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Black Hills & Sturgis History

96 historic places across South Dakota's Black Hills and Wyoming — Sturgis, Deadwood, Lead, Spearfish Canyon, Rapid City, Hot Springs, Custer, and the gold-rush ghost towns.

Belle Fourche

Black Hills Roundup

A one-off 1918 fundraiser for Red Cross war relief, held in a fenceless pasture with no chutes, drew 15,000 sp

Geographic Center of the Nation Monument

When Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union in 1959, the geographic center of the United States jumped 550 miles o

Tri-State Museum

A ranch widow's 1955 gift of Western artifacts and $1,000 seed money grew into the museum that now tells the f

Cascade Springs

Cascade Springs Resort

Developers platted a 36-block resort city around a spring gushing 2,000 gallons of warm water a minute and pla

Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse Memorial

Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear told sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, "My fellow chiefs and I would like the whit

Custer

1874 French Creek Gold Discovery Site

On French Creek near this spot, prospectors riding with Custer's 1874 expedition panned the first flecks of go

Custer City

Originally christened "Stonewall" by trespassing gold-boomers, this French Creek camp became the very first wh

Custer State Park & State Game Lodge

President Calvin Coolidge ran the country from a rustic Black Hills lodge for three months in 1927, sleeping a

Flintstones Bedrock City

For nearly 50 years, kids could ride a miniature train past a papier-mache volcano named "Mt. St. Wilma" and p

Gordon Stockade

Twenty-eight illegal prospectors — including the first white woman known to enter the Black Hills — built this

Jewel Cave National Monument

Two prospector brothers chasing cold air out of a canyon crack in 1900 found what has since grown, mile by sur

Needles Highway

Governor Peter Norbeck personally walked and rode horseback over every foot of the route before a single machi

Spokane (ghost town)

Deep in Black Hills National Forest sits one of South Dakota's best-preserved ghost towns — a mining camp that

Sylvan Lake

This granite-ringed "jewel of the Black Hills" predates Custer State Park by three decades — and in 2007 it st

Deadwood

Adams Museum

A Deadwood businessman gave the town its first museum in 1930 — and it's still city property nearly a century

Broken Boot Gold Mine

Opened the same year as the gold rush itself, it barely made money on gold — its real product was fool's gold,

Days of '76 Museum & Rodeo

A century-old rodeo modeled on Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, held in a town famous for a poker hand — now ran

Deadwood Main Street Historic District

A gold-rush boomtown, gutted twice by fire and left to fade, saved itself in 1989 by legalizing the very vice

Galena (silver camp)

Galena boomed as the Black Hills' first major silver camp — its Sitting Bull Mine alone produced over $750,000

Historic Adams House

A Queen Anne mansion built for one Deadwood pioneer family was bought by another as a memorial to his dead wif

Historic Franklin Hotel

Deadwood's first grand hotel opened in 1903 with an elevator, electric lights, and telephones — and hosted two

Homestake Slime Plant (Deadwood Mountain Grand)

A gold-processing plant built with Douglas fir beams railed in from Washington State ran until 1973, then sat

Mount Moriah Cemetery

Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Seth Bullock, and Potato Creek Johnny all rest on this hillside overlooking t

Mount Roosevelt Friendship Tower

Deadwood's first sheriff built a stone tower on a mountain he had renamed for his best friend, the former Pres

Nuttal & Mann's Saloon No. 10

Wild Bill Hickok was shot dead here on August 2, 1876, holding two pair — aces and eights, black on black — fo

Old Style Saloon No. 10

"The only museum in the world with a bar" — and it's NOT where Wild Bill was shot, though it has spent 90 year

Tatanka: Story of the Bison

Kevin Costner built it after filming "Dances with Wolves" — and then spent over a decade in a legal fight with

The Gem Theatre

Al Swearengen's Gem Theatre pulled in as much as $10,000 a night from gambling, liquor, and coerced prostituti

The Midnight Star

Kevin Costner turned a historic Deadwood building into his own casino after falling in love with the Black Hil

Tinton (mining town)

Tinton started as a gold camp, reinvented itself as one of the only significant tin-mining districts in U.S. h

Wing Tsue Bazaar

For nearly 45 years a pair of brick buildings on Lower Main held the heart of Deadwood's Chinatown — the shop,

Devils Tower

Devils Tower National Monument

America's very first national monument was a 1,267-foot volcanic column that two Wyoming ranchers first climbe

Fort Meade

Fort Meade

Soldiers at this frontier cavalry post started standing for "The Star-Spangled Banner" in 1892 — nearly 40 yea

Hill City

Rochford (mining town)

Discovered by accident when three Deadwood hunters stumbled on gold-bearing rock in 1876, Rochford grew to aro

The 1880 Train (Black Hills Central Railroad)

The oldest continuously operating standard-gauge steam railroad in America runs on tracks originally laid duri

Hot Springs

Battle Mountain Sanitarium

Congress built a soldiers' home in Hot Springs specifically so disabled Civil War and Spanish-American War vet

Evans Plunge

Businessman Fred "Big Fred" Evans built a wood, iron, and glass pool house over a cluster of warm mineral spri

Hot Springs Historic District

Boomtown Hot Springs rebuilt its downtown almost entirely out of locally quarried pink sandstone in the 1890s,

Pioneer Museum

A sandstone schoolhouse built in 1893 to educate all twelve grades of Hot Springs students now holds the town'

The Mammoth Site

A bulldozer clearing land for a housing subdivision in 1974 broke into a 26,000-year-old sinkhole packed with

Wind Cave National Park

A hole in the prairie that blew a man's hat off in 1881 turned out to be the entrance to the world's first cav

Interior

Badlands National Park

Congress authorized protecting the Badlands' lunar-like spires in 1929, but the park wasn't established for an

Keystone

Holy Terror Mine

Legend says a Black Hills prospector named his richest strike after his own wife — not as a tribute, but as a

Iron Mountain Road

Senator Peter Norbeck built three wooden "pigtail" bridges that spiral drivers back over their own road, and a

Mount Rushmore National Memorial

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum blasted 450,000 tons of granite off a Black Hills peak to carve four 60-foot faces — a

Lead

Black Hills Mining Museum

Built by more than 100 retired Homestake miners themselves, this museum lets visitors walk through a recreated

Central City

Once a booming gulch town of 3,000 that nearly rivaled Deadwood and Lead, Central City absorbed half a dozen n

Cheyenne Crossing Stage Stop

The last horse-change stop before the Cheyenne-to-Deadwood stagecoach made its final run into the gold camps i

Hearst Free Library

Phoebe Apperson Hearst gave the miners of Lead a free public library stocked with 10,000 books in dozens of la

Historic Homestake Opera House

A $250,000 gift from the Homestake Mining Company gave Gilded Age gold miners their own opera house, heated sw

Homestake Gold Mine

The richest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere ran for 126 years and swallowed its own discovery site into a

Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF)

The world's most productive gold mine became the deepest underground physics lab in the U.S., where scientists

Terry (mining town)

A hard-rock mining boomtown of nearly 1,200 people vanished almost entirely — swallowed by open-pit mining — a

Mystic

Mystic (ghost town)

First named "Sitting Bull," this Rapid Canyon mining camp got its own private railroad — the "Crouch Line" — a

Nemo

Nemo (Homestake timber camp)

A tiny Black Hills valley town founded to feed the Homestake Gold Mine's timber appetite became the site of th

Rapid City

Art Alley

What began as unsanctioned canvases hung on downtown brick walls in the early 2000s grew into a permit-managed

Canyon Lake Dam & the 1972 Rapid City Flood

On the night of June 9, 1972, a debris-clogged dam above downtown Rapid City gave way and sent a wall of water

Chapel in the Hills

An exact hand-carved replica of Norway's 850-year-old Borgund stave church, built in the Black Hills in 1969 a

Duhamel Trading Post

A Canadian-born saddle maker's hardware store grew into the largest saddle supplier in the United States and a

Elks Theatre

A 1911 Elks Lodge meeting hall-turned-movie palace sat flood-damaged and vacant for two years, then reopened t

Firehouse Brewing Co.

South Dakota's first brewpub poured its first pint inside a 1915 fire hall that served Rapid City's fire depar

Hotel Alex Johnson

A railroad executive's Tudor-Revival skyscraper hotel broke ground one day before work started on Mount Rushmo

Main Street Square & the City of Presidents

A downtown parking lot and an adult video store became, within a decade, both a plaza with a winter ice rink a

Rapid City Indian School (now Oyate Health Center)

A campus built in 1898 to strip Lakota, Cheyenne, and Crow children of their language and culture spent the mi

Storybook Island

A free storybook-themed children's park built entirely on donated labor in 1959 has closed only once in its hi

The Journey Museum & Learning Center

A 1997 museum built to house four merged collections shares its grounds with the oldest surviving building in

West Boulevard Historic District

Rapid City's gold-boom elite platted a 190-foot-wide boulevard with a landscaped median in 1885, and more than

Rockerville

Rockerville (gold camp & flume)

A New York-financed company sank a fortune into a 20-mile wooden flume to wash gold out of the gulch at Rocker

Savoy

Dances With Wolves Winter Camp Site

In November 1989 a Lakota winter camp of real teepees was built in the snow north of Roughlock Falls for the c

Homestake Hydroelectric Plant No. 2

This second Homestake power plant literally dried up one of Spearfish Canyon's named waterfalls for decades by

Roughlock Falls

Wagon drivers once had to chain-lock their wheels to inch safely down the grade here — giving this roughly 50-

Savoy (canyon hamlet)

This unincorporated speck of a resort hamlet began as a sawmill town supplying the Black Hills timber trade, a

The Latchstring Inn

Named for the frontier custom of leaving a latchstring hanging out as a welcome sign, this canyon inn has oper

Sheridan

Sheridan (drowned townsite)

South Dakota's very first Pennington County seat spent its last decades as a dying gold camp of about 10 peopl

Silver City

Silver City

Founded in the 1876 silver rush and originally called "Elkhorn Prairie" by Custer's own expedition, Silver Cit

Spearfish

Black Hills Passion Play

For 69 seasons, a German family who traced their Passion Play tradition to a 1242 monastery performed it night

Bridal Veil Falls

A 60-foot sheet of water cascading over limestone right beside the highway — Spearfish Canyon's most easily se

Burlington Spearfish Line

For 40 years a Burlington branch line hauled lumber, farmers, and $2.50 excursion tourists through Spearfish C

D.C. Booth Historic National Fish Hatchery

Congress funded this fish-culture station in 1896 to stock trout across the West — and for a decade it ran a s

Homestake Hydroelectric Plant No. 1

To avoid buying coal, the Homestake Gold Mine paid for a 5-mile, 8-tunnel water diversion through solid canyon

Matthews Opera House

Built by a Wyoming rancher who fell in love with the town, this 300-seat opera house spent decades as a movie

Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway

A 19-mile limestone gorge cut by spring-fed Spearfish Creek, exposing three rock formations and 300 million ye

Spearfish Historic Commercial District

Founded in 1876 as "Queen City" by prospector-brothers Alfred and William Gay, Spearfish grew into the gold ru

The Thoen Stone

A small sandstone slab found near Spearfish in 1887 claims to be a dying prospector's 1834 confession — and if

Sturgis

Bear Butte (Matȟó Pahá)

A solitary mountain rising from the plains that Red Cloud, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull all made pilgrimages t

Broken Spoke Saloon

Dave Iversen built the Broken Spoke on the site of an old lumberyard in 1988, deliberately just off Main Stree

Full Throttle Saloon (original)

Billed as the world's largest biker bar and immortalized on truTV, the 27-acre Full Throttle Saloon burned to

Hoel's Indian Motorcycle Shop

Nine riders raced for a $500 purse behind a small-town Indian Motorcycle shop in 1938 — and accidentally found

Hotel Sturgis (Benevolent Hall)

Built in 1892 as a fraternal lodge hall, gutted by fire in 1906 and rebuilt the same year, this Main Street bu

Jackpine Gypsies Racing Grounds

The entire Sturgis Motorcycle Rally started as a side effect of a dirt-track race at this one small track — or

One-Eyed Jack's Saloon

Billed as the largest bar on Main Street, One-Eyed Jack's became such valuable rally real estate that it repor

Sturgis Buffalo Chip

Bikers got kicked out of Sturgis City Park in 1981 — so a local rancher built them a 600-acre kingdom four mil

Sturgis Commercial Block

Nine cut-stone storefronts raised in 1888-1900 are the last standing witnesses to Sturgis's origins as a lawle

Sturgis Motorcycle Museum & Hall of Fame

The rally's official museum is housed in Sturgis's former U.S. Post Office, which served the town's mail for m

The Knuckle Saloon & Brewing Co.

The Knuckle Saloon occupies an entire downtown block that its own history says once belonged to Col. Samuel D.

Whitewood

Whitewood Historic District

A town literally built by a railroad's decision to stop — for about three years, Whitewood was the end of the