Spearfish, South Dakota: The Canyon Town That Fed the Gold Rush

When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in eighteen seventy-six, thousands of people rushed into the hills looking for it. Most of them needed to eat. Spearfish figured this out early.

The town was settled that same year, eighteen seventy-six, at the mouth of a canyon where a cold creek emptied into the valley. Dakota peoples had long called the creek by a name that translated to the place where people spear fish, and that name attached itself to the town. Unlike Deadwood and Lead, which exploded as raw mining camps, Spearfish sat in a wide valley more suited to agriculture. Its founders understood that a camp of ten thousand miners was also a market of ten thousand hungry customers.

Spearfish became a supply town: irrigated farms, cattle, dairy operations, lumber milling. While mining communities nearby lurched through cycles of boom and bust as veins played out, Spearfish kept producing food. It never had the violent reputation of Deadwood or the heavy industry of Lead, but it survived them both in their original forms.

In nineteen thirty-eight, a German-born performer named Josef Meier chose Spearfish as the home for a passion play he had translated into English. The Black Hills Passion Play, a dramatization of the final week of Jesus's life, ran in a six-thousand-seat outdoor amphitheater every summer for sixty-nine seasons, drawing more than six million visitors before it closed in two thousand eight.

Spearfish Canyon itself, the limestone gorge behind the town, stretches roughly nineteen miles and drops a thousand feet in elevation. The canyon walls reach up to over a thousand feet on either side of the road. It has served as a dramatic backdrop to the town's history since the first settlers looked up from their fields and saw what they had landed in.