A Crossroads Resource

Unit VII: What, Then, Is This American? ca. 1865 - 1900

Question/Problem 4: What was the West like for miners, cattlemen, and homesteader?

Miners' Reading #1
In the Spring of 1876 the rush to the Black Hills officially began, as thousands poured into the mountains from points east, west, and south, bound for the diggings in Deadwood Gulch. Predictably, only those who arrived as early as February were able to locate claims worth the effort of working; Deadwood's placers were rich but limited in extent to a few rich outcroppings and washes, which were taken up quickly. According to the patterns of tradition, disappointed miners then scattered into the gullies and gulches north and south of Deadwood. Among them were the Manuel brothers, Fred and Moses, veterans of gold fields in Montana, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, California, Arizona, and Alaska. For nearly ten years they had haunted the mining camps of the West without success and were giving it another try in the Black Hills. After dismissing the possibility of finding a paying claim amid the crowded throng of Deadwood Gulch, the brothers wandered up to the mouth of Bobtail Gulch and with two partners began pros prospecting in earnest. Three months later, they found what they had spent nine years searching for.

In 1903, Moses Manuel related the circumstance of their discovery: 'Toward spring, in the latter part of March or April, four of us found some rich float quartz. We looked for the lode but the snow was deep and could not find it. When the snow began to melt I wanted to go and hunt it up again but my three partners wouldn't look for it as they did not think it was worth anything. I kept looking every day for nearly a week, and finally the snow melted on the hill and the water ran through the draw which crossed the lead and I saw some quartz in the bottom and the water running over it. I took a pick and tried to get some out and found it very solid, but I got some out and took it to camp and pounded it up and panned it and found it very rich. Next day Hank Harney consented to come and located what we called the Homestake, the 9th of April, 1876. We started to dig a discovery shaft on the other side of this little draw and the first chunk of quartz weighed about 200 pounds and was the richest ever taken en out. We came over next day and ran an open cut and found we had a large deposit of a rich grade ore. We ran a big open cut and saved the best quartz by itself. Afterwards we built a road to Whitewood and brought an ox team and wagon, built an arrastra [an ore-crushing machine] and hauled the ore over. We ran the arrastra the following winter and took out $5,000.'

By fall, the brothers and their partners had added a claim to the Old Abe, next to the Homestake, and that same year started producing ore as rich as that at the original discovery. At the end of the year, the mines were both producing steadily, and a ten-stamp n-stamp mill had been installed by Moses to pulverize the ore more efficiently than the arrastra. The hills above and below them were a welter of claims and working mines, as prospectors hurried into the area to tap into the great discovery, and a town had been laid out and christened Lead (pronounced to rhyme with 'greed') City.

From T.H. Watkins, Gold and Silver in the West (Palo Alto, CA: American West Publishing Company, 1971), pp. 112-113.

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