The Sidney-Black Hills Trail

Norbert Mahnken's 1949 study in Nebraska History describes the traffic. Way stations stood about every 15 miles on a road of some 267 miles from Sidney to Deadwood, by Snake Creek, Point of Rocks and Running Water to the Red Cloud Agency. Marsh and Stephenson and Gilmer and Salisbury ran Concord coaches, up to three a day, with nine passengers inside and three to seven on top. Riding with a freighter cost $10, $15 less than the coach. Bandits began robbing stages in 1877, and when the railroad reached Pierre in 1880 the big freighting firms moved there.

What the plaque says

The Sidney-Black Hills Trail Beginning in 1874 thousands of freight wagons and stagecoaches passed here along the Sidney-Black Hills Trail. The route first supplied the Sioux at Red Cloud Agency on the White River and the troops at adjacent Camp Robinson. The southern terminus of the trail was at Sidney, Nebraska, on the Union Pacific Railroad. The 1874 discovery of gold in the Black Hills soon gave the trail new importance. Within two years it had been extended to Deadwood and other settlements in the Black Hills. Until about 1880 much of the freight for these mining camps was shipped from Sidney over this route. The peak 1878-1879 trade was estimated at more than twenty- two million pounds. Three stagecoach stations were located along the trail in this region. To the south were Snake Creek Station and Halfway Hollow, while a few miles north was the Running Water Station on the Niobrara River. When Box Butte County was settled in the 1880's, several sod buildings including a store and post office were built a mile north of here. Czech settlers erected a Catholic Church nearby in 1888. The church cemetery remains, a symbol of the heritage of these pioneer settlers.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Agate Fossil Beds National Monument — 25 mi
  A fossil quarry on the Niobrara that also keeps the gifts Red Cloud and other Lakota and Cheyenne visitors gave the ranching family who were their friends for thirty-five years.
• Carhenge — 25 mi
  A son's memorial to his father on the family farm north of Alliance: Stonehenge copied to scale in old American cars sprayed gray, dedicated at the 1987 summer solstice.
• Fort Robinson State Park — 26 mi
  The army post beside the Red Cloud Agency where Crazy Horse was bayoneted in 1877 and Morning Star's Northern Cheyenne broke out into the January cold of 1879.

More markers nearby

• Hemingford — 10 mi
• Box Butte Country — 21 mi
• German P.O.W. Camp — 25 mi
• Burlington Locomotive 719 — 25 mi