Dear Garret:
I am new to gold prospecting, and have limited computer skills, but I am planning a trip to the Black Hills. I saw your address in Gold Prospectors magazine -- any info/directions on where to mine the Internet for gold in South Dakota would be appreciated – thanks!
- Dean Dahlheimer, http://www.firstcityloghomes.com
Great question! First off, let’s take a look at historic mining in South Dakota, and get an idea of the location of the state’s major gold mining districts from USGS Professional Paper 610:
Figure 1. Principal gold mining districts of South Dakota all lie in the Black Hills area, at the western border with Wyoming. Click to enlarge the graphics.
Clearly, the best gold you’re going to get from this state is in Lawrence County and Pennington County. That’s the heart of the Black Hills. Custer County, to the south, is probably also in play, but not a strong contender. For that matter, it might make sense to check the drainages headed east from the Black Hills if you catch wind of a 100-year flood…
I went out to the South Dakota geology web page and found this relief map of the state:
Figure 2. Black Hills appear like a giant oval uplift on the western border of South Dakota in this relief map.
Now you can start to see the Black Hills, on the far western border, and what a significant mountainous region it truly is. And that drainage pattern isn’t too bad, either – I count about ten drainages that end up in the Missouri River.
Check the Claims Guide
First, before doing a lot of Internet searching, let’s check the GPAA Claims Guide and see what it says about South Dakota. According to the guide, gold was first discovered along French Creek in the Black Hills during Custer’s Expedition in 1874. The resulting influx of miners upset the Sioux, who had supposedly gained ownership of the Black Hills by treaty. Eventually, as most history buffs know, Custer was killed but won the war, and the area went back to public lands. The area’s big producer was the Homestake Mine, which eventually produced more than 30 million troy ounces of gold before closing.
The guide suggests the following placer opportunities:
For Lawrence County: ‘All streams, bench and terrace gravel deposits, including Deadwood, Whitewood, Gold Run, Bobtail, Blacktail, Spring, and Strawberry Gulches, plus Spearfish and Elk Creeks and their tributaries, around Deadwood. Squaw, Yellow, False Bottom, and Annie Creeks show promise. Blacktail and Sheeptail Gulches, and all other area streams and benches around Lead are worth checking. The Negro Hill district, including Sand Creek, Beaver Creek, and Bear Creek, shows gold. Also Potato, Negro, Poplar, Mallory, and other creeks and gulches should be checked.’
In Pennington County, try ‘Spring Creek, Rapid Creek, Castle Creek, and Battle Creek.’
In Custer County: ‘All stream, bench, and terrace gravel deposits, especially on French Creek, site of the first discovery, along the eastern slopes of the Black Hills, near Custer.’ So my earlier thoughts about Custer County need revising.
Here’s where your full GPAA membership pays off; there are four member claims in South Dakota, all in the Black Hills. In Pennington County, check out MIGG 1-4, comprising 80 acres near Rochford on Rapid Creek; also try the Mary Ann and Rainbow Claims nearby. Or, if your Harley is tuned up, check out a spot near Sturgis, known as the Husker #1 claim.
Given all that, an Internet search should at least verify what we know, plus provide answers about state rules and regulations. I like to get an idea of how many people I’m going to trip over, where the museums and camps are, etc. It’s the concept of “local color” that defines an area, so you know what to expect on your first visit to the region. Aerial photography is good, but I like to develop a complete appreciation for a spot so that the trip is more in the category of ‘verification’ rather than ‘discovery.’
Finding Gold in South Dakota
http://www.e-goldprospecting.com/html/finding_gold_in_south_dakota_.html
This is a comprehensive site that offers clues about finding gold in most states. For South Dakota, the site recommends these starting spots:
· Several Black Hills streams due west of Rapid City, from Custer in the South to Lead and Deadwood in the North area. An interesting area is Castle Creek, Hoodoo Gulch, Crooked Gulch, and Chinese Hill, all of which are near Mystic.
· You can look in Rapid Creek, which is located near Placerville and Rockerville, and are both southwest of Rapid City.
· Along the banks of French Creek in Custer County.
Mayhill Press
http://www.mayhillpress.com/wygold.html
Here’s what Mayhill Press says about South Dakota’s two noted gold-bearing counties, with an emphasis on hard-rock mining:
LAWRENCE: Bald Mtn District - 3 m West and SW from Lead, Mogul Mine.
.....Deadwood-Two Bit District - around Deadwood. Mostly from placers in Deadwood Gulch and the following creeks: Two Bit, Elk, Strawberry. Also Strawberry Gulch. Mines: Cloverleaf, Mascot.
.....Garden District - 1-3 miles N from Lead. Maitland mine - 3 miles NNW from Lead.
.....Lead District - at Lead. HOMESTAKE MINING COMPANY.
.....Squaw Creek District - 6 miles W from Lead. Includes Elk Mtn, Carbonate, Ragged Top areas. Placers at Squaw and Annie creeks. MORE MINES: Gold Reward - 2 miles SW from Lead; Wasp No 2 - 2 miles S. Gilt Edge - 5 miles ESE; Spearfish - 7 miles W; Uncle Sam - 7 miles SE; Lundberg, Door and Wilson - 2 miles WSW; Hoodoo-Union Hill - 5 miles ESE; Reliance - 5 miles W; Hidden Fortune - .5 mile N.
PENNINGTON: Hill City District - near headwaters of Spring Creek and around Hill City to the NW. JR mine - 3 miles NE from Hill City.
.....Keystone District - 1.5 miles SE to 3.5 miles NW from Keystone. Mines: Keystone-Holy Terror.
.....Rockerville Placer District - E from Rockerville.
So now you have the names of some hard rock mines to check as well as placer locales. I’ll leave the hard rock mining to concentrate on placer locales. Whenever I see a creek called “Two-Bit Creek” I know I want to try it. I’ve been on Ten Cent Creek in Oregon and recently spied “50-Cent Creek” in Wyoming.
Black Hills National Forest
Check out the links to the US Forest Service map page, as there are lots of files to download and plenty of good information. This will give you ideas about camping in the area, too. You’ll probably want to order the Black Hills National Forest map if you plan to do any exploring at all; it’s practically a must-have.
Here’s what the Black Hills National Forest says about rockhounding, gold panning, and fossil collecting:
· Rock collecting in small amounts for personal use is allowed on the Forest. Make sure you surface collect only, with no digging or excavating.
· Recreational gold panning is allowed in some locations. Contact the closest Forest Service office for more information on locations and rules.
· Metal detectors are allowed, as long as you don't dig holes.
· Federal law prohibits the collection of fossils.
If I’m not mistaken, the last bullet about fossil hunting is new. Collecting non-vertebrate fossils used to be fine for amateurs. Also, what’s the point of metal detecting if you can’t dig a target? Just remind people to fill in their holes and move on!
Here’s the address:
Black Hills National Forest
Highway 385 Northg
Route 2, PO Box 200
Custer, SD 57730
(605) 673-2251
Geology Information
http://denr.sd.gov/linkslandnav.aspx
Check out links for abandoned mines (there’s a name and phone number if you want to contact the office about promising mine dumps) and links to geology maps. There is a nice section of web links at http://www.sdgs.usd.edu/other/webresources.html as well. You could spend a lot of time tracking down documents and links from this page. For example, the South Dakota University School of Mines and Technology is located at this address: http://sdmines.sdsmt.edu/sdsmt.
More Geology maps
http://www.sdgs.usd.edu/publications/general.html?limit_to_download=Yes&sql_option=7#g10
The maps on this page include a geology map for the entire state in PDF form, which you can zoom in on. There’s also a statewide topo map.
Figure 3. Note the ancient geology of the Black Hills, with an abundance of Precambrian rocks at the core.
Tourist Info
If you can plan far enough ahead, contacting a tourist-focused website can net you a full envelope of brochures about an area. If nothing else, I’d hate to miss a promising brew pub (Black Hills Brewing Co., 51 Sherman St. in Deadwood). Here are two tourist sites for the Black Hills area:
Deadwood
Request their brochure, entitled The Official Guide to Deadwood. Figure out where the gas stations, mini-marts, and taverns are situated. Check for museums and other attractions – especially if you have kids with short attention spans.
Lead
Lead is not all that far from Presidents Park, Deadwood, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Spearfish Canyon, Wind Cave, Jewel Cave, Custer State Park, and Devils Tower, to name a few sites. It would make an ideal vacation headquarters, as this site points out.
Gas Prices
Here’s a site I learned about during the big price run-up in 2008. Actually, it wasn’t just the prices I was worried about – just FINDING gas is often a challenge.
First off, you can add GasBuddy.com to your Google maps. I went to google.com and entered “gas prices” in the search box. The first link was to Google Maps, with easy instructions to add prices to the overlay. You can also go to http://www.gasbuddy.com to get the widget. I find this interface tough to use, but by clicking through I got to http://www.southdakotagasprices.com/Map_Gas_Prices.aspx and the map of “gas temperature” comes up. This is a graphical representation of where prices are red hot. The trick here is to set the time limit in the bottom right corner to “All Stations.” That way each gas station shows up, even if the reported information is “old.”
Google Earth hack
http://www.gearthhacks.com/dlfile10754/-Homestake-Gold-Mine,-South-Dakota.htm
I’ll just assume you already have Google Earth loaded, since it’s such a great tool for checking an area before you visit. Label this link under “advanced” Google Earth – it’s a user-created “hack.” This is pretty neat – if you already have Google Earth installed, click on the link for the .kmz file and you’ll bring up the Homestake Mine.
Amateur Geologist
http://www.amateurgeologist.com/roadside-geology-of-south-dakota.html
This site is always a good source of information if you’re trying to puzzle out some likely spots missed by earlier prospectors. You’ll need to understand schists, quartz veins, dikes, sills, pegmatites, and ancient metamorphic rocks if you want to sort out the Black Hills geology. Roadside Geology of South Dakota is often sold with the Geological Highway Map for the Northern Great Plains region.
SD Department of Energy and Natural Resources
http://denr.sd.gov/des/mm/forms.aspx
Get a small-scale mining permit at the DENR’s “one-stop shopping” site. Check out the FAQ if you have questions. A small miners permit – a state level permit issued by the DENR – is required for anyone who uses motorized equipment, such as a dredge or high banker or panning wheel. It appears that if you want to use a bucket, shovel, and sluice, you also need to check in, but it’s always good practice anyway. At the very least, contact the National Forest if you are planning to do anything other than pan and trowel work. But it’s a good idea to just get the permit and start accumulating concentrates by the bucket.
Broken Boot Gold Mine
http://www.brokenbootgoldmine.com
The Broken Boot Mine is noted for its underground tours. It wasn’t the greatest gold mine, but makes for a dark underground experience. Here’s a snip from their home page: “…gold wasn’t the only metal Seim and Nelson found in their mine. They also found plenty of iron pyrite, or fool’s gold. Fortunately for the miners, iron pyrite was in demand. Since it could be used to make sulfuric acid, which was used in the processing of real gold, the miners could get decent money for iron pyrite. Indeed, the mine made more profit from selling fool’s gold than they did real gold.”
South Dakota history
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/us/A0861208.html
If you just want a snapshot of the history of the Black Hills, Infoplease is a good site. Here’s a snip:
“Rumors of gold in the Black Hills, confirmed by a military expedition led by George A. Custer in 1874, excited national interest, and wealth seekers began to pour into the area. However, much of the Black Hills region had been granted (1868) to the Sioux by treaty, and when they refused to sell either mining rights or the reservation itself, warfare again broke out. The defeat (1876) of Custer and his men by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall in the battle of the Little Bighorn (in what is now Montana) did not prevent the whites from gradually acquiring more and more Native American land, including the gold-lined Black Hills.”
If you want to spend hours tracking down obscure historical facts, there’s no better site than the South Dakota State Historical Society. The link is http://www.sdhistory.org.
Ghosttowns.com is still one of my favorites. Try http://www.ghosttowns.com and click on South Dakota. Then you’ll get a list of old towns, such as Rochford or Rockerville. Be sure to think of them if you return from the area with photos, as they can use all the updated information and photographs they can get.
South Dakota GPAA
http://www.blackhillsprospectingclub.com
The site isn’t real active, but it’s a good start. I always get the best information when I talk to a GPAA member directly. The phone number is listed as (605) 341-0483 but is subject to change. Check in the Pick and Shovel Newsletter (free with membership) for the most updated info on state claims committees.
Geocommunicator
http://www.geocommunicator.gov
Since that’s where three of the four GPAA claims in South Dakota are located, I used the BLM’s Geocommunicator site to check the Rapid Creek area in Pennington County for active and abandoned claims. Here’s a snapshot of the area from the BLM’s LR2000 database:
Figure 4. Active claims on Rapid Creek as shown by the Geocommunicator tool.
Note that if I were to flip the switch on this display to show the expired claims, most of the streams and creeks in this area were under claim at one time, but there are a few open spots now.
Treasurefish
With all that gold mineralization in the Black Hills, you know there is bound to be some rockhounding as well. I checked Treasurefish and got this report about South Dakota:
“Don’t forget the gems - The State's best known chalcedony is its colorful and beautiful Fairburn agates. Named after a community near a very prolific agate deposit in Custer County, these brightly colored banded agates are similar to Lake Superior agates found in Michigan and Dryhead agates from Montana. The color patterns are alternating bands with one of the bands always white. The colors that alternate with white include yellowish-brown, dark red, salmon pink, black, yellow, grayish-blue, and milky-pink.
“The agate nodules range in size from about 20 millimeters in diameter to some that weigh as much as 20 kilograms. The nodules are recovered from the weathering of the Chadron Formation in an elongated belt covering parts of Custer, Pennington, and Shannon Counties, with the community of Fairburn at about the center of the belt. Nodules similar to the Fairburn nodules weather out of a limestone formation in an area that includes parts of Custer and Fall River Counties.
Other varieties of agate are found in the State. Moss agate, much like the famous Montana moss agate, can be found in river gravels of the Little Missouri River system in Harding County. A wide variety of agate can be found in the gravel pits in the entire eastern part of the State.”
The reliable Western Gem Hunter’s Atlas (Cy Johnson & Son, 1994) has good information about South Dakota. Here’s a snip of their map for the area around Deadwood and Custer.
Figure 5. Rockhounding map of western South Dakota, from Johnson (1994).
Summary
This should be enough to get anyone started on a fantastic trip to South Dakota. You can see why the reader got the idea in the first place – the place drips with history, the gold should be good, and there are a lot of things to see in the nearby area. I can even suggest a snip from a Beatles song to hum to yourself as you tour the area:
Now somewhere in the black mountain hills of Dakota
There lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon…
Garret Romaine writes from Portland, Oregon.
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