City and Yankton trespass on the Sioux Indian Reservation,” he instructed his military department commanders, “you are hereby directed to use the force at your command to burn the wagon trains, destroy the outfits and arrest the leaders, confining them at the nearest military post in the Indian country. Should they succeed in reaching the interior, you are directed to send such force of cavalry in pursuit as will accomplish the purpose above named.”8

That sobering bit of news shut down the Yankton hopefuls and deterred all but a handful of the gold seekers gathered in Sioux City from sticking with Collins’s illegal enterprise. By October, only twenty-six men, one woman, and a boy remained. Between them they had six wagons drawn by fifteen yoke of oxen, six saddle horses, two greyhounds, and a donkey. To disguise their destination, on the lead wagon they scratched in charcoal the words “O’Neill’s Colony,” a settlement in westernmost Nebraska.

On October 6, the neophyte gold hunters hitched up their wagons and edged west onto the prairie to test the truth of the “ten dollar diggins’” that purportedly lay nestled in the Black Hills five hundred miles distant. They were a diverse lot. A young Wisconsin farmer wanted to emulate the exploits of his father, who had taken part in the California gold rush. Such an adventure “had always been one of the greatest desires of my life.” David G. Tallent, a Sioux City attorney, joined up strictly for the gold. His slender, well-bred schoolteacher wife, Annie, came along, resigned to trudging behind a wagon day after day and then passing the winter in a stockade among two dozen men fated to situational celibacy. The Tallents’ nine-year-old son accompanied his parents. Eight Wisconsin lumberjacks threw in with the party, which ensured that members would at least have snug cabins, assuming they reached the Hills alive. The group also contained a like number of experienced miners. John Gordon, a wiry, dark-complexioned loudmouth of dictatorial pretensions whose boast of extensive frontier experience had won over Charlie Collins, led the group.

The members of the Gordon Party, as it came to be known, all shared a contempt for the federal laws that banned them from the Great Sioux Reservation, just as they scorned the rights of the Lakotas and the authority of the frontier army, whose duty it was to keep trespassers such as themselves from violating the Fort Laramie Treaty and perhaps provoking a war. “No one seemed to take into consideration the enormity of the trip,” confessed a member, an arrogance that he attributed to “dull, indifferent stupidity.”9