BLACK HILLS GOLD

Explore South Dakota’s sacred mountains and discover a bonanza of historic mining towns.

- BILL MARKLEY

“GOLD!” proclaimed Dakota Territory’s Bismarck Tribune on the front page of its August 12, 1874, edition. The newspaper was exuberant about the discovery of gold by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Black Hills expedition. It didn’t matter that the federal government recognized that the Black Hills belonged to the Lakota people, the rush was on.

After crossing the Cheyenne River in western South Dakota, a traveler heading westward across the prairie will spy low, dark mountains rising in the distance appearing as a landlocked island. The Lakota people call them Paha Sapa, Hills Black. The hills form a rough oval stretching north to south approximately 110 miles and east to west approximately 70 miles. The rugged mountains’ highest summit, Black Elk Peak, rises 7,244 feet and is one of the highest points east of the Rocky Mountains.

Black Hills geology is complex. The central granitic core is over two billion years old. Eighty million years ago an uplift began in the region. Imagine it as a massive boil that did not burst through the surface. Over millions of years the outer sedimentary layers eroded exposing the inner granitic core alongside twisted, compressed metamorphic layers, and more recent sedimentary rocks flanking the Black Hills’ outer edges. Superhot subterranean fluids entered rock fissures depositing gold, silver and other metals as they cooled. The Black Hills is a rock hound’s paradise.