now became a reality . The news spread quickly across the country , launching a full-blown gold rush . With no one to stop them , pioneers and prospectors poured into the area illegally .
Most of what they found was flakes , making miners even more eager to locate the larger placer gold deposits that they knew must be the source . Miners moved north from French Creek and established settlements near creeks along the way . Spring Creek led to the creation of Hill City . Rapid Creek led to the start of the small town of Pactola . But at each camp only small deposits were being found , while the great bonanza eluded everyone . That is until prospectors reached the northern Hills and began working Deadwood and Whitewood creeks . In November 1875 , a large deposit of gold was discovered in Deadwood Gulch .
By then , nearly 4000 fortune hunters had made their way to the Black Hills in search of gold . And as of 1876 that number had almost doubled . Miners claimed all the land around the creeks near the newly formed camp town of Deadwood . Along with eager goldpanners and fortune hunters came a variety of opportunists and entrepreneurs , planting the seed for a strange cast of characters that would shape this part of the American West .
I was born in Sturgis , South Dakota , just a 20-minute drive from Deadwood and its nearby twin city , Lead . Both my parents worked in Lead , my mother at the hospital as a respiratory therapist and my father as an underground laborer at the Homestake Gold Mine . My father used to tell stories of working nearly 2 miles down in the mine and how hot the air was because of geo-thermal heat . Much of what I remember of Deadwood from the
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