Hill City

The bronze calls Annie Tallent, teaching in the cabin school behind it by 1883, the first woman to enter the Hills, and gives her the wrong middle initial. She was not first: Lakota women had lived here for generations, and Sarah Campbell, a Black cook on Custer's expedition, came in the summer of 1874, months before Tallent arrived that December with the unlawful Gordon party. Tallent later wrote The Black Hills; or, the Last Hunting Ground of the Dakotahs, a book defending the settlement.

What the plaque says

Hill City First laid out as a gold camp in February 1876 by Thomas Harvey, John Miller and Hugh McCullough, the rich strikes in the Northern Hills made it a deserted village by May 1876. Its deserted cabins had many transient occupants and the cabin that stood just behind this marker was last occupied by a family named Crippen. Prior to 1880 Samuel H Coates and others came and needing a school, re-chinked the outside with mud, the inside with V-shaped slats and Coates taught the school. By the time of the Tin Dis- covery in 1883, Annie E. Tallent, first woman to enter the Hills and its historian was the school teacher. Then in 1886 a new frame school was built alongside. The east end of the Coates house, also behind this marker was that first frame school. Erected 1955 by Hill City Chamber of Commerce and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1880 Train — 0.2 mi
  A steam excursion on a mining branch line that hauled gear for Mount Rushmore, named for a decade it never ran in by a man who wanted steam to survive.
• Black Elk Peak — 4.9 mi
  The highest summit in the Black Hills, renamed in 2016 for an Oglala holy man after carrying, for 150 years, the name of the general who attacked a Sicangu camp in 1855.
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial — 6.8 mi
  Four faces blasted out of a sacred mountain by 400 workers in fourteen years, with a Jefferson that had to be dynamited off and a hall of records never finished.
• Crazy Horse Memorial — 6.9 mi
  A Lakota elder's answer to Mount Rushmore, carved for more than seventy years by one family with private money, and still argued over by Crazy Horse's own relatives.

More markers nearby

• Sheridan 1875-1942 — 5.3 mi
• Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Horse Creek — 6.3 mi
• Mount Rushmore Inspiration — 6.4 mi
• Gutzon Borglum — 7.2 mi