Thoen Stone

Two carved faces of red granite look across to Lookout Mountain, where Louis Thoen, a stonemason, and his brother Ivan found a sandstone slab on March 14, 1887. Its scratched message names seven men who came for gold in 1833 and says all but Ezra Kind were killed. Doubted from the day it surfaced, the slab is in Deadwood's Adams Museum. The 1953 face here goes further, crediting the party's deaths with saving the Indian his homeland for forty years; the Hills were Lakota land before and after.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spearfish Canyon — 9.4 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.
• Deadwood Historic District — 10.0 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.
• Mount Moriah Cemetery — 10 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.
• Homestake Open Cut & Sanford Lab Visitor Center — 10 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.

More markers nearby

• 1940 DAR Penny Pines Forest — 8.4 mi
• Preacher Smith of Deadwood Gulch — 9.1 mi
• Henry Weston Smith — 9.1 mi
• Northern Hills Rest Area — 9.3 mi