The Black Hills gold rush was the last great gold rush in the continental United States. Its colorful nature often makes us forget the silver "boom," and the tin "boom," and others that followed. These boom and bust cycles, and fluctuating prices for minerals, combined to create many Black Hills ghost towns.

    Besides gold, silver, and tin, here are the mined minerals, that had promoters calling our Black Hills the "richest hundred miles square on earth!"-copper, mica, coal, tungsten, lead, graphite, gypsum, feldspar, Fuller's earth and jamesonite. There was even sometime spent prospecting for diamonds, though to no avail.

    History records some spectacular population shifts in the Black Hills mining camps. Custer experienced an almost overnight depopulation when richer placers were found to the north. The same thing happened to Hill City. Some accounts claim that both Custer and Hill City went from populations in the thousands to a mere handful who remained to guard property.

    Then there was the case of Crook City. You can reach what is left of this one-time city of 2,000-3,000 people by going about a mile south of Whitewood. In 1876 Crook City was growing by leaps and bounds. One reporter noted that, of the 250 buildings in town, at least half the saloons. But there was also a school, a church and other civic buildings. Curiously, the Crook City Tribune came out with a first issue on June 10, 1876, but was never published again.

    Crook City collapsed almost as fast as it grew. When bypassed by the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad, the folks of Crook City started leaving. They took their possessions and even some buildings with them. By the early 1880's most of Crook City was empty enough to be homesteaded by a pair of individuals. In 1900 the census showed just 27 souls in once might Crook City.

10/01/03