Lead and the Homestake Mine

The town around you is named for an old miner's term: a "lead" is an outcropping of gold-bearing ore. Brothers Fred and Moses Manuel spotted one here on April ninth, eighteen seventy-six, while the Black Hills were still Lakota land under the Fort Laramie Treaty. Their discovery was small by appearance but immense in consequence. They called their claim the Homestake because they believed there was enough gold to let them go home and stay.

Within a year, mining entrepreneur George Hearst, father of the newspaper magnate, bought the claim from the Manuels for seventy thousand dollars. Hearst had an eye for ore; he had already made a fortune in Nevada's Comstock Lode. He brought capital, machinery, and a systematic industrial approach that transformed a rough prospect into the most productive gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. By nineteen ten, the town of Lead had more than eight thousand residents, nearly all of them connected to Homestake's ever-expanding underground world.

For one hundred twenty-five years, men descended into those depths. At its greatest extent, the mine reached more than a mile and a half below the surface, deeper than any other gold mine in North America. Over its lifetime, Homestake produced nearly forty million troy ounces of gold, worth well over a billion dollars at historical prices.

The mine closed in two thousand one when gold prices could no longer justify the cost of going deeper. But the story did not end there. Scientists recognized that a shaft going more than eight thousand feet underground offered something rare: protection from cosmic radiation. In two thousand seven, the National Science Foundation selected the old Homestake workings as the site for the Sanford Underground Research Facility, now one of the most important dark matter and neutrino research labs in the world. The same hole that Hearst drilled for gold now hosts physicists hunting for some of the most elusive particles in the universe. The mountain was always full of something remarkable. It just took different generations to find it.