Deadwood's Gold Rush: The Town Built on Treaty Land

Deadwood Gulch in the spring of eighteen seventy-six was a narrow canyon in the Black Hills, timbered and cold, running with snowmelt. The Black Hills were Lakota territory, guaranteed by the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight. The treaty meant nothing to the men with picks coming up the canyon.

The settlement grew at a pace that made formal government impossible. By summer, twenty-five thousand people were crowded into a gulch a quarter mile wide, in tents and raw-lumber buildings, with no law beyond the miners' informal committees and no sanitation beyond the creek. Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane arrived with the first wave. So did a businessman from California named George Hearst.

Hearst bought a stake in the Homestake Mine in eighteen seventy-seven for seventy thousand dollars. The Homestake eventually produced forty million ounces of gold over one hundred twenty-five years of operation before closing in two thousand one. It was the largest and deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere, eventually reaching about eight thousand feet below Lead, South Dakota, a town built directly above it.

The city of Deadwood burned to the ground in September of eighteen seventy-nine and was rebuilt in brick within a year. The rebuilt downtown is largely what visitors see today. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-one.

Gambling was legalized in Deadwood in nineteen eighty-nine as a preservation strategy: gambling revenue funds the city's historic preservation program, and the arrangement has largely worked. The buildings that survive are the ones the money paid to keep.

The treaty whose violation made the city possible is still technically in force. The Supreme Court confirmed in nineteen eighty that the taking was illegal. The Lakota still have not been paid.