Deadwood's brick downtown filling its narrow gulch, seen from the hillside of Mount Moriah, with pine-covered ridges behind — Gorilla Jones / CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

South Dakota · Region

Deadwood & the Northern Hills

Bear Butte where the Lakota and Cheyenne still pray, Deadwood's gold-rush gulch, the Homestake's mile-and-a-half shafts, and Spearfish Canyon.

5 places to explore

Bear Butte rises alone off the plains east of the hills, a dome of igneous rock the Lakota call Mato Paha, Bear Mountain, and the Cheyenne call Noahvose. Both nations still come to it to fast and pray, and the prayer cloths and tobacco ties hanging in the trees along its trail are offerings, to be left where they hang. Every August the Sturgis motorcycle rally fills the valley below it.

The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie set the Black Hills aside for the Lakota. Eight years later miners poured into Deadwood Gulch anyway, and the town they built on treaty land became the capital of the gold rush, the place where Wild Bill Hickok was shot at a card table in August 1876 and where Calamity Jane was buried beside him. Up the hill at Lead the Homestake Mine worked one ore body for 125 years and sank its shafts to 8,000 feet, deeper than any other gold mine in North America. Nearly a mile down, in the 1960s, Ray Davis filled a tank with cleaning fluid to count neutrinos from the sun, work that won him the Nobel Prize in 2002. The mine is a physics laboratory now.

West of Lead, Spearfish Creek has cut a deep limestone canyon through the hills, and out on the northern plains Belle Fourche keeps the monument to the geographic center of the fifty states, which lies in a pasture to the north.

What to See in Deadwood & the Northern Hills

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Spearfish Canyon

Spearfish

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.

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Historic Sites

Deadwood Historic District

Deadwood

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.

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Mount Moriah Cemetery

Deadwood

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.

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Towns & Gateways

Bear Butte

Sturgis

Mato Paha to the Lakota and Noahvose to the Cheyenne, a lone mountain off the plains where both nations still come to fast and pray.

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Industry & Mining

Homestake Open Cut & Sanford Lab Visitor Center

Lead

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.

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Scenic Drives through Deadwood & the Northern Hills

Scenic Byway

Deadwood to Devils Tower and down the Belle Fourche

About 130 miles around the northern Black Hills: Deadwood to Devils Tower by I-90 and US-14, then down the Belle Fourche through Hulett and Aladdin to the town the river named and the Reclamation dam it fills.

132 mi · 3 hrs

Stories from Deadwood & the Northern Hills

History

The Hills Are Not for Sale

In 1980 the Supreme Court ruled that the United States had taken the Black Hills unlawfully and owed the Lakota for them. The nations have never touched the money.

5 min read

Geology

The Hills in Rings

The Black Hills are a dome pushed up through the plains and worn open at the top, so that driving in from any side means crossing its rock layers in order, youngest to oldest, like the rings of a cut tree read from the bark inward.

5 min read

Deadwood & the Northern Hills rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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