Gold! (25 page)

No, the best way now to find out what was really in the Black Hills was for the government to send an expedition to find out what was there. This would be no ordinary military expedition, nor would it be commanded by an ordinary man.

14.

THE BELIEF LIVES ON

George Armstrong Custer. The very name struck fear into Cump Sherman's heart.

When his old friend and commander Ulysses S. Grant was elected president, he promoted Cump to the grade of full general and gave him overall command of the U.S. Army. Cump's second in command was General Philip “Little Phil” Sheridan, whose protégé was Custer.

Custer had made his reputation in foolish Union charges during the Civil War that despite leading to great loss of life, were successful in beating back the Confederates. Custer became the youngest brevet general (a wartime rank) in U.S. history. After the war he was commissioned a lieutenant colonel and given command of the 7th Cavalry on the western frontier.

Cump never had much use for Custer. He put up with
him because of Sheridan. That plus the fact that Custer had just taken command of Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory, close to the Black Hills, meant that he was likely to get the assignment to explore the Black Hills.

He did.

In the summer of 1874 Custer led a thousand-man expedition into the Black Hills. Being the vain, stupid, and courageous man that he was, Custer brought along the 7th Cavalry's band to play the regimental theme song, “The Gary Owen,” at particularly dramatic moments along the way. These included gathering examples of extraordinary flora and fauna to be analyzed later. The expedition did, however, have a resident geologist, Horatio Ross. His job was to inspect and gather specimens of any valuable minerals, especially gold and silver.

In mid-July, Custer and his men camped near the present town in South Dakota that is named after him. Ross was inspecting the bed of nearby French Creek when he spotted gold. Being the publicity hound that he was, Custer immediately dispatched his favorite scout, Charley Reynolds, to bring the news to the outside world.

Reynolds took four nights to make the 115-mile ride to Fort Laramie, avoiding Sioux along the way who looked at his ride as an incursion. From Fort Laramie, word of the gold discovery was telegraphed to Cump. Custer's thirty-five-hundred-word dispatch described the Black Hills in detail. Yet the meat of it is only a small paragraph in the middle:

Gold has been found at several places, and it is the belief of those who are giving their attention to this subject that it will be found in paying quantities. I have on my table forty or fifty small particles of pure gold … most of it obtained today from one panful of earth.

Custer had found himself in the same situation as Marshall and Sutter before him, having to figure out what to tell the rest of the world about a gold discovery. Like the latter two men, Custer chose to downplay the find, but even in doing so, it was clear that a bonanza was in the offing.

By the last week in July 1874, newspapers in the United States and worldwide were giving the discovery front-page coverage. Meanwhile, Horatio Ross was not about to let any moss grow under him. Along with a few other partners, Ross staked his claim to District No. 1, the area in which he had discovered the gold. He called his company Custer Mining.

Finishing up, the expedition traveled through the central and northern Black Hills, and then left the area near Bear Butte. Arriving back at Fort Lincoln on August 30, 1974, Custer had covered twelve hundred miles in sixty days. By the time he returned to the fort, prospectors had already taken the field.

It made no difference that the Sioux had legal right to the Black Hills; the rush was on, and the government would do everything it could to promote it. At first, miners gathered in the southern Black Hills, but the diggings there proved meager. Prospectors began traveling through the hills looking for better spots.

There had been earlier “gold rushes” that turned out to be false alarms when the area in which an initial strike was made did not pan out. For a few years, it looked like the Black Hills would fall into this category. Things changed, however, when some peripatetic miners discovered Deadwood and Whitewood Creeks in the northern Black Hills. In those locations, each shovelful of dirt revealed a gold bonanza to those who staked their claims first.

Fueled by the mining fever, the town of Deadwood sprang up literally overnight. It was a claptrap affair of wooden shacks and canvas tents. The best place in town was the Gem saloon run by Al Swerengen, who controlled the town's rackets. There was no law, so men such as Swerengen were free to do as they pleased to make money.

The faded lawman Wild Bill Hickok came to town to try his hand at prospecting, but spent more time at the poker tables instead, where he made the mistake of incurring the wrath of a coward named “Broken Nose” Jack McCall. McCall shot him in the back of the head. That prompted shopkeeper Seth Bullock to become the town's first sheriff, a political ascendancy that would lead Bullock to eventually become an advisor to President Theodore Roosevelt.

As for Hickok's murder, it made no difference to the prospectors. They took murder in stride. Like California, death and disease of all kinds were rampant. In and around Deadwood, every piece of available land was quickly claimed by prospectors once again lured by the promise of
get rich quick
.

The Black Hills gold was placer gold. The same as the California discovery, placer gold was loose gold pieces mixed with the rocks and dirt around streams. Prospectors knew that gold occurred naturally in quartz rock. The trick was to find the rock formation or formations from which the placer gold had leached after being subjected to millions of years of erosion.

On April 9, 1876, prospectors Fred and Moses Manuel, Hank and Frank Harney, and Alex Engh discovered a gold-laden rocky outcropping near present-day Lead. They staked a claim, naming their new mine the Homestake. It would later be deduced that Deadwood Creek's placer gold flowed from this vein.

More than that, what these men had unwittingly discovered was the richest gold vein in U.S. history. The Homestake would produce 10 percent of the world's gold supply over the next century and a quarter. This kind of production needed investors who could bring in the proper mining equipment. No surprise then that the Homestake wound up in the hands of three wealthy Californians who had made their money in the California Gold Rush: William Hearst, J. B. Haggin, and Lloyd Tevis. They would go on to make another fortune from the Homestake.

The Homestake's quartz rock was brittle enough to be easily crushed, thus releasing the gold inside. Mercury would then be applied to the rock to separate the gold. Elsewhere in the Black Hills, the gold was not so easily extracted from the rock and was quite difficult to get at without more complicated, and expensive, chemical
processes. That didn't stop the miners from flooding in, nor did it stop the Indians, many of whom left the reservation precisely because the government had abrogated the Treaty of 1868.

Custer's annihilation at the hands of a superior force of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors on June 25, 1976, on the Little Big Horn River was a direct result of the Indians' dissatisfaction with the United States, once again breaking an Indian treaty. Gold was gold; it was worth a person's life to find it as long as that life was someone else's. As for Custer, Sheridan was quick to shed himself of his protégé's memory: “Had the 7th Cavalry been held together [Custer divided his force into three parts before attacking] it would have been able to handle the Indians on the Little Big Horn.”

Sheridan was too polite. He neglected to point out that the impetuous boy general had attacked the largest group of Indian warriors ever gathered in one place on the North American continent in modern times. It was Custer who had led the miners into the Black Hills, though the Indians did not know Custer was commanding the 7th until the Battle of the Little Big Horn was over. Later estimates place the hostile force as high as ten thousand warriors, though five thousand seem more likely.

In Washington, President Ulysses Grant agreed with his former colleague Sheridan, telling the
New York Herald
, “I regard Custer's Massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself that was wholly unnecessary.”

After the massacre, the Indians fled, splitting up, with some, under the leadership of Sitting Bull, going to
Canada. That left the miners free to explore the Black Hills and retain their scalps at the same time. Unfortunately, as it always does, the placer gold ran out. And while everyone else hoped to find a bonanza like the Homestake, it didn't happen, at least not immediately.

Chemical processes invented in the 1890s would make gold extraction from nonbrittle rock easier. But even later Black Hills mines, including those at Carbonate, Bald Mountain, and Galena, could not hold a candle to the Homestake, which didn't close down its operations until 2001.

On June 16, 1880, Congress adjourned before passing a bill that would have given Sutter what he had been seeking: financial restitution for the Gold Rush, to the tune of $50,000. Two days later, John Augustus Sutter died. He was returned to Lititz and buried in the Moravian Brotherhood's cemetery.

Back in 1849, Samuel McNeil, on his way home, had run into Sutter at Monterey and penned this account as part of his book:

“At the appointed time we started in the
Panama
. Raising steam and firing a farewell gun, we were on our glorious way [from San Francisco] with 300 passengers on board. Among them was the world-renowned Capt. Suter [sic], being a delegate to the convention held at Monterey to form a state government. Him and I conversed considerably together. He again spoke of Col. Frémont, again relating the grievances I before mentioned, that is, how Frémont stole his property.

“‘Freemont is a tyrant and a blackguard,' Capt. Suter [sic] said but spoke very highly of Col. Kearney who superseded Frémont on that military station.

“‘Before the discovery of the gold,' he told me, ‘the inhabitants slaughtered the cattle only for the hide and tallow, but now they slaughter them for the meat and throw the hide and tallow away.' Sutter also related to me how he first emigrated to that wild region.

“Once he kept a store in Louisville, Kentucky. There he foolishly went bail for a friend (or enemy), and through the imprudence of the person he bailed he was ruined or almost. From there he went to New Orleans. Thence to Fort Independence and across the Plains and Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River in Oregon. From there to the Sandwich Islands. The government of those islands furnished him with ten servants to act as life guards, and, accompanied by them, he went to Santa Barbara on the Pacific Coast.”

More likely, Marshall bought some slaves and took them with him as indentured laborers to California.

“There the government, for the proper settlement of the country, granted him the region in which most of the gold mines are. I then asked him, to tell me the worth of his property at this time. He supposed about $500,000. He has an amiable son in California, and a wife and two daughters in Germany, adding that he had sent for the latter, and they would soon be in California. The Capt. is a German, sixty years old, and much of a gentleman.”

The captain was also a liar and a visionary, a quintessentially American mix. As for Mrs. Sutter, she died the
following January. The notice of her passing appeared in, among other papers, the
Tombstone Epitaph
, which served the mining boomtown of Tombstone, Arizona.

Despite being part of the United States since the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ended the Mexican-War, Arizona was still a sparsely settled territory, filled with hostile Indian tribes led by the likes of the brilliant Apache warriors Geronimo and Cochise.

Ed Schieffelin, though just thirty years old in 1877, was one of those who had bought into the Gold Rush dream. He had been prospecting for more than a decade and had never struck it rich. That spring, when Ed left Camp Huachuca, his fellow though less hardy miners told him that he'd find his tombstone rather than silver.

Moving into the hills, he found a wash, and scattered all along it were pieces of silver. Ed wasn't an experienced prospector for nothing. He knew enough to follow the wash, up to a red and black ledge of what looked at first sight to be silver ore. Getting right up to it, Schieffelin figured the vein to be fifty feet long and twelve inches wide.

Climbing onto the ledge, he stuck his pick into the rough surface of the rock and pried out a few pieces. Turning them over in his hand slowly, he saw that the rock was caked dark. It was pure silver. Schieffelin had finally gotten his strike. He thought of his fellow miners words of warning: “All you'll find out there will be your tombstone.”

A man with a great sense of humor, Schieffelin named
his claim the Tombstone. The name stuck and was then used to describe the settlement that grew around the Tombstone Mine and other mines discovered in what became known as the Tombstone Hills. The really smart businessmen, of course, started businesses that soon thrived in a mining community fueled by what seemed to be an inexhaustive supply of silver in the nearby hills.

Within two years the town had grown to five thousand full-time residents. Miners flocked to Tombstone from all over the world to see if they, too, could strike it rich. Lawlessness, of course, thrived in Tombstone like any boomtown, only this one had a marshal named Virgil Earp. Along with the brothers he deputized, Wyatt and Morgan, they were known throughout the western towns they worked in as the Fighting Earps.

The way it worked was that Wyatt would come in and get a job in a saloon as a bouncer or faro dealer with a piece of the take. Brothers Virgil and Morgan would become lawmen, while brother James was the bartender who sold whiskey and girls to the miners. Sometimes parts were reversed, with Wyatt the head lawman and Virgil and Morgan his deputies.