Rockerville: Rockers, Flumes, and a Famous Editor
Near Custer, South Dakota
Rockerville takes its name from the wooden rockers prospectors used to sift placer gold from gravel, and in eighteen seventy-six those rockers were busy. Gold was discovered here that year, and by the close of the first season the camp had several hundred residents and had pulled out an estimated one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in dust and flake.
What made Rockerville unusual was its engineering ambition. The Black Hills Placer and Mining Company built a flume nearly twenty miles long, tunneling through two ridges to carry water from Spring Creek for hydraulic mining operations, one of the first such systems in the hills. The project ran into trouble, partly through alleged embezzlement, and shut down in eighteen eighty-five. For a brief period, the man overseeing that troubled flume company was the writer Ambrose Bierce, already a celebrated journalist, who managed the operation before returning to his typewriter. By nineteen fifteen the post office had closed. Rockerville never entirely died, lingering as a tourist stop through most of the twentieth century before finally going quiet.
