Sheridan 1875-1942

The bronze is unusually frank for 1958: until 1877, it says, this was still Indian Country and everybody here a trespasser. Sheridan was Pennington County's first seat, from 1877 until the seat moved to Rapid City in 1878, and is credited with the first federal court west of the Missouri. What is left of it lies half a mile northeast under Sheridan Lake, behind the largest earth dam the CCC and WPA built in South Dakota. The bronze puts it thirty feet down; other accounts say twenty.

What the plaque says

Sheridan 1875 - 1942 Sheridan, located 1/2 mile NE, now 30 feet under water, was named for General Philip Sheridan and founded in 1875 on Cheyenne-Deadwood Trail, as Golden, in the belief that fabulous placer gold existed here. Still Indian Country and everybody a trespasser until 1877 Sheridan was named county seat of Pennington County on April 19 and in October of that year Judge Granville G. Bennett held first term of Court in Black Hills there. The first gold seekers here came in early July 1875 and were Andre J. Williams, Ernest Barthold, John W. Allen, J. Carlin, Ed Flaherty, Frank Bethune, William Nasten, Ezekiel Brown and Deacon Dillard. Williams got $2.00 in gold in first pan on July 18 and hastened to Custer to apprize his partners and on return found his own claim jumped. Up the creek a short distance was the intake of a 17 mile flume, built of lumber milled on the job from the adjacent forest. It went down Spring Creek and took water to the Rockerville placer, oper- ations 10 miles away, from 1881 to 1884, where over half a million in gold was recovered. James Redpath was first postmaster on October 22, 1877 and Ernest Barthold, the last, on June 13, 1913. The dam creating Sheridan Lake submerged its remains in 1942. Erected 1958 by William & Clara Williamson and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1880 Train — 5.0 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.
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial — 6.3 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.
• Black Elk Peak — 7.4 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.
• Crazy Horse Memorial — 11 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

• Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Horse Creek — 2.4 mi
• Hill City — 5.3 mi
• Gutzon Borglum — 6.4 mi
• Civilian Conservation Corps Camp - Pactola — 7.0 mi