Deadwood Gold: A Story of the Black Hills

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE AUTHOR

THE Black Hills! — land of mystery, of adventure, of romance! How often as a boy I sighed for an opportunity to visit this famed region which spreads over the edges of Dakota and Wyoming! I think my zeal to do so had been greatly stimulated by the reading of one of the early-day thrillers. Live Boys in the Black Hills. I was especially anxious to know whatever became of Charley, the young hero of that story, who in the last chapter got lost in one of the mines. The author evidently intended to continue the story in our next, but, so far as I know, no other volume ever appeared to solve the tantalizing mystery.

One thing, strangely enough, that has come out of the search for more stories of the Hills, is this little volume. When I found here in the heart of New York a splendid old veteran who knew the Black Hills like a book, you may be assured that I went eagerly after his stories. And here are some of them — from the days when gold was discovered at the grass roots, through the exciting times when Custer’s cavalrymen brought the first prospectors out of old Red Cloud’s hunting preserve, on during the mad rush to Deadwood, and throughout the after years that brought, in these same Hills, the discovery of some of the greatest gold mines in the world.

It was Colonel George W. Stokes who held these memories for us. From his birthplace near the haunts of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, he was taken west as a boy by his parents. While he was working out there in old Denver, the call of the Black Hills came to him. Slipping round the soldier guard, with other adventurous young American companions, he was among the first to get to the new gold diggings. The stirring days he spent in the Black Hills were kept in vivid recollection during all his later years, up to the day he passed away. He died in the summer of 1925, at seventy-eight years of age.

It is to be regretted that he did not live to see this little volume which he had worked so earnestly to bring into being. He did read and approve the manuscript in its final form.

A short time after this his days were cut short suddenly. He died, as he had hoped, while yet he was clear of mind and still in service. Colonel Stokes was a gentleman to the core, a true-blue soldier of the old school, a kindly friend and a faithful father. Peace to his memory!

It is fortunate that he has left for us this charming book of his adventures and his life’s work. There is romance in his story and more. His life was cast in one of the most interesting of our fields of industry — the mining world. To read the autobiographical sketches that make this little volume is to get a most vivid picture of many aspects of the gold mining process.

Especially does the book give clear, humanistic descriptions of the activities connected with placer mining — the kind that are associated with the great gold rushes of all time, from the days of Jason on through Columbus and Cortez down to the exciting days of California and Alaska. The Deadwood gold stampede was akin to these.

Nor do we end there. Colonel Stokes later, as an expert in placer mining, went out to pass judgment upon diggings new and old over both North and South America. It was while in this service for mining magnates that he had some most interesting experiences in the land where Columbus opened the gold-digging industry in the New World. He was even to fall into possession of a fragment of the bones of the great Columbus himself.

HOWARD R. DRIGGS

CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD DAYS IN OLD MISSOURI

I WAS born in the little town of Louisiana, Pike County, Missouri, just after the close of the Mexican War, about the time that Brigham Young outspanned his tired oxteams near the shores of the Great Salt Lake — that is, in 1847.

My birthplace was a glorified loghouse. The logs had been hewn square and mortised at the corners, and were well chinked and grouted with mortar. A coat of whitewash brightened up the interior, but it did not cover entirely the scoring of the ax on the logs. There were four large rooms, two upstairs and two down, besides the usual kitchen ell, making a rather roomy and comfortable home for those pioneer days.

Father was a blacksmith, and a good one. He was not content, however, in this calling. His ambition was to sell goods and become a merchant prince — on a modest scale.

He had come to Missouri from North Carolina. Prior to his going into the West, he had drifted from Carolina to Delaware. Here he had met my mother, a girl of the McAllister-Witherspoon clan, and had induced her to join him in a venture into much-praised Missouri. So little did blood and family pride affect them all, that I do not to this day know whether or not my grandmother, who was born a Witherspoon, was related to the family of the old bachelor Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration of Independence. The McAllisters I knew more intimately, since some of this branch of mother’s family came to settle near my parents in Missouri.

On the negro question our clan was divided. Some of the members owned slaves; some did not. It was a cause of division and high tension among many families in that border state. I recall a barbecue in 1855 given by the adherents of James Buchanan, at which partisan feeling flamed forth. My mother’s relatives took opposite sides. It was a case of brother against brother, often father against son — a bitter time indeed.

When the presidential election of 1860 rolled around, the seething pot of politics boiled over. Lincoln, Douglas, Bell, and Breckinridge were all in the race. My father chose to support Bell, but Lincoln, as we all know, was elected.

During this time a change came about in our family fortunes. Having found a purchaser for his blacksmith shop, my father sold it out and fulfilled his heart’s desire by becoming proprietor of a general store. For this venture he removed to the hamlet of Culpepper, two miles up the Mississippi, where there was a landing at which steamboats stopped to take on wood. Great ricks of cordwood were piled up out of reach of high water, and when a Keokuk or St. Paul steamer needed fuel, it would give a few toots and draw up to the shore. Father then would go out and measure off with an eight-foot stick what the negro roustabouts carried aboard until the captain called a halt.

Fuel for home use cost the settler nothing but the energy it took to get it and chop it up. The old Mississippi brought down all the wood that was needed, and piled it along the shore as the high waters receded. Lumber too was delivered by the stream, enough at least for the repairing of fences and stables.

Almost everybody owned a skiff or had the use of one, to gather in what the stream had to offer. A skiff was needed especially for fishing, and the boys and men were always at this sport, landing the bass and goggle eyes, the croppy, sunfish, pike, and buffalo or carp, with which the river then abounded. The fish helped to enrich our ordinary diet of hog, hominy, and cracklin’s. Besides fish, there were mallard, teal, redhead ducks, and other kinds of water birds, to vary our food, while out in the fields the quail were so plentiful in those pioneer days that the plump little birds were caught by the gross and shipped to St. Louis in crates. Rabbits and squirrels were slain by the hundreds, not so much for food as to keep them from eating the corn and other crops.

But a man couldn’t hunt or fish all the time, even on the off days when he wasn’t chilling and burning with malaria. Nearly every resident chilled and fevered every other day for a spell in summer and fall, until the increasing doses of quinine would cause the disease to miss a day, then two days; and after a while the chills came only once a week, and finally the shaking stopped for the season. Generally the malady kept one thin, but fever and ague rarely killed, as I remember.

The recreational advantages of Culpepper were not many. There was little for the boys and men to do during their leisure hours other than sit around father’s general store and post office, and talk or play checkers, or in fine weather pitch horseshoes out behind Ed Tarpey’s blacksmith shop, which stood next to our store. Few of the community were bookworms.

Dad’s store about met the requirements of Culpepper. There were two or three half-hearted efforts at competition, but father had the trade. The store, with its square front, looked larger than it was as one approached it from the boat landing, but it really covered a space of forty by sixty feet. The building was raised four feet off the ground, not intentionally to provide a snug harbor for hogs and dogs, but to keep out some of the pervading dampness.

Along one side of the establishment ran crude pine counters with a showcase at intervals for the display of gun cracks. On the shelves were calicoes, bleached and unbleached muslin with Pepperell Mills stenciled thereon, Coates’ and Clark’s cotton threads, and other kinds of dry goods. Across the back end of the store were barrels of whisky, vinegar, tar, and molasses, and perhaps whale oil, for coal oil, or kerosene, was not yet on sale. On other shelves were lanterns, candles — tallow and sperm — saleratus, madder, indigo, quinine, pain killer, three or four kinds of pills, liniment for man and beast, sugar, spices, rice, dried apples, a cheese with a fly-specked wire cover, cutlery, powder and shot, and so forth, while suspended from hooks in the numerous posts, and pillars were harness, collars, currycombs, men’s and boys’ boots, shotguns, rifles — but no real Colt’s revolvers until after the war got well started. An attractive showcase for us youngsters displayed peppermint, lemon, and cinnamon candies. It was, all in all, a typical country store of pioneer days.

In the center of the store, planted in a box of river sand four inches deep, was an enormous square stove. Around that old stove was waged many an argument on the questions then stirring the country, and many a time there were fights growing from the bitterness between those who stood on opposite sides of the slavery tangle. Father managed to keep a pretty level head through it all, though it was sometimes a difficult thing to do, especially when his Illinois customers — from free soil across the river — were jeered at and even called black abolitionists and nigger lovers by the pro-slavery men and boys.

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