Some Black Hills Ghost Towns and Their Origins
Watson Parker
South Dakota History, volume 2 number 2 (1972)
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.
A ghost town is any village, stage station, post office, mining camp, railroad siding, or wide spot in the road that consisted of more than one family and was a named community with an existence of its own, distinct, and in addition to that of the family or principal business that it contained. A ghost town is a town that once flourished but is now defunct, abandoned, quiescent, or so radically altered that it has lost completely the original goals with which it started. These are towns that the passing years have long since divested of the ambitions, purposes, and populations which originally gave them their community existence. Nevertheless, among the ruins and the memories that still inhabit them, their spirits-call them ghosts if you will-can sometimes still be seen and oftentimes still be savored. Even in as vociferous a mining area as the Black Hills such towns arose from a variety of causes and decided or changed their names, their aims, and their inhabitants for many reasons.
Rockerville. for example, was once Captain Jack's Dry Diggin's, a busy little placer mining town with an enormous plume that came from Sheridan and brought water to wash the sticky clays of the Rockerville bars.' Now. it is merely a rebuilt tourist attraction. All that remains of the old town is the chimney of Cortland Rush's cabin, and tourists have pretty well made away with even that. Sheridan, once the county seat of Pennington County, now lies beneath the rippling waters of Sheridan Lake. Pactola was once a mining town that was named for the Lydian River of golden sands, Pactolus. It, too, sank beneath the waters of the lake that bears its name. Deerfield, originally known as Mountain City, is under Deerfield Lake although a hamlet by the same name still serves as a post office and store for nearby ranchers. Otis is another town that has changed completely—it was once a logging camp with a busy sawmill. Now, the State Game Lodge rests on the foundations of the old mill and the character of the community has materially altered. Sometimes, as at Lauzon. the community was once a bustling one, but all that is left now is the school.
The earliest communities associated with the Hills are the old fur trading posts, which if not exactly in the Hills, are so tied up with the history of them that they must be included. The Sarpy Post, located where the Rapid Creek enters the Cheyenne River was such a place: it blew up in 1832 producing a rain of bear traps that continued for a week, and of course killing Mr. Sarpy. The post was then abandoned. The courses of the Rapid Creek and of the Cheyenne River have both changed and no one knows for sure just where the Sarpy Post was.'' Another fur post was near Cache Butte, southeast of the Hills. To the north Saint Onge is said to have beams in cellars and basements that bear dates from the early 1830s, scratched into the wood by the Frenchmen who built the buildings.
Military posts, though transient, have left their names on the land. Camp Warren, Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren's base near what is now Newcastle Wyoming was a trading post for many years, and only in 1875 when it was taken over by the Jenney expedition did it get its present name, Camp Jenney. Camp Success in Custer State Park, a few miles southeast of the Gordon Stockade, was the post from which Captain John Mix successfully searched for and evicted the Gordon Party in the winter of 1875. The Gordon Stockade became an army post, but it should not be confused with the Union Stockade, which was in the heart of Custer City. Camp Collier was a genuine fighting fort at the mouth of Red Canyon, a few miles north of Edgemont. Traces of the walls and corner bastions can still be seen on the
ground near the Jim Boll Ranch." Camp Crook-and there were several places called Camp Crook-was founded when General George Crook came into the Hills in 1875 to expel the miners prospecting in violation of the Laramie Treaty with the Sioux. It was about where Pactóla Lake is. Fort Meade had as it predecessors Camp Sturgis and Camp Ruhlen and opposite, on the other side of the Hills, Camp Bradley Housed soldiers beneath the shadow of Inyan Kara Mountain. The soldiers did not leave many traces, but if you know how to look, you can find the places where they lived while they alternately fought the miners and the Indians. If you look hard enough, you can find some traces, like General Custer's initials "GAC, US 7th." in the rock to show you that mighty men were there.
In 1875 the placer miners came to the Black Hills. Briefly expelled by the energetic General Crook during the summer of that year, they surged back in the fall and came in strength in 1876 to lay out. sometimes with laborious formality, sometimes with no formality at all, the early placer mining towns. Hayward, now merely the home of Rushmore Cave, was once a county seat that was served by a lengthy flume from far up Battle Creek that brought water to the placer workings high above the valley floor. Traces of the flume can still be seen and placer work still goes forward to this day. At Castleton, near Mystic, the miners tried to work the deep, slatey placers of Castle Creek, but the gold lay too deep and the works were soon abandoned. Revived in the 1890s as a railroad town, Castleton thrived briefly, housing the railroad crews that pushed the railroad north toward Deadwood. Then, it died, again, as the crews passed on. A third boom in the 1900s brought a dredge into the valley and left behind the huge piles of waste that still mark the site of its activities. The ribs of the barge that held the dredge can still be seen, sinking into Castle Creek by the side of the road.
The Concord stagecoaches and their slower companions, the ox-drawn freight wagons brought adventurers as well as supplies into the Hills. Gamblers, fancy women, mining engineers, speculators, and greenhorns rode in perilous style over the rutted trails while miners and prospectors plodded behind the bull teams toward the new bonanzas. At first, the stages made their way up the center of the Hills from Red Canyon, protected by the vigilant troopers at Camp Collier, but Indian hostilities soon made this route too dangerous and in 1878 it was abandoned. You can still follow its ruts, however, and where time has healed those scars, you can follow the trail by the quarter-mile posts that were set up to guide the drivers through the winter snows. Spring-on-the-Hill, a famous stop on the side of Red Canyon, was a welcome place of refreshment after the long pull up the valley-an oasis in the dry and barren southern Hills. The Twelve-Mile Station, later known as the Humphreus Ranch, was not only a famous stage stop but later a well-known summer resort. Gillette Stage Station north of Custer and Bull Dog Ranch north of Rochford also provided rest, protection, and sometimes raucous entertainment for the passing travelers headed for the diggings of the northern Hills.
The railroads, both standard and narrow gauge, soon followed the miners into the Black Hills, and little towns and communities grew up beside each whistle stop. Tunnel, north of Deadwood, was just such a community. It still has a few houses and one of the most durable privies in existence. The incredible clutter of rail lines around Deadwood are a delight to the railroad buff-one line ran up to Trojan and over the side of Spearfish Canyon and then up the canyon to Spearfish itself. Another line from Trojan went to Preston and pushed on, nearly to the cliffs overlooking the Latchstring Inn, to serve a growing mining camp at Cyanide.
Logging operations, too. had their railroads that shifted and altered the land as they gnawed their way through the Black Hills timber, their puffing Shay and Heisler engines straining upward over 12 percent grades. The Warren-Lamb operations ran from Rapid City clear to Sheridan and from Fairbum up to what is now Center Lake in Custer State Park They even hoisted their trains up a 28 percent grade and lowered them down the other side on a 34 percent decline to cross a particularly perilous divide. The Homestake logging rails ran south as far as Merritt where a fish farm is now, and the McLaughlin lumber interests ran a line from Nahant clear into Wyoming and perhaps as far as the Homestake's now deserted logging city of Moskee. Anywhere you walk in the northern Hills, you can find abandoned railroad grades, and as you walk along them, you may stumble in the depressions left when the crossties rotted away and trip now and then over a spike that once held down the rails. If you listen carefully, you may even hear the high-pitched, squawking whistle of a Shay or Heisler coming up behind you!
There were cattle towns too, until trucking replaced the railroads as the economical way to ship stock off to market. Dumont in the northern Hills now has only its cattle pens and the ruins of a section house. Clifton, on the Burlington, has ghosts that whisper from deserted ranches and abandoned cabins. Even the church at Dewey is falling into disrepair and one day Buffalo Gap may be a memory.
Quarries needed to supply a burgeoning Black Hills boom founded still more towns. Calcite and Loring provided lime to sweeten the water for the Homestake's boilers, and if you poke around the old kilns, you will get some idea of the origin of the expression "as dry as a lime-burner's hat." Evans near Hot Springs supplied high-grade sandstone for many public buildings in and around the Hills. Buena Vista, north of Edgemont. provided grindstones. Some are still there-too big for even vandals to damage or remove.
Coal founded the greatest ghost town m the Hills, Cambria. It was located on a spur of the Burlington north of Newcastle. Here high-grade anthracite was mined for over forty years to feed the delicate appetites of mountain-climbing locomotives. Coke, too, was cooked in rows of beehive ovens, and it was a bargain for Cambria coke contained three or four dollars worth of gold in every ton. Cambria is still there, now nearly crumbled into the ground, but the manager's home on the side of the valley still keeps an eye on the remains.
Resorts to entertain the busy Black Hillers and attract tourists from the East created many towns which are now forgotten. Cascade, southwest of Hot Springs, was built in the happy expectation that its warm springs and strategic location on the best possible railroad route into the Hills would transform it into a prosperous spa. But the railroad went elsewhere, and the town collapsed leaving behind the ornate stone bank, the bowling alley, and the banker's home, which was built long ago in late Victorian Gothic style. The Black Hills Country Club, founded in 1925 by a group of Chicago dudes, flourished briefly near Hill City until the Great Depression when it became Palmer Gulch Lodge, a summer resort and summer cabin area.
No matter how many communities sprang up from peripheral causes, the fact remains that it was the hard rock mining industry that produced most of the ghost towns in the Hills. The gaping shafts, the piles of mine waste, and the badlands of eroded tailings at Hornblend, Blue Lead, Bald Mountain, Flatiron, and Galena mark the site of many hopes and failures. Shaft houses, ore bins, and foundations at Maitland Two Bit, Golden West, and Myersville are still there, at first too valuable to be dismantled and now too decrepit to be worth the trouble. Enormous vats from the cyanide process, scoured bright by the corrosive chemicals can still be seen across the valley from Trojan, and at Astoria, the mill and hoist of the Golden Reward Mine is noticed by every tourist on his way from Lead to Spearfish Canyon. The Lookout Mine's mill on Castle Creek is still the awesome structure to which ore was brought on an elevated tramway from far up the side of Lookout Mountain.
Whole gold mining communities await the ghost town hunter in the Hills, Trojan was abandoned in 1959 when the Bald Mountain Mine ceased operations. Roubaix in its quiet valley was the home of the Clover Leaf Mine, but only a few homes and the bull wheels from the stamp mills still remain. Rochford in Irish Gulch was the home of the old Standby Mine and the ruins of the mill brood in silence over the community. Little Myersville near Rochford is surrounded by silent mines and houses. The Mineral Hill Mine near Welcome on the Wyoming border still operates occasionally, but the old New Reliance House on Annie Creek no longer takes in borders.
Sometimes all that you will find is some scrap of the past that only the enlightened eye can understand. Odd wood troughs at Minneapolis may have been part of the Diamond City mines. A broken hoist at Cyanide hints that once a railroad and a hundred homes provided for the miners there, beneath the shadow of Ragged Top Mountain. Sometimes all that is left is a gasp of imagination as one views the Victoria Mine at the top of Spearfish Canyon and sees in the mind's eye the dizzying aerial tramway that carried ore and miners to the mill at the bottom of the valley.
Silver, as well as gold, has produced its ruins. Galena is still an occupied town, and although the Homestake is even now reopening some of the silver mines that have been closed for seventy years, the town still has many ruins to recall its much more lively past. Carbonate is deserted, and the nearby Cleopatra Mine is crumbling into ruins along Squaw Creek, its heavy machinery trapped at the bottom of the valley, Spokane, southwest of Keystone, has a school, a mill, and offices all guarded by an affable and watchful caretaker. For years the waiting mine stood ready to spring into renewed activity at the throw of a switch, eager to resume production of silver, lead, zinc, and arsenic.
Tin, also, has been a long-continued will-o'-the-wisp of Black Hills mining. In the 1880s the Harney Peak Tin Mining Milling, and Manufacturing Company, an English concern, owned over a thousand claims between Keystone and Hill City. Their tin mill near Hill City was for years a noted landmark but has long since been dismantled. Their mine, the Addie. and the nearby Good Luck Tungsten Mine gave rise to Addie Camp and the community around it, but neither mine produced very much. Tinton on Negro Hill has been the site of tin activity for nearly a century and the deserted town has a miner's hall, a store, and miners' houses—but not much tin down in the mine. Glendale near Keystone has a multitude of houses awaiting the reopening of the Otho Mine.
How are these towns traced? How are the clues gathered that lead to their discovery and location? The ghost town hunter knows the answer through a patient search that has all the fun of a crossword puzzle in the library and of a mountain climb in the field. First, look up the sources, and then, try to get to the spot. Many of these now-vanished towns are shown, often inaccurately, on early maps of the Bhick Hills. The great mapping of the Hills around the turn of the century, which was carried forward by the United States Geological Survey, recorded still more towns. The revisions of these maps and the others based on them continue to reveal new towns and new names for old ones. Old newspaper items often mention the founding of a new community—or at least a new bar and grill-at some identifiable place and sometimes this small enterprise grew into a real community, nourished, and then decayed back into the rocks and weeds from which it sprung. Names, too, changed. Gregory, north of Rochford, seems to have been known successively as Elk Creek, Elkhorn City, Carterville, Montana City, and Grandview. This is, however, only supposition: each one of these may have been a real community in its own right, adjacent to, but not superimposed upon the original town of Gregory. Old books and old documents mention various localities that travelers and visitors passed through and it is left to the historian to figure out just where they were. It is a search based on frail clues. But. when you find the area, and some local inhabitant full of years and lies confides in you that this indeed was the town that you were looking for—tho' it hasn't been known by that name for many years—you know that the clues were not completely false.
There are well over six hundred such ghost towns in the Hills. They are little communities, sometimes with a few ruined houses, sometimes with little more than a trace of the foundations and a few ash heaps, or maybe only the recollections of old-timers to identify them. Each one. however, is a place where the spirit of the past is strong and where the deeds and the voices of those who once lived in the area still murmur in the wind-blown grasses. It is this sense of achieving a communion, a continuity with the past, of standing on the very spot where others long since have gone once stood that lures the ghost town hunter toward new discoveries. He stands amidst the ruins and says, with a touch of awe and of sadness, what the unknown writer of the Book of Lamentations said when he gazed on the ruins of Israel so long ago: "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.
