First Deadwood Gold Discovery

The first of two 1976 bronzes on Deadwood's gold discoveries stands at the north end of town beside a sculpted prospector, near the mouth of Spruce Gulch. Here Frank Bryant's party found gold paying twenty to forty cents a pan in August 1875 and came back to stake a discovery claim on November 8. Its companion two miles up the gulch, cast the same year for the same three bodies, says Deadwood was laid out on April 28, 1876. This one says by April 26. Deadwood's historians say only late April.

What the plaque says

First Deadwood Gold Discovery Near this point in 1875 occurred the first of two initial gold dis- coveries in the Deadwood area. The more accepted account of the discovery states that in late August, 1875 a party consisting of Frank Bryant, John B. Pearson, Thomas Moore, Richard Low, James Pierman, Sam Blodgett, and George Hauser located gold deposits here paying twenty to forty cents to the pan and built a cabin. Bryant and a party left to prospect other areas, then returned in early November. On November 8, 1875, Bryant, Henry Coder and William Cudney staked out "Discovery Claim" just east of the cabin built in August, at the mouth of Spruce Gulch. By January 1, 1876, 50 miners were working Deadwood Gulch with an average take of $10 per day, and on January 5 the entire gulch was occupied by mining claims. Thus the Deadwood gold rush began in 1875. Residents, however, celebrate the Days of '76 because the city of Deadwood was laid out by April 26, 1876, and because the great rush of miners into Deadwood came in the spring of 1876. By August, 1876 combined digging and building had produced a city resembling a "heap of lemon boxes propped up on broomsticks." In the century since 1876 the Deadwood-Lead mining district has produced gold estimated at over $800,000,000. Erected 1976 by the Lawrence County Historical Society, the South Dakota Department of Transportation and the South Dakota State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mount Moriah Cemetery — 0.8 mi
  The hillside where Deadwood moved its dead: Wild Bill and Calamity Jane side by side, Seth Bullock looking at his friend's tower, and the Chinese burner of 1908.
• Deadwood Historic District — 0.9 mi
  A gold-rush town on treaty land, rebuilt in brick after the 1879 fire and rescued a century later by a vote to let casinos pay for its preservation.
• Homestake Open Cut & Sanford Lab Visitor Center — 3.3 mi
  A 1,250-foot pit on Lead's Main Street, the visible top of a gold mine that went down 8,000 feet in 125 years and is a physics laboratory now.
• Spearfish Canyon — 11 mi
  A limestone canyon nineteen miles long whose waterfalls ran dry for most of a century while the Homestake piped their water to its power plants.

More markers nearby

• Henry Weston Smith — 1.3 mi
• Preacher Smith of Deadwood Gulch — 1.3 mi
• Second Deadwood Gold Discovery — 2.3 mi
• 1940 DAR Penny Pines Forest — 2.9 mi