The Northern Black Hills- Of South Dakota- Journals

Kathy and I would hike all over the Hills

exploring places like Tinton, Seventy Flats all

the way down to Bullah, Wyoming and

 throughout Bear Canyon and Beaver Creek,

 Cement Ridge and the Needles, which were

these huge rock formations overlooking

seventy flats behind the old two story house

we lived in.

This abandoned two story house that sat on a claim of W.Os and was cut off from everything. Surrounded by over ten thousand acres of national forest and another equal amount of private land.

We decided to move in there and our backyard was these needles of rock and the bedroom window faced the meadow where deer and elk would graze.

We would wake with the first morning light and see a pair of wood chucks every morning welcoming the dawn.

We lived by the cycle of the sun  isolated, but within reach.

I was in a holy place- the home of the great manitou or The Great Spirit.

Our house had a cook stove and was very isolated just this claim surrounded by some private land and a large area of National Forrest land.

It had been the home of squirrels and woodchucks and was quite a mess but we cleaned it up and moved into the cabin where we spent a whole summer only going into town once every two weeks to stock up on supplies and we had to back pack it to the cabin.

We met Charley and Wanda Johnston who were from the area and in fact the log cabin on the site of our place use to be his home growing up and now Charlie owned Tollgate Flats about 150 acres of meadow land.

We soon became great friends.

He told me stories of growing up there and walking to Tinton every day to go to school . Wanda was best known for growing up in Deadwood and as a child she and her brother discovered the hidden underground part of Deadwood that the Chinese immigrants built complete with antiques and opium dens which her family later donated to the city museum.

It seemed that one of the chinese over lords was a nephew to the Emperor.

And when he died they sealed up that part of the chinese opium proliferation like a tomb- 

I worked for Charley at Tollgate Flats fencing and in exchange would get produce from their garden and Kathy would work with Wanda canning jams and jellies, hazelnuts -Service berries and choke cherries and gooseberries and such.

We would hunt deer for food and hang it in the old mine shaft close to our cabin and fish for brook trout and take our baths in the cold creeks.

We also would collect herbs for teas and I loved foraging for Hazel nuts.

Charley and Wanda would visit us from time to time they had an old red Willys Jeep &  a ATV- they would come back to pick us up from time to time and help us out and tell us stories of life growing up here in the hills.

On occasion we would get a visit by horse back from Kathys brother and his wife.

It was such an  six months a idyllic summer and one that will always remain in my memory.

Another time we would live in our other house.

Kathy and I lived up at the Fillmore mine at the cook shack after that and we would wake and put fishing rods in the ponds and just go off and do our chores hauling water to the cook shack and splitting wood for the wood stoves.

When I returned i would always have a couple of trout on the line which we would eat for breakfast with some potatoes or give them some to W.O.

The cook shack had no indoor plumbing and no insulation just the two pot belly stoves and a large cook stove which kept the place very toasty even in the dead of winter.

The fires had to be always stoked- One time I remember one big log that just fit into the pot belly was too wet and I awoke to a major chill.

It was zero degrees and icecicles were forming on my moustache- I had to jump out of bed and fire up the pot bellys again and hug them till I got warm. 

We lived around 4300 hundred feet up and it was November.

One day W.O, asked me if I had ever done any gold panning and he offered to teach me and take me to his favorite place down bear canyon on Bear Creek.

We loaded up the truck and after about a fifteen minute decent into a canyon we stoped and he taught me how it was to be done.

I saw this tiny dip in the creek and decided to go there but he told me- No! not there!, because he had already worked that area, but I wanted to indulge my curiousity and I was just learning.

There is a hidden chapter here that I have written about  it deals with a para-normal expierence that happened similtaneously....

I dug there with my hands filling the pan and all of a sudden something fell into my left hand that felt heavy.

As I lifted it out of the water in astonishment I had a nugget even larger than the nugget Potato Creek Johnny found.

I could not hold back my excitement at my find! " OH My God Look at This!"

W.O was ecstatic dancing and said we had found the mother load and I would never have to work ever again.

He took that nugget from me and said he wanted to see what other types of minerals were attached to it so he could identify where it actually came from.

We were so happy and celebrated this huge piece of gold that hadn't traveled very far because gold being heavy -drops to the bottom and I knew it came from close by.

I believe it came from a place called Nigger Gulch and Bear Creek.

I should of known that this was to be the last time I had the nugget-

Many people told me that I should have not said anything and just dropped it back into the water or put it in my pocket and kept my mouth shut.

There were other circumstances involved that made that not possible.

I later found out that W.O was famous for not delivering what he promised.
Nigger Gulch, this derogatory name came from when some black miners at the turn of the century 1890s came down to Bear Town asking the white miners where they might go to set up claims and look for gold.

In jest the miners sent them to this gulch and laughed thinking they would not find anything, but to their dismay the black miners struck pay dirt and retired rich men. To my dismay that was the last time I had possession of that nugget.

W.O. split my nugget into three parts and died shortly afterward and it dissapeared by someone in the family - all the Fillmore's remember that it was me that found this huge nugget before W.O. died.

Looking at Potato Creek Johnnies nugget mine was much bigger than his.

(It fit just inside the palm of my hand and it about half the size of my Tantalum piece.)

I guess I should be in a record book, but just the family and Kathy remembers me finding it- and so it is my true tale of the hills.
Wanda and Charley didn't think much of W.O and said I would never see that nugget again.

One day Wanda took me down to her basement and showed me her extensive rock collection and gave me a rock and told me to show this to W.O.

I was to tell him while I was walking on our wandering -I had come across a shelf of rock - this stuff- and if he could identify it?

One evening I approached him with this rock and asked him.

His eyes lit up when I showed it to him and he tried his best to find out where it had come from.

I played like I had forgot and created the aura of mystery of another very valuable find.

I still have it to this day and its one of the finest examples of pure tantalum found and a perfect specimen..

He always thought until the end that I had the gift and incredible luck with minerals and believed that once again I had struck it rich.

But- that is another part of my story that I shared with him..

Old script from my life in The northern Black Hills of South Dakota 1976

joelsamuelpresents

journals

One evening Kathy and I became entranced siting on the high rock ledge overlooking seventy flats and down to Wyoming.

It is just about a twenty minute walk behind our house.

Nightime came upon us so suddenly it was so black even with a small flashlight we could not see more than about a couple feet in front of us.

Nigels' Mother Rachel once led me out of a dark place so I asked my Nigel to walk us home and grabbed onto his tail.

He had a beautiful long bushy tale that had saved swimmers who had cramped and could not continue and pulled them to shore.

We ended up getting so lost that when the light finally had finally changed we were a long ways away from our cabin.

Though Nigel seemed to enjoy being out in the dark all night long with us.