Deadwood, South Dakota in 1876, vintage postcard.

This image available for photographic prints HERE.

Deadwood has been known the world round for over half a century. It is the smallest "metropolitan" city in the world, with paving and public and other buildings such as are seldom found in cities less than several times its size.”

- John S. McClintock, Pioneer Days in the Black Hills, 1939

The famous and the infamous have called Deadwood and the Black Hills home over the last several centuries. Lewis and Clark, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, George Armstrong Custer, Poker Alice, the Sundance Kid, Calamity Jane, and many others have all passed through here in search of fortune and adventure.

But long before the arrival of the white man, the land was home to the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee, Crow and Sioux (or Lakota) Indians. The Sioux, who migrated from Minnesota in the 1700's, dominated a tract of land large enough to support the buffalo herds on which they subsisted.

At about the same time as the Lakota migration, French Canadian explorers began mapping the Missouri River and trading with the Indians for pelts and hides to be shipped back East. Adventurers Francois and Joseph La Verendrye claimed the region for King Louis XV in 1743 by placing an engraved lead plate on the bank of the Missouri River near present-day Pierre.

When President Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon of France, the 828,000 square-mile purchase included all of what would later become South Dakota. In 1803, Jefferson sent his personal secretary Meriwether Lewis and Lewis's friend William Clark to explore the new territory. The 31-member party met little resistance from the Indians as they passed through South Dakota. Along the Missouri River, the expedition was joined by French trader Toussaint Charbonneau and his 15-year-old wife Sacagewea, whom the Frenchman had won in a gambling match. The young Shoshone woman helped to guide Lewis and Clark all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

When the expedition returned east in 1806, their writings were widely read by would-be settlers headed for the upper Missouri Valley. As European immigrants flooded the eastern United States, white settlers gradually moved westward seeking fertile land and suitable town sites. Lewis and Clark heard tales about the Black Hills from other traders and trappers, but it wasn't until 1823 that Jedediah Smith and a group of about 15 traders actually traveled through them.  While other adventuresome trappers also explored the Hills, most avoided the area because it was considered sacred by the Lakota. 

The Lakota never welcomed the white man to their hunting grounds and as immigration increased there was a marked decline in American Indian-white relations. The Army established outposts nearby, but they seldom entered the Black Hills. Trouble escalated when bands of Lakota began to raid nearby settlements, then retreating to the Black Hills.