Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/419

 miles to the south. For one-half this distance our road followed down through the centre of the Black Hills, a most entrancing country, laid out apparently by a landscape artist; it is not so high as the Big Horn range, although Harney's and other peaks of granite project to a great elevation, their flanks dark with pine, fir, and other coniferæ; the foot-hills velvety with healthful pasturage; the narrow valleys of the innumerable petty creeks a jungle of willow, wild rose, live oak, and plum. Climbing into the mountains, one can find any amount of spruce, juniper, cedar, fir, hemlock, birch, and whitewood; there are no lakes, but the springs are legion and fill with gentle melody the romantic glens—the retreat of the timid deer.

A description of Deadwood as it appeared at that time will suffice for all the settlements of which it was the metropolis. Crook City, Montana, Hills City, Castleton, Custer City, and others through which we passed were better built than Deadwood and better situated for expansion, but Deadwood had struck it rich in its placers, and the bulk of the population took root there. Crook City received our party most hospitably, and insisted upon our sitting down to a good hot breakfast, after which we pressed on to Deadwood, twenty miles or more from our camping place on the Whitewood. The ten miles of distance from Crook City to Deadwood was lined on both sides with deep ditches and sluice-boxes, excavated to develop or work the rich gravel lying along the entire gulch. But it seemed to me that with anything like proper economy and care there was wealth enough in the forests to make the prosperity of any community, and supply not alone the towns which might spring up in the hills, but build all the houses and stables needed in the great pastures north, as far as the head of the Little Missouri. It was the 16th of September when we entered Deadwood, and although I had been through the Black Hills with the exploring expedition commanded by Colonel Dodge, the previous year, and was well acquainted with the beautiful country we were to see, I was unbalanced by the exhibition of the marvellous energy of the American people now laid before us. The town had been laid off in building lots on the 15th of May, and all supplies had to be hauled in wagons from the railroad two hundred and fifty miles away and through bodies of savages who kept up a constant series of assaults and ambuscades.